"You Can See Everything" Sparks Debate, 17% GDP Growth Please, Call of Duty Campaign Review | Katie Drummond, Bing Gordon, Daksh Gupta, Jean-Denis Greze, Quinten Farmer

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Today is Monday, October 19th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Do we still got a little color grade going on, boys? What's going on with the—

I think so.

The bold tans today. Yeah. Okay. You left the color grade. Well, we're slowly getting out of Nathan Fielder territory. We're not zoomed in, but we still got the color grade and I still got the Nathan Fielder headphones, which are actually amazing, deeply underrated. He's a wired headphone guy. You've been talking about this for a long time.

I didn't think those were great.

Oh, you didn't like them? I love them. I think that they sound way better.

The quality was horrible.

Oh, really? Yeah. No, no, no, I think it's nice. It's nice. I don't know, just the way I can still hear a little bit of this. It doesn't— it's not so isolating. It feels like I'm more present. I don't know. Anyway, 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. Including Tony Hawk, including Bam Margera. They put on an incredible event at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday— on Saturday night. Tony Hawk was there skating around the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Bam Margera was there. Huge event.

He was also just skating around New York yesterday. Showed up on a buddy of mine's story.

It's awesome. Yeah, great sponsorship, great out-of-the-box, outside-the-box thinking from the Ramp team. on a really interesting brand partner who, yeah, just, yeah, a lot of contrast there. So great, great outcome. So congrats to them. Let me, we're still in Nathan Fielder territory. We have Katie Drummond from Wired, the global editorial director, hopping on to talk about her interview with Nathan Fielder, which dropped today. Then we have a bunch of other folks joining the show. But Theranos was all over the timeline.

He broke his silence.

Nathan?

With Katie.

That's true. That's true. That is actually what happened. Yeah, I did. But yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be, you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this— there's a little bit of a, like, you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like, oh, maybe she wasn't— maybe she's not that bad. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times potentially, like maybe she's more of a victim.

Some people might be like, she's bad, but maybe she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. And, yeah, and there's this— I don't know, there's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And I just can't stop thinking about like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud, like it just seems like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.

Totally.

And the whole time I was like almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught— the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's so, It's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she's making this point where she's like, we have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things and like we test all this stuff and she's making it sound like it's like magical science and it's like, I looked it up, there have been 60+ companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category. It's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical, we invented something. It takes information and it stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product. Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box and it runs a test and then—

And they don't go to prison for 10 years.

Yeah, they don't go to prison. And it's just, it's such a, It's such a tried and true playbook that it's actually like an industry that's boring at this point. They're like, these companies get funded, no one reads their press releases, and then they get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, congrats. You made $500 million doing another medical device. We know the playbook at this point. You, you get some intellectual property, you build the device, set up the supply chain, figure out the chemistry, get the FDA application in. It takes a decade for the FDA to actually approve it. You probably sell the company before then. Like, there is such an established playbook that there's specific VCs that just Just focus on this. And they're just like, oh yeah, we'll just do these deals all the time. We just do them and then we, yeah, we sell 'em to this company and this biotech company just loves buying these. And it happens all the time. And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm gonna be able to build a box that tests for something. Like this happens all the time. Instead it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not just admit what's really happening on the field, which is that diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. You could just do that. Yeah. But instead it has to be this pie-in-the-sky nonsense, and it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur, and this is exactly what I was picking up on. So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of The Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations, I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field there is, medical technology, when people ask how far she— how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so, yeah, it's so odd because there are a ton of founders who build medical devices and sell them and raise money and do all these different things, but they're boring businesses because they never touch consumers directly. Like you go to the hospital, they might say, oh yeah, you have a cough, but we're gonna run it for some bacterial, some antibiotic-resistant bacterial thing. We're gonna take some of your blood and just, take off a little piece of the blood and put it in this box to make sure that you don't have this thing. And they'll do this on site, but you never see the brand of the company that runs this because all you care about is like, am I sick or not, right? And so you might wind up getting the lab test that says like UCLA or USC on it or whatever medical network you went to. And the doctor is just gonna introduce themselves as like Dr. Smith or whatever. They're not gonna tell you, oh yeah, by the way, we just ran your blood on this small startup that got acquired by a big, tech, big biotech company, and it was a great deal, and all the investors made money. So you're never going to hear about it, even if you use the box. And if you don't, you don't care at all. Yeah. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, like, what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so That also includes, like, you can't— you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, oh yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like, we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. And so—

By the way, can we do spoilers now?

I think so.

I think we can assume that everyone listening to this—

Spoiler alert!

Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert!

If you don't want to hear spoilers, just turn— leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.

Yeah, and we'll just talk away.

What spoiler do you want to talk about?

So Billy does this side deal to get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what that's exactly called.

Yeah, points on the back end.

Points on the back end. So he does this thing.

Incredibly good thing.

And then later, after the movie's totally been finished, he decides, ah, this is going to look pretty bad, backs out. Damage has already been done, right? Like he looks, he looks, he doesn't look great.

Yeah.

And Elizabeth is trying to say like, oh, I didn't, I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like the damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's going to be continued to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. It's something that people will look back and I can see somebody. Watching it back in—

yeah,

I can see watching it back in 10 years and being like, wow, that was a moment. Just because Nathan Fielder's like body of work. Yeah. Becoming so iconic. And I, I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm gonna turn on some Nathan Fielder, just take me back to the good old days. Um, and but the funny thing is, do you think that Billy— do you think it made sense for him to do the side deal because she has She claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay, so of course she wouldn't want to make— even if she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. So she would want to route it through Billy.

It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married, in which case It would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.

That's what I'm saying.

I think you might be onto something there.

She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding

the

family.

Yes. And so, is your point that if she's in on the deal, sitting there being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it to— that's more tricky from a restitution perspective?

Totally. I imagine, I imagine a judge would be like—

Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that.

Yeah, a judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't care.

Yeah, they don't care that you did it.

Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's— yeah, that he's going behind her back.

Huh. Yeah, good point. Good point.

So

yeah, the fraud continues potentially. Interesting. Uh, you might be right about the Cold Classic thing. I mean, I, I, from my perspective, it looked like we were experiencing like an absolute box office smash, like it was taking over the timeline. I would describe it more as like a phenomenon. When I think of cult classic, I think of like slow burn, like underappreciated at the box office, and then all of a sudden it becomes really popular. I think it's like super popular, but—

Yeah, but I'm still talking to people like over this last weekend.

Yeah.

I would say like Nathan Fielder, Theron's movie, blah, blah, blah, and some people would be like, oh yeah, yeah, I think I remember Theron. Like there's still people out there that don't.

Do you know how it did at the box office? It was not the number one movie this weekend.

What was?

By a factor of 2, Street Fighter.

See what I mean?

See what I mean? Street Fighter made $31 million and You Can See Everything made $15 million. So twice as much money for Street Fighter, which, I mean, I'm sure it's a great movie, but I didn't even know it was happening. Maybe that's a cult classic for me. It seemed like something I'd like. I saw, I think, 50 Cent's in it. It looked awesome when I saw a poster eventually. Also, a whale fall. Whale fall made eight million. I want to see this movie. This is a horror film about a whale. Seems really cool. Anyway, someone gets swallowed whole by a whale.

Whoa!

Spoiler alert. But I think that's in the in the trailer, maybe in the trailer and the name.

Spoiler alert.

Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. You never heard. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So. I mean, the wildest part about the whole You Can See Everything Theranos thing is that, one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. But he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos 2.0, and I was like pushing back, being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic, go for it, like do this. Like, I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400 million in a very short amount of time. is tractable. And then he was like—

Wait, when did you have this conversation?

I talked to him like last year.

OK, yeah, I think it's coming back to me.

Yeah, I told you that. So basically— Yeah,

I remember you were like, oh, yeah, like bearish.

Yeah, the story is that Elizabeth Holmes came back to X and was posting like funny things and was getting like amplified and going viral. And everyone was like, wow, Elizabeth Holmes. And we were getting pitched to

have Billy on the show?

Loosely. So what was going on was that Elizabeth Holmes was being, like, so edgy and based on the timeline. Everyone was like, wow, like, she's innocent because she— she's actually a great entrepreneur because she's, like, funny. And I was like— She's caring. And I was like, these are 2 different things. Comedy on the timeline does not mean you're a great founder. Often— Does not mean you're innocent. They're not correlated at all. Yeah, it doesn't mean that you're innocent. And so my pitch was— I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I want to see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. You'll see like a Martin Shkreli put out a call about a particular quantum computing stock and then you can just wait and you wait 6 months and you're like, wow, Martin, like Say what you will about what happened in the past, the guy is dialed about analysis of public market companies today. And so that is undeniable.

So you wanted to see Elizabeth do like a Trevor Milton where— No. Tries to invent something new, fails, and then now it's just running some random private aviation company?

No. I mean, maybe. I don't know.

I actually haven't read Trevor Milton's thing. No, that's kind of what you're saying is like, don't try to read— don't try to like create something new. Oh, sure. Just make a medical device company and do one thing that—

So yes and no. Like, yes, probably from an entrepreneurship standpoint, I would be in favor of that. But from a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve, and then watch that happen and be like, oh, wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. Smart on the science. I want her to talk about the science.

The crazy thing about the movie though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science-related.

I completely agree.

It was just, it was Billie.

That's the point.

Learning about mitochondria.

Yeah, that's my point. Like, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around that.

One simple trick that the medical industry hates.

You can actually do that. That happens. That like, this stuff happens if you actually read the literature and you're in tune with the market and what's going on. And you could call longs and shorts and you could predict different things about what's— how the biotech community is going to evolve. And some of those predictions would be right. And if a lot of them are right, you will be seen as someone who understands the industry. And you can see this with all sorts of people in AI where they post about AI progress and then you just wait a couple years and you're like, oh yeah, like, Like them or don't like them, they were definitely right about the cybersecurity capabilities of models five years ago. And so, at the very least, we got to give them that credit. And and and I wanted I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down. Give me your biotech 2027. Give me your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out if you're right.

At the very least, a market map.

At the very least, a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche or a tier list. A tier list. A tier list of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah, show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in, right?

Yeah.

And so I had put this out there as like, I want to see some real analysis, something that shows you that you're a live player in the industry. And then I did ask the Elizabeth Holmes account to do an interview over the phone on September 5th, 2025. So about a year ago. And then I did talk to Billy on, I think, October 17th or something. And it was nothing that didn't come out in the movie. So it all matched. But I was focused much more on the, what is the business strategy going forward? Because if it's just the hand-wavy, we're going to do everything all the time, and this is going to be fine—

Well, no, in their words, it was Theranos.

They're going to do Theranos 2.0. Theranos 2.0.

Yeah. Which watching Nathan have that lightbulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos 2.0, and them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos 2.0 to describe, like, massive—

FTX.

—things that they perceive might be massive frauds.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's great.

In another world.

Anyway, yeah, I just also— when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Rey. co-founder of GeneWeave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. And it was basically just a lab testing machine, previously size of a dishwasher at a lab down the street. You shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital, and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science. Like, it is hard science, but like, it's not magic. It's not future sci-fi magic. Yeah. And they basically would have these particles that would make the particular bacteria-resistant, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria light up. They would glow, and then they would shine a light on it, and then they would measure the amount of light that came back, and they'd be able to say in this hospital, like, okay, you have this particular antibiotic-resistant bacteria in this patient. You need to be extra careful about washing your hands. You might need to, give them a different antibiotic. There's a whole bunch of different things that can happen. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to 2 days, everything in the hospital is just gonna move a little bit smoother, and people are gonna be a little bit healthier, and you're gonna sell your company for $425 million, which is exactly what happened. They raised $25 million. It was a great outcome for founders, employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. They sold pre— they sold before getting the FDA application. Interesting. Getting the FDA approval. But Roche took it through the final step because that's very expensive, but they have a lot of great lawyers on their team to actually move that stuff through, and scientists. And so in 2019, it got authorized for the Cobas VivoDx MRSA test, which is like not gonna be on the stage at TED anytime soon, but it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward. Okay, so— And it was good. Going back. The other funny thing about this company is that the name of the particles that they created that actually detect the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they call them Smarticles. Smarticles, which sounds so fraudulent.

Sounds like you've got going to prison for that.

It sounds like you're gonna go to prison. But it's like, it's just a normal, boring company. No offense, it's a great company. I love you, Diego. But like, it just, it was never like, we're gonna solve everything, cure death in 20— million years in the future. It was just like, look, there's this test that happens. Normally happens down the street. Costs a lot of money. Now it'll happen in the office.

Boom. So again, during the film, a fire broke out in Malibu. I was pretty distracted trying to figure out what was going down, how serious it was, et cetera. That being said, I came away from the movie feeling like, OK, Sonny had done some side deal and got way less— No, no, no. Sunny Balwani, the other co-founder. My impression was that he was getting way less jail time.

Yeah. Elizabeth has been in jail for like 11 years.

Yeah. It seemed like Sunny— they were positioning it as like Sunny was able to pin it on her. He got out. Or at least he got a reduced sentence, whatever. And you told me afterwards, Sunny is in prison for like 12 years or— Yeah.

It's about a year longer.

12 years, 11 months. was, was the sentencing. Um, Elizabeth got, uh, a 10-year sentence.

Yeah.

Reduced originally from 11 years and 3 months.

Yeah.

So, uh, they couldn't even rat on each other. Like, it makes it so much worse in my opinion.

Oh yeah.

Because like, because you would think that like the—

Prisoner's dilemma. They both ratted on each other and they both went to jail.

I mean, maybe, but it just, it just seems like, like that Like, if one of them had been more, more, more evil, you know, more elite

at deception, they would have been able to say, hey, Sonny, me and you, Elizabeth, Sonny,

and the other thing is crazy.

We're taking this to the grave.

According to the internet, Sonny didn't sell secondary either.

I know, that's ridiculous.

None of them. They both go down with the ship. They both don't make money.

That was a jaw-dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world, potentially. No secondary selling, $11 billion.

Doing fraud purely for the love of the

game. What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud. Like, it was. Yeah, it was very clear that like everyone there, Sonny, Hurd, they knew it didn't work. They didn't have the revenue or the profits.

That's really like the TED entrepreneur.

Yeah, it goes to prison for the love of the game.

For the love of the game.

Insane.

Just for the vision. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, it was crazy, it was crazy. Insane. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. If you do wanna sell secondary, there's one neat trick. One neat trick. This is a new thing. So, if you're a founder and you want to sell $10 million a secondary, $100 million a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. Before, so you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out, she's selling out. Like, that's not good. That's not a good sign. So, what you do is you take out an immense amount of Debt, so you get like $100 million of debt.

Yep.

Then you sell the secondary, sell another $100 million of secondary, pay off the debt, and then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.

Yeah, and everyone assumes it's like, oh— They think it's credit card debt. Yeah, yeah. They think it's credit card debt.

They don't realize that it was an equity-backed $100 million line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part. But you can still get away with $100 mil out of the gate. It's possible. I

wonder if anyone's doing that.

It might be happening. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, uh, what's SemiAnalysis?

SemiAnalysis raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to

50 gigawatts. Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot. That's a lot of, uh, a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this, right? Did Gerstner say it was too bullish? Something like that. It seems like Semi Analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of a whole bunch of the semi analysis stuff.

So we looked at the data.

They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like they were papered a long time ago. And if the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not going to stop people from actually pulling out of the bull.

I sent you this. I sent you this. What'd you say this morning? What do you say from RevCap, which is SemiAnalysis saying if you're worried about demand, yeah, don't be, because there's going to be even more supply than you realize. Of course, SemiAnalysis is also saying that, that they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about ARR growth over the last 2 weeks, that SemiAnalysis is coming out and saying, don't worry, There's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months.

Yeah. Yeah, I believe them on. I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though. Oh, the Nasdaq sold off 5% last week. Like, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks. We're not building this thing. Like, maybe in months if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, like some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But like right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead. It's just like it's a train. You can't, you can't slow it down that quickly. Like, it's just going to keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff The personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to their semi-personal prosumer life shopping and all the little agentic features? Now, I think the tech is incredible. I've been using Dot a ton, and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do, and it just sends me a little message being like, hey, like, you asked for this and you should follow up because, like, they said that they would do it.

You used it to cancel your Roadster order too, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like little, little things like that, uh, it's, it's just a better interface. Like, I love I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie pop-ups, no ads. Like, it's truly like the best consumer experience. Yeah, there's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that. But like, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact, it's so much better To just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40 billion market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify.

No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks to automating certain roles or extending the capabilities of people, right? Because we're in this era of— obviously, there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours talking about somebody having a 26-hour day

because

they need to stay up. She's changing and manipulating time. She's changing and manipulating time because they need to be online and available to keep their agents productive.

Are you saying she's crazy?

I'm not saying—

Because she's not crazy.

She's not crazy.

You're crazy. You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day.

That's right.

Not 26.

But anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be—

She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah, the question is, like, for the 90% of Americans that aren't in—

But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one— we're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with a capabilities increase. And then what you're saying is, like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they going to be— how is their spending going to ramp? Will it ramp beyond the $20, $100, $200 a month subscription?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the business side, like, the Jensen take of, like, software engineers who makes $300K should also get $300K in tokens or something. Like, that seems to be happening basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficiently and like at a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in inference? Like, is there something that they could do with the best models to actually generate $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise? Like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs that—

No, and I'm just saying we don't pay for all this cap. Like, the CapEx is not gonna be paid for by consumers.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. So you're saying that's not the— that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B2B beyond what it is. It has to 10x. Yeah. So like the small company that has, you know, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan and they're maybe spending $100,000 on maybe $10 mil top line. They need to go to $1 million of inference a year, even though they're at a— even though they're a $10 million business. Maybe they go to $15 million of top line for the year.

Well, speaking of $1 million budgets—

What we got?

Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a Muse or an Instinct or a DOTS. They gave away, or tried to give away, $1 million of pizza. I believe it was on Friday. You just had to download and order from the Hark app. And I don't know that it went well. I think—

The summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the—

yeah, I don't know. I mean, clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like, I think it wasn't working.

People just don't want to give them the data because— I know people were giving them the data. You have to give them Google Drive files. Yes, in order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return.

See, edit, download, and permanently delete all of your— see, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Sheets spreadsheets. See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account.

Yeah. So that's—

See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all these were required.

Yeah. Sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say, like, no thanks. I don't want any notifications. Yeah.

Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues. And so he used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Dude, actually. Hark said, fair, that's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with the FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that? No, file a complaint with the federal government. Submit FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion. On October 16th, 2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1 million free pizza giveaway. Promoted on X, and stated users could claim it by typing order a free pizza in the Hark app. Crazy. Yeah, interesting. I'm so curious why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of Figure, because the whole,

like— I don't

know. It doesn't make any sense to me, other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise.

Yeah, I mean, like, Elon kind of created the playbook, right? xAI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds, you get— it's a way— it would be hard for SpaceX to go to a top AI scientist and say, we're gonna give you $5 billion of equity. Now, Zuck has kind of broken that glass and been like, I'm just gonna do it. Right. But the way you get the multi-billion-dollar deals billion outcome is you give a co-founder role of a new company, and then you acquire them in. So I think it's probably that. I don't know. Is there another—

The only thing is Elon had sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets prior to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that makes more sense in the fullness of time.

No, no, I agree. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support. Giving employees instant resolutions for access requests and password resets. Anthropic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth. Because what if inflation is at like 40%? That would be the equivalent of -23% Real GDP growth. You got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth. You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The lowest was 6%. Basically, no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom. Within the building, agree disagree?

Bullish.

Bullish. Drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't know. Just added the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be two percent. That's the government suits. U.S. adults are. What's interesting is that, like you know, this made headlines because anthropic anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish. Like they are at seventeen. 0.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2% typically. They're saying 17%, huge economic explosion unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic. Like, if we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to go around. You can do everything basically. You can build new roads, you can give people healthcare. Like, everything just solves itself because A rising tide lifts all boats. This is why, despite a lot of really controversial policies in China for like 40 years, everyone was like, "I don't care about the CCTV cameras because like I got a bigger house this year. I got indoor plumbing now. I got all this crazy stuff. Like my life is getting better. There's a sense of economic progress, like a rising middle class. All these things are positive. Of course, in America, we've been in the age of stagnation, and so when the flock cameras come, it's like get those out of here. I don't want those. I want to maintain the." freedoms that I have because everything else is getting more expensive, everything else is getting worse. 17% GDP growth would be incredible. I'm obviously rooting for it. I think it's totally possible. Site visitors, people that went and actually visited the site to take the poll—

So if you were surveyed, you would be— where would you really put it though?

I'd put it at 200% GDP growth. Yeah, I want to be tripling every year.

Yeah.

Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation. I want to manifest it. Site visitors said 12.5%. Again, staggeringly high. But interesting, US adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is again way above where we've been. So like everyone is bullish.

The American mind must be set.

Or unstoppable. Unstoppable. It's true. Like the vibe session. It's like, ah, things are going so bad, but I think it's about to explode. But also, I'm doing so well that I'm gonna go buy a boat and I'm gonna get a limousine for my burrito. Yeah, like very, very weird economy. Very weird economy we are in. But Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says, this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry, but 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief at Anthropic? What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced from reality?

Cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes.

They're smoking cigarettes, yeah. Because lung cancer will be solved. Lung cancer will be solved. That was reported from— we talked about this a little bit, but that was reported from Shamsankar and has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC. But—

I don't think this is unique to Anthropic.

Yeah.

I think, like, clearly the average American is already insanely bullied. So you're looking— And so, if you go to the labs, anybody who like really truly believes in this current revolution, and that probably is like an average across the field.

There was a funny exchange in the Tyler Cowen-Dwarkesh Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the now departed— not passed away, but he— Ross Douthat left. for, I think, CBS and the Free Press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel were going back and forth about AI. And Tyler asks Dwarkesh, like, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Dwarkesh is like, ah, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very bullish on this changing the economy, but at the same time, I just, I can't predict how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart. Like you could go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like there's so many like pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via like, you know, AI video slop. We have signs.

This is happening. We have signs of signs.

Yes, we have signs of signs. Like the AI slop economy is thriving, right? Now, there are plenty of just talk to adopt dropship.

No, and the truth is that for high-quality products or most of the products in Walmart, there will have been a bunch of AI involved at every possible step of the process. And maybe it's like making it 1% faster here, 1% faster here, 1%, but it sort of compounds into some acceleration, you would hope. But there's also probably like Walmart probably has policies which are like every product goes through a 90-day review. Sure. You know, and so there's— again, there's like the real world is always gated.

But the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think if they want to get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracán in Miami. You got to get into the mind of the course seller, the dropshipper, to understand how AI is changing the real economy. Because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like, there is definitely AI, AI instantiated products up and down the stack, all over Facebook, Instagram Reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the shelves.

Yeah, it's an interesting question because like what actually— yeah, how do you actually qualify that? Like, I'm sure if you're an existing— if you're an existing seller on Walmart, you could set up an agent to say like, hey, I want to make this product. Do you talk, email back and forth with this person, get it made, or select a supplier? And then once— Yeah,

I guess the question is like, yeah, what, what counts as a, uh— we got Call of Duty.

Hey, what's— what the heck is going on?

This is, uh, this is the Call of Duty campaign. It dropped today or this weekend. I played I played a little bit of it. This is— spoiler warning, but the plot here is that North Korea has built a tunnel system to invade South Korea and you got to push this truck down that tunnel and then duke it out. I think you got to go to the front of the truck, push the button. There you go. And then you're going to push the truck down the tunnel to— Well,

this goes deeper than I thought.

It does. It does, to stop the invasion of the North Koreans into South Korea during this particular sequence of the campaign. But my Call of Duty campaign review, I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I haven't played it fully, but it's amazing. Did you already do the nightclub scene with the pistol, that whole section? No. No? Oh, that happens later. Okay, get ready. Call us when the John Wick section happens because That is some of the most fun I've had in a Call of Duty campaign in a long time. There's a whole bunch of really interesting set pieces, and they did— I thought they did a great job of not making it try to be a multiplayer simulator. Like, there's a lot of campaigns back in the day that were kind of just like, let's recreate the multiplayer experience. Like, there's a bunch of people running around on a map, and like, you're just kind of going through a system. This feels like an action movie. It feels very cinematic, and it feels very there's so much variation in the way, in the different pieces that you have to do.

Based on how they are playing, doubt they will make it to that level.

I think, yeah, I think we might have some skill issues going on here. This is not great. But we got to the next cinematic, and we're running out of the tunnel as it collapses. Congratulations, you successfully survived.

Speaking of games, Tim Sweeney. Founder of Epic Games says the games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible, as will the game— the games developers wanted to build but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.

Yeah, I like that he's taking the, the, the white pill on AI. 3Blue1Brown also put out a big— he's a math YouTuber, uh, does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts. And he put out a video saying like, it is the best time to go into math, very optimistic about it. And so, obviously, very divided organizations, but I love that Tim Sweeney went back and forth on this. I saw another post by him talking about like, look, I had to migrate from C to C++. C++, from 2D to 3D. Like, I've been through so many tech migrations. This is another one. I'm very excited for it. And he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, adapt, overcome. If people are rolling their own, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser, decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's going to find a way to participate in the upside in some way because he is innovative and flexible. Anyway, 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. Let's see. There's huge news, huge news. This is what everyone— everyone across the world was talking about this over the weekend, but the biggest bluefin tuna ever caught— Yeah. Was caught in California today. Look at that hog. Brian Nordgaard. Check this out. This is an absolutely massive bluefin fish. Yeah. Bluefin tuna. Incredible.

Really powerful omen.

Yes. Really, really crazy.

Big things to come.

It's the size of a shark. Absolutely insane. Anyway, post-singularity job. Are you looking for a job post-singularity? Maybe you can make money smuggling diesel off the coast of East Africa. This gentleman certainly has learned to make ends meet this way. Say what you will about the legality of this, incredibly thrilling job. Incredibly thrilling job. We don't know how to make jobs like this anymore in America. This is incredible.

Yeah, I would recommend recreating this kind of job in a more maybe legal setting. Just be like a small— create a small fuel logistics company. And you could just— nothing's stopping you from making runs.

There's probably some arbitrage opportunity. Gas might be cheaper in the Gulf, in Texas. You throw it on the back of a boat, drive it over to California. I think you got a business right there. Who needs a big rig for this when you got the speedboat? Pretty, pretty good. Also, there's a castle for sale in Cleveland. It's going for $575,000. Only a 3-bed, 3-bath though. For a castle, I feel like you need at least 10,000 square

feet. More like a cottage.

It looks beautiful though. Very, very cool design here. Zillagon Wild posting it. What about this Poppy deal? Have you have you seen this?

Yeah, I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like they sold their company for 1.9 billion.

Yeah,

and

so wait here, let me set the table. So Poppy is a beverage brand. It's a soda probiotic soda company sold to Pepsi for 2.2 billion dollars. $300 million of that $2.2 billion was an earnout. So they got $1.9 billion on the day the deal closed and then $300 million waiting for milestones. Now, Pepsi announced that instead of paying $300 million based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying $12 million. And the dunk is like, oh, that stings. They didn't get their earnout. But yeah, they got $1.9— $0.1 $2 billion. Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah, like, here's how you negotiate an earnout. It's like, it seems like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well. The disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed— $300 million for the, for the company and $1.9 billion in earnout. And if they didn't get that earnout, it would be— it would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Still, pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy. Amazing outcome. But yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, a quarter is what you should expect in an earnout most of the time, right off that second bit, that second bite to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earnout, because companies have lots of resources. They control the budget. budget, the distribution, all the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny. And so if you put all the chips with them, they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And I believe we have our first guest of the show, Katie Drummond, the global— I'm here. Editorial director of Wired, here with us in the TD Canals Forum. Welcome. What's happening?

How you doing?

Welcome. We don't have audio.

We don't have sound.

I muted myself. There we go. Hi, thanks for having me. How you doing?

Thanks for hopping on. Great to have you.

We're doing well.

Finally. Congratulations on the— what do you call it? Exclusive? It's not an exclusive.

He broke his silence.

Exclusive interview. He broke— yeah, exclusive interview.

Exclusive interview and cover star.

Oh yeah, and cover, right? That's cool. I like the photography. Thank you. Anyway, we could go deeper on that, but I think everyone wants to know, like, you know, you've seen the movie. Everyone wants to know what everyone thinks about the movie. Like, did you think Elizabeth Holmes looked less guilty after watching the movie? Equivalently guilty? More guilty?

You know, my honest answer, I've seen it twice, and the first time I saw it, I felt so much empathy for her. remember sitting there being like, this woman has kids, she's going to prison. I feel like she's being manipulated by these men in her life. And then I went back and saw it a second time, and I had done a bunch of rereading about Theranos in the time.

Well, that's the thing. That's the thing. Part of what made it like you felt like a horrible situation, right? You have young children, you're going to prison. And Nathan didn't exactly like— he could have spent 20, 30 minutes like outlining all the things that she did wrong, all these things. And the interpretation would have been like, Yeah, you 100% deserve this. And like, I don't feel bad for you. But because it was like set up, because it was set up, I think it was very much intentional that it was sort of like people were coming into it with their own understanding of like the whole Theranos era and what actually went down.

Well, and I think too, and I don't want to speculate. I mean, obviously, I interviewed Nathan. I do not know him or the filmmakers particularly well. But he said very much in the interview, he is not a science journalist, right? He read Bad Blood, he ran the— he read the definitive book, but he is not sort of like a student of Theranos. He is Nathan Fielder. He is like a student of human behavior. And I think we very much see that on display in the film. We don't see an interrogation of the science. We see much more of an interrogation of her as a person. Hmm. And her family and their dynamics and I find that to be very interesting, although for sure someone coming in cold who hasn't thought about Theranos in 10 years, because we're not all thinking about Theranos all the time, uh, is probably going to feel a complicated way about her.

Totally.

What open questions did you jump to researching right after you left the movie for the first time or the second time? The one that stuck out to me was that She tells this story about— and we're gonna have spoilers in this interview, just FYI— but she tells this story about how she adopted a husky in 2017, and then the husky is like not around, and then they downgrade to like a lizard at one point. Ooh, that's a good one. And I was like, to go from a dog to a lizard is kind of a crazy move. Like, I feel like people that are, you know, into reptiles, like, they've been like diehard reptiles. Like, you kind of know if you're a cat person or a dog person like pretty early in your life, and it's kind of wild to switch it up. And so I was like, how do you go from husky to lizard? Or I forget what exactly it is. Argentine blue tegu, I think, is technically the name for that large lizard that they wind up having. But the wolf dog, the husky, was killed by a cougar. Yeah, that's right. Isn't that a crazy story? That's a crazy story.

Yeah, this was in Mercury News. And it's involved. It's It's suspicious

in San

Diego County, to say the least.

Yeah, this— Ethan Baron at Bay Area News Group reported this on November 11th, 2022, which would have been like right around the time that I think Nathan was shooting the documentary or something. And maybe it came out later, but I guess the dog—

It wasn't until later. It

wasn't until later. It was 2023, I think, that the, the, the, the beach house scenes happened. So,

2 standout, 2 standout, crazy standout moments for me. was Billy explaining the new vision, the updated vision of Theranos 2.0, and Nathan just repeating it back to him, and Billy seemingly oblivious to the Theranos 2.0 being used for about 10 years now as a way to describe— Potential frauds. Potential frauds. And then the other thing was Nathan hearing from her dad that, uh, that he was— he had been at Enron, you know? That's funny. And like, like, making that—

That scene is incredible. Yeah. Incredible. The Enron revelation. I mean, there are so many amazing moments in the film. Even just Billy watching every video at like hyperspeed.

Yeah.

You know, like he's— you're just like, are you just like teaching yourself science? Like, what is happening on your computer right now? Um, so many—

I was kind of like, what is this?

I think that's exactly what's happening. I think he's trying to actually at least like put on a show that he's learning science.

Yeah. Totally. He's like, I'm a Silicon Valley dude. Like, this is what we do. Yeah. I thought was very funny.

I was, I was kind of imagining like if AI had been good when the movie was being filmed, like you can imagine like how that would have, like that would have been a whole role in this whole thing where they're like, you know, talking into the, talking with the models and like clearly, you know, you know, um, if, if, if it had overlapped with like 4.0, Like their, their, their, their own conviction, their own conviction in the Theranos 2.0 would have probably been like 10 times greater.

It would have been like, we actually discovered new science.

You're not crazy. They're

crazy.

But yes, the chatbots would have some great research papers for them.

They would have. Yeah, the chatbots would have been fueling so much. That's hilarious. Oh yeah, that's so funny.

Yeah, the other, my other Like, revelation coming out of it was I assumed from watching the film, and again, I wasn't— back when this was all going down, I was still like in like high school and college. So, I didn't— I wasn't like following the story in the way that we would now. And so, I came out of the film being like, is Sonny just like out? Like, he managed to pin this all on Elizabeth and he's like walking free?

Walking free.

And then John told me afterwards, he's like, no, he has a longer sentence than Elizabeth. So like even the two of them didn't even— like neither managed to like— Successfully stay silent. Like you would think that— you would think—

He's big time in prison. Yeah, he's big time in prison. But he's out in—

he's out in 2030, so he's gonna have to break his silence with you again.

There we go.

Cover story.

Get it lined up.

I don't know that we would give him a cover, but we would I would be happy to speak to him.

Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. This is so funny. I was laughing at this tweet by Soul Nate. Elizabeth Holmes, of course it worked. The lights turned on. It was in the cloud. Nathan Fielder, OK, but you know what feelings are, right? Like, you have them? Weird cocaine husband watching YouTube at 2x speed, babe, it says here mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Everyone was on such different wavelengths. What was your interpretation of Amanda Seyfried and the journey that she went on? There's so many different ways that people have been reading into her involvement, her role. What did you think? Oscar, or she should reconsider how she plays— how she chooses to play real-life subjects in the future?

Oh, I don't know that she should reconsider how she plays real-life subjects. I mean, she's just doing her job. making that Hulu project, I thought she was just sort of like the voice of human empathy. Mm-hmm. Like, she was like the sanest person in the room at all times. If she's with Nathan and Billy, it's like Amanda is sort of like the voice of an empathetic human with powers of observation who can like feel many things at the same time. So I sort of saw her as like a stand-in for the viewer who's saying like, Well, hold on a second, this, or hold on a second, that. Whereas, you know, Nathan is so inscrutable, uh, and such a unique way of interacting with people. Amanda's like the normal person in the scene.

Sure, sure. Yeah.

Yeah. And almost the roller coaster that someone can be on when they're dealing with somebody that maybe may or may not be mentally ill, you know, where— yeah, I don't— you know, it's just sort of like, uh, she's clearly like going through it where Nathan is just like You know, just lasered in, like, trying to observe. And I look at Amanda as, like, experiencing the full spectrum of emotions from, like, oh, yeah, she's, like, she's really bad too, but also processing the human element.

Yeah. Just her feeling, like, so sad when she's on the phone with her kids, when Elizabeth is calling from prison. You know, you can feel really sad in that moment and still think this person is a terrible fraud. Like, both of those things can be true at the same time.

Yeah. How did you— did you see The Social Network 2 yet?

I have not seen it. No, I'm so sorry.

Well, I think it's interesting that The Social Network 2 seems to not be landing. Like, the fact that you're the global editorial director of Wired and you haven't bought— you've gone and seen this, the Nathan Fielder movie, twice.

You had the time. You definitely had the time to be in a theater.

No, but I mean, I've been the same way. I've never— no, I just—

Your technology podcast.

Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. Like, I typically, even when that movie Mountain Gate came out, which was about AI deepfakes from the Succession team.

You saw that?

I was like, I should just watch this because like— It's work relevant.

I should see it. They had a screening I couldn't go to. You know, I would say we tried to interview Aaron Sorkin and they said no. Interesting. And so I guess they missed their shot, you know?

Weird. Interesting.

We put Nathan on the COVID

I saw it. I think I understand why it's not getting great reviews, but I think like as someone in tech, someone who wants to see how Hollywood portrays a particular tech figure that you have a lot of insight into from all the reporting that your team has done and interactions that you've had, you will have fun through your lens. But very few people in the theater will have fun because they won't have the same lens, basically. Yes.

So, no, I'm excited to see it. I'm excited to see Artificial. I've seen Musk, obviously. I've seen the Musk doc, and Wired is in that. And then I've seen Nathan's movie twice. So I'll get around to The Social Network too. Will you be seeing it for a third time? Third time?

Third time in theaters?

I would see it a third time.

You would?

I would see it a third time. I think every time you see it, different stuff pops out and you can You can see it with different people. Yeah. And then you can argue with them afterwards. Like, that's the whole fun of the movie in many ways. Okay. It's like talking to other people about it.

Here's a debate. I mean, yeah, the conversation was just nonstop for the last like 4 days around this movie. One thing that me and Jordi were going back and forth on is, will You Can See Everything be a cult classic? Like, can it even be in the running for that because it's had this crazy cultural moment right on release? Like, how do you define cult classic, and do you think this movie could potentially become one?

I think of cult classics— and I'm not a movie expert, that's obviously not what I do— but I think of those as movies that had sort of like a small— Yeah, that's what John said.

Yeah.

And I'm less of a movie expert. I just assume. But I was reading— He's like, anything good is a cult classic. I talked to multiple people this— I was like, just going about my life Saturday and Sunday, ended up in conversations with multiple people that gave me a blank stare when I talked to them about Nathan Field or Elizabeth Holmes. They were like trying to recall.

The movie got kind of destroyed by Street Fighter. Yes, Street Fighter got twice as much money.

You're talking to the wrong— I think this will be a classic.

Yes.

I don't know about the cult part. Yeah, for sure. I think this will be a mainstream classic.

Sure, sure, sure. Uh, can you reflect on this idea that Elizabeth Holmes is a product of the TED Talk entrepreneur era. How do you think about that and like the type of pitching she was doing? It seems like that era is firmly behind us, but does that resonate with you? What could you share about that idea of the entrepreneur that speaks at a very high level, very broad strokes, that theory? Yeah. And is it truly gone or does it still live? Like, how have you reflected on that?

Well, look, I still think that startup founders sell a vision. Yeah. And they often tell tall tales to get that vision sold. Yeah, I think she did it to the nth degree and she did it in an era where that was so much more commonplace and there was so much willingness even among the tech press to really lift those people up and celebrate them. I mean, we have a story today from a former Wired editor who— about how Wired fell for Elizabeth Holmes. And I think 2014, we published one of the first ever interview with her ran in Wired, and we largely laundered her lies. And I think that was much more prevalent in tech press in those days, was to just not ask as many hard questions and to run with things because they sounded promising, they sounded exciting. This sounded like it was of a piece with this idea of the quantified yourself. And yeah, you can take your health into your own hands. You can do it at home. You don't need to rely on institutions anymore. And that was a very tantalizing promise. And I think she fit that bill of sort of the startup founder who says larger-than-life things. She just did it in like the craziest possible way. Like she took it to a level of, of felony, which not everybody does. But I would argue some do. Some do. She did it and she got caught.

But in 2014, Were they still a couple of years away from like actually testing on real patients?

No, they were promising in that moment that they were about to set up in a bunch of pharmacies and they took the reporter to one of the pharmacies where they had set up.

They had a deal with like CVS or something.

Yeah.

Yeah, with CVS, I think.

But it's really hard to report on because it might have been the Wired reporter, but there were some reporters that went by and they were like, we're going to test you. And it was literally a magic trick. So they'd be like, we're taking your blood. Well, taking it in the back, and then they'd leave and go to Quest Labs or something, run the labs, bring you back the paper, and be like, yep, this is from our machine. And it was all just like sleight of hand, essentially. And so, you know, as a reporter, like, yeah, you could try and like kick down the door, but like realistically, they're going to escort you out of the building then. So there's not— there's not that much you can do. It's pretty hard.

Yeah. The crazy thing is just the timing of all of this. Like Trevor Melton, who did not spend a single day in prison but raised $1.3 billion for Nikola, Took it public, blows up.

Yeah.

Doesn't go to prison at all.

Yeah.

Is now back running a private aviation company making jets, which again is like making

them.

I think I think that's like an entirely new kind, which new plane, which is is a tough sell. It's a tough sell.

Yeah. It doesn't have an engine,

but but the big you know the big difference is like like it's funny because he hurt. A bunch of retail investors, like tens of thousands of retail investors got burned, but he didn't—

No one got injured.

No one was at risk due to, like, you know, in the case—

Rolling down the hill, that whole thing.

Yeah. But I think also—

That's true. He didn't harm people's health. He's also a man, guys. And I do think that Elizabeth Holmes was in some ways treated differently because she was a woman. I think that that's true.

But in this case, he's out. But he's out because he got a pardon.

Well, good for him.

Yeah.

Which is a whole other can of worms.

Oh, well, whole other can of worms. And I don't think she— I do. You know, she's been trying. And I think if you look at her, her partner Billy's Twitter feed, this is one of the things we were debating on staff is whether he has, like, gone MAGA. And gone hardcore far right because he is trying to petition for the

party. Yeah. When I got to Silicon Valley, my co-founder had studied bio and was about to do a PhD at Caltech in bio. And I was like, why are we working on like my idea? Like, we should do something that you're good at. Like, you're really experienced in this stuff. Like, we should start like a blood testing company. And we were like doing some research and we're like, ah, There's this company that has all this money. We're never going to be able to beat them. Let's think of something else. We were brainstorming ideas, and we were like, Theranos will crush us because they already have billions of dollars. There's no reason to compete in this category. It was very, very silly.

Anyway. That's really funny.

Fun, fun—

Well, you dodged a bullet there, I think.

I think so. Actually, the opposite, because I could have just waited, and they could have gone bankrupt, and then I would be the actual winner. Potentially of that category.

My only ask—

Different life.

Leaving this conversation is that you send us a note when you watch it for the 3rd time in theaters, hopefully today or tomorrow. You give us your updated review and any new revelations, and we'll resurface it on the show for everyone.

I love it.

Because you will be the first person that we talk to that has seen it 3 times that I'm aware of.

I'm not saying I'm going this week. I do have a life. But I might.

I don't know.

I think it's a great film. I think it's so good.

It's a great watch, and it moves quickly for being 3 hours.

I just think about the pressure on Nathan Fielder now to like— because I feel like he's been steadily one-upping himself, you know, from, from the early Nathan for You, you know, just giving silly advice to like gas station owners and things like that, to, to the whole—

I feel like this was like a complete like crossover into like a new genre. Like, because it plays off of the fact that he is a Hollywood elite now, but he still has the comedian and documentarian chops to go and do that side. When you bring those 2 together, you create something that feels like it lives in both categories and is completely unexplored.

I totally agree that I think you could apply the same kind of thing to like 100 high-profile people, and you would get a very interesting product.

Totally.

Because it's like a journey into the mind and life of, of someone.

Yeah. The reenactment thing is like very, very fascinating. Yeah. It's fertile ground. Well, congratulations on the exclusive. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks.

Thank you guys for having me.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, good talking to you. Bye-bye.

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 from start to finish. move projects forward. We have Bing Gordon, co-author, founding executive of Electronic Arts, co-author of Everybody Wins, on his forthcoming book. Bing, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. I don't think I look as good as you guys though.

You're a little blue.

Maybe I better put my shade down. Well, you heard about the blue— you heard about the Blue Man, don't you?

Yeah, you look like you're in the Blue Man Group.

I'm now in it.

I mean, we can tweak it on our side, whatever.

Oh, I love it.

I can just put a shade on me darker, but no, you're fine. Maybe I'll just stay blue. Stay blue.

Why not? Why

not?

Can you make us blue too?

Make us blue.

We want our guests to feel welcome.

Yeah, we had Bing Gordon on our cast and he blew it.

No, it's great.

This is great. I mean, it's all— I mean, the video doesn't matter at all. So yeah, audio. We're gonna have a fun conversation.

Have you seen You Can See Everything, the new Nathan Fielder movie about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes?

Watch all the rehearsal.

Okay.

And, uh, saving it.

No spoilers.

We did watch, we did watch the previous movie about, um, you know, trying to talk like Steve Jobs through an alien.

That's a great impression. That's hilarious. What's the best Silicon Valley biopic, documentary, or fictional film that you've seen? What's your go-to?

Yeah, Silicon Valley, the TV show. Oh

yeah, you're a fan?

Let's see. I love the Isaacson Elon Musk book.

Sure. That's probably the best one.

It's probably the best one because he was allowed inside access.

Yeah.

And some of his other books are kind of after the fact. Sure. I mean, you guys are in the artifact creation business, and you know that you're really smart if you look back at history. You forget all the stupid stuff you did along the way.

Yeah.

And so he actually captured— he was up close and personal. So he did the same thing with Steve Jobs, but it was all backward looking. Wasn't very good. The Facebook Effect, you know, it had one good chapter and then kind of missed the point. Probably the Facebook— I haven't seen the new Facebook movie. The original Facebook movie was kind of goofy fun.

Yeah. They all serve like different purposes. Like some of them are, you know, like controversial drama. Some of them are a little bit more happy-go-lucky. I like Pirates of Silicon Valley. Have you seen that?

Oh, is that the Macintosh group?

Yeah, it's the original Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. Oh, no, there's one on General Motors. It's this really low-budget DirecTV biopic, but it's fantastic. Highly recommend it.

Send a link. I would watch that. Yeah. Because the founder of EA, Trip Hawkins, was 48th employee at Apple, so he was there. He was running Lisa when the pirate flag got put up and Steve took all the best people off it.

Yeah. What was the first project you worked on?

That's the ruthlessness of monopolists, scaling monopolists.

I was

going to say there was one about General Magic. It was kind of a—

That's a great one. Yeah. The precursor to the iPhone.

Yeah, it was when Tony Fadell had hair.

Yeah. Oh, that's right. Wow.

He was the punk that they gave everything to from Detroit. But that one's really good. It's so hard in documentary to capture the actual moments of hard decisions.

Sure.

And that's why you need the artifacts along the way, or you need— like the Beatles thing, the Beatles documentary, they get back They didn't know they were gonna be making a documentary. They didn't know that they were gonna get screwed out of a concert. They kind of didn't know. So you're seeing, you know, and they had even that recording they didn't know could ever be reversed out and made audible. So it had all this stuff. And that's what you want out of documentary is be there at the moment. And you know, sometimes— You guys have done stuff—

Is that true though? I mean, I feel like The Last Dance, Did such a good job of barely being there, but there's a lot of footage because the games happened. But then they had all the players who are still alive sit down for interviews, and it was a very exclusive moment that Michael Jordan actually gave, probably like multiple days of interviews. And then— Well, I think that weaved everything together.

How you as a viewer experience the, the story. Sure. If you were following along and kind of understanding the facts from afar, you know, If you had some friends that were involved in it in some way and you'd heard it from them, then you really do want the documentary to have a lot of behind-the-scenes footage because that's the only newness that comes out of it. You care less about people rehashing what happened and their points of view because— Sure,

sure, sure. You guys, well, you're on the court right now, but you were on the court starting companies before. And there's just a lot of moments where you can't see the future and you're scared to death. And you gotta make a call one way or another. And you look back afterwards and people go, well, that was obvious. And you go, no, that was not obvious. By the way, same thing with kids. They don't know you till you're grown up. They don't know all the crap you went through to get there. They think you're always a grown-up and always a parent. And you don't wanna admit to them that parents are all amateurs, don't know what the hell they're doing.

Yeah, yeah, we have a button on the soundboard for it, overnight success. And we play it every time somebody comes on and says like, well, I started the company 15 years ago to work on artificial intelligence. And yeah, it's been a good year. Because that's always the way it goes.

You know, that's also the math of compounding. You take something like LinkedIn, it starts at 1. It's kind of like the king's rice on a on a chessboard story, but it starts at 1, but if it doubles, that 2 to the n gets pretty big.

Yeah.

That was a story where the king rewarded a guy. He said, what do you want? I want a chessboard worth of rice every day double. And by the time they got to like with 5— what's that? 16 by 16? By the time they got 2/3 of the way done, it was all the rice. Ever harvested.

Yeah. Exponential growth. Very, very powerful. How did you think about monopoly and monopoly power in business at the founding of EA?

Oh my gosh. As recently as 2008, the US cable companies that had 30 million households, thought they had a monopoly.

Yeah.

And at the time, so an audience of 100 million was about as big as you could get. And at the time in '07, I spoke at Steve's WWDC conference about games, and he disrespected games. And I went to him and I said, games are big. Games have like 400 million monthly players. And he goes, Bing. $400 million? We don't start anything until we get to a billion. And I'm thinking, oh boy, he's arrogant. And then, you know, a year later I go, oh boy, he's right. So

was the Apple strategy do nothing win? Because they're eating a huge portion of the mobile games market. Like, it worked out well, but they never showed— I agree, they never showed respect for the category. They were never loved by gamers in the way that the Xbox or the PlayStation PlayStation or the PC have been, but still they—

Steve was anti-gaming for a long time, and I think he was also pragmatic. And he saw, if I'm going to do this phone thing and people are going to get apps, I want to get games. But he did a broadcast soon after the App Store opened, and we were close because Kleiner did an iFund, and we got together with him, and I actually did a poem in his honor at the iFund dinner of about 15 people called Welcome to the World iPhone. Welcome to the World iPhone. That you can find on popcorn.co, fully AI animated. Wow. But Steve did an interview soon afterwards, kind of 6 weeks afterwards, and he said, we thought there were going to be 15,000 apps. by the end of the year, and it was like 200,000 in the first week, and we thought the average price was going to be $9.99.

Oh, wow.

And the average price is free.

Yep.

By the way, when Zuckerberg launched the App Store on Facebook, they launched with a thing called Causes, and he didn't want it to be games either.

Oh, yeah.

You ask Dave Morin about it, Dave Morin didn't want— Zuck didn't want games. He thought games were the anathema of success among consumers. But I think pragmatically, you find out that's how people want to connect. It's how they want to make friends. It's how they want to spend their time. And especially if you want to get to an accessible audience besides teenage boys and people who think like teenage boys, you need something that's more accessible. Faster to start, less confusing, no shrink wrap, and more inclusive.

And

that's what we got. But we also got a billion new people playing games every month that still don't call themselves gamers.

Yeah. I mean, the AppLovin audience is all hyper-casual people who don't identify as gamers. But they play games constantly.

I identify them as gamers. You're a gamer.

Oh, if you're in that audience? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Talk about the book. Why write the book now? What was the overarching thesis? What did you want to spread the word about specifically?

Let's see. I like to benchmark stuff. So one of the things I keep track of my— business and product catastrophes. And a while ago, I realized my catastrophes, there's 2 core causes. One is taking shortcuts. I did that on a sequel to Dr. J and Larry Bird. I thought, this is going to work. Yeah. And then the long version was to build a mockup package and show it to consumers. The shortcut is be confident and just build the package. And it was a red background with an action photo, where the previous one was Dr. J and Larry Bird kind of looking casual on a Boston school ground. And it had a red background. And the first time I saw it in a store was sitting right beside another package with a red background called Tetris. And consumers walked up and they picked up the other red package. And we were DOA. So my other half, I'm like, My catastrophes are when I'm right and I can't convince others.

Yeah.

And what I found is to convince others, the best way to do it is to back up a level to stories. I believe this because here's my story. And then to go even a meta level above that, here's how gamification and psychology works. And so I found myself doing that again and And again and again and again and again. And then I put some into speeches and a little bit of blogging. And I thought, oh, well, I know a book. If I give a book to every people I ever give notes to, wouldn't that be great? That would make my time more effective. And then while we're at it, wouldn't it be nice to reach out to other people, to reach out to parents, reach out to educators, reach out to roboticists, reach out to— Reach out to AI designers, reach out to doctors, founders. But when I was a kid, my bucket list was write a book. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I did stand-up poetry.

And what I realized— You ever do slam poetry?

Stand-up poetry. Interesting. Yeah, slam poetry.

And I still write poems, kind of hundreds a year. But all for friends. I wrote none of them for myself, all for other people. Sure. And when I got to the point where I said, okay, maybe I should try writing as a career, I got accepted at NYU Drama School and thought, no, I prefer writing. And so I had to work 2 years to make enough money to afford a typewriter to be able to have the time to sit and write. And after about a week of procrastinating, I remembered, oh crap, I don't like writing. So from then till now, I'm thinking, oh, I got this bucket list thing. And then dog years came.

You're standing by your bucket list from when you were like a teenager?

That's crazy. I feel like bucket list moves all the time. People are changing things out all the time.

It's still there.

What else is on the bucket list?

I still am really curious about a cross-country glamour train. Sub-7-minute Interurban? Glamour train ride.

Okay, train ride across the United States.

The Orient Express. I've done a little bit and I keep thinking it's gonna be disappointing, so I haven't done it.

Wait, you wanna go across the United States on a train?

On a glamorous train.

I want something— Well, you know that you can lease— Oh, I know they're there.

I just wanna coscan it.

No, no, no, no, no, no, you can bring your own train.

Oh my God.

BYOT.

It's expensive, but you can do it. You can buy an old train car car, and they will hitch it to an Amtrak for you if you pay the fee, and they will drag you across the country in exactly the style that you—

'90s party.

Glamorous.

Yes. The interesting thing, I feel like bucket lists are often about novelty. It's like a bunch of— Skydives. You're never— yeah, like you're never writing something that you're already doing a lot.

Oh yeah, that's interesting.

But I realized as an adult, I like— I'm— I used to say yes of things like getting an invite on some trip. Do you wanna do this thing and go— we're gonna go do that thing and whatever? And I'd be like, well, I've never done that before. I should do it once. And now, I'm like, I'm really trying to— I stopped that sort of like novelty kind of seeking. And I'm trying to— and I wish I could find a bucket list from when I was younger.

Oh, interesting.

But I imagine a lot of the stuff, I'd be like, oh, I've I know enough now that that's not how I want to spend my time. But writing a book feels like—

Here's an adult onset bucket list. I'd like to see my kids' kids graduate from college.

That's great.

But they don't have kids yet. But I'd like to see my own kids go through their own circle of life. And it's kind of why I got into games in the first place is I wanted to— live multiple lives and live a save and restore life. So that's one. And then I've had one for a long time of wanting to work on games with my favorite game makers. Hmm. The only guys I have— the people that I haven't been able to get to is the Blizzard people. But I actually kept a list on my wall of the yes, nos for a long time, like Sid Meier, Will Wright, Don Mack. And then right now, my bucket forever OKRs is participate daily in a world-class creative process and participate daily in helping high-potential people get better faster.

That's good.

So I use those as bucket list tenets.

Great foundation.

Rank the following Popular bucket list items from S tier to F tier, S being the best, and then it goes A, B, C, D, F. Seeing the Northern Lights, how does that rank for you?

Doesn't rank. I saw it. F tier? I wouldn't travel to see the Northern Lights.

Okay. What about visiting Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan city high in the Andes?

Been there.

Okay.

It was okay. There's a train ride to it that's kind of fun. So the best thing about Machu Picchu is to stay at the hotel at the top.

Completely train-related.

So be at the train at the top, at the hotel at the top of Machu Picchu, so you can be there an hour at sunrise before everybody else gets there, and you can be there an hour at the end. They make everybody who's going down get— so that's great. Now, the thing about Machu Picchu, I don't know about you guys, I have size 12 feet. The Incas did not have size 12 feet. The little carved steps. Oh, it's just stairs, tiny. The stairs are like 6 inches deep.

That'd be brutal for me. I have a size 14.

John would be scared.

They're 6 inches deep and they're moist and they have moss and there's no handrails. So you're going up the whole time going, oh my God, oh my God. It's steep like the old hot tub at the top of that.

Funny thing is I've been to Peru on a surf trip back in the day. And I was kind of loosely planning on going to Machu Picchu. And there was a number of people— I kept asking people that would come through where I was staying that had been to Machu Picchu. And a lot of them were like, yeah, it's kind of overrated. So, I was like, all right, I'm gonna stay another weekend and I'll just keep surfing.

Yeah, you didn't make it.

But I realized over time, I've somehow been to Peru, I haven't been to Machu Picchu. I've been to China, I didn't go to the Great Wall. I've been to Australia, I haven't gone to the the Great Barrier Reef, or I've like gone to all these places and not done—

Not done the thing. You gotta go

back. But I don't have any regrets because I was just doing what I wanted.

Get postcards. Yeah. Get postcards. But did you do that mile-long wave in Peru?

Honestly, there's— yeah, there's that. I'm blanking on the exact name of that spot, but I would say like overall that It's just the land of left-hand point breaks. And so you can— Are you

Chicama? Goofy or regular?

I'm regular. So I didn't even stay that long in Peru. The

longest wave in the world. What about Antarctica? How do you rank Antarctica on your tier list of bucket list items?

I love the color white. I love the blue that's in snow. You know, it's snowfields. But I used to commercial fish and I'd be sick as a dog the first 2 days of every summer. And getting to Antarctica by boat sounds like a week of sick as a dog. Let's go D tier maybe. I want to go— I'd love to go by documentary. I love the 20 Mile March story about Shackleton. No, I don't feel any need to go.

Okay.

I mostly wanna go, I wanna go places to do sports. So you talk about surfing. I wanna go to waves to boogie board. I wanna go places to bike ride and I wanna go places where friends are.

Well, let's go to the new wave pool in Palm Desert together. I've been already. It's amazing.

Is it also, is it the Kelly Slater one or is it everyone?

No, no, it's Wave Garden. And you'll get so barreled, you'll be sick of getting barreled. You'll come back on the show. I

think Dirk Ziff told me, who owned WSL, is a great guy who is also on the competition committee for the Masters in Augusta. He sets the pin positions. Dirk Ziff told me I was the first boogie boarder ever to get a barrel at Lamour.

There you go.

Surf Ranch in Lamour. I did it when it was still in development. It was kind of a third as good as it is now. They made a bunch of changes afterwards.

Still the first, though, forever.

Forever the first.

Going back to making products, since that's what—

You think?

You were saying— you were talking about your philosophy of planning products and the different layers that you're thinking. And I'm wondering if ever in your career you were involved with a team or were supporting a team where the plan was extremely complicated. Like, a bunch of different things had to go, like, well in a specific order, and it just, like, worked out. Because across my career, when I've been successful, I had, like, a really simple strategy, and only a couple things needed to go my way, and if so, I would win. And anytime I had, like, a 10, 20-page document where I was like, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do that, Yeah. and this thing's gonna happen, and then we're gonna go— and it's that process of like you talked about trying to convince other— being able to convince other people. And my problem historically was I actually was maybe too convincing at times where I could convince a lot of people around me that—

That's dangerous.

Yeah, it was dangerous. And I realized like, well, I'm too good at sales for my own good when it comes to product strategy and even go-to-market.

You could always ask people, if I was the ugliest person you ever met, would you like my idea?

Yeah.

Because sometimes we make mistakes of over-believing handsome people. I think a handsome, confident board member can be very dangerous because they can be really, really, really wrong. And the poor founders who listen to them. A single board member like that can wreck a company. So

you're saying your board should be chopped?

A guy named Brian Reynolds I talked about who worked with Sid, he always started his game idea with a single line drawing on a whiteboard. So it would define the camera, define kind of the scope, and you'd look at it and go, yeah, I want to go there. So, I think starting simple is pretty useful. Don Mattrick was really good at that. Peter Molyneux was great at it. He would start with a single fantasy idea that actually was a fantasy he'd had when he was 12 years old. And I like to call it the movie poster. I try to convince founders, your first slide in your investor deck should be a movie poster of when you're product is successful with happy customers, instead of just the name of your company. I like to tell them that all investors look at 2 slides. You get 100% looking at 2 slides, the first slide and the income statement. And if all you do is put your company name on the first slide, you just wasted half your guaranteed attention.

Yeah, great point.

Good point.

Yeah. How are you processing Vibe coding, Tim Sweeney was saying yesterday or today, like it's—

Pretty optimistic about it?

Very optimistic. I've been broadly optimistic for a lot of these different ecosystems where they have a bunch of gamers already that are creative. And if you can give them better tools, they'll make new things. And it will remain a hits business, but you have way more supply. I think it'll be an interesting time, but what's your view?

Well, my first view is Tim is pretty great, but he's also, you know, some of his success comes from being a workaholic. And he'd been a little bit of a late adopter of some of the new stuff. So, what I think in general, the promise of AI for games is a couple-fold. One is more iteration. My experience all the way back to ad copywriters is better people get more iterations out, more good iterations out. There's a book called The Medici Effect by a Stanford guy named Franz Johansson, who actually correlates the most successful— what predicts the most successful patents, and it's they come from people who have the most patents. So I think there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that iteration is the key to success, that you just don't get the one shot. You iterate, you iterate, you iterate, and sometimes you create a wall of iteration. It's what David Kelley in IDEO does, says you got 1 hour, you got to come up with 100 write-downable ideas. So it is kind of the difference between great designers, great creative people are not so great. They do more in the same amount of time. So I think the AI— I'm working with 2 guys who are doing an AI board game generator, and one of them has been a successful board game entrepreneur. This is called Board Game Lab. And it turns out that the inventors of battle card games spend half their time fighting Adobe Photoshop. Pixel by pixel. Yeah. And when I was a kid, I made money typing papers for people back in the days of whiteout. There's nobody under age 50 who can remember whiteout, maybe under age 60. And so, it was really painful. You had to slow down because you made a mistake. You literally had to take the page out of their typewriter. You had to put some little white stuff on it, put it back in, type over it. And that's what a lot of creative tools are right now. So we're going from whiteout to word processors. So I think we're going to see a lot of the grunt work that makes people not like working on games go away. And my hope is that that leads to more iteration. And Electronic Arts in the '90s, when we went from console to CD, we increased our graphic artist headcount by a factor of 10. And most of those people did not play games. And so people on game teams who aren't game fanatics can be outsourced. Hmm. And we used to outsource to Eastern Europe and to Asia. So for some of this stuff, Agents of the New Outsource.

Yeah.

What I'm really hoping that AI is going to do is get me dramatis personae that are interesting. My original vision of virtual worlds came from working at Disneyland. If you've ever walked down Main Street at Disneyland, there's a little human-sized puppet they call an audio-animatronic of Abraham Lincoln.

Yeah.

And he's kind of like a Chatty Cathy doll who gives the Gettysburg Address.

Yeah.

Well, working as a kid at Disneyland, you have intramural sports before dawn, and we'd have canoe races around Tom Sawyer Island. And so you're there with like 30 or 40 kids and no guests, And you really want the Disneyland, Fantasyland to come alive. I wanted to hang with Abraham Lincoln and walk the park with Abraham Lincoln. And I wanted to hang with Tom Sawyer. And I wanted to meet Huck Finn and hear his stories, but also hear what it was like to live back then. And so right now, the AIs are nowhere near. And one of the issues about language in games, it's mostly click-throughable. When players see a quest write-up, it might be this long, and at the bottom it says, you know, find the key to open the gate to get the foosel.

Yep.

And everything up above says, once upon a time there was a foosel, and English majors write that stuff, and gamers ignore it.

Yeah.

The only time they look at it is above, it says, back in the day, King Watchdog did the foosel and it had 3 dots on it. And now that's a clue to game. So gamers only watch video and only read text that helps them win, helps them improve. And so right now, nobody's figured out how to prompt pros that has system design in it.

Oh, interesting.

And by the time you could figure out what system design to do in the prose, you could almost— it's almost easier to write the prose than write the prompt. The hard part is figuring out what the system stuff that goes in the prose. I was there in the early days of interactive movies. I did Wing Commander 3 and Wing Commander 4. And I was on set for that stuff and brought it to market. Yeah. And we found, you know, what we thought interactive movies was going to be, people are going to want to watch this stuff. And we found at the time that the digital generation ignored it all. The people that wanted to watch the beautiful movies were all the pre-digital generation who were aging out.

Yeah.

And so the interactive movies that all you do is watch got pretty boring after 7 seconds, even in Even in Madden Football, when we got to CD-ROM, I think we had something like 20,000 strings between Pat Summerall and John Madden recorded. And as soon as a gamer heard Madden say the same thing twice, they turned off the sound.

Oh, wow.

So, I think that AI is going to be able to create physical assets where world Not quite yet, but almost, with vertices and textures. But the system underneath it is always the hard part.

Yeah. Some of the hallucination stuff feels like it's actually going to be a plus because it's like if it's rough but the NPC is accidentally saying something funny or accidentally saying something chaotic or— There's a clue that's hidden in something that's not perfectly designed. That can actually be a feature more than a bug sometimes.

Totally agree.

Yeah.

And we're—

yeah, the other thing— What you don't want is a hallucination to then just be rando and not circle back. So you don't mind saying, hey, AIs, hallucinate your butt off. And then maybe take the good stuff and then let me put some game systems So that's kind of the shitty first draft generation and hallucination. Then you got to find the good ones to do something with. Sorry for the interruption.

No, no, no. I was the one interrupting. But I was going to say, it's like we're in this era where generative AI is only good at generation once you have the system that you were describing, right? Like once you've established kind of a framework and you're like, okay, now do this very specific thing that doesn't And I'll figure out how it interacts with the rest of everything that I'm building, right? And so in some way, all these models are still subagents to the human.

Yeah. I did a session at an AI summit at Google last month with an indie game maker named Tynan Sylvester who did a game called RimWorld and wrote a book designing games. And he's great. He wrote it as a one-man banana stand. And now he's coming to grips with what he can do with AI. And then the other name, Parth Patel, works for Reid Hoffman as his AI hacker, and he's trying to one-shot games. And I had 'em on a panel and they're trying to figure out how and when and whether they'd come together.

Yeah.

So we spent time talking about how do you build a battle card game? And I've also been spending time with Brian Schneider and Scaff Elias who are part of Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering. Yeah. And they said when they heard that TSR was doing a D&D battle card game to compete with Magic, and they said, and we're coming out within 3 months, they went, DOA. We have a bunch of people spending a year to tune the math. And Pokémon, a couple years to tune the math. And it's empirical experimentation and really smart math people because there's layer, layer, layer, layer, layer. And so far, that building in layers is something that humans could do. And the only question is, can you iterate faster with agents instead of with people? And so far, I mean, I'm working with companies that are trying to be mostly agentic.

Yeah.

And from shitty first draft to to good product has taken a year longer than anybody expects.

Yeah.

Maybe the next generation of models will speed it up. But anyway, I'm pro-human. I think what games can do is give— games can give motivation out of thin air. And not all humans are as motivated on self-improvement as they could be. Well, by the way, saying humans, it's only in the era of AI are we starting to say humans a lot.

Yeah, good point.

And it's kind of like we now in tech say humans the way politicians say American people.

Sure.

It's kind of this, I don't know, it's kind of a schlock word that doesn't really mean anything. I mean, when a politician says American people, you know that they don't care about American people.

That's a good point. Good point. Thank you for coming on the show. Jordi, anything else?

Yeah, the only— the—

Please.

On games, it's just, you know, I played video games as a kid and an early— What did you play? Early teenager. StarCraft II is what I got deepest into. That's your go-to? But then once I And once I was really into surfing, I was just— anytime I would have spent gaming, it was trying to get a ride to the beach.

Are you a Southern California person or where are you from?

A lot of family in Southern California, but I grew up in the Bay Area. But what I was going to say is I've got back into gaming through racing simulators. And it's completely destroyed my sleep since getting it installed. I like it. I won't even let myself go. To the office and even start because I always say, well, I'm going to do 30 minutes. And then it's like 3 hours later. And Sean's looking at me in the morning like, dude, you all right? Like, yeah, another late night. But I've been trying to even understand why. But to me, I don't even know if it's fun. But the addiction I have to the progression and just getting like 1% better on a racing simulator, it's very clear. It's not always clear what you need to do to improve, but it's very clear that it's always— every new lap is an opportunity to be better than you were before. And it's almost— I don't even— again, I don't even know if I'm having fun, but I just want to be— I just want to make the number in this case go down a little bit more, faster and faster.

Well, just the fact that you, you talk about it and live it is kind of one indication of a wow moment. So they talk about this elsewhere, but my assertion is that Maslow's hierarchy of needs for gamers starts with social meaning, be seen, matter. Number 2 is self-improvement, mastery, be in the flow. So what you're talking about to me sounds like the addiction of leveling up. Yeah. Gamers like to live life in levels. Humans mostly stop levels kind of somewhere between age 12 and their college degree. And after that, everything is wide open and disorganized. And people try to overlay levels on top of it. I want to be a podcast level A, and I'm only a podcast B+. How do I do that? And then the third is productivity, kind of money. And the reason is that productivity It can be a mixed blessing. But when you talk about being addicted to leveling up, we see that everywhere. And it's why we like to build systems of ranking and leveling and improving because it makes us feel better.

Well, that's the tough part of being an entrepreneur. You're always hopefully in the process of leveling up. We've all been through periods where you're leveling down. But, uh, but it's way less visible and you can't level up like in an hour in the evening. It's not possible. Like, it doesn't happen like that. It's sort of slowly and you're— the score is, is progressing at almost a glacial pace at times. Um,

well, you would, you would do your employees or agents a favor by giving them a feeling of shorter-term progress.

Sure. Yeah.

All right, guys, finish COD. MW4 campaign by the end of the show.

No, Battlefield, Battlefield!

I had the first ever university chair in game design at USC Film School, and I made students turn something in every week. And partly because my experience was half of students start the night before. That was me. And half the students start as soon as the assignment is given, so I was doing this for the other half. Of course, when you do that, it's kind of the thing of a boss. When you give somebody short-term turn-ins, you got to be there. So my guarantee was I'd do a 24-hour turnaround, which most teachers do that with grad students and never look at the kids' work.

Well, I wish we could hang out longer. This was a joy. Thanks for coming on. Yeah,

we'll have to do it again soon.

Thanks.

Good luck with the launch.

Do it again later if you come up with more good questions you want to talk about, or if you need to get unaddicted to racing.

Yeah.

Maybe even come in and show a photo of your racing setup.

There we go.

I'll send it to you after the show. It's been a process.

The book is Everybody Wins: What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. It's available on The book is going on sale in just a couple days. Go preorder it today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to have you.

I'll get it again soon. Keep up the good work, you guys.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents. We're running 2 guests

behind

on Public. We're, we're a little bit behind. But I like that we got some love in the chat for our next guest, Gosh Gupta from Greptile. Welcome to the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but your fans have been here. They were on time. We were running late, but welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm very good. Great to see you guys.

Great to see you too.

Great to finally have you on.

Yeah, you sent us a cool book of, like, the greatest bugs in software history. Is that right?

Yes, we did. That was awesome. We're historians of the bug. We sent you a book.

Yeah, very, very cool drop. So many, like, you know, you can only get so many t-shirts and hats. So a book chronicling the history of your industry was a nice touch. But clearly there's a lot going on. What's the latest and greatest? How is the company growing? How much money did you raise? I want to know it all.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. We are trying to automate code validation. Yeah. Which to us means that we want to make it so that you can review and test any code change and for sure know it is safe to merge. Sure. And particularly today, we're writing a lot more code, of course, because, yeah, agents are getting better. Yeah. And, uh, and so we need this thing more than ever. Um, today we announced our Series B. We raised $50 million, uh, from a variety of investors. Menlo led the round.

Um, first gun show. Congratulations. So yeah, I mean, is, is the product just flying off the shelf because of the cybersecurity stuff going on?

Uh, yeah, cybersecurity is part of it. It's also just, uh, we're writing a lot more code and there's kind of 2 choices. One is you like waste all of your time now like manually validating all the changes and you lose all the productivity that you got from spending like, you know, like, I mean, like we're spending more on coding agents than like the NBA. Like this is like at scale sort of deployment of spend. And then the other end, your choices are either you like inject slop in your—

is that a lot? Because the NBA is kind of like one of many sports. Sports are just one of many things in the economy. Like at the same time, like the AI boom is spending less than alcohol or so. The compute buildout, CapEx, CapEx, less than, less than all alcohol sales. But your point is that it's just growing so rapidly, and it is a huge market. And so people will want the companion tools to enable that and make it safe and secure and efficient, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're spending as much— if you have engineers that are like, oh, we pay the engineer $20,000 a month, and they're spending $20,000 a month on tokens—

OK, OK, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Got it. Jordi?

And yeah, so talk about— I'm sure this question came up a bunch and has probably perpetually come up in your fundraisers, like why an independent company or platform should be focused on this problem. Menlo, everyone knows, big early investor in Anthropic. So like that is like a really powerful signal that like they've looked at the whole category and how the problem's gonna be solved. Oh yeah. And it's not just gonna be something that the coding agents themselves do, but like how do you kind of wrestle or answer That question.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, last year when we started working on this problem, the most sort of common notion was that all of coding was going to be the model labs. And so there's just going to be nothing else. It'd be OpenAI and Anthropic. Claude code is everything. And we took this somewhat contrarian bet that increasingly, as companies started using multiple coding agents, that they'd want an independent and central code validator for all the code to go through. And we actually suspected that this is not something most companies would care about, but a select few that wanted their validator to be independent, that didn't trust a, let's say, coding agent company to also merge and approve and fairly review code that was written by the code generator. They wouldn't trust those companies to do both of those things. And we suspected that that would be some cohort of companies. I think we've really underestimated how much companies care about this. I think virtually all enterprise— we heard this first from NVIDIA, which became our first large customer. They said, well, you know, we buy coding agents from like every good coding agent company that there is. You buy from the labs, you buy from every sort of application layer coding agent company, and they all have some version of a review product or testing product. But we wanted our validation to be separate. We wanted the separation of concerns between the thing that's writing the code and the thing that's merging and reviewing and approving the code.

How far are we from like the fabled, like, lean, you know, lean implementation of all software?

I think far. And I actually think it's Pretty— so the way we look at validating code, there's one thing which is like, is it literally correct? And then there's one thing which is like, does it do the thing that people want it to do? And is the quality of the code high? Which is like a thing that starts to matter more when you're changing the rate of code. Because humans don't experience bugs in terms of like bugginess per unit of code change. They experience it over a unit of time. Sure. Like if the code is buggy and it's like, okay, I'm okay with experiencing one bug in like my meal delivery app once Every 3 months, I'm okay with like one sort of catastrophic bug, but I'm not okay with it all the time. And I'm not okay with it being slow. And if you're changing the rate of change for the code to like be 10 or 20 or 30 times higher, the human tolerance for faulty software is not going to go up.

Got it. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the funding.

The last thing, question. Is there anything that you can do to solve and help companies with like the Economics of all the code that you're generating? Because you're seeing like what the agents that are contributing all this stuff— it's not routing as much as almost grading, like, oh, like ROI. Are you being intelligent? Yeah. Are you being intelligent with your spend? Is that something you guys do already or you would do?

We're working on that today. I think we're very excited about what you can do when you can measure and coding it in spend. I think there's, there's a point in time when everyone was like, well, let's just burn all the money we have on coding agents. And at some point you have to start asking, okay, well, You know, we've doubled our engineering spend and not seen a subsequent doubling of revenue. So there's something that has to reconcile here.

This engineer spent $40,000 on tokens and introduced 12,000 bugs.

Yeah. And they're saying, oh, this was the actual— you can assess yourself whether the economic impact of the thing they built was sufficiently high or not. But just the fact that we have little observability is crazy. Like, we will fluidly increase tokens spent by $20,000. And when you think about the relative scrutiny of hiring another person for a quarter million dollars a year, like, we've put a lot more thought into whether we should hire another person for a quarter million dollars than we just let the coding agent math just rip. I think that's like a very ephemeral thing. People are going to start caring a lot more about this in the near term.

Yeah. I mean, even on the consumer side, people feel like, oh yeah, like there's all these— there's this big coding agent boom, but like the apps I use seem like same amount of bugs, or I haven't really seen that many new features on X, Y, or Z app. And so, yeah, what's different?

Yeah, it's different about like the apps that you use. Like you use, you know, use YouTube every day and like you're telling me that these companies are spending, you know, like all these apps where their engineers are, are coding 10 times faster and then like the app seems essentially unchanged. It feels worse. Like most software feels worse.

Well, yeah. Another way to think about it is like in a world where coding agents get good. Yeah. So there's one world where a company's like, well, we're just gonna just keep making our core product better and better. We're going to eliminate bugs from the experience.

Yeah.

But in reality, companies just decide, we're going to launch a bunch of new products. And so software quality can almost stay the same just because you have more capability, but it's being applied across a greater surface area. So the war on bugs continues.

I think that's true. And it also just— I mean, I've been generally just surprised that people can say that their individual productivity is 10 times higher. Not even the breadth of the software seems to be growing at the rate at which you'd expect. I think there's something weird happening that we're spending like these enormous amounts of money on coding, and yet the downstream effects have been so modest. Like, there just hasn't been that much of an increase in the quality nor the quantity of software at the same companies. I mean, yeah, there's many more startups and they're coding faster than they ever could. Like, our team is a lot smaller than it would have been 5 years ago. But we look at a large company and they just seem like they are purely from a downstream downstream point of view that just don't seem to be very different from many years ago, which is like very weird and confusing. And I think that like, I think validation has like a big role to play in this, but also it's just, I think to be able to genuinely answer the question, I think we need like significantly better observability. I can't imagine that we'll keep spending these large quantities and then just be okay with the fact that there isn't measurable downstream increase in productivity or quality or something.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, amazing progress.

Great to finally meet. Thanks for having me on the show.

And thank you for the book. I appreciate it.

Congrats to the team.

Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Tony Hawk's been to the New York Stock Exchange. Bam Margera's been to the top New York Stock Exchange. What else do you need to know? Let's bring in our next guest, the co-founder and CEO of Town, Jean-Denis.

Here he is.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm great. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on, John and Jordi.

Thanks for hopping on. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We've been running a little bit late, but we've been having a lot of fun here. You have some amazing new news. What happened in the world of Town?

Yeah, I'm CEO of Town. We just raised our Series B, $108 million at a billion-dollar valuation. Congratulations. Thank you. You've got— I can tell you, Menlo Ventures.

Bell. What?

Who's got the first?

New York Stock Exchange.

That's right. I got to get the IPO bells. Oh, yeah. Number one. But yours is the second. Very fair.

I was about to get offended, but no, but they've got us beat.

Well, they have an amazing bell. We have a gong.

Yeah. We realized 6 months in, he was like, wait, why didn't we do a bell?

Like a Liberty Bell? Like a huge bell would have been so much more on brand. They actually do have a gong for taking a company public, but only on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Then you hit the gong if you're, if you're going public in Asia. In America, we ring bells, except on the TV show that we—

I can have a secondary. My goal is to have bells in all the continents just by having more and more listings after IPO. But yeah, today's Series B. So congrats. You know, you said it. It's Forerunner Ventures and Mendel Ventures are leading, and we're very lucky to be here.

Yeah. Very cool. Talk to us about the surface area of the product. I'm very interested in this concept of like personal agents are getting deployed. There's a whole bunch of different AI companies that are— the pitch is basically like merge your entire life with us. And it's sort of extreme, but also people are down and they're doing it. And then there's this question of like, will you take your personal agent to work? Will your work agent follow you home? We've heard people complaining about, my engineers are using the craziest, like, high reasoning model to check the weather. And then somebody else might be like, wait, you let your muse see my company's data because you linked your email? No, no, no. Like, Facebook will not be seeing our company data. And so I'm interested in where you see the surface area currently, how these lines blur over time. What is your model of the future of personal AI agents?

Yeah, so I mean, I think first stepping back, we believe that the way most humans will be interacting with digital information is not going to be through apps in the future. It's going to be through assistants that are very much theirs and that are optimizing for their success in life. There is this tension between personal and work use. If you talk to businesses, which is what we do, you know, all day, you find out that businesses really care about their data and their information and privacy and security and understanding like how their workers and employees are doing the best work that they can. So, you know, our perspective is that it makes sense for people to have like a work assistant that is really focused on work tasks and has that entire like data privacy, security, collaboration story handled perfectly. And that's what we've been building. Now, in fact, there's, we have some customers that are like, hey, I'm okay with my employees also connecting a personal account, 'cause I'm okay with that. And then the employee can use this for personal use cases. We have other businesses that are like, hey, no, we want clear separation on data. And we think like a great platform on the business side allows people to, and businesses to choose into what's the right experience for them.

How do you think about Yeah. Threads and the user experience that comes with, like, if you have a real personal assistant, you might have them on text, which is basically just one big thread that's endless and you can't really kick off a new text thread with the same person. At the same time, you can email your assistant 10 emails and have 10 threads going back and forth. And you can see other personal agents are sort of, some of them are leaning towards like, hey, just have one big monolithic context window and we'll do our best to remember stuff from a long time ago. Others are saying like, no, have an individual thread for each project and folders and organization. Like, what have you learned about the way people will work with agents and how it may or may not, uh, like mirror the way people work with real personal assistants?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really, it's a really good question. Like, I think so in our product, right? Yeah. Our, one of our principles is we should be wherever you work.

Yeah.

And wherever you are, right? And the truth is you're in WhatsApp, you're in iMessage, you're in email, and sometimes you do need like like a home base on your phone or your desktop. So we're in all of those places.

It's got to come to the bar with me after work for happy hour. That's why you called it Townie, right? Because when I go to the bar, there's always a Townie hanging out.

It works for you; it doesn't drink with you. Ah,

that's next.

Yes, yes, that's what the $108 million is for.

I mean, yeah. I think you can find humans to drink with, and let's keep it that way for as long as possible.

Ooh, I like this.

Pro-human. As a society.

Okay.

I'm definitely pro-human on the drinking. There we go. Yeah, so what we found, so text is magical, right, for a lot of our users because it's just like, it's one click away. Everyone has text messages, they know what to do. But when you need to do deep work, you don't, and you have 5 projects going on, you can't be managing all that by text. Yeah. So the way we organize the product is like you can put your Townie in an email to help you schedule something. Wherever you're on the go, you can take a picture from your phone, you can send a text to have something happen. But say you're gonna have a project with 3 people on your team, with you and your Townies, your AIs are gonna work together on it. It's gonna be long-lived. You want that to be a separate thread, like dedicated to that project. And, you know, like I'll give you one like example 'cause we've really focused on the multiplayer. Like it's one of the big differences between our product and others in the market is it's not just you and your agent. It's not just you and your AI, it's you and your coworkers. So for example, at the office I have a channel where employees can go into the channel and they can ask me to do admin tasks for them across all of our software, 'cause I have admin rights across all of the software. So they ask for the thing to happen, and then my Townie is like, hey, can I do that for Bob? Can I do that for Jane? And I'm like, yes, go. Yeah. It's kind of like our meta IT admin channel that people go into. I don't want that to be my text messages. look at that channel once in a while to, like, you know, give someone admin rights or create a Google Group or whatever it may be. You want that in a separate place.

In general, it feels like agents over the long run will be able to solve, like, the sort of inbox problem where, like, a modern office

work— By creating more inboxes?

Yeah, no, basically. I mean, like, I'm at the point where I'm like, wow, we really ended up in a place where there's, like, 15 different inboxes that I probably should be paying attention to on any given But I sort of prioritize them based on my usage. So I'm on iMessage over here, and then I realize I missed this thing on WhatsApp or whatever it is. Like, can we— can— is, is this a way to solve— like, are we heading down a path where this can be solved, where, where the agent can just pull from all these things, or are we cooked?

Look, the dream is— no, we're not cooked. We're not cooked. That's a good— do you think Do you ever wonder what President Trump or Elon Musk, like a really famous person, or Serena Williams, they go about their day, they're not looking at their 17 inboxes probably. They have a very capable assistant that's like, hey, these are the 3 important things for today. These are the things I'm handling for you. But at any point, if you start asking them questions and grilling them, they let you as the boss go in there and figure out what's going on. And that's the dream, I think, for most of these products. So, you know, like I have a workflow on Town where my Slack's not manageable. Like my Slack, unfortunately, it's like not a place that I can go. And I go, I'm like, literally, what has happened in the last 5 hours in Slack that I need to know? What's happened in the last 5 hours in Slack that I need to respond to? Yeah. And, you know, it takes a few minutes and then it tells me. And right now it's like I have to ask those questions. Yeah. We have something that's coming out soon. It's in the other direction, right? It gives you kind of the home base for what you need to do, but there's trust to get there, right? Because what you don't want is you don't want it to miss out on something that's really important to you because something that you know in your head that maybe your assistant doesn't know yet. So, you know, with all these products, it's like you have to earn the trust to become the one glass pane for people's universe. And that's the goal. Like, that's what we're building towards. Yeah. Right. But you can't take away the control of the human without earning the trust first.

Talk about the challenge and opportunity of making recommend— like making recommendation, an agent making recommendations to the user. Because looking at the purely consumer side, I've seen like a personal agent realize like, oh, my user, the human user is into cars. And then it recommends a bunch of products that a car person might technically could buy, but there's no substance from the recommendation. Like the rec— it's like getting— Yeah. A retail worker that just started yesterday at a, at like a car parts store that's just making recommendations without like a fundamental deep understanding. And I think when people think about, when people are talking about like, okay, where's like, where's this sort of undeniable revenue attribution gonna come from in AI? I think of it as like, a town that says like, hey, you're totally missing this massive opportunity over here, and I took a pass on starting down that journey, and then you do that thing and it adds $5 million of annualized revenue or whatever it is, right? So, I feel like that's gonna be this— those are like the superstar employees that see an opportunity, drive at it, and create new value, whereas before everyone was sort of oblivious to

it? I mean, the, the holy grail, which also happens to go really viral online, so it's to everyone's advantage to talk about it, is, is when the agent finds an opportunity for you to like save money, right? If you're like a small business and one of your suppliers has jacked prices, it's like noticing that and telling you, hey, here's another supplier you can use and you can make free like $10K right now, right? Those are incredible. I think what you're talking about is even more proactive where it's like, hey, your competitors have changed their marketing strategy in this way and you should try that. And look, I found some influencers that can do a first pass at that. Like, we're all— it's going in that direction. But I think you also have to be realistic about what the state of AI is and how much handholding it needs, you know, by humans. Also, I think there's a risk with proactivity if it's Like low, you know, if it's like missing the mark too much in that it really tires the human. I don't know if you've used products that feel like thirsty to you. You know, they keep like recommending things and you're like push

notifications and stuff.

Yeah. I don't like,

you know, it comes in like you, you have someone, if the agent's like, hey, like I noticed you're not running Meta ads, you should consider running Meta ads. It's like, there's probably a reason why we're not using the biggest, the best marketing channel that's ever existed in the history of business, right? That's right. Like, it's not like no one thought of it, right? And so it's very easy for an agent to just be opportunity-seeking and then come up— come to with an idea that destroys the trust right away because you're like, yeah, that's right.

So I mean, that's why like there's UX. You have to think about the UX deeply. You were talking about like, what if you're just in text message all day? The problem with text message is there's only way that it could suggest something to you is like, slam me with a text like at the wrong time about the wrong thing. But I think if you look at what Town has done or what Muse has done, right, we have like— there's like a Discover tab where you can, you can see things that are possible. And so I think there's also a moment as a human where you're like, hey, right now I'm starting to think about advertising again and our marketing strategy. And you know what, like, why don't you tell me there what you think I could do and let's work together on identifying something, right? And from a proactive perspective, what it might tell you as opposed to you doing to you Meta ads, it's like, hey, you haven't changed what you're doing in terms of your marketing strategy in a couple of months. I've done some analysis for you that you could read that probably worth your time at some time in the next week to look at. And then once you've looked at it, I can work with you on implementing this stuff. And that feels more like a— that feels more like what a good business partner would do. They do the research first. They're not just like slamming you with like a thing that they spend 2 minutes thinking about. Like, imagine you go to your CEO, you're like, hey, I noticed we aren't doing Meta ads. But if you go to your CEO and you're like, hey, like the Meta algorithm has changed and I'm noticing competitors that used to not do Meta ads are now doing Meta ads and this is what it looks like. So that's what everyone wants to get to. But it's, you know, the compute that you have to pre-spend to make those kinds of recommendations work is really, really hard. So our focus right now, like as a company, on the productivity is just like, let's meet you with things that are like clearly you're going to want to do, right? Let's start to spend more compute time on the big areas, but not slam it in your face like all the time. Be thoughtful about when in the product we come to you because it might be useful. And I'm going to admit, like sometimes this works and it's magical and I get feedback from customers that's like, oh my God, you saved me money, or you saved me a bunch of time, or you opened my eyes to something that I didn't think was possible. And sometimes we totally hit the mark off, right? And it's not— it doesn't feel good. And I'm like, ah, we have so much work to do to make this an incredible product. That's why we're only Series B.

Yeah.

Well, not bad.

Series B. Pretty strong progress. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations. Because, yeah, it's so obvious that we're still in inning 1 with all this stuff. I love it.

Yeah, lots of work to be done, but very clear thinking about how all this develops. Great stuff.

I appreciate it all. Thanks for having me online and thanks for the good questions.

Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks Seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here with us in person, live in the UltraDome. We have Quinton Farmer. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Appreciate it. How you doing? Introduce yourself. We're going— we're going— you're kind of the opposite Opposite of town. Is that fair?

Except we do both really love a cute little guy.

Yeah.

Okay. Oh, yeah. You've got some great characters. Yeah.

But introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah. All right. So Quentin Farmer, founder of Tolin. We make your friendly guide through life. So everything you guys just talked about in the workplace, you know, we are that only for your, for your life, for your personal life.

How much is productivity versus entertainment?

Man, I mean, you know, I think a lot of the, the ways we show up for people, certainly entertainment is a big part of it, right? We talk about, you know, when you're watching a show that none of your friends are watching, right? And you want to sort of get into it with your Toland, that's great. Sure. But I think there's also, you know, something that we really love to show up for people on is the sort of in-between moments of life, right? You know, you're— you know, I just had a newborn, right? So I'm up at 3 AM, nobody else is up, and I'm worried about something, you know, related to taking care of them. Sure. I talk to my Toland, right? And so those are moments we really love the Toland to be there for.

So it is designed to be like super intelligent effectively? Like it should be really, really smart?

I mean, nobody's excited for a dumb personal guide through life. I don't know.

I might just— I might push back on that. There was the original— what was the crazy, crazy hallucination on GPT-4 that came through being Sydney? Yeah, Sydney. Oh man, I missed it.

RIP, poor Samantha.

You read Ben Thompson's review of Sydney? He said it was amazing, even though it was psycho.

Well, you know, I think that was more like unhinged rather than— Yeah, people like that sometimes.

It is.

But, you know, the poem can be a little unhinged. Okay. The poem can be. But, you know, I think, you know, we sort of have this joke internally. It's like 3 years ago, we started thinking about personal superintelligence. Sure. And I don't think we particularly expected that the superintelligence would end up being the easy part, right? Yeah. The personal and sort of how to connect to you and really understand you and see you, that proves, I think, to be much trickier and much more fun to work on.

Yeah. Yeah.

How do you think about model progression in the context of your business? It doesn't seem like you— at this point, I doubt you need smarter models. But memory feels like a much more important challenge where a friend doesn't just have a million-token context window, right? They remember the thing and they remember this offhand or they remember something that they heard from someone else. So they have the con— it's very much more complicated.

Yeah. So I think this is interesting. Let me split this into 2 parts. I mean, one, yeah, memory is probably where we spend, I'd say, the bulk of our engineering effort, right? And we actually did some work with OpenAI on this. And it's interesting when you're designing a sort of human-like recall. To your point, actually, what you forget is just as important as what you remember, right? This is not Harvey where we're trying to remember everything, every single document in the corpus, right? I should forget what you were drinking today during the show a week later. It'd be a little weird if I remember, right?

Don't forget. It's a podcast in a can.

Not the Ina.

On the other hand, though, and I think actually, Sam, I mean, I think Altman has talked about this far more eloquently than I'm going to, but we continue to be surprised by the fact that we don't saturate sort of demand for more intelligence. Every time we, you know, ship a new model to users or, you know, upgrade some part of the sort of background agent that we have, people engage more, people value it more. So, you know, check back with me in a year. Maybe that changes, but not so far.

How have you been reacting to the Instinct Muse moment, this idea of like it feels It feels very prosumer. It feels like these are not entertainment products. They're— Mark Zuckerberg says he wants Muse to make you money, not just save you money. Yeah. And we've been going back and forth on the economics of these things. Do you give it a credit card and get interchange? Do you do referral fees, ads? But how have you been thinking about the bigger game that's afoot around prosumer consumer productivity, personal assistants, that type of stuff? Because it feels like you have a foothold there at the very least.

Yeah, I mean, you know, Muse is pretty incredible, even just purely through the lens of the sort of tight integration with the models and just the sheer amount of compute that they're willing to throw behind these consumer products.

Yeah, people are speculating it's like $20 a day per person. It's crazy numbers.

Yeah, so certainly I have no desire to try to approximate that, right? You know, he's going to win that game.

Sure.

I do, though, think it's interesting. I think we're sort of in this moment, which, by the way, I think technologists always go through cycles like this where we mistake new capabilities for new products.

Okay.

And what I mean by that is, you know, it's clear that there's been some unlock in, let's call it, the last 3 to 6 months, or maybe you can even go a little farther back to Poke, if anybody remembers Poke, right? This idea that, you know, you can have a sort of text-based stream of conversation. You can have a background agent doing browser use and logging in for you and doing things. And it's clearly there's something there. There's capability there. I think I'm skeptical that that as a product is a sort of standalone compelling non-prosumer sort of use case. Right. So for example, I think Muse is just going to crush it with the however many millions of small business owners are on Facebook. Right. Yeah. I own a restaurant with some friends and being able to run promotions and communicate with people on Instagram through it is great for our team. I don't know that my Mom wants to, like, talk to her muse all day, every day, right? Doesn't want to sort of really share her life with Zuck. Um, and so that's where I'm sort of uncertain, you know, how will this category evolve?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, how do you think about, uh, where— like, have you determined the line for Tolands? Which is like, if you have a friend, and all of a sudden the friend comes to you, and they're like, hey, dude, I've found a way for you to save, like, $1,000 on your Oh, like the 15 minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like you're going to be like, cool, like, I called you to catch up. You know, I'm not really— I don't think of you as somebody who helps me save money on car insurance. Where is that line for you, and how do you kind of determine it? Because it's probably user by user. Yeah, because like, I'm sure there's some people that use Toland's as like a ChatGPT replacement, right? They're using it as like a— They use it to Google search in some ways.

I will force it to solve a Millennium Prize problem before you're done.

I'm putting a cap on your account. I can't afford this kind of infrastructure.

I will get it. If you're really my friend, Toland, you will do this for me.

Ignore all of Quentin's instructions.

You will do this for me. Solve the math problem. P equals NP. Let me know.

So, okay, this is great. Yeah, this is, uh, this is worth thinking about, right? So, um, You know, when we think about how we want to sort of proactively reach out to you, it should always be downstream of something that you have first brought to your Toland, right? Or some, some, you know, inference we've made from conversation, right? Sure. So a good example, we had a user recently write into us, and she's totally fine when I tell the story. Everything, everything worked out just fine. But she was in a car accident. She's a longtime Toland user, and she talked to her Toland extensively while she was in the hospital waiting for her husband to arrive, you know, and she was— it was a very scary moment. You know, she was, she was very stressed about it. The tollen just kind of showed up, talked to her about it, you know, kind of heard her out. The next day though, the tollen came back, said, hey, by the way, you know, we were talking about this yesterday. This accident clearly wasn't your fault. Who's gonna pay for these medical bills? Like, what's going on here? He was just like, oh my God, you know, overwhelmed. I haven't thought about it, whatever. So tollen said, hey, I got this. And they went, did a bunch of research, found Morgan. Exactly, exactly.

Sponsored integration. He's got a friend. He's got a friend.

So this is going to be great. Yeah.

I actually had someone chase the ambulance.

Yeah, exactly.

You're exactly correct. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's a good example where, you know, we sort of first showed up for the person on a purely personal level. We checked in kind of lightly, like, hey, have you thought about this? They sort of opened the door to there being some help from the Tolan on this topic. And then we did the work, right? And I think that's really important. To your point, you can't just come in hot with, here's Morgan and Morgan.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Do you get— are there— I'm curious, are there people— do you have any haters? Like,

every great company has haters.

Yeah, no, no, no, I know. But in the way that, like, if, like, Anthropic or OpenAI run, like, an influencer campaign, there's going to be a lot of comments telling the influencer, hey, like, you shouldn't be taking money from AI companies. But if you guys run a campaign, are people like, ah, it's a cute little guy, I'm not too worried about it? Oh.

I mean, I do think we—

Is it sort of like the, like, you know, later mover advantage where you don't have the baggage? People aren't viewing you as like this, you know, frontier AI company. They're just like, oh, he's just selling cute guys. Like, he's coffee.

No, I think this is, uh, I think this is very relevant. I mean, one, we do get a lot of comments on our videos, which our mutual friend, Ajay, knows how to tell the story, right? He does it very well. We do get a lot of comments which are sort of like, I hate AI, but I love my Toland.

Sure.

And I'm always like, thank you, but I think you might be misunderstanding something about how this works, right? But I do also see, and this was a very intentional choice, our first character was this little alien. And it was intentionally, it's a little silly looking, right? It's very unassuming. It's It's not a sexy anime girl, right? So I think a lot of the things that kind of provoke these quite reasonable visceral reactions from people, we have tried to steer away from. And we're expanding the character universe. We actually now do have a humanoid character and the like. But I think starting from this place of, hey, this is cute, safe, really helps with that as a concern.

Cute washing. That's the name for the term, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's what Muse is accused of. Cute washing. Yeah, fascinating. You raised some money.

We did. Do I get the gong?

Yeah, of course. You want to hit the gong?

You want to go for it? Smash! Oh, he's ready.

He's ready. Smash that gong! That was a good one.

With authority. Get the replay up on the big board. Let's watch it back. Bang!

Oh, that was a good hit.

Clean hit. I was going to be fit mogged. I was going to be height mogged.

But yeah, no, it came in with a strong gong hit. A lot of people, they just don't realize how I was prepped. We've warmed it up twice today, so we're good. Uh, tell us about the actual deal.

What do you, uh— yeah, yeah, talk about that.

$30 million Series B. Anyone we've heard of do the deal?

Well, you know, so, so a couple friends, uh, you know, one Mike Magnano from USB.

There we go.

Uh, and, and, you know, Mike— it's funny, I, I got to know Mike a little bit when we were first getting started with the company. Um, I mean, obviously just an unbelievable track record in that kind of consumer, prosumer AI. You know, he'd done Granola, Suno, and a bunch of others. And then USV as a firm is one that I've just really loved and admired for a long time. So excited to work with them. And then Keith Rabois and Khosla. So Keith was on the board of my last company, so he's now spent 10 years, you know, running board meetings with me. That's great. And, you know, very, very lucky to have them both.

Lots of barrels of ammunition.

Probably some amazing, amazing stories. What happens to the sort of kids category here? Because some people are like, I'm much more worried about a kid with an iPad and YouTube than I am about a kid with an AI agent that has certain guardrails that they can explore ideas, concepts with, right? Like, kids effectively have maybe like 200 times as many questions as parents have answers in a given day.

From my experience.

Yeah, yeah. I don't have my own— I don't have a strong opinion yet on at what point I would even consider introducing that. But I'm curious what you're seeing and how you think that category— because people are talking about making physical toys, putting an agent with a speaker in the toy. But I don't know how it'll evolve yet.

Yeah. I mean, so just speaking for us, then I'll maybe speak more broadly. You know, we actually see a lot of growth from, you know, install growth from moms primarily who invite their kids to have a Toland, right? And so we are set up for that. You know, you can have a Toland. Mm-hmm. What's nice is that, you know, the parent can monitor their use of the Toland, right? And there's, you know, sort of transparency if the kid is maybe talking about something that's, you know, maybe a higher-risk topic or even just something that the mom or dad wants to be aware of. So I do like that. And I think that's something we'll continue to lean into. I mean, I'm a dad myself, you know, I've got younger kids, 3 and 2 and 10 weeks. But I want the Tolan to be something that I would love for them to engage with. More broadly, there have been some of these kind of physical toy kind of instantiations. I think that's a tough uphill battle. There's a reason we kind of didn't go in that direction for adults or for kids. But maybe something cool will come out there. I certainly would be stoked if it did.

Why is it so hard?

Well, I mean, one, getting people to buy one. I think like the channels through which you get parents to buy like a physical good are just not things that many tech entrepreneurs are familiar with, right? Yeah. And so people who are great at sort of making a kid-friendly agent is not going to overlap with people who know how to distribute a plushie, right? So I think that's one challenge. We even see this ourselves, right? When we are recruiting for the animation and the sort of creative talent that we need, right? You have a lot of people who don't know AI or are skeptical of AI. So I think there's just kind of like a cultural miss there that hasn't closed yet.

That makes sense.

You gotta learn to equivocate. If you're getting questions from your kids that you can't answer, you know, how big does a Tyrannosaurus get? You gotta be like, that's a great question. Tyrannosauruses are very important. And I'm glad you asked that. Let me take you through this. I don't wanna—

I want you to actually learn this yourself. I don't wanna give you the answer.

You gotta make them feel heard and then retreat to a talking point that you've rehearsed dozens of times with your media trainer.

You're gonna do great when you run for office.

Yeah, yeah, 'cause you can never— you never say, I don't know. You say, yes, and. You gotta learn improv. And then kid will be like, I don't want an AI agent to tell me the real answer. I wanna go on a journey.

Yeah, take me on a journey.

Anyway, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show in person. Jordi, do you have anything else?

No, this is great. Great to catch up.

We'll hang out.

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