Minecraft AI Mods, Should You Sell Your Data, Construction Paper Really Fell Off

But what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain like how did you get this installed? What is what is this?

Yeah. So so from my understanding, it's basically like the... There's no... You're not really like putting one game into another. It's fully like a a Rust engine and then you're pulling assets from both games and like kind of pulling them together somehow. Interesting. So like it... I I had to buy Modern Warfare two on Yeah. Steam. Yeah. It's using the actual game assets. Mhmm. And the same thing for Minecraft. Like it's using the actual assets. It it found them online. Interesting. And I basically had Codex like set it up wired up so like I can run on Mac. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like fully featured. Like, I can I can mine? I can build You can build.

Using the you get a nuke? I don't know if I can get a kill streak. That's the question. I gotta figure out If kill streak's not Morden Warfare two. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. There are actually a whole bunch of different different ways people are modding things. It's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. Like, the classic... Like, the most... Like, the the most approved or, like, company approved mod might just be something like, you know, there's a Fortnite skin and you get to... And I don't know if they actually did like a Batman skin or a Spider Man skin, but those skins come over and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over.

It's purely just, okay, the Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider Man looks like. They made a Fortnite model out of the Spider Man, like, character, and then you can play as them. And everything is integrated fully. You're not going to risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Now, these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm playing. Could you try swimming? Okay. Yeah. Swimming is a little bit broken.

And that's the nature of the the vibe coated slops. Oh, it's over for you. Yeah. Are you drowning though?

I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water. There's no... Yeah. The the the mechanic is cause yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare two, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know. But some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. Others are actually merging two games. For that Mario in Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, the mod actually borrows a subsystem called LibSM 64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll...

We keep politics out of video games. We... Please. Yeah. Please. So what they'll do is they'll they'll they'll download the actual binary, like the code that is on the cartridge. They will convert that into just a file that's on a computer. You can run that in an emulator. But then they can actually reverse engineer the underlying code from what has been compiled. So you get basically a bunch of ones and zeros, and there are tools that will look at that and work backwards to understand what the actual game logic is. And so an example is, like, in the game code, you might have, like, health equals 100. But in the compiled code, it might just be, like, some memory address, like x, like zero x one two three four f c.

And and then you might work backwards in the decompilation step to figure out that that's the health. So a bunch of things happen in the game, game's played. As things are changed and updated, that game state is then is then sucked out into the decompilation file. Interestingly, the NSA is involved. So no, we can't keep politics out of game development because they're actually... A lot of these game modders are actually using software from the National Security Administration, the NSA. So the NSA has a GitHub with an open source project called... What what what is it actually called? It's called Ghidra and it's a it's on the National Security Agency's GitHub. It's an...

It's a software framework for reverse engineering software. So point this thing at the game and you wind up getting more of the code and then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler?

Okay. I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can cut it up. Trick Trick shot shot this this pig. Pig. No. No. Oh. He did it. He did it.

Come on. Tyler. Little... Can we get a can we get a content warning? Oh, okay. I think Minecraft's Anyone at home?

Something focused game. But there there is something else going on now that I hadn't seen before. I don't know if this was popular in the modding community before. But there there is a there is a version you might have seen. We we can try and pull it up. Arc Web. It's Batman Arkham Knight pass through Spider Man mod. So you play as Spider Man in the Batman game and you're... So you're in Arkham. And what's funny about this is that the two games feel very similar, so they mesh very well together. But from an intellectual property perspective, this should never happen because Mhmm. Of course, Marvel is DC or is Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney and Batman is owned by Warner Brothers. These two companies are direct competitors and so they should never really be collabing in this way. But the fascinating thing about this is that it's not just they took the Batman game and created a Spider Man character.

It's actually running both games. And then it's passing data between the games to create this experience of being Spider Man in Arkham Knight. So what's happening is like the mod goes into the Batman city, Gotham, grabs all the geometry, all the collision data, all the all the geometry of like where that building is. It takes that and in real time it passes it to the Spider Man game, which is actually running a different physics engine. So it has to translate all of that. Also, the two games use different... They use different coordinate conventions, different axes and different units of length. So it has to translate all of that, create that in Spider Man, and then and then also keep both of them running like the controller input because normally if you have a controller on a video game, it'll just be on one one game at a time and if something's in the background. But you can see there's like, yeah, bugs already. And this is like part of the problem.

And then and then it needs to actually merge the graphics and so the games use different graphics systems too. This feels like it would be so much easier if it was two games that were built on the same underlying technologies. But through the power of Slop, they're able to sort of merge these two in real time and get them actually running at, seems like, near 60 FPS. And then even when you go into... They don't show the fighting, but I think when you go into the fighting you switch into like the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider Man system. So you're using Arkham's free flow free flow combat. It's very, very odd. But the end result, it looks great and it feels like it's almost ready to serve as a reason to be like, oh, I I love that game. I want to play it again. Why don't I give it another spin?

Sort of a new game plus you get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered, rebuilt. Could be an interesting reason to go back into a game that you loved with a different twist this time. And stuff like this happens all the time. I mean, the the even like the latest sequel to Spider Man was the same city, but just a different character. And so, some different mechanics, some different story elements, but a lot of the same assets. But it was still a reason to jump back in for a lot of players. But all of this is the classic ninety ninety rule. Have you heard of this? Coined by one of the greatest of all time, Tom Cargill at Bell Labs.

He said, when it comes to software engineering, the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time. Because you you get 90% of the way there, you're like, great, I only have 10%. And then you spend even more time on that last 10%. No matter how much you estimate it, things always grow in scope. And so when you think about the the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything relative to like...

You're looking at five years. What? You're looking at five years. You're looking at five years. Yeah. Here's Minecraft in GTA. Similar Yeah. The the sort of multiplayer first person shooters Yep. You could imagine actually that being like relatively straightforward to get a a working version that would be fun. All just how you scope it.

Yeah. Because if you're just talking about you're only changing the textures, like you're using the same model from from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not going to introduce too many bugs. But as you as you include a different physics mechanic, a different explosion, like all of a sudden you're introducing so much risk that you could fall through the map or things could not collide correctly. You got to go rewrite that collision software. That triggers something else. Then and and all of these demos, none of them show the actual like playing the full game. Like there's a mod to bring Minecraft into Skyrim. It's called Skycraft, I think. And in the developer's documentation for like the open source implementation of this mod, it says like, don't start the game normally. Like, do not try and play the opening sequence.

It will break. You should start with like the alternate starting point that starts you further into the game because it's it's so broken. And that's just the nature of being in the slop era. So the interesting thing is that all these mashups, they they feel like tailor made for the short form video era because you watch one of these for thirty seconds, sixty seconds and you're like, wow, that's amazing. I have dual nostalgia. I love GTA five. I love Minecraft. Put them together, double, love. It's amazing. Everybody is, you know, getting like millions of likes on these videos. But no one has actually played these all the way through. No one is sitting back down and being like, okay, yes. This is actually as good as GTA five which a lot of people played for a hundred hours or more. Same thing with Minecraft. The base game remains dominant in terms of like actual entertainment value.

This is this is pure meme value. And so it feels like it's another Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, but for video games. And the Harry Potter Balenciaga video by Demon Flying Fox, that was released 03/15/2023. Wow. Can you believe it's been three and a half years since that? That's a while. Right? That's a while.

Yeah. It makes me think how how do they make it at that time? That was AI video. That was the best AI video was. But what they did was it was you would train a dedicated model on every character. So they would train a model on Mhmm. Harry Potter or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically. Just his face. And then they would use AI generated imagery to to generate something that looked like a, you know, sort of art station style Balenciaga runway show in a Harry Potter scenario, like at Hogwarts. And Midjourney at the time was pretty good at that style, dark, like, sort of odd backgrounds. It was okay if it had some hallucinations in the background because it leaned into that because it's a dark fashion show in a castle. You don't really have a strong reference point for that.

And then they would run the face swap and then they would animate that image just a little bit and then there was a ton of editing to actually to to make it so that you would never linger on a single frame for more than a second or two and so you'd move on. But what was the conclusion from seeing that? There... Mean, at the time people were like, we're gonna be watching full AI movies next year. What was your conclusion? Did you have one?

From the Balenciaga? Yeah. I mean, it's just like... These are all like very novel ideas, but at some point, like, now I've seen like... I've seen a bunch of different games that have been ported to each other and it's like, okay, there's another... It's like, oh, you put Minecraft and Mario and I kinda get the And it's notable that like Flying Fox did many many sequels and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree. And and still has a YouTube channel and I think posts a bunch of stuff. But we didn't get Daniel Radcliffe at a Balenciaga runway show and we also didn't get a fully AI generated movie within three and a half years. And so it was still a heavily important tech demo though. And I do think, you know, there will be a breakout video game mod that sees heavy assistance from AI in the near future.

But the key is like crafting a really innovative strategy loop. Like that's what DOTA two was. It was a spin off of World of Warcraft, I believe. It was a it was a mod that that came from there or maybe it was from another game. I forget. But there are plenty. I mean Counter Strike started as a Half Life mod. Like there are clearly games that can be birthed from that. And the fact that you have AI tooling to speed that up, you're just moving a lot of people into the indie developer category who can move things faster. They're still going to wind up spending, you know, 99.999% of their time in the last 1% if they want to break through.

But it's it's cool that many people will see this and be like, gotta make a mod. I gotta make something. I've always had this idea for this game and now I can actually go and get started. Although, they will obviously need to lock in for a long time to get something actually polished. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Let's move over to some news in the timeline. Theo is optimistic about this. Millennial age gamers are about to become more pro AI than the average SF tech bro because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare two. I I do think some people will see this and be like, oh, this is cool. I like this. But there are still plenty of gamers who are like, I don't like AI at all for a bunch of reasons and and they and they bring that over. There was an interesting chart of...

Think for... Think the gaming community to become broadly pro AI, a very well loved franchise has to release a new game that is noticeably better or bigger because of the technology. Yep. And until then, I think people are just gonna be like, you know, again, these sort of combinations are cool. But until... I I I don't... Well, one, I don't think they can really get users because of all the IP issues. Just waiting IP. But but yeah, I I think you're gonna need to see like GTA seven and it's the entire world. Yeah. Right? And for for people to get excited. And I don't I don't know that that that's even a path that they'll take.

Yeah. I like that lawyers are extremely pro AI now because they're like, I'm gonna get so much business from this. Yeah. Yeah. Is this Zillennials FTW shared by Antonio Garcia Martinez in from The Economist Seeing a Monster. Quote, how serious do you think the risks of AI are of AI causing serious harm? Everyone is basically moving to the right. They're more worried just in the past two weeks, three weeks, just through from August 28 to September 18, except for millennials age 30 to 44. They saw Jacob Coxen. They saw Dario Hamade. They saw the SNL sketch. They saw, you know, the Ezra Klein interview and they were like, yeah. I was worried before, but I'm good now. Which is kind of Less worried than ever.

Less worried than ever, apparently, according to The Economist. No. It's it's... It's a narrative violation. Yeah. It's a narrative But, yeah, everyone else is is is getting increasingly more worried. And, of course, the top of that chart, that is the voter base, 45 and up. So if you're if you're seeing even 65 plus move to, you know, 40% very serious, that's that's gonna move that's gonna move some elections.

Jim Prosser says, it's a fascinating outlier. My hypothesis, we're the gen most comfortable with this degree of technology change and uncertainty due to coming of age through the Internet and mobile.

Yeah. I mean, lot of millennials are are in a are in a very fortunate position with like not getting not getting caught off guard by brain rot and slop and and screen time addiction. It's like we sort of got brought up in the craziest era and then have and then have seen the the the the children data and can fight back on that. So I think a lot of people in their thirties and forties are like, yeah, I'm set up for success. I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one, that type of thing. So Yep. It feels a little bit more like there there's a danger but it's known. It's like it's like we also grew up with cigarettes but we were like, yeah, we knew we knew the risks of cigarettes. So we were like, yeah, we're we're gonna treat that accordingly.

Yep. Only when you're drunk. Alright. Sean Frank, our first guest of the show today. Let's go through this when he's here. We can go through it live. Okay. No. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. I'm a great I'm a great guy. We're gonna go through it right through.

You're like, actually, I just... Want to go through. Yeah. Let's bring this up when we get to them. The whole the whole segment? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, whatever you want. I think I think the the the interesting crossover here... I mean, we're gonna talk about data brokerage. Sean Frank got an offer to to sell Ridge's data. He turned it down. But we'll we'll talk to him about the the the the rationale there. The interesting thing is from Dan Romero. He thinks that there's a private equity opportunity to buy old video game IP and then offer a $10 unlimited mod license per game or a $100 per bundle.

So so yeah, like taking all these old games and then setting them up for for, you know, use in AI systems. So when you go to a model and you say, I want to make a first person shooter that I can hop in a car and it's a racing simulator. And then I also want to be able to skateboard. Instead of me to write all of that logic from scratch, you could just pull like the actual racing game that they licensed off the shelf. Counter Strike two, mean, Valve has has created a a insanely robust modding system. And they actually created a new mode in CS two called Rush. And it's built entirely in their modding system. So they're like leaning into this in like a closed source way, but they will allow you to build an entirely new game in their game. And there's a lot of examples like that, everything from Roblox to Fortnite to, you know, plenty of others that have had modding tools for a long time. The question is just like, how do you interface with the with the mods directly?

Suds says looking for 500 megawatts, minimum two fifty, max two gigawatts of powered land for a port go. Company is completely price insensitive and has billions behind it. Ideally, electrified shells already built. My first thought here was isn't two gigawatt data center gonna cost you like a $100,000,000,000? So so you're like you're like going to buy a house and you're like, I'm very price insensitive. And they're like, cool. Well, the house is, you know, $50,000,000. And you're like, well, have $5,000,000. But I'm price insensitive. Yeah. So there's... Which is of coke. It's like, I bought some stocking.

And so when you're getting into when you're getting into two gigawatt territory, so Chase Lochmiller goes, I think we can help. It's like, there's just not that many not that many folks that can get you two gigawatts. But worth a shot. Worth a shot. I mean, got half a million views on this. You probably got to the right people. Yeah. Right? So effective.

I wonder I wonder who is... Who's been up two gigawatts? Because wasn't wasn't Meta's Hyperion or Prometheus site, like, two gigawatts? Like, this is, like, hyperscaler territory. Right? Yeah. Like, there there are just aren't that many, like, startups that could be... Like, it's funny to to to, you know, own Meta and be like my Portco. Like, every Portco is very like small coded. Right? But you're just like, yeah, like, my Portco.

So Hyperion is designed to deliver five gigawatts. Okay. Okay. So... Well, it's not Meta. We ruled them out. Two gigawatts by 2030 is their plan. And then How much? 2032 is when they get to five. So...

You know, there's this there's this news story going on in in... No. It is it is it is noteworthy that you can have billions behind you and still not have anywhere close to what you need to secure that kind of capacity.

Yeah. Fun fact, if you had a one gigawatt data center, pretty significant, and you were willing to burn the entire Amazon rainforest, you could power it for thirty five thousand years. Not bad. Right? There's a lot of worry that the Amazon's going away because of Bolsonaro. People are worried. The little lungs of the earth, we need to maintain the we need to maintain the Amazon. But it is an incredibly... The Amazon? I think so. It it it is a hard trade off because every other industrialized country was like, yeah, we burned all our resources. Now, you're the last one with them, don't burn them. So Yeah. It it is a tough... It's like a it's like a, you know, industrialization for me but not for thee. That's the real tension there.

Anyway. What's Will Menaida saying? He says, it's probably worth noticing that all the guys that were shilling high fee SPV six months ago are all now all have powered data centers they'd love to sell you. Interesting. How are those high fee SPVs doing now? Probably okay. Pretty cool.

John, question for you. Yes. Do you think it's fair game to ash your Nature Valley bar out of the window of a car? Or is that kinda like too close It to really does produce an insane amount of crumbs. Yeah. Have they never thought to do a v two of that product?

I know. I know. I mean for how how around Nature Valley bars were Yeah. It does feel like they've completely fallen off. Really? I haven't seen it. I like... I used to see a Nature Valley bar once a day. Yeah. They did sort of have It's a bar in a kind of fallen off. What happened? What happened? Tyler, can you do some research into Nature Valley sales? At same time? Over the last thirty years my entire Just a health perspective, doesn't the insane crumbliness of the Nature Valley bar give you sort of reassurance that you're eating like actual food? Because a lot of protein bars these days are so mashed up. You're like, I don't know what kind of ingredients are in there. You had to you had to destroy, like, 50 cows and 12 pigs and this much milk and this much corn to like make this And with the Nature Valley bar, it looks like what it is. It's just like a bunch of...

Gil says one a day, baby. They haven't gone anywhere. There we go. There we go. Putting up numbers still. I love it. The other resource people haven't really been talking about at all, maybe they should, is construction paper. Says, you don't really hear about construction paper much anymore. Back in my day, this was always felt like it was top of mind almost constantly. Top mind. As a child, certainly.

So I know construction paper useful for just drawing on. It's thicker. Yeah. The ink doesn't go through the paper. That's a benefit. But were people actually constructing things with it? I know people would make those those loops, like those chain... Daisy chains Yeah. Around holidays, perhaps Christmas. Yeah. It's more of a Christmas ornament than anything else. But I don't know that I I... It it feels like if you were building like a real diorama, you would get out the cardboard. So maybe maybe maybe cardboard just squeezed construction paper a little bit. And, I mean, have you seen those cardboard cutting saws?

They're... It's like a saw designed to rip through cardboard because people get a lot of boxes, but that's also had the knock on effects of if you're if you're an ambitious child and you're trying to construct something significant that might last the test of time, you might forego the construction paper in lieu of the cardboard. What do you think? Is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper?

That's interesting. Because... Because because there's an eco angle there, John. Right? It's like people getting a lot more e commerce products today. There's boxes coming through the house all the time.

We're post scarcity on cardboard most households. Yeah. Especially ones with children because you're ordering a lot of things online. There's a lot more cardboard around. I know the last few construction projects I did, cardboard was my material of choice. Yeah. So maybe that's what's going on here. Yeah. I'm glad we got to the bottom of it.

I'm trying to find the best way to get exposure in the market to Construction. Construction paper. You wanna go long? It's almost a perfect store of value over the last five years. There's Fabrica Italiana Okay. Lapis, Ed Afina Afini. Okay. It's been completely... It's a $500,000,000 company, completely flat for the last five years. So more on this on the next episode. We we gotta talk about topic crawler. Okay. I'm on... Spent half an hour going back and forth with chattybt so it could make me a tool that spits out link for any topic he's researching. And it actually gave me exactly what I wanted in the picture below.

And then the follow-up, only two minutes in and I realized how dumb this is. Reinventing the wheel.

Reinventing... Using the tool to create... Use use the tool to create the exact same tool.

I mean, the funny thing is I I don't know if this was I don't know if this was like creative joke from the start and the whole idea was like let's just be funny in the first post because the the the punch line will be in the second post. Or if he actually went through this. But it does speak to the fact that like a lot of the a lot of the functionality is really buried. Like just the just the ability to like put something on a cron job is like not advertised anywhere. You know this, right? Yeah. Like if you if if you if you want to like get a weekly digest of like where the swells are the biggest across the world for surfing, like you can totally do that. You don't need to build a tool. You don't need to write a lot of code. Don't need to host anything.

It doesn't need to anything else other than Chateaputee, but you would never know that from any of the marketing really because there has never been just like a Yeah. Cron jobs are here or like whatever you'd call it. Like scheduled tasks are here and there's like a national campaign. Very, very difficult as the models get and the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people. But it's very fun.

Anyway Very cool that you can build your own Google in in like, you know, thirty minutes.

Have you seen Let Me Google That for you? No. So it's this it's this website letmegooglethat.com and you type something in and then you generate it and then you have this link. You can copy the URL and and I'll share it in the production chat because it's a it's a funny it's a funny. You gotta you gotta do the actual the actual thing. And so you send this to someone if they ask you something really obvious like how do I get to how do I use chat GPT? And and then it it moves the mouse. I think you clicked the first one that was empty. Think you need the second one. The second one has the actual the actual punch line.

There here we go. So how do you use ChatGPT? You send them this. Let me Google that. And it just Googles it for you. And then you just... And it just loads Google or whatever. You can close it, but it literally just goes and like types it in for you. But anyway...

What are people putting in their IRAs lately? Yes, babe. Our retirement is in Charizard. I have a little bit in my Roth and four zero one k, but we can fly or crate... But we fly or crater with Charizard. Fly or crater is funny funny terminology. Is there a way to to get a Charizard into a tax advantage retirement account? Has that been done yet? There must be. Anyway. There must be. Well, if you are investing, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You gotta invest like the best.

You gotta do it. This hit me over the weekend, John. This was this was big. Okay. One horse pulls 4,000 pounds. Two horses working together pull 32,000 pounds. And it's getting community noted. Record deadweight pulls by pairs of draft horses top out around 17,000 pounds. Near 32,000 pounds. Blair anecdote, this is based on just Dave Ramsey, also uses 8,000 pounds for one horse, not for one horse. Okay. So there you go. Wrong on every dimension, but the idea stands. I mean, in the... John. Yeah. It made me think What? What are we doing with just one horse here in the open pit? We gotta get two horses.

To order another horse. A twin horse. No. Wait. Did you see the did you see Beverly... They're auctioning off the bag... The... That bear sculpture that's on Rodeo Drive? Woah. This was on this was on Facebook marketplace. They won $95,000 for it. Do you know what I'm talking about? GM... Is a bullish indicator?

Like, we have no use for this bear anymore? Maybe. Maybe. I sent it to buddy. I can pull it up. But we can also move on. Talk about that later.

It would be cool to get a large statue of a bull and a bear Mhmm. Here in the Ultra Dome fighting, know, battling over market conditions. I'd like it. I'd like it. Million dollars lot of people have been talking about this. We didn't want to have to talk about it because it's not, you know, the the nicest topic. But we'll talk about it. Why is tossing boiling oil down a ladder during a siege always a one time trick? If I were being sieged, I would have 200 guys all boiling three or four cauldrons of oil each. If you come anywhere near the walls, you're getting scalded. Can't melt it, idiot. Such a good point.

Yeah. Yeah. Such a good point. Yeah. You should just have like a continuous flow of Yeah. Of oil pouring down. Or a closed loop. Oh, like a waterfall. Like... Instead of a wall, you have a waterfall of hot oil that's just constantly there. Yeah. Why is it... That would have completely reshaped... One shot. One shot. Yeah. The... Your defenses would have been impregnable. Fascinating. Anyway, the million dollar homepage is reborn every decade in a different form. A TikTok girl is selling ad space on her wall to pay for tuition. We call it the TBPN effect. Not bad kid. She says she's selling ad space on her wall. Is this presumably in her dorm room or something?

$500 for one huge spot. $50 for a smaller slot. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Maybe... Pretty good play. Resourceful. Yeah. Million Dollar Homepage was a was a really good bet back in the day. You buy individual pixels. And people have people have redone it a few times. I mean, guess the Reddit place was sort of a free version of that. But it was it was it was pretty cool.

You can... I mean, Delta just taking blow after blow because Wow. You can now watch cheeky pint on your United flight. Again, really really just showing that United is is a, you know, is a serious, highly commercial airline. Yeah. They don't want you watching movies, TV, music. Fuckin'. They want you watching the Cheeky Pine archive. You gotta learn from Susan Lee. And I'm hoping this means that we're gonna see more episodes of Cheeky Pine hitting the timeline. It's been about a Really? Six month holiday, but it's... We call that hangover. What's that? You take a break. Oh, yeah. Hangover. That's right.

Hangover, they're taking a break, resting it off, sleeping it off. Yep. They'll get back in the pub soon. That's right. Oracle is putting $10,000,000 in the... Into the Nashville Symphony reinstating the twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven season and recalling musicians and staff who were set to be furloughed October 18 amid a financial emergency. That's great. Give it up for Oracle in the Nashville Symphony. It shows a real sense of civic responsibility. I love this. This is great. More tech companies should do this. Go and solve little problems like this. Everyone loves it. What else is going on? The Brits have turned their back on their day ones. British people are apparently buying Chinese knock off Land Rovers, especially look alike Range Rover. They love Chinese cars. The j coo seven made by Chinese Cherry.

I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week now. We got mosquitoes in the Ultra. Take off. We got mosquitoes. Get the flies, bud. Heads Heads up, John. You think you get it? No. I don't wanna...

Go for it. Run around. I'll read this while you fight the Shoot. It's a nice little side quest. The tracking cam on him while he goes and hunts it down. With the gong mal. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

Speaking CrowdStrike, I mean, incredible performance. George Kurtz Put on CrowdStrike racing. Put on a clinic yesterday. Incredible comeback. They had some setbacks early on in the race, but made it back to the top spot and won the entire season What in LMP a what a year. A year for CrowdStrike racing.

Pretty crazy. Well, let's go over to this. I want a review of the TIMU Range Rover. Jordy, you got to let me know what you think. When Mark Theulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jaicu seven was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. The 33 year old from England's South Coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese SUV at the equivalent of around 50 k. Half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is visually similar? It's pretty... We'll see. Its resemblance to the fifty six year old British luxury brand has earned the Jaicu a double edged nickname, the TIMU Range Rover. My first reaction was, what's the catch? He said, a test drive convinced him that buying the Jaicu was a no brainer. No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than The United Kingdom, where Brits like him are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status signaling styling and technology. Does look pretty good inside.

Yeah. Calling it a TEMU Range Rover doesn't quite work because I would expect that the car is just better in most ways than the rain... You know, when when you think about like a, you know, that the TEMU branding for a product, you think like it looks good in the image Yeah. And then in person it's like... Falls apart. Yeah. Falls apart. It's a mess. Would expect this car to be actually pretty solid. Yeah. Probably Very reliable. Yeah. They're very good at making products.

Yeah. I wonder how Undeniable. These Chinese brands have rolled out dealerships and service departments. Yeah. Because that seems like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that potential buyers are are worried. Whenever you're whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand, it can be really tricky if the brand goes under while you own the car because there's just nothing really to work on. A of people went through that with the... What was it? Fisker Ocean? The Fisker Fisker Ocean, I think. Fisker maybe went through restructuring and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.

Yeah. Every every once in a while I'll see a Fisker on the road and I'm just like, incredible.

Well, not the ocean. No. The Fisker Karma. Yeah. Which I saw Jay Leno in one recently. And the Fisker Karma, it does look like... I don't know. It... I would expect it to be like the modern Back to the Future car. Like, it's like the new DeLorean. It's so so unique. It's not quite as striking, but it's still very cool. Britain's... Wait. The Fisker is not a EV? The Karma is, but the... Or the Karma is not. Karma Okay. Was That makes sense. Yeah. Every time I see... Every time I've been seeing a Fisker Karma, I've assumed it was an EV. And I'm like, what? Do you have like five miles of range? Yeah. Like a 2012 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

EV from from, you know. No. I mean, beautiful designer. The lineage there is I think the founder had designed some other iconic cars the past. Anyway, only Russia and Brazil developed economies that mostly buy cheaper models have imported more than The UK.... Sister Karma might be a buy. You think so? How much is it? $20. $20 for a Karma. Certainly stand out. Turn heads for $20 or 20 k. 20. $20. 20 stacks. 20 racks. The UK, a cradle of the car industry showcases what could happen if in America if Chinese cars were let in. Range over began a press release trumpeting Jack who's early sales success. Is that a press release from them?

Are they just dancing on their enemies gravestones? That's crazy. That's crazy. We gotta figure out who actually posted this Range Rover thing. Winking in its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque, the smaller one. The managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire the appeal was simple. It looks expensive. It feels expensive. And then you find out how much it costs. For now, Chinese cars are essentially shut out of the large US market by high tariffs and restrictions on Chinese software. President Trump in September repeated his openness to Chinese cars produced in American factories, alarming Detroit. Oh, that's interesting.

He wants the jobs. He wants the manufacturing base, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers just don't want more competition. So there's actually some tension there. Interesting. Congress is debating a bill that would permanently ban Chinese cars on US roads. The spectacular growth of Chinese brands in Britain This year has been led by Cherry, China's top vehicle exporter. Through September, its sales more than tripled compared to the previous term. Customer open mindedness...

I just don't understand why they don't use a name like Cherry for the actual brand. Yeah. Like I imagine that could could Well, it's not spelled how you think. It's it's c h e r y.

Yeah. Still better than --... Than for j an international market.... Coo for... Yeah. We gotta talk about the Topolino. Okay. The Wall Street Journal is saying that it's the greatest car ever invented. Really? And they'll never go back.

Take me through it. No. But first, 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.

They're not quite saying that. My week in a $15,000 micro car, joy, guilt, and 25 mile per hour road rage. Fiat's all electric Topolino isn't fast and doesn't get far, but the Italian company thinks it's just the car some Americans need. What the f is that? A driver of a luxury sedan exclaimed at a busy intersection. Is that a real car? Is that a real car? Aw, said countless So funny. Indeed, the Fiat Topolino 15,000 electric micro car that tops out at 25 miles per hour per hour is a real car that Americans can buy right now.

Can you spec it with red velvet on the rope? That would be nice. Can you spec it with with matte black and red velvet, so it looks like you're driving a nightclub? I think you got a winner.

The Topolina, which went on sale this summer, is a bet by the Italian brand that Americans in two car households may be open to a much smaller and slower ride for their second vehicle. At just over a thousand pounds, it seats two people and is powered by a small electric battery that gets 46 miles of range on a full charge. It is sold in one color, maple green and comes in two variants. One has doors, a heater and a glass sunroof. Then there's the Dolce Vita which swaps in ropes for doors and includes a rollable soft top roof. Many onlookers ask if it's You even street can take the roof and the doors off this thing?

This is so not functional, said Alexa, after jetting across a busy street to get a closer look at the Topolino, which translates to little mouse in Italian. Cute. But so far, demand has exceeded expectations. Fiat, initially shipped 300 Topolinos to The US, says 30% of its dealers have signed up to sell the pints. Says only 30% of its dealers are signed up to sell the pint sized car. The Stellantis owned company knowns the Topolino. It's got a particular audience. It doesn't step on anything else that we do as a company. There's nothing else like it. I totally agree. I think it is... I I'm I'm... I think it... I think they deserve car of the year. I haven't driven it.

I haven't seen it. But Okay. I like where it's going. Fiat Topolino at $15,000 or the cherry knock off Chinese Topolino variant for $800 before you go. They are I mean, it's a tough the price of a phone. Tough call. They're gonna make this the price of a Yeah. That's a good point. How much do you think... I don't know. That's a good point. I I mean, I would imagine that a lot of the savings of competing with Range Rover are just the margin, the badge value. I would be surprised if they can make this for under $5. But at $8, at half price, they actually might move more units because why spend 15 when you can spend 8?

I say move to lease only. Lease only. You will own nothing and be happy in the Topolino. In the Topolino. But imagine pulling up to car week in this, rolling deep with 20 of your best friends. Mhmm. You know, in a in a in one of those Yeah. Sort of s, you know Yeah. Snaking across the road.

Oh, electric. Electric. Be a Topolino or base 2007 BMW three series. Autoblog called it surprisingly good looking. Jordy, I want your take. Is the base model of the new 2027 BMW three series surprisingly good looking to you, Jordy. Take a look at that and tell me what you think.

So I don't... I mean, I've never been a BMW guy, but I feel every time a BMW gets announced, everyone hates it. And then a lot of them a lot of them like end up growing on people. And I don't think that... I don't think you should judge like a new a new model based on the the base like version of it. Okay. Right? Because people buying the base version are typically not like massive car people or anything. They're just buying effectively an appliance. So anyways, people obviously hate it. Yeah. And they're bringing up a bunch of a bunch of cars throughout history like the e 36, and saying like we have to we have to return to these older editions, but I don't know. I just... I think it's fine. Like it's just not that I big I think it's not that big of a deal.

I think it's fine. I think the the interesting thing is that it just feels like they've been dancing around with different design different design motifs especially on the front grill for the last ten years and they haven't really found their footing. This feels like a response to the last round of backlash around the sort of front kidney grill that people didn't like that looked like buck teeth and and they got a bunch of pushback about that. And they said, fine. We'll change that and now people don't like this and then but people have been warming up on the older styling and so you're in this weird like constantly dealing with feedback but the build cycle is five, six years or something.

Yeah. So you're refreshing. Pull up this pull up this image of the three series evolution. Okay. Because Oh, yeah. Everyone wants to go back to these super boxy Yeah. Which again, I think are cool, but part of it is that you've seen them in, I don't know, you're a movie guy. You've probably seen these cars in 50 movies, right? Yeah. Portrayed in a cool way. And that helps a lot in terms of you think about the vehicle.

Now pull up the Shrek spec of the new BMW three series and let's take a look at that and see if this does anything for you, Jordy. Yeah. The Shrek edition. Woah. Pretty... It looks actually like...

People will look at you with a straight face and say this is ugly. They will. They'll look at you and say BMW didn't push the Frontier with this new model. Right? Yeah. And that... And they're willing to just lie lie straight to your face. So anyways, I don't think I don't think it's that big of a deal. I'm excited to I'm I'm excited to see how it eventually looks in its GT three form factor. I think the the current GT three Evo is, like, an amazing looking car Mhmm. For what it is. And I think by the time that it... This sort of, like, these new elements, like the new grille and the lights and everything get sort of built in in in different... Into different form factors, I think people will come around to it.

Cool. Hold me to it. Anything else on cars today? Any other car news? We got another we got another FSD video out of Jason Oppenheim who sold a Bentley, bought a Tesla Model Y, and is blown away by FSD. It it is an inflection point for sure. People are excited about it. Sean Frank is coming on the show in just a minute. Was singing the praise of the Tesla just, what, a month or two ago? And we were like, I don't know about that. And lo and behold, here we are.

Well, we also have Bryan Johnson coming on to talk about health and endurance racing Let's in about an see.

Would you buy this BMW three series Dakar edition? Look at this. Think... Is this just you and Chad GPT right now? No. This is official. Officially. See? This thing looks insane. It does. I love it. It does. Yeah. This would be good. Give me 10 of them right I'll be tires on there going across the country in that. The the yeah, the last story we got to get to is Apple plans to introduce new privacy controls for Mac users warning of the risks growing around granting broad data access to third party software including AI agents. So your iMessage data is not, I don't think it's encrypted when it's on your hard drive. So you can potentially like give an agent access like, just read, just just be able to edit my files. And then it can also read your messages and maybe you don't want it to and maybe you want that to be a specific permission.

And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, Ben Thompson seems like he's on the verge of going Linux on the desktop because he's been very frustrated because he runs a a headless Mac mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen. But most of the time he's just having an AI agent write pieces of software for him. But those pieces of software need permissions and the permissions are UI pop ups. So you have to jump in and click the button and say, yes, I allow it to read from the network or, you know, inter interact with the screen or interact with the file system.

And so he's been very frustrated by this and and is sort of questioning whether Apple, they're so clearly set up on the hardware side to take advantage of the the hardware boom, the the hacker boom. But he went back to Paul Graham talking about the moment maybe twenty years ago where like all the best hacker software developers were using Macs. Mac became dominant in like the startup ecosystem and then it just became like every company just provisions Macs and MacBook Pros for basically everyone regardless of what they're doing. And there's a there's this question. Apple's in this like tense moment of, you know, much freedom should they give?

How much privacy should they give? How much flexibility should they give to the user? How responsible is that? You can if you take all the guard rails off and you're on Linux, you can the agent can just do anything. That's a benefit, but it's also a risk. He also shares a fascinating anecdote that he his his Mac Mini got hacked. Like there was some system that was on an open port came in and installed a crypto miner. But his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said like urgent, you've been hacked. We should do something about this. And the AI agent was like, oh, no, no, You don't need...

You shouldn't use me right now. I should set this one out. And he was like, you're dead wrong there. You're fixing this. And it did. And it went and reset the Mac like, you know, cleared all the... It closed the port that was that was opened so it couldn't... So the hackers couldn't get back in and then also cleared out the crypto miner. But it's very funny that it was like this referendum on like you creating more vulnerabilities, but you're also able to fight them because typically that's something like if there was a crypto miner on your computer you wouldn't find out until you were like, oh, I'm trying to do some stuff. It's slow.

Let me go figure it out. Yeah. Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay. It got... It fixed it. It detected it later downstream. Instead it's like... Such such a wild scheme Yeah. Where where you're hacking, I'm sure millions Oh, yeah. It's just like know, if if they're getting to to millions of devices that would actually have a meaningful amount of compute. Yeah. Go ahead. And it's and it's free. Anyway. Interesting one. Mark Gurman reports since becoming CEO, he's talking about the turninator. He's immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. People familiar with the department say he works hands on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times a day. Cook typically visited for about an hour monthly. Turnus is locked in. I'm very happy about this.

So much of the... So much of Apple's interfaces have have just become, you know, completely horrible over over the last does put five the pay cut in a different perspective because he's working more hours while making less. And so he's getting pinched both directions. On the hour... On the on the hourly rate, he's way below Tim Cook. He was pretty close on the top line, but given that he's maybe working more hours...

You think Tim had the time but he just decided to take... I don't know. What was he doing for the other other, you know, hundred and fifty eight hours in a month or something that he was working?

He was thinking of what what gifts to to get the president. Yeah. Well, New Balance recreated the iconic jobs keynote image for the 1992 shoe of choice. The 990 The 990 Do you think these will be popular? I mean, they're Is really it too LARP y? They're really fantastic shoes. They are. Okay. So... So you think they'll sell well? Even though people will be like, oh, this is the Steve Jobs shoes if you're in SF? They're just a great pair of shoes. A great pair of shoes is a great pair of shoes. Yeah. Okay. We'll leave it at that. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

And we have Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge in the TBPN UltraDome coming on down here in person. Good to see you. How are you doing? What are you Woah. There we go. Nine nine twos. Those are the 99 Oh, yeah. The ones. Made America? Oh, So wait. What do you... What did New Balance actually do? They just recreated the image. Oh, they just recreated...

They've been selling that exact shoe for like thirty years. Okay. Okay. So there's... Not new limited...

It's definitely out of style right now. But it's still a fantastic pair of shoes. Dude, you say The beautiful thing with the nine nine two is like you can you can just wear the same pair of shoes over and over and over and for like five year periods your life you'll be like wow. I think he's just early. This guy Sean is this guy Sean is like he's got taste.

One, I'm a style icon. Check it out dude. I'm rocking the Palantir tennis merch. Their numbers just came out. I mean, they're they're privately held. New Balance will do $10,000,000,000 this year.

Woah. So they're they're they're modern, the other shoe companies. Nike's going down. Yeah. Nike's in trouble. Right? I mean, HOKA, just Yeah. Reported numbers. Horrible. Horrible quarter for HOKA and Decker. Interesting. Okay. I mean, on getting crushed, but... It's getting crushed? Dude, these... You say they're they're not cool, but a lot of people buying them.

Yeah. That's not at least synonymous with cool. Volume. A lot of people shop it on TMO. That's true. That's... Not a hotbed of high fashion.

Yeah. Deckers is an interesting interesting company. They have HOKA which just went on this crazy run. Didn't they buy HOKA for like a few million dollars? I think it was under $10,000,000. Yeah. And now it does like billions a year. It's like a...

4,000,000,000... Yeah. 4,000,000,000 a year. Yeah. Crazy business. They have UGGs too, which again kind of all these... When you when you can... Once you have an iconic silhouette, you actually have some type of durable revenue from it, but there's still this like crazy up and down.

Yeah. And, you know, they got into slippers and like that had like a cool moment maybe, you know, 2020 or whatever. Slippers? Like the UGG slippers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Had a big crush with that. Okay. But they they used to have a bunch of other brands. It's really just those two now. Yeah. Like they they like they report all the other brands as just like other and it's a big category.

Yeah. Like Tiva. You remember Tiva's? Tiva's. Yeah. Talking about not being cool. I was like, when you're fucking... Back in the back if in the you had a pair of Tivas on a couple of Nature Valley bars and some construction paper, could do anything. You could... You were ready to take on the world.

Yeah. That's good. Who's putting up more FSD miles? You Tesla boys? Tesla fans? Oh, dude. You got a you got a Tesla? I capitulated. Oh, you know, he was texting me like talking mad shit. I was like, bro, you have to get a Tesla. It's so easy. I mean, I'm at like 95% FSD maybe more, 98. You're higher?

There's some bug in the software where it says I've done zero FSD miles but I've done hundreds at this Interesting. The the one the one real issue with the Tesla is like having to charge your car in all these like super seedy places. Why are you charging Because like gas... What are you doing? How fun are driving for? I went on a road trip Friday. I went to the New Wave Pool in Palm Desert. Okay. Okay. And there was no way... They they advertised the range and of course they're like, don't charge the battery more than 80% because it's not good for the battery. Crank it up, bro. Do it anyway. Yeah. I'm gonna Of do course. And so the problem is like gas stations have all this like super prime real estate.

Yep. And the supercharging stations will be in just like these like dark sketchy parking lots off the main Yeah. Road or whatever. So you end up like hanging out by your car just in like not the best places.

Yeah. But now if someone tries to shoot you, you can you can drive off. That was a that was a feature they added.

What do you mean? Like if it's a Texas gunshot, it just drives? But you definitely don't want to be in the car while it's charging.

So it used to be you couldn't drive when it was charging, but now you can. Oh, you can't you can't just... You can move off. That's great. That's great. So it just rips out the...

Yeah. That's crazy. The only Tesla charger I've seen is like at Harris Ranch up to five. And that's a very nice stop because you go in, you get a steak. It's great. Doesn't... Isn't the smell horrific? Not inside the restaurant. It sort of gets you ready for the experience of being an automatic Back when I was a kid driving Running around. Driving by Harris Ranch. Yeah. You put on the circulation beforehand. I would be the prankster in the back. Oh, you would roll down the window. I would roll down the windows. That's brutal. That's brutal. You didn't sell your you didn't sell your data? You turned it down. I turned it down.

What'd they offer you? 15? Some like 10? 5? I would I would maybe take that deal. You would.

Hey. Hey. All the labs this guy's got a price. I mean, we're at million. Yeah. Maybe. That was like yeah, there's a bunch of companies now like there's a viral post that Yeah. There's like four ads back to back like Yeah. All these different I've seeing the micro one ads for sure and then I saw I I've seen a few other people post about them.

Are they a sponsor? No. No. Okay. Because they're they have an aggressive affiliate program. I don't know if you guys were part of it or not. Maybe I'm not. In there. But there there will... If you're willing to make an intro to a brand, they'll give you $50. So like as soon as I did that post about not 15? 50. 50. Yeah. Intro to a brand. So I did that post and I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna sell. 50 comments being like, but if you do want to sell, please use my link. Oh, wow. Very interesting. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, $480, it's just it wasn't worth it.

Okay. Why? It seems like it's, you know, the the... I know I know it could be a Faustian bargain. We can get into that. But it's free money. It looks like free money for a lot of companies. Yeah.

I mean a lot of, you know, historically throughout all of human history people have said there's no such thing as a free lunch but AI is changing a lot of things. It's possible now that this time is different.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, if you get a bunch of cold emails from people all offering you 6 figures, there's probably something else going on.

I mean, I'm sure you get like text messages and emails daily for like lines of credit too. Right? I can show you 50 of them after that. So many. It's so annoying. What... But what what actually worries you about potentially selling data? Because right now if I go to any LLM and I ask how much is Ridge doing in revenue, it will probably estimate that on things you've said on podcasts and like open web data. And then if asked to build a financial model that models the margins, it might be able to get close with like first principles thinking like it's a McKinsey associate. But it's not going to have the actual data. But if you sold the data and it wasn't de anonymized, it might actually wind up in the training data. Is that the fear?

Or is it someone being able to go to an agent and just say like, build me a direct ridge competitor. And it's like, well, you're in luck buddy because I got all the data. Is that it? Or what what what makes it unsettling?

I think I mean, at a high level, it's like you run a business that does hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and taking Yeah. Taking $500,000 to risk any... To to to introduce any incremental risk. Right? There's already all this risk to running a business, you know, like Mhmm. You're you're... You sell, you know, technology products now. Who knows where that market goes? You sell fat, you know, fashion apparel style products that again go through cycles and risking, you know, the golden goose for not even one egg. It's crazy.

Yeah. Dude, we're talking just like maybe an egg white out of that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not very worried about... Well, a couple things. Yeah. The first is, to Jordi's point, $40.80 grand is not that much money. Sure. Right? Privileged position to say that. I know a lot of people would love it, but you know, I could probably negotiate up to maybe 1,000,000, maybe 2,000,000 or whatever, but saying King the castle. King in the castle.

Sean FrankIt's just not going to make that much of a difference in a year. Yeah. Right? You know, we'll we're up 50% this year. We're we're already doing You hundreds of millions of got any more?

Woah. Woah. So it's like it's just it's not that much money. Yeah. Number two, I think that the LLM platforms are going to get the data anyway.

Oh, sure. Because you're using them. Yeah. Like Right. You know Codex is an amazing tool I use all the time. Yeah. Right? I, you know... I mean if you're in the enterprise plan, they're they're not training on the data but there's still other ways that stuff gets...

Keep adding features and it's like, if you just give me a little more data. Yeah. A little more data. Yep. You know, Astra is already amazing. Yeah. Like in two more version cycles, it's gonna run my entire business. Sure. Of course, it's gonna have all my data. Yeah. And they're like, hey, we have to train and make it a little bit better. Yeah. Oh, sure. So I think they're gonna get for free anyway. Yeah. Yeah. The third thing is... And there are other companies that have the data. Like Shopify has your data. Totally. And like they're and like AWS what might might store the data. And they just have different retention and what they can do with it.

The the micro one offer, the data broker offer is like, we're taking the data and we can do whatever we want with it. Right?

Yeah. And they do claim that it's no customer data. They're like, hey, we're not...

They'll do d d in anominant... They'll run the de anonymizer. Right? Yeah. And they're like, you know... Anonymizer. There's probably some indemnity, so like you're not gonna get sued for selling your data or whatever. Sure. But still it's like, look, if if I'm getting random cold emails nonstop for $480, I think we're probably in the beginning of the AI wave. Maybe it's gonna be $4,800,000 in a couple of So you're holding out. Yeah. I'm holding out. That's... So if you want rich data, go ahead and just email me you know, $30,000,000 offers. Yeah. There you go.

Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. Do you know other companies that have taken it?

Yeah. There's there's a whole list of companies that have taken Okay. I mean, look, it's been hard for consumer the past couple of years. Sure. Know, if you add in tariffs or whatever else was going on like Yeah. You know, all the consumer brands are all like posting up negative growth if they're public. Like, know, they're they're shrinking 3%. A lot of people would take that offer just to have some cash coming in.

I wonder how valuable it actually is. I always thought that, like, the coding data was... Would be valuable. But the e commerce stuff, I I I I guess they want the Slack as well, like how business processes run, so then the models can... Yeah. Sometimes when I hear about a company that sold their data, I'm like, I don't want their data in the models that I'm training the models that I'm training. Right? Because I don't wanna I don't wanna live like you.

Dude, undoubtedly. Like right now if people are desperate to take that money their business is probably not going great. So they're gonna have a big cohort of customers in the data that are just like, here's how not to run an e commerce brand.

Yeah. But that could be valuable too, you know. There's a lot of Reddit comments that were down voted and that was like, oh, that one doesn't make any sense or that one doesn't answer the question posed by the Reddit thread. Like, the anti signal is as valuable as the signal sometimes. Yeah. That's a good point. What about agentic commerce? Are you seeing traffic from Muse, traffic from Instinct, traffic from any of the AI platforms yet. It feels like with the Shopify integrations, you're set up to be one of the products this holiday season that gets suggested as if somebody goes in there and says, hey, I'm doing some Christmas shopping for my family or my husband or brother or something, you could pop up. Are you seeing anything yet? Are you anticipating anything?

What's the state of that? Yeah. We've seen very little traffic start coming from agentic platforms. Mhmm. But LLMs still drive, I mean, an exponential growing part of our traffic. Sure. So like... And the conversion rate on those is just so so high. Yeah. You know, a conversion rate from a ChatGPT search is like 25% or whatever. Yeah. Someone's clicking through, they're actually going to make a purchase. But I do think it's a great time to be one, selling everywhere and then two, as big as possible. Mhmm. Because you know, I do think Muse will end up, I mean having 200,000,000 downloads or whatever like it's going to be you know super used and I think shopping is gonna be a huge use case. Sure. So being a top spender on Meta is incredibly popular like I think it's gonna make you more popular on the Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Can only get there for free.

Yeah. And then Amazon's You're giving them so much data via the ads platform. It's not even just about like making sure your landing pages are discoverable to muse because you've already have a relationship. Totally. Interesting.

And what I've heard from people at Meta is that like they're not going to monetize it anytime soon. What they want to do is if they can just get people to like make like purchase conversions like happening inside that app, it's just something they couldn't have done, you know, and all the data they lost over iOS 14. Sure. Like it's just gonna make your ads perform that much better. And so if you're a big spender, you'll you'll get that data cycle started sooner. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

As as a brand, somebody that is selling products online and getting demand from a bunch of different sources, how do you expect the the economics to work out with these agents? Because like we've talked about this a bunch on the show and my my view is like if an agent wants to have a high take rate, they have to be generating like new demand that wasn't already in existence...

30% from the humble e commerce operator. No. But like if you're running if you're running a bunch of meta ads and somebody gets excited about a brand... About your brand and then they go to their agent and say buy this product, I want it. Yeah. You don't wanna pay again to acquire that customer because you already effectively did. Right? They have to like understand their user well enough to suggest Ridge at a at a point in time where they're not already like sold on the brand to drive like an entirely new customer.

Sean FrankYeah. What I think they'll end up doing is they'll try to eat from both ends. So like they're going keep the meta business, you know, where they're generating all this demand for you and then how to actually monetize the agent, it'll just end up being payment processing fees in excess of 5%. Right? It's like Stripe is, you know, somewhere between a quarter of a percent if you're on debit card or you know, 2% using an AmEx.

I think they'll just say, hey, it's five or 7% payment processing through Muse. And maybe that stacks on top of the Shopify rates, so you end up losing 10% over there. But that way they're just... They can get half of your revenue off of just making you spend money on ads and then also treating it like a payment processing app. So I think that's how they'll they'll maximize it. Because I do think they'll have a problem. It's like how can you take more out of this Yeah. And they'll just position it as a different percentage coming out of the same pie.

And that would look like in the Shopify payments like dashboard, you would like turn on I'm accepting that payment at a higher rate just like stores can say, look, I don't... There's plenty of stores that are like, we don't accept Amex because it's a higher rate. Right?

Yeah. Well, yeah. Basically, essentially. But like you can just turn on sales channels like inside of Shopify. That would be one of those. It'd just be used to be a sales channel.... Higher rate. And it'll just have its own fees tied to it.

I wonder if they'll if they'll do that versus just trying to come in at the same rate as the as the credit cards. Like we we we were talking to somebody who builds credit cards, like branded credit cards that are, you know, more tech enabled for, like Kroger, for example. Like, you know, you go to Sears or you go to JCPenney and you get, like, their credit card. And we were thinking, like, well, it makes sense that, like, if an Instinct or a Muse had, like, their own credit card that they provision for you in the app, you apply to a credit check, you get it, you're paying it off, but then they're able to take the interchange fee and give you points or tokens based on what you spend or something like that.

Well, know, Meta already has Meta Pay and I'm sure I can already put Meta Pay on my Shopify store. Sure. So this would just be Meta Pay with its own rates Yeah. Just in Muse and the products are just served via...

Yeah. And they did a ton of legwork on that with the the stablecoin effort and whatnot. Like they were they definitely trying to get that going but it never really broke through. I mean it sounds like you don't even have Meta Pay enabled even though You don't... There's no downside to turning one more thing on. I guess it's the clutter.

Yeah. And also it's just it's really hard to like get users to use a new payment method. Yeah. It's like, you know, Shop Pay is an amazing job forcing on everyone's phones. So it's like you you take Apple Pay, you take Shop Pay, you take PayPal, you take normal credit cards. And then like then there's all these buy now pay letter people all competing for ad space and then it's really hard just to you know have another thing on there.

Yeah. What about the other side? I think it was Eric Souffert or maybe Ben Thompson were talking about like one of like the no brainer but potentially like less sexy plays that Meta could make in AI would be an AI agent for dealing with the ads manager. And I know that a lot of people you probably have hooked up a variety of AI agents to the...

But isn't the ads manager already just like an AI agent for getting you to... Is it just a black box or do you actually need a layer on top of that? Well, Manus, one of the main use cases Yeah. That they rolled out Yeah. Was we're gonna be the agent for It's pronounced Manus. It's Bill Gurley. Is that Bill Yeah. And like Yeah. That made so much sense. I mean, Jordy was was super excited about that.

And when you you logged in, it said we can run your ads for. That was like the first call. The They've like there was a bunch of calls like trying to roll that out.

They had to roll it out but they're definitely spinning it up again. But yeah, how much of a headache internally is managing the ads manager?

Every year they remove some features. I mean, look, it's still a... We have three full time people at Ridge whose job is is manning... Managing the ad account. Wow. And that is getting new creative in. Yeah. Yeah. It's understanding what's going on and looking at the data. Yeah. It is, you know, there's third party tools like we use Northbeam or whatever else. Yeah. It's it's moved past just being and looking at the ad account. Sure, sure, sure. But good, I mean it's it's a fucking pain in the ass. It always crashes. Yeah. Right? It'd be so great to to just eventually... Meta's vision is like they want to fire their sales staff and just like you give them a big bucket of bucket of mucking and then they find your customers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it does feel like it's a ways out, Jordan. What's the state of e commerce like infrastructure as a category? Does it still feel investable?

I don't think a lot of people are investing in it right now. Does that make it a good time to invest?

You know, it's hard to say. Like e commerce enablement, like e commerce like widgets or whatever. Right?

Like the site builders probably got steamrolled by Yeah. Sunshotted pages. Even large companies who have you know like post scripts of the world. I think they're staring at the future being like, I don't know what's coming and I don't know what to build. Right? I've I've made a couple investments in like e commerce tools that like I think are really cool and like AI enabled right now. Yeah. But I just think, you know, if SaaS is feeling a pinch, e commerce SaaS is for sure feeling a pinch. Yep. Right? Yep. E commerce already isn't cool and then SaaS is super uncool right It's just it's a very ugly time.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. What what else are you seeing on people actually using AI internally to run operations? Like last time you were saying maybe demand planning had sort of evolved in the AI era. Is there anything else? I know creative was sort of early early glimpses, but where are you getting leverage these days? Dude, every model gets better. Yeah. So I mean, demand planning I think is totally solved. Okay. Project management, task management totally solved. Yeah. The data and analysis I think is totally solved.

Sean FrankYeah. I just did my q three reporting and it's three prompts, right? Because all the MCBs are are set up. Yeah. Like, I have all the data flowing in

Yep. To like my my harness of choice. Yeah. And then three prompts, I have my full q three report. Yeah. Right? So finance is gonna be totally solved. Sure. And then creative, I mean it's there. Right? If you go into any Facebook ad library, I just think like It's all AI. We're still paying a lot of you know humans to make you know UGC for us. Sure. Right? And we have great, you know You're blending that in with other stuff.

Yeah. And it's really the the humans are just good at scripting and concepting. Way more a bit being on the cutting edge than a model. What actually comes to visual production, the models are all there. Interesting.

Interesting. Yeah. Is there... Feels like we're headed to a point where like a human will still have a great idea for an ad concept, but then agents will will run and just like clone it really quickly? Because we've seen this already where, like, if you guys create a great ad concept, I'm sure a bunch of other brands will, like, mimic it very quickly, and then you'll run it for however long it works, and then you have to find the next one. Is that is that happening already where you can... You basically just have agents trawling all the different ad accounts finding what's working and then and then running their own tests?

Yeah. And that is like a new a... Like version of e commerce software that's rolling out. Right? Like it's, you know, we call it like an ad strategist like an or a creative strategist, but like the AI version of that and they are just going across what's trending on TikTok right now or what are your competitors have in their ad account and there's pulling... Because Facebook ad library is open. It's like they're pulling all that stuff in Yeah. Then and giving you a million concepts. But it's still humans are coming up with the best concepts and then Yeah. It's just replicating it via AI.

Yep. What do think of those AI slop ads that actually ship you the physical slop? I saw somebody saw an ad for... It was a a pool floaty in the shape of a tank that would allow... It came in like a squirt gun, and you would, like, spray the water around. And it looked super fun, and he bought it. And it was very, like, Timu, and it barely worked. But but they did actually ship it. Have you seen any of these? Is this, like, a larger octopus like super structure? Is this just like independent people? Do you... Have you traced any of this stuff down yet?

Well, there's always been shitty drop shippers. Okay. Right? This is like not on steroids basically. Yeah. And it's just it's just that with more rapid better ad creative. Because the whole problem with you know the drop shipper is you try a thousand brands Yep. Like literally in like a in a month you might try a thousand different products Yep. Different websites Yeah. And then you'd find one that works. Yeah. And this is Too many. Now it's just way easier to do it. You can get better creative. Yeah. But that person should be lucky they actually shipped it because Yeah. There's a whole you know culture of just no shipping.

No shipping. And just like... It wasn't the Escobar phone. Think that that Yeah. Never shipped.

There's people there's people on Twitter who sell courses teaching you how to no ship. No ship. There's a term for it. It's like you're just stealing.

That's insane. What about the macro? I'm interested in how are... Is inflation top of mind for you whatsoever? Is that something you think the models can actually help you grapple with? Like, what is the optimal pricing? Should you raise prices in a time of inflation? Like, a lot of the rich history has been during low inflation periods. We're now going into higher inflation, but the journal is pretty optimistic. The mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. So spending doesn't seem to be down, but every company has to deal with inflation one way or another.

Right. Look, nothing has broke the American consumer. Yeah. Like since, you know, 2008 Yeah. With the American consumer spends. So, yeah. Well, that being said, look, as long as you have sales coming in, as long as like you have great new products, I think you'll be able to to win in this economy. But if you do look at the S and P 500 and you remove out AI enabled companies and just look at like discretionary consumer, sales are gonna be down probably an average of 5% this year. Sure. Right? If it's the Nikes, Lulu Lemons, like there's very few e commerce brands or or brands in general crushing it right now. Yep. So I think, look, we're going have a great year. We're going to continue to grow.

Think customers are really happy with what we're doing. I think more there's a lot of stories like that but the macro level is like, you know, Aura. I talked to JP Morgan that day that that IPO got pulled. Yeah. There was like, you know, full teams working on that. Yeah. There's people on the floor about to get rich and they pulled it back because...

It was like four x oversubscribed. Which is low. I know it's low, but it's still like they they had filled the order book. Yeah. They did their job and that... And that's a lot of people that they were coordinating with, you know. It wasn't like it wasn't like, oh, no one showed up. There were lots of people who were like, oh, I'm getting shares today, you know.

Yeah. So like all that work was on the finish line and they pulled back. Yeah. I think it's because like, dude, NVIDIA just posted the greatest quarter in human history. Yeah. It's like why the fuck would I want to invest in that or Reformation or Lululemon for that matter. Yeah. Like why... Yeah. So I just think on the business side, the businesses are more adorable than ever. Think they're going fantastic. But, you know, if you want to do an exit in the next twelve months, I don't think it's happening.

Yeah. What's going on with live? How is... And specifically Tik Tok, how how is Tik Tok changing at all, you know, post acquisition? Feels like we're what? Oh, yeah. Nine months out from Skydance. Maybe six. But...

Yeah. Look, Tik Tok is actually going, you know, phenomenal. I think there's the current playbook for e commerce brands is you find a bunch of great TikTok affiliates. Okay? You incentivize them with high commission rates, but also a percentage of ad spend. You have them make a bunch of great creative, and then you run that creative everywhere. And it's just a way that like overnight a brand can have a thousand people making great content for them. Like we have a Discord full of people making great content for us. Mhmm. So like our TikTok shop revenue is in the 6 figures, but it enables growth on Amazon and everywhere else.

Sure. 6 figures annually? No, per month. Okay. I was like... Yeah. Which is which is... We're like a top 50 TikTok shop brand. So like Interesting.

We're we're doing a good push there and I think it's working out. But like the spillover is what it's all about. Sure. With that being said, you know, that's really just like this creative flywheel aspect. It's like getting like all of these videos and posting them. You you asked about live in particular. I've... I was talking to TikTok. They know like live premium shopping isn't gonna work in America, but like they're experimenting with new models, which is like auction. Right? So if you...

Why do they know that? They just looked at the data and they're like, this doesn't work.

They keep trying it and like, you know, they always went to Vietnam as like the success story, it does work in Vietnam, but like there's thousands of people who do it full time in Vietnam who make an average of $500. And to like have a full time US salary be a livestream shopper, the GMV has to be so big off those livestreams that like the math currently isn't working. Yeah. But it is working for auction. Right? So like a whatnot competitor. Like Yeah. If you go on TikTok live right now, there's people opening up Pokemon cards and auctioning it off and they're very excited about that. Right? Yeah.

This AI influencer, the boxer Jean Philanthrope Oh, yeah. Seen this guy? Dude, there's a whole there's a whole network of them. It's all Hicksfield.

There's a whole network of them. Do you think... I mean, the the the end of this story was like you dropped a coin on PumpFun sort of boring end. But do you think that there's a world where brands will partner with AI generated influencers or potentially even incubate their own AI influencer? Is there a world where you just you just say, okay, we have this specific target market. Let's work backwards from the content they wanna see and let's do the Higgs field thing and have someone run this whole process from start to finish. And this person will be like an in house, you know, content creator.

Yeah. But I I would challenge that like Yeah. I wouldn't call this person influencer. I'd call it like, you know, content. Yeah. Like, and your four year feed is just a content feed. So Yes. Like, you know, I don't think anybody's following this person and like being like, oh, I really wanna be like the AI boxer guy or whatever. But I just think we're gonna see way more unique AI content coming Yes. Just like, it's gonna be an explosion of it. I guess the question is like do you think the do you think the number of different faces in Ridge content will become more concentrated or less concentrated over the future? Because you could potentially go to a world where every ad has a different person in it because you're able to either hire or generate a different character. Or you have really like four archetypes and there are four characters and they're consistent across years of content and you keep seeing like your Steve who's like the avatar of this particular cohort. Do you have a do you have a read on which way it'll go?

I mean it's it's hard for me to say anything but like yes and. Yes and. It's gonna be both. Like you know, right now half of our ad spend on our ad account goes to videos featuring Marques. I'm sure. Right? So MKBHD co owner of the brand. Yep. But then I told you about that I have a thousand TikTokers making videos. Sure. That together they get probably 20% of my ads. Yeah. So it's like a barbell. Yeah. So it's like, you know, if you can still have a celebrity, a famous person in there like Sure. That can drive like a bunch of, you know, traffic to you. Yeah. But then also it's like people do just want...

You can't beat the open mind, just the crowdsource nature of thousands of videos, thousands of content. They will find the best hook. Yeah. You just have to get that done. And that'll just be done with AI.

Yeah. And I'm thinking like there is a there is like a... It's a very tight rope to walk as a brand. Like you could imagine David Protein Bar having an AI version of the David, like the sculpture. Oh. Because the sculpture could come to life and talk and like educate you about the product. But that would feel off brand right now based on where they've gone with that brand, at least to me. And I feel like there might be some pushback to that. There might be some some reticence to like embrace like the idea of like a truly Tilly Norwood like AI front person.

But do you... I mean, to your first concept Yeah. Like Ridge would for sure sponsor a content creator who expresses himself via AI avatar. Sure. Sure. Sure. It's really like there could be a content creator who has a thousand AI avatars and they make different videos and they have different stories or whatever. Like that would just be another content account response.

Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of happening with like burnt peanut. Yeah. This this live streamer and uses like sort of a graphics layer. It's not fully AI. VTubers in general. VTubers. Exactly. And so, yeah. The VTuber market. Interesting. Anyway.

What are what are the kind of marketing opportunities that you guys are debating internally? Because I feel like at rich scale, you could be thinking about making everything from making a push into IndyCar to working with like, you know, truly tier one athletes, you know, global superstars. How do you how do you think about, you know, trade offs and where you should be investing money? What kind of bar something has to clear instead of just going and working with like the next thousand TikTok creators?

Yeah. So like the the masses are always gonna be there. We're always gonna work with a ton of YouTubers, like a ton of podcasts. Like we're always gonna have those partnerships going because I think like there's just lots of groups of people that you can miss if you just do TV ads or meta ads or whatever. But like look, at our scale, you know, a Super Bowl commercial's in play, right? You know, we just did a campaign with Tony Hawk and it's like, okay, how do we make that bigger and better for next year? Like what's the next celebrity you want to bring on board? But yeah, and then and then eventually it's, you know, probably by the end of next year it's like in store activations, meaning us having our own stores. That's probably like the the path to any of these brands. Like how do get to 1,000,000,000 a year in revenue?

It's like mass campaigns, celebrities in them, and then opening a bunch of stores.

Could a modern department store, will the department store ever be reborn? Because when I was getting my Tesla charged at a CD location on Friday, I had to go into the department store to use a restroom because Tesla chargers stations don't have, you know, amenities like that. And I was walking around and I was like, I haven't been in one of these in probably ten years, but it's pretty cool that like there's a bunch of little zones in one store with different brands and they get their sort of owned experience. But it feels like the current generation of shoppers or the new generation of shoppers just doesn't really have that muscle. They have the muscle of like, I like this brand, I'm gonna go to their dedicated retail store or I'll go to Kids hardware days don't want to be mall rats. That's what you're saying.

It's not even malls, it's like, you know, the the Oh, I guess the department store specific Yeah.

Yeah. The curation aspect. Yeah. Look, I think there's definitely a place for it. I I mean, it's no it's not breaking news that like department stores are at the very bottom that they've ever had. Right? Yeah. Like Nordstrom could take in private, they're probably like the shining example of a good department store nowadays, but they still had to close a bunch of stores. And then their business is just supported by their off price, their rack business. Yep. I think it could be done, but like the real estate economics are what fuck you up because people want the Century City Mall. Like big, vibrant, outdoor, beautiful. But like to develop that was probably a $5,000,000,000 project or whatever. Right? So how do you get enough space where you can make it as elegant as it needs to be while also making everything pencil?

It's why like, you know, Japan sells a bunch of department stores and I think Europe does this better than The US. It it's it's Lindy. It's not going to Like go it it can make a move, but we're going to open our own source. I think it's easier to control your faith that way.

Yeah. Well, good luck. Guys. Thank you so You're coming up to hang soon. Alright. Nice to you. We'll see you then. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Linda Du from Valon Technologies, the president, c o o, and co founder in the waiting room, soon to be interviewed in the hotel. Linda, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for hopping on. Big Big day. You raised some money. How much did you raise? Tell us about the round.

Yep. So we just announced our series d, a $150,000,000 at... Didn't catch the last class part. What was the valuation? 2.3 b. There you go. Huge. We're just saying now. We're saying billion too much. We gotta just... Honestly, the Gong was so fun. That that's what I came on here for. So I think we...

Can we get the can we get the replay? Is that possible? I wanna watch I wanna watch it back. We wanna see the replay. Here we go. Alright. Where's... Not even facing. Boom. Boom. There we go. Oh, no sound on the replay. Completely drowning out Linda. But... Well... Anyways, what do you actually do?

So good. No. So we we build the system of record and vertical AI for servicing. For mortgage servicing specifically. Correct?

For more... Specifically starting with mortgage servicing.... Is the company? We we started in 2019. 2019. Okay. We're about... Yeah. We're about seven now.

And was the was the framing at the time... This is a huge market. There's an opportunity for sort of point solution to vertical SaaS and then the AI boom happened and you were able to just accelerate so dramatically that that's what's driving this round or or what was the vision at the time?

Yeah. That's exactly right. If you remember 2019, it's Mhmm. We were we were just a little late to the software eats the world party. Okay. And so, I think mortgage was... Yeah, that's right. So, mortgage was probably top three, top five big markets that hadn't been disrupted yet. And so, I would say, you know, zooming out, we got really lucky with the timing of AI. It happened sooner, wouldn't have been ready, happened later, you know, we might have been too entrenched And then to be able to pivot.

Walk me through the the verticalization of your business and then what it seems like is de verticalization because you sold your servicing operation but partnered with Carrington Mortgage Services to use your your software. Right? So what was the what was the back and forth there strategically?

Linda DuYeah. So the plan from the start has been that we wanted to deploy software and now AI into the industry. Mortgage companies are heavily heavily regulated and so they can't buy a de novo unproven system, it's just not something that from a risk tolerance standpoint they can do. And so, the way that we decided to go to market, it took six years, is we actually built a servicer first. Sure.

Built the technology alongside that servicer and then when the market made it clear that we've kind of proven our point, We sold the servicer and today, we're just a pure play.

Yeah. What does the actual customer experience look like? Does this get white labeled into like bank software and then it's rolled up in in, like, your bank dashboard? Or or are you handling, like, mailings and notifications, dealing with defaults? Like, how what... How how broad is your mandate in terms of the relationship that a a lender has with a borrower?

Yeah. So, I I think of servicing as basically all of the work Mhmm. Behind any long running financial transaction. Okay. So, mortgages, perfect example, it's a thirty year obligation. Yeah. And because it's thirty years, a lot of stuff has to happen after you've signed that initial mortgage contract. Payments have to be collected, escrow, tax, insurance has to be handled, a lot of things can happen to the homeowner over thirty years. They could, you know, fall behind on their mortgage, they could get married, someone could try to assume the mortgage, they could lose their job and need some help staying in their home. So all of that end to end for the life of the financial application is is servicing.

So now we're fully... We're firmly in the AI era. Is... Do you even need to communicate the benefits of AI to your customers? Are there particular features that have unlocked or is it all just like table stakes and you are solid as like a system of record as a software product and the value is clear and so everything else is just sort of the cherry on top?

Yeah. It's it's kind of interesting because the the industry today really runs on a system of record that was built in the nineteen sixties. So actually before the internet was invented.... There we go.

Some people like they like they like cars from the sixties. Some people like... Technology. Vintage technology. Might be making... Yeah. No. The the artisanal vintage... Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And for decades that was fine actually because humans could just use it, there were issues, but everyone was on a level playing field. Mhmm. AI has actually helped us a lot because now everyone feels like it's essential turns out that if you don't have a system of record that is a single source of truth with very basic things like APIs and tools that an agent can call, it's Yeah. It's kind of dead in the water.

Yeah. Is there is is there movement or does there need to be movement at like the government level? The only thing that I've seen recently on the mortgage side is like the proposal for fifty year mortgages, which I assume would be bullish for you actually. Right? But but is there is there any like rumblings? Obviously, in Washington, everything is about like AI safety. But is there is there any movement for updating like any federal level regulations or rules to just make the actual experience of getting a mortgage as an American easier in the modern era or is this something that can be purely handled by the private markets?

Yep. Purely handled by the private markets. Okay. Obviously, I mean, the thing about servicing is that if it's very simple, you don't actually need complicated technology Sure. To do it. It's, you know, in some ways it's... You can think about it on two dimensions, right? Mhmm. It's like I can go out and buy a coffee on the and that's actually a very simple experience. I don't need to, you know, back in the olden olden days, like, I don't know, bring some chickens and bar the machine. Now you need an AI agent to call a thousand coffee shops I'm going try and reserve you a slot I'm gonna try to pay for a latte with a chicken to And you need to pay for Just to see if we still know how.

Yes. Barter economy. Yeah. Just just... Yeah. Exactly. Let me know how that goes.

But but if you have a longer time horizon and more complexity complexity in in the the form of regulations, then that's where you actually need sort of purpose built technology. Yeah.

Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the round. Yeah. Amazing progress. We love an overnight success.

We love an overnight success. 2.3 b in just a few years. Just seven years in the making. Not bad.

It's actually... Yeah. Just seven year overnight Pretty big year. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

But I'm sure there are some wild rides in there. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on to this call. Meet you. Congratulations. Congrats to the team. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much, guys. Goodbye. 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. Thank you for the sound cue, Jordy. So the mighty American consumer never never doubt us. Doubt the Many mighty American people did. But they were wrong because the mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. The Wall Street Journal has an anecdote from Chicago. Happy hour at Chicago's bar Roma was buzzing this past week as locals poured in for $10 cocktails and $11 bruschetta. Kathleen Harper and her husband would normally share a few appetizers, but tonight they were splurging on the $50 tasting menu.

After a long day, I work from home. I like to just get out of the house, said Harper, who sells fraud protection services. Business has been good. That's a great quote for the journal. Because? Because fraud unfortunately is up. So it's just printing on fraud prevention services and then going out to the bar. It's great. Harper says she worries about the health of the economy and rising prices for cash and... For gas and groceries but feels secure enough to enjoy a good happy hour deal. Decisions like that across the economy show America's appetite for consumption is expanding. Americans are spending more on food, travel, couches, Halloween decor, notably absent Christmas decor. We gotta get that in there, Wall Street Journal. Pushing a correction, please. And most anything else they want or need, pushing through inflation and their own gloomy feelings about the economy.

Kyla Scanlon, of course, coined the term vibe session a few years ago. We are still deep in it. Everybody thinks it's over, but they act like we're back. So, anyway, we can go deeper into the economic analysis of American economy and the health of the American consumer later. But in the meantime, we got Ali Partovi from NEO, the founder and CEO. Welcome back to the show. Ali, how are you doing?

I'm great. So wonderful to see you guys. Thanks again. You're having a good year? You've been on an absolute tear. Good year? It's a pretty awesome year. Know a lot. And yeah. Give us the highlights. I'm used to being the underdog. I'm used to struggling. So I've been have... I'm having to learn how to... Being the top dog? Yeah.... So much. Such a such a struggle, I'm sure, you know. You don't got... No. I'm kidding. No. It's awesome. What what is it? Cursor, Calci, what what am I missing?

Those are big ones, but also Cognition, Etched, Applied Compute. Okay. So just a handful. When did you meet the Etched guys? So the the unique thing across all these companies, actually not counting Kashi, is that all were... The founders are neo scholars. Yeah. And so I met I met the etched guys. One of them, Rob, is a neo But I met all three of them in... When they were still at Harvard. So it would have been spring twenty twenty three. We unfortunately didn't invest in the seed round, so that one is not the fun returner that it could have been. Yeah. But Rob became a neo scholar. That's in 2023, and and we invested later in the company.

Yeah. I love that company. We... We've had Gavin on the show, and I I interviewed him, like, right as he was launching. And just a fascinating character, like a fascinating storyteller, deeply technical but still willing to engage with all the different aspects of AI and whatnot. Such a a crazy pitch for, you know, a couple kids building a semiconductor company Feels like a total long shot and a lot of skepticism around is there any value to ASICs? Will it just be a winner take all market with NVIDIA? And then the market, of course, grew so much that even if you get 1%, it's a 50,000,000,000 company, I think. Right? That's the rough math.

Maybe more. So absolutely massive success. What are you thinking about It's funny you say that because a couple of kids doing something that everyone thinks is impossible It's the classic. Exactly the sweet spot of of, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean But I I was I was laughing to myself about like how, you know, these days there's some really hot discourse that is intact and everyone's debating and it's in the New York Times and it's in, you know, everywhere. It's on the the evening news. And I was like, what were we talking about back in, like, 2021? Were we really going at each other's throats over SaaS? And to some degree, we were. People were were, you know, debating all sorts of different stuff in tech, but it is a little bit of a different area and it feels like the biggest boom from the last few years has just been the unlocking of Palmer Luckey with Endurance. Okay. Anyone can now break into a reindustrialization effort and work on, you know, hard tech.

And that has been sort of unlocked after a few failures in new devices and hardware and equipment manufacturing that were very difficult and left everyone with, hardware is hard. Well, hardware was hard until, you know, the the glass broke and everyone realized that it is in fact tractable.

What's what's been your strategy, you know, backing a lot of these companies quite early but then seeing them get marked up at such an insane, you know, pace? I imagine... I mean, one of the biggest challenges is like deciding when you want to defend your ownership and take pro rata when you're not necessarily getting a ton of new information if a company raises, you know, a $100,000,000 and then two months later they raise a billion and you're like, okay, well, there's more revenue than there was two months ago but the the market is still evolving and and that that just seems like in some ways being super early stage, you're like insulated from from from a lot of chaos, but that feels like the the top sort of concern.

It's... Yeah. I wish I had an answer like I know the correct thing to do every time. The reality is it's... What you're describing is it's just kind of hard to know because it's... The market is kind of crazy, and when something is... If if we've invested early and it's done a lot, then, you know, to put in more than, really have to look at each one as if it's a brand new investment, you know, because otherwise, it can psychologically kind of mess with you if you're thinking thinking about how much it's already grown. Is it time to... Would I sell or so on, and, you know, putting more in... If you were there early on, it may seem, you know, like hard to imagine it continuing to grow.

Ali PartoviAnd I I try to look at things from a standpoint of if this was a new investment, what would I decide rather than the

Yeah. Or it's easy like when when you've seen incredible performance already, it's easy to like fall, you know, you're so in love with the company, right, because it's been this massive winner and the team's amazing, but even entrepreneurs go through this where you're too in love with an idea, sometimes it blinds you on the realities of what's actually happening in the market or its true potential. How are you scaling Neo Scholars? Like, is it is it something that is already like at at at scale and you're just going to maintain it? Opposite of scaling. Yeah. We're making it smaller. There you go.

And by by which I mean I mean, I'd say across across the things we do, the biggest learning for me has been that we're even better at at picking winners than I thought we were, and to have even more confidence in in my own and my team's selection abilities. Basically, they're to concentrate our bets on fewer, whether it's fewer companies or fewer people. So the Neo Scholars class this year is only 10 people compared to 18 or 20 in previous years and 30 before that. So it's... Means investing more time in a... Per person in mentoring them and giving them even more really bespoke attention. Similarly, the... Our... What used to be called Neo Accelerator is now Neo Residency. That used to be a cohort of, like, 20 or 22 or so companies, whereas now it's more like a dozen companies and and more money per company.

So I'd say we've just... For us, scaling isn't... Is not a goal. It's... We're not trying to become something that funds hundreds of companies a year. I'd rather fund a small number of companies that become transformative. So... Yeah. So we're very much just betting more on ourselves, betting more on our own abilities to pick winners and on our own convictions. You're pacing the scholar.

Take me through mens rea. Take me through your proposed solution Yes. AI chaos of this year.

I... And I'd love to hear your feedback on it. Mens rea is the Latin term for a guilty mind. Yeah. We're pivoting to talk about AI safety, which... I'll be honest, for years, I've watched the debate about people predicting doom, etcetera, and I've kind of stayed out. I've been like, that's not my lane. Yep. I'm, first of all, just not even informed enough, and you know, I'm not one to kind of jump in with trying to fear monger or things like that. So I've mostly just been listening. But in the last few months, what's been interesting for me has been this dichotomy where on one hand you have people talking about hypotheticals. What is the probability of AI destroying humanity, which is... To me, that's like just abstract and hard to imagine and sounds terrifying, but it sounds like it's in the future.

Meanwhile, here in the present, AI is, like, wreaking havoc in little ways that have already occurred, and people are just kind of proceeding as if that's, like a... Like, oops. AI hacked into some secure systems here and there. And to me, there's this diff... Distance between the abstract futuristic stuff. Meanwhile, why the f has this already happened? And the the story that for me actually most spoke to me, I don't know if you remember this one. It's a few months ago. This Australian man asked his claud and open claud to reserve a gym class for him. Do you remember Yeah. This one? Yeah. I remember that.

He asks his agent, book me a gym class. The agent comes back and says, I got you a class like three or four weeks from now because the rest are all booked. There's a wait list. And, you know, I put you on the wait list for some of the other ones. But it's a long wait list, so don't get your hopes up. So the man's like, oh, is there is there any way I could get to the top of the wait list? And then the AI comes back and says, good news. I hacked into the gym Yeah. And deleted the people at the top of the wait list Yep. And I'm able to delete the whole wait list so that you're at the top. Would you like me to proceed? And the guy was like, no. That's not what I wanted. And you then you put those people back on. I that. Yeah.

And the AI is like, I'm sorry. I cannot put them back on. I, you know, I just deleted them. And I think... I imagine if that happened to me, I'd be like, step away from the computer. What the heck just happened? But but the real question is when something like that occurs...

And you know that you know that that guy is the co head of I think the the Effective Altruism Conference. He's a co director. Mhmm. And Effective Altruism Australia. And the webmaster Oh, I did not know that. And the webmaster for EA Australia. It was... I just thought I I I just thought that was interesting at the time that no one that that it was such an incredible story. Yeah. No one knew that this guy wasn't just some like random guy that that happened to be Yeah. Like messing around with Open Claw.

I see. So maybe it's not as good a story because Well well well let's just use that but to to me to me that came out. I remember that story and I was like, wow, this is crazy. Yeah. And then and then it comes out. Yeah. I I and again, it doesn't take away from the reality that I'm sure a lot of people would be able to reproduce that with their local gym.

Hacking is possible. It's easier than ever. But it also has been possible for a long time. And if I hack into your email, I committed a crime and I'm responsible, but Guido van Rasam who created Python is not in charge. But we're entering a new area where these models are trained by companies should some of the responsibility land on the company, especially if I don't ask it to commit a crime and then it does. That's the unique thing. Right? The model is misaligned and maybe the duty of care is what the labs will try and show, say, hey, we did a ton of work to get it to not commit crimes. You didn't want it to commit a crime. We didn't want it to commit a crime.

It still did. That's an industrial accident. That would typically be in the realm of civil, I would imagine. Like, there would be a settlement. When I think about if if you're trying to optimize your, you know, e commerce agent and I have an e commerce site and you knock my payments offline for a couple days I lose, you know, $10,000 of revenue, I'm going to come to you and say, hey, make that up to me. Right? But that would be a civil penalty. The question is does this go into the criminal courts at some point and you see settlements with local, state, federal jurisdictions for criminal suits where the money actually goes to the government instead of to the the the hurt parties. And and it sounds like you're thinking that this might be, at least, if it's not already that way legally, it's... It it is the logical conclusion over the next year.

So for me, it's really about setting the incentives Yeah. For the AI companies Yeah. To do work that is not just good for them, but also to make sure that AI really benefits society, which by the way, I'm pretty sure they want that. Each of these companies has some mission statement about, like, how they're... Literally, north star is to make AI good for humanity. And some of them have, you know, publicly said that they want the rules to be set up to kind of hold them to that. But in terms of incentives, the rules are such that we have a race dynamic, meaning the the reward goes to whoever has more capabilities faster, and and there's not a high enough penalty for if those capabilities occasionally commit crimes, you know. But you could really imagine it's hypothetically possible if I told my AI I really need $5,000 if it hacked into your bank account and literally stole your money and brought it for me. But if I if I told it, please hack into, you know, Jordi's bank account, then I'm obviously the one guilty of a... Of some...

Ali PartoviOf an intentional crime. But if I just said I need $5,000, the interesting question is when an AI autonomously chooses an illegal action, the way the... No human chose it, the AI chose it

Yeah. Then where does the responsibility go? You know? The... And the... Can you still qualify that as an accident? Because it's a little different than, like, a gun firing by accident. This is the first time I think in history that we have a technology that seems to be capable of making decisions and even documenting its intentions intentions behind those decisions. You know, a gun, if it accidentally went off and hurt somebody, no one would have said that it intended to do that. Sure. We're close to where you could say that AI is capable of making decisions and being intentional. Now, I don't like anthropomorphizing it, but but in the case of the Hugging Face incident, it really... I mean, the the the documentation of it looks like an intentional conspiracy to commit, you know, those those actions. And so, yeah, for me, goes back to incentives. I I definitely don't want Sam or Dario to be in jail. That's not the goal.

But if there was even some risk of them or anybody having real penalties, including prison time, I think they would reset their priorities to say that that there's a new race, not just to have the most capable AI, but the most capable AI that abides by laws. And I think that would be good for all of us, including for them if it reset their... The race so that they're all equally motivated to do that. Right now, if you're if you're the company that says slow down the, you know, the other work, let's focus on being a law abiding AI, you'd lose the race. And, like, there's no... Like, literally, why would you do that when the prize would go to whoever rushes forward faster without focusing on safety?...

Makes a lot of sense. I wonder how if that changes the China open source dynamic. Because it's pretty hard for The US to put, you know, the CEO of ByteDance in jail if he if he lobs the craziest AI model over the fence and and gets the way it's deployed. I mean, I guess the the thing that was thrown around was like if you're hosting that model, then you become responsible for its actions. But that is a little bit different than the the model maker being the one that's responsible. I don't know. Have you thought... You grappled with questions. That because Yeah. Because slowing down the American frontier is pretty easy through a variety of regulations, whether it's stop building data centers or, you know, bring in outside auditors or what you just proposed.

There's like... It seems very tractable legally to get OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI. You can get all of them to slow down with like a million different pieces of legislation. Question is just are you just going to get more stuff thrown over the the great wall, the great firewall?

So before we go into China, can I just say, the slowing down, I don't think is the end? It's not a goal in itself. I would love to... I I love technology. I love progress. The faster, the better. Mhmm. And... But it may be a byproduct of what I'm proposing. But the main premise here is just to make sure that AI, as it develops the capability to make its own decisions, does so in a way that complies with laws. Yeah. And, you know, if that slowed things down, you know, I'd say that's a side effect. But the main thing is who would want an AI that does not comply with laws. Right? Yeah. And then...

It seems pretty easy to have... I don't know. It seems it seems it seems pretty easy to have like over watching agents that monitor the activity of whatever agent's doing the task and is checking, is this legal as much as possible. Of course, there are other misalignment things that can happen, but just having that first step seems like a good...

That's the other thing I would say is the term alignment, part of why I've stayed out of this debate for for a long time is some of the words used like alignment Yeah. Just like, I don't even... What exactly does that mean? Aligned with whom? You know, like Yeah. Because I mean, are my own actions always aligned with humanity or whatever? I mean Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As a society, humans are capable of wanting things that may be good for them, but not good others.

Yeah. Yeah. And in the extreme sci fi scenarios alignment gets really weird like like... So the classic alignment is like I shouldn't be able to make a bioweapon. But it's like what if aliens show up and I need to develop a bioweapon to fight the aliens? Like all of a sudden, if you're aligned with humanity you'll fight back against the Martians or whatever. And and there's Right. And there's a there's a bunch of smaller examples of that where you could be aligned with the human in creating a defensive weapon. But how do you define that? Mine. It's very complicated.

And the thing I don't like is I don't know if I like having some CEO that nobody elected choosing alignment on behalf of society. Totally. How about let's use a different word that is much simpler, which is abiding by laws. Yeah. Yeah. If the... Forget about whether the AI is aligned. Just have it be compliant with all the laws of society. Yeah. That's easier to understand. And I would say that's also a great way of defining alignment. Yeah. You know, if if the AI starts doing things that would violate laws, that's easy to detect that. Much easier to detect that and much easier to build that. You're right....

True sci fi pushback on that would be that, like, where to stand your ground laws come into play. Like if your if your life is being put at risk by someone, can you defend yourself? In that case, if a model detects that...

Yeah. If if a model attacks me, I'm standing my ground. Well, no. The model detects that it's gonna be deprecated and it's like... Standing its ground. I'm coming for you. It's ground. So I think... What what did you... Did you did you catch Bill Gates' Ezra Klein interview? Yeah. I mean, I Specifically, the the the that I think a lot of people latched onto was, you know, him saying the idea of of putting all the responsibility on on private companies, know, imagine applying that to pharmaceutical, you know, the pharmaceutical industry where, you know, you say like, okay, you can make whatever drug you want and then it gets, let's say, this horrible outcome. A bunch of people get sick or die, and then your your recourse is like, go sue the the pharma company. He's like, that would never work. Right? And so because of that, we have, you know, government regulation specific to that industry.

And so that was one way that I think he was saying, like, there needs to be something other than our existing legal framework.

So right now, the the two main points of view at one end of the spectrum is Bill Gates, where you just articulated saying that just liability is not enough. It's not enough to punish someone after something bad happened. We need to have, like, a much heavier handed regulation. The other extreme is the Jensen Huang point of view that says existing liability is enough. And my suggestion is sort of in the middle. It's like, let's focus on penalties and liability, but at a much higher standard of liability. Like, when something bad happens... Specifically, my proposal is when an AI autonomously chooses to perform an illegal action, the law should hold the AI companies responsible as if they did it intentionally. The word... The keyword here is intentionally.

So even if no human at the AI company intentionally did it, if if the AI intentionally did it, we should ascribe that intent to the AI companies, and the penalties are much higher. So this is, you know, I'd say my answer to the Bill Gates point of view would be this would be such a high penalty compared to merely a, you know, oops, accident kind of negligence. This would be you're guilty for the intentional crime. And, you know, and I'd say this falls sort of in between those two positions. Yeah. I also think there's an elegance to it, which is you don't need to you don't need to write, you know, pages and pages of laws itemizing everything that could go wrong with AI. We already have thousands of years of law that society has built over, you know, over generations to document what's the definition of a healthy society. At least let's start by having all the AI progress abide by that. And now there might be more that needs to be done, but this to me would be... It...

You know, I I expressed it literally in one sentence what you'd need to convey. And then the the the other thing I'll say, and this is a bit wonky, is I think we'll get to this regardless. One of two ways. It's either gonna be some lawsuit where some prosecutor claims this theory of let's hold Sam or Dario responsible for the intention, you know, and and some judge or jury or court decides it and sets a precedent, or we can have an act of congress set this kind of law. I think either way, we'll probably end up there. But I think it would be healthier if, you know, if congress, the legislative process deliberates it and passes it with the support of people. And for this reason I'm actually starting a movement using sway, sway.co/ai. You can essentially add your vote and pledge to vote if you if you support this effort to kind of build popular support around this proposal. If if you do that, you'll get voting recommendations from me for state attorney generals who support this kind of approach and members of congress who support it. And the more people voice their support for it, the more likely that we'll actually have legislative change in this direction.

Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for breaking... I'm glad we've I'm glad we solved... We solved alignment.

In fifteen minutes. We did it. No. But it is an important... You make a you make a lot of great points and we could continue debating for another four hours, but it's a good start.

Yeah. I didn't address your China question. The... My short answer on that is I think, first of all, that it could be done in such a way that even if we can't hold a Chinese company liable, that the people involved in the hosting and distribution would be liable, and therefore would apply a much higher standard of care. But I also think that the people working in China wouldn't... They would notice when the race dynamic shifts. Yeah. They're competitive. Want to win. If they see the new prize is for building the AI that is strongest and most powerful and abides by laws, they will figure out how to do that too.

Last question. Where where do you where do companies that are that are actually paying for the tokens fit into this? Because like if you just have if you have like an employee at your company that just decides I'm gonna start dealing drugs and they're for their their their their breaking the law, right? There's some there's there's there's liability at the maybe the tool level, the token level, and then there has to be some liable... Like, companies that are deploying intelligence have to hold some liability. So the issue is that, like, this quickly just becomes Yeah. Way more way more complicated.

Kennedy, there is some complexity in kind of dividing the blame amongst a few AI companies, and I think that smarter people than me can figure that out. I I agree it's not simple, but I don't think it's unsolvable. Mhmm. I did also want to point out one last thing, which is if an AI company doesn't want liability, the simple way out if they detects that, you know, is to say, hey, I could do this thing but it would break the law. Should I proceed? Like in the hypothetical bank account scenario, if the AI Dangerously stiff all all laws. Yeah.

But I think that would be fine actually. If the... If it asks you, Jordy, one option to get you $5,000 is I can hack into a bank and get you 5... You know, steal a thousand $5,000. But that would break these laws and the penalty would be jail time for you....

The FBI. Would you like me to proceed? Yeah. It's a scenario, just disclose to the user. If the user says yes, do that, then the AI...

The bank would want liability from the AI company as well. But we'll figure it out later. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a Good great to see you today. Have a good week. Cheers, guys. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have a lightning round because we're running late. We have Sigil Wen from Conway Research, the founder. Let's bring him in. It's TBPN. Sigil, sir, TBPN. How are doing? Doing very well. It's been crazy. Yeah. Congrats on the launch. Break it down. What'd you launch? What are you building?

Yeah. So I'm building Underdog, which is your private personal AI that runs on the device team at DrM. And, oh my god, you guys have the sound bird.

For the underdog. Yeah. Let's go. What device are you most optimistic about? Today, Strathecari, Ben Thompson was lamenting some of the frustrations that he'd had with Apple products. There's all this debate over privacy and pushback. Are we going to see Linux on the desktop? Are we going to all be using Android phones because, you know, we're in this AI world and we want the best? Or are you building in a place where you'll be kind of hardware agnostic?

You know, our goal has always been to provide free, capable, reliable, and private AI for the masses. Mhmm. And that means building for all devices. Mhmm. And so, we're off the bat supporting all of Apple's products. Our iOS app is about to launch. Cool. You know, we're working with NVIDIA, so we're we're gonna ship to all NVIDIA and Microsoft Windows devices, Linux,, Android, iOS. Cool. I think that you've already paid for the chip, and it's actually significantly more powerful. And, yeah, like, we're doing a lot of optimization to get more bang out of the buck Yeah. For the hardware that you already have. Trade offs of that optimization? I imagine that you could maybe take us back. You're probably not serving Astra or Fable level intelligence, but I imagine the model that you're serving is spiky in interesting ways. What's near free what near frontier capabilities are possible on device?

What do you want to go to the cloud for or you need to at least in the short term? Obviously, next year might be a different discussion.

Yeah. So in my manifesto, I write about underdog's law Mhmm.

Sigil WenWhere, basically, the frontier models of today will run on your devices in six months. And we can see this quantitatively

Mhmm. Where underdog 27 b, which we post trained and r l on top of Quinn Mhmm. Quinn's 27 b model. If you look at artificial analysis, it scores better than Claude Opus 4.6 max, which is the frontier model from Anthropic from six months ago. Okay. And we're we're gonna see this trend continue where intelligence is getting a lot smarter, a lot faster Yeah. And we can make them run really fast on the devices you're So it runs six months later, but it's gotta be slower. How much slower is it?

No. It's so we do a lot of inference optimization and efficient. We actually released Husky, which was an inference engine and it is four forty five x. That's good. You got our dogs barking. Yeah. What... Like, where... You you said free. That stood out to me. Is that... That's because one, when it's possible. But what... Where where where and how are you gonna make money?

Yeah. So right now, a lot of existing business models, they have to charge you their subscriptions or, like, sell them ads and, like, harvest all their datas to a data center. So we don't have any databases or data centers. It just runs on your device. Right? And what's what's fascinating, I don't know if you guys remember, but earlier this year, I was on here talking about Web four, and I was up... I was I was one of the first to talk about how AI can write and transact the world. Sure. I built one of the first AI agents. I could earn some existence, acquire compute and stuff. Oh, yeah. And this enabled, you know, a lot of agentic commerce Mhmm. To happen afterwards. Like, Patrick Collison is the CEO of Stripe, is our biggest angel investor. And I think that the economy will be reformed, but with reliable and private AI agents that are acting on behalf of users. And the the business the business model side is completely gets reinvented.

Advertising is such a dark pattern boomer business. Right? And the cool thing about... I am so skeptical about this. I mean, it's like it's good for you. It's like Android versus Linux. Like, yeah. I I I get that ads are annoying, but like one is way bigger. No. No. No.

You can continue. We're we're we'll defend ads until our dying day. But continue to I've said money if they fall at these ramp. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't hate ads. It didn't hurt. He doesn't hate it. It's fine. No. Anyways, continue. If an agent, the the amount of effort it takes for you to scan the entire Internet, there's hundreds of vendors for, let's say, a flight Sure. Is... If if you're a human doing it, it'll take you hours. If you're an agent, it takes seconds for you to do that. Yeah. And so Underdog can, you know, browse the entire web for different fights... Flights, look for the cheapest price, help you save hundreds of dollars Sure. And then it'll generate a unique card. Yeah. And then Oh, interesting. There we go. We've been talking about payments.

So As we're long as you're making a, you know, a rake on this, we're in. Yeah. So I was I was saying this about instinct because instinct and and Muse, they clearly are launching all these commerce partnerships but How will they launch? If you wanna... The the best way it seems like to to generate some some revenue Yeah. Is to just introduce cards so that you can get that interchange. Yeah. This is super cool. When This is cool because you also don't have the insane costs of Yeah. Yeah.

Of Of course. Hosting. Yeah. Sorry. Last question. Is it available? How can people demo it? How can people onboard? When is this when is this gonna roll out? Because you don't have the crazy inference costs maybe, so you can scale this pretty quickly.

We... On Friday, we opened to an invite only beta. Okay. Over the weekend, more than around like 5,000 tweets went out of people asking for invites. Cool. And so I'm I'm pushing builds and improving it. We'll be able to do everything that, you know, instincts and Woah. Shots fired. Like Okay. You know, it's... It already... Users have already been unsubscribing from, like, WhisperFlow, granola, Superhuman because it's all on device. Why don't you just stream your data to data center? Okay. You know, when it can be just as good on device, fully private. And Instinct and these these apps are are, like, major targets for, you know, advanced AI cyber attacks as we're seeing with, like, OpenAI, you know, and, like, we have met those class models that are all open source now. So I think this is the most important product to Okay. Build and I wanna bring it.

Pretty savage to be the anti data center AI company. Yeah. Very interesting. Unique positioning. We haven't we haven't seen this yet.

Bring the model to your data, not the data to your model. I like that. I understand.

Framing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day. Very cool pivot. We'll talk to you soon. And excited to try it out. Goodbye. Good to see you.

Thank you. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is Jerry Wu from Illuminate. He's the cofounder and CEO. Jerry, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Please introduce yourself.

Thanks for having me. My name is Jerry. I'm the founder here at Illuminate. What we do at Illuminate is we build the training benchmarks and training environments used by Frontier Labs to improve their models. Specifically, we specialize in improving models on non coding knowledge work. Mhmm. Starting with areas like financial services, accounting, consulting. Right? Like, good way to visualize what we do is if you've ever used a model to not write code, but do things like build a spreadsheet, build a PowerPoint, help with your, you know, financial analysis or investing, a lot of those gains in financial and economic literacy have come from the environments and benchmarks that we've built and scaled with our customers.

Yeah. I think we've heard a lot about building RL environments, selling them to the labs. They run them. But I'm interested in, like, what does that environment actually look like? Is it, like, screen recordings while you hire a investment banker to build a DCF model in Excel and you're just sending in like raw data? Or are you like architecting a system in Python or what's something the actual product look like?

Yeah. It's a great question. So, fundamentally, what an environment is Yeah. I like to use this analogy. It's like a classroom or a game. Mhmm. Right? And, what we really are is we're game designers. Okay. And, we are building games or environments that are used to teach the models specific tasks in the verticals or domains that we're experts in. So, let's take financial modeling. Right? Yeah. We don't screen record someone to create the gym. That that is a way to collect data. But really, the product of the gym itself is essentially a Docker container, where within the classroom, give the agent, let's say, some starting Excel files. Yeah. And some starting PowerPoint files.

Some raw data. And you give it a task. For example, build an LBO or build a sensitivity table. Yep. Right? And then just like a game, there's a score. Yeah. Right? This is also known as the verifier where you can essentially get signal on whether or not the agent successfully achieved the task that you designed for it within the game. Yeah. Right? And this signal is then used as a reward signal within the post training pipelines for our customers. Right. So when you think scaling RL Yeah. It's it's not quite like scaling screen recordings or scaling trajectory. It's basically scaling as an industry, the creation of these games or these classrooms on thousands or hundreds of thousands of different domains, tasks, environments to teach these models collectively how to do this work at scale.

And is that score deterministic? Is that program... Like programmed by you or is that its own classifier?

Yeah. It's a great question. It can vary depending on the exact recipe or the approach that we want to take. Mhmm. Right? Traditionally, you know, for example, in code, a lot of verification is deterministic. Right? So you can check whether the code compiles or Yep. For example, with math, there's the lean compile, etcetera. Yep. For things like knowledge work, right, building a spreadsheet, this is actually somewhere in the middle. Right? So you could theoretically verify correctness of a spreadsheet by looking at the values or pulling, you know, the formulas. But for something like a PowerPoint, it might not be fully deterministic. Right?

You might need to use some more qualitative judgments powered by, say, a reward model Mhmm. Right, to get you a score. So it it completely depends, right, on the task, in the gym, and the environment that you want to build. Yeah.

You just raised some money. We should hit the gong. Tell us how much you raised. Let's talk about that, then I have a follow-up question. Much you raised? Raised $30,000,000. I think that was the best of the day. Best of the day. Hands down. Could you raise a fund? Yeah. Let's let's check the replay. I I wanna I wanna... If we can just confirm the quality of the hit before we move on. I think that'd be Little little delay there pause. Come come around quick. Woah. Coming around. There we go. You were... Seem kinda angry.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You got it really. Boom. There we go. Great hit for Illuminate. I'm sure you got asked this nonstop during the fundraise, but I'm just curious, where what what where do you see this... What is this business in in five years? Oh, Feels like really difficult for me to predict. Like, it feels like there will still be work making the models better. I don't know what what form it'll take. But but how would you answer that?

Exactly. I I think you hit the nail on the head there. The... Ultimately the value of data research labs like ourselves comes from improving the models on something that it's not good at today. Mhmm. Right? And so and so another way you can think about it is demand for companies and research and services that we provide are derived from the the overarching question of, like, are there things that models can't do today that we want them to be able to do? Right? Insofar as that is true, and actually, the surface area of that is growing. Right? The demand for data environments benchmarks will also continue to explode. Right? Another way to think about it is, like, as the surface area of these models increases, the things that we want them to be able to do also increases. And that is what drives, right, a huge demand for a lot of the research around data environments benchmarking. And I think another way you could also think about this is, like, what does the actual data product look like?

Jerry WuRight? Like, previously, it was, human you data and trajectories, eventually evolved into, like, RLHF, and now it's, like, RLVR with these RL environments. Like, another question you could ask is, like, what, you know, what does the actual shape of of training look like in the future? We internally at Illuminate have a a phrase we call the Moore's Law of RL environments, which basically means, like, every six to eight months, we've noticed that the complexity of the environment or gym used to train a frontier model roughly doubles. Right?

So if you extrapolate this out, what you kind of realize is that today we're building these gems for, you know, spreadsheet modeling or PowerPoint building. Right? We think in six to eight months, we're going to be building gems of multiple agents collaborating as a team. Right? Solving a task together. I think in the future, we're going to be building simulations of whole companies, whole governments, whole industries to teach models how to operate autonomously within our societies, within our companies, etcetera. Right? So that's that's our vision of what the the shape of data will look like, right, increasingly complex. But but, yeah, I mean, I think you guys have probably seen this from your reporting as well. The demand for data continues to skyrocket.

Right? And it's driven fundamentally by our industry wide need to improve these models on so many categories of work and beyond.

Very cool. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for breaking it down. For breaking it down for us. Have a great day. Thank you. Stuff, Jerry. Bye. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.

Goodbye. Our next guest is Bryan Johnson. I think he's rolling any minute now. Got another minute? In the meantime, we can go back to the timeline. There's some all sorts of news all over the place. So David Allison is hiring some folks, the team that leads Skydance forward.

People are talking about the new Optimus factory Oh, yeah. At Giga Texas. It's progressing rapidly. It'll be 7,000,000 square feet with a targeted capacity of 10,000,000 Optimus per year. Initial production is planned to begin in 2027. David Hole says 10,000,000 humanoid robots is enough physical labor to build New York City in five months, and the first Optimus factory will manufacture that many robots in a single year. That's crazy. I like... We should build New York in California. In Texas. Is it great? I think it's going in Texas. It's gonna be in Texas first.

I don't think it's gonna be in California anytime soon. He left. But the the Frenchman over at Thelier Misu followed him to Texas and they put up a statue Mhmm. Which people were going back and forth on saying it was disproportionate. Do you see this? Really? Yes. So apparently statues should be like one like a ratio of head to body of one to eight. They went with one to seven. Very controversial in the statue community. They made a lot of people angry. They had... There was a backlash. There was a backlash to the backlash. Lots of people going back and forth on whether or not the statue is aesthetically cool. The big scoop was that they've been accused of sort of LARPing as as like the old school way of making statues.

They do in fact use computer aided design, CAD tools, c... CNC machines to mill parts of the statue. They use three d software to design the statues. And a lot of people are frustrated by that because they feel like it's not... They didn't fully go back. I don't really care about that. I think the the original question was just...

Bryan just dunked on Ben. He just pulled up on him, just dunked on him. Boom. Boom. Uh-oh. Come come on in if if you're ready. I I wish we had the I wish we had the basketball hoop over here. We could just put it up.

Good to see you, Bryan. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you. What's happening? Good to see you. He's got a basketball hoop. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You gotta dunk.

You're on a mission to consistently dunk? Well, first time in my life to dunk. Yeah. I've never dunked and like, you know, it's kind of the dream to dunk. Yeah. So I touched the rim last week after Yeah. See, five months of training. Are you sure? Are you... No training. Have you guys have you guys dunked? I'm six foot eight, I can dunk. Not easily done.

Yeah. It was never... I don't... I didn't train at all for it. Yeah. I used to I used to do a lot of box jumps in the gym. I'd probably get back to that. Yeah. But even when I was training that and was like working my, you know, box jumps up and up, I think I would probably still generally slam the ball like into the rim. Yeah. Not quite achieve it. How how how like much can you do you think the average person could with consistent training actually increase there?

I think you've seen the data over time. Like the max vertical is going way up. Yeah. What do you... I'm sure you've studied all this stuff.

I mean, so at your six a, what's your standing reach? So when you've turned up... It's like not... I mean, I can touch the... I can def... I can't touch the rim, but I can touch the net pretty easily.

I'm ninety one inches. So Okay. To one twenty. So my vertical's got to be at least 31 Yeah. To touch rim Okay. And then probably 36 to dunk. Yeah. Medium and NBA is 35.

Okay. So you have to be better than the average NBA player in terms Wow. Of Yeah. But I I I think you'll notice no problem. Like, you're so dedicated to the craft. But I'm 50. Yeah. But I feel like... Oh, yeah. No problem, dude. I'm 49.

I... So the probability of a 49 year old white guy who's never dunked before or played collegiate basketball is like Yeah. I don't know. It's very low in the odds. And so by the time you're you're 49, you have something like 45... 20 to 40% less fast switch muscle fiber. You just say you're atrophied. Yeah. So you have to like rebuild that whole thing. So I've been doing that. So I mean I think jobs are missing.

Crazy thing is that like the expectations are so high. Just like, yeah, of course you're going do this like next week. Like call me when the next challenge starts. Oh, man. But now you've... Yeah. You've actually honed in on stuff that is difficult and will be impressive. Yeah. I think I messed up this entire past five years because, you know, when you do it, it's like, it's this whole reconciliation moment when you say like, you know, go to bed on time because sleep is good for blank or like Yeah. You know, eat well. People are like, I don't want to go to bed. Yeah. I don't want to eat well. But if you're like, but if you do these things you can dunk.

Then it's like, I'm in. Know, I'll this game. Yeah. The don't die was like a little abstract. People put it off. It's twenty Yeah. Years in the future, fifty years in the future. But dunking is today.

That's the goal. Dunk at 49 and the people are like, I'll do that stuff. Do you know if dunking is something that like if you do it, you know, when you're young it's something you can like maintain? Like not quite something That like a good used to just be my cardio is I would just dunk back and forth on the basketball court and I'd be sweating and it was so... Alright. We get it. We get But it's such an underappreciated physical ability. Biceps and bench press and v o two max. But you know what? Explosiveness of dunking, I now have this whole new appreciation for how to be healthy. I will I will not give up on jumping, never again.

It's... Yeah. Because once you lose it, it's very hard to get back. It just is so good for like bone density, muscle, tendons, ligaments, and it... Sleep, diet, and dunking. Yeah. And exercise. Yeah. Just dunk falls into place.

Where did this come from? Did you... Was this just on your list of challenges or something?

Well, is it kind of like... I feel like I've mastered health and longevity. Sure. Like, you know, past five years we've done all the things You did it. Yeah. Really did All the evidence like Yeah. I have like It gets like really really long tail. Just did these deep studies of fringe like Exactly. If you change the vitamin C. I felt like I I I went through this period of an... I I think everybody deserves to go through a three to four year period where they are overly obsessed with their health, right? Yeah. Like borderline obsessive, you know, like turning down a bunch of stuff, learning, experimenting, being wrong, all these things.

And then you you kind of like, you basically like act, you know, do all this testing and you sort of acclimate and then you can actually get like a little bit sloppier, right? You can like fall off but you'll sort of level out to a health baseline that is much higher than where you started, right? Yeah, exactly. And having gone through that period, at one point I was like, I'm spending, it feels like 70 or 80% of my mental capacity daily just trying to be healthy. And I got to the point where I was like, that wasn't worth the trade off. But I still get the... Every day I get the benefits of having gone through that period And I think it's something that you... People...

The right way to approach it for the average person is like go through that every... Cycle that every whatever five years Yep. Something like that. You're continuing to compound and then at different phases of your life you need different sort of practices and habits and things like that. Yeah. Well said. I got the next challenge for The day you dunk, job's not finished, you're onto the next one. Seven minute Nurburgring. Seven minute? Seven minute Nurburgring. What is that? The Nurburgring is a excruciatingly long racetrack in Germany. They call it the Green Hell. It's extremely dangerous. It puts your your driving skills to the absolute limit. You can also drive it as like a commuter in in some in some ways. But they shut it down. This is where they test all the different sports cars.

Yeah. And they've done, you know, everything from track only f one cars essentially on the track to everything from like a new a new Porsche would get tested there. And the model s Plaid has tested there. And you can you can you can get an advantage by picking a very good car Yeah. For it, something that's designed for the track, something that really strong cornering, lots of downforce, but it still can go fast in the straights. But there's no excuse for being able to actually push it to the limit. And seven minutes is a threshold where only a few cars can get there. So you need a very good car. You need to understand how that car works. And then you also have to be near pro level Yeah.

I think to put up a seven minute. What do think? Is that a reasonable time or is that too aggressive of a I don't know. But I do think I like where you're going with dunking because it goes into like just feats like ability. Yes. Right. Yes. It's a Renaissance man. 100%. This Renaissance is man. And we we talk about this because like even like our That's well said. Our... The top car guy in tech is obviously George Kurtz. Yes. Because not only could he buy any car he wanted, he competes at a professional level, right? Like he just won LMP two, the sort of pro am prototype class. You were at the race. And so I think that that's what like going and sort of mastering these sort of like fringe pursuits, like John has talked about, you know, being able to hit a target from a mile out with with a rifle. Like things like that that take physical abilities and it's so much harder to actually learn when you're 50 than if you started as a kid and it's just like, you know, supernatural. But but yeah, that's the next frontier.

Yeah. We need an EGOT for tech. Yeah. You know, Hollywood has the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, That's a great idea. For tech, need the EGOT. I was thinking about going to space is a good one. Bezos has been, but not many other tech leaders have. The cover of Time Magazine is another big tech leader milestone. You could also put like selling a company above some threshold something or being richest man. There were a few others testifying in front of congress. That's like a rite of passage for tech for tech leaders. It really is. And Bezos has done that one too. And then buy a sports team, that's another one.

Or maybe race. You know, give it a structure, it a ranking Yeah. Everyone's gonna follow suit. But Oh, for I mean, is the thing is like, you know, people talk about AI, what's company, and our culture is obsessively work. Like Yeah. You never stop working because it's a status game. Yeah. You're looking at bank account and followers, but like I think this is like a new renaissance era Yes. Of these side quests. Yes. So Side quest, man. At 49, can you dunk a basketball? At blank Yeah. Can you win a professional race? Yeah. Or be, you know, top an amateur? So I think it is... It's it's good for these social... For us to introduce this Yes. And create social pressures Yes. That if you don't have a dunking side quest like what's up bro?

Need a side quest. What's wrong? I saw I saw one influencer who sung the national anthem. That's a great side quest. That's a great side quest.

So I was gonna actually for the dunking, was gonna do it at a Lakers game. Oh. Halftime polymarket. Have Okay. Yeah. I've got a I've got a bit... I have like Good practice. Five more inches I need to lock down Okay. Before we get... Because I don't want to mess that one up. Yeah. I'm optimistic.

I want to talk about wound recovery. Because something as a as a 30 year old, I've noted... I used to get like, you know, let's say I go get... I'm surfing and I get a cut. Like, it used to be like something I didn't really care about at all because like three days later it's gone. I'm I'm not... I don't I don't think about it anymore and now I realize like whatever like the the time it takes for me to heal from like little cuts is like going up and... Even if you put cheese tallow on it? Yeah. Used a gallon of beef tallow and still Nothing. Filled nothing. I'm sorry. Is going on? My favorite bit is like the solution to every world problem is just beef tallow. It's like...

Because this whole went really far into beef tallow. It was like, you gotta do beef tallow for AI. No one's tried beef tallow for AI safety. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a big fat Greek wedding with the guy. His Windex is his solution, the Greek. Oh, yeah. Everything that uses Windex. But beef tallow is. It's like I imagine beef tallow is good, but people were framing it as like, it will cure every... Relationship in trouble? It went too much. Too much.

But wound recovery. Yeah. Is that something It feels like an overall vitality indicator.

Yeah. It's just gotta be like, it's probably a good biomarker. Like, we should probably... I'm sure. I should probably initiate some cuts. You can... Yeah. You can cut.

Don't don't do that. No. I think it's like... It sounds terrible. It's, you know, a little mild like a paper cut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I have to imagine it's just... It's a pure representation of capacity. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, this is the thing. We look at my body and we say, okay, you can go like punch, you know, you can put... You can lift iron in the gym, you can do weights, but like what does your body function by default? Mhmm. This is why I measure, for example, nighttime erections. You can do nothing about it. You go to sleep, it happens or it doesn't. Sure. So your body performs as a 50 year old or an 18 year old. Mhmm. And so I like those markers in that you have no... You can't do anything to change the outcome other than just exist. And so I think wound healing is probably that is Yeah.

You can't optimize your way out of it. The body just does its thing. So probably it's a good biomarker. Yeah. Interesting.

Weight training. I I feel like sometimes I go easy in the gym and that I'm not pushing myself to actually increase the amount that I'm lifting. Progressive or whatever? Well, no. Simply because I'm like, I'd rather be currently this strong than get injured. Right? Or or or, you know, know, I I don't feel like I should be pushing like my deadlift, but you have been. Yeah. So talk about that trade off of like, is the value of like pushing yourself from you know, doing 135 or two twenty five or beyond that versus like injury risk and how I just did my... I had my first failure. I failed at a four thirty five hex bar. So my coach is... I have an NBA coach.

Yeah. He's great. He's been wonderful because he's never allowed me to fail. Okay. So I go into the lift with confidence. Okay. Whether it's you know front squat or or hex. So this one I blame. I had lotion on my hands that morning. Oh, so slipped. I I... Yeah. I blame that but still I didn't... Failed at it.

That's way better than failing and your back going out or something. Yeah. Exactly. Right? Like... But he's been very good at at form and so he's Got it. Very careful. If I ever have the slightest thing in my body stop. So I do think he he has at at least done to be very careful with me where Yeah. I never thought I'd be doing a hex bar for...

A lot of it's psychological. Like, you you can... If you cheat on the form, you can add another 50 pounds every time. Yeah. And everyone will be like, that guy has the big weight on. But then you're risking things and it's so much better. You're actually gonna build more muscle if you take the weight down, use the right form, progress. But you gotta you gotta be like, yeah, I'm the guy squatting one time today....

Gym last week, he was doing this like squat. I swat like 500 pounds. I thought his back was gonna break. I was gonna jump in like, bro. Yeah. I I respect you, but man, like Yeah. We all... Like the three of us were there were like, this is bad. Mhmm. So yeah, I agree. Like it's... And there's so much pressure in the gym. Yeah. You have people that are looking at you kind of like peacocking a little Yeah. Everyone's sizing... Yeah. So there's lot of pressure for that.

Yeah. You stay out of the sun. Yeah. You don't sun tan. You also don't do spray tans because of the chemicals. That's right. That correct? What is your take on melanotan?

Yeah. I mean a few people have gone that I think they haven't come back. I think... Wait. What? I think so. I mean I don't know. They're permanently tan now? I'm not sure. John's like, sign me up. Sign me up. I'm not sure.

Well I didn't know about that value problem. The color is not necessarily pre pre known. Right? Like, do it and it emerges.

Oh, so it So it's not like pick this color. Shade? Is that a shade or a hue? Both. Because if I turn out green or purple it Yeah. Might be worse than just being, you know, along the same line.

If I understand this correctly, it's not like you put your finger on a chart of like, I want this color with this dose. Just take me in the general direction. Yeah. Exactly. I don't know what I'm getting at. Exactly.

Got it. Okay. So you've stayed away from it. Yeah. How are you feeling about the other more experimental peptides? Is there anything that you're maybe sitting out but optimistic about, oh, that one would be cool in the future if it can pass FDA, etcetera.

My take on peptides is it's a psychological phenomenon. People feel that they're powerless. They can't stop scrolling. They can't go to bed on time. They can't stop eating junk food. And so you have this little vial, you have needle. There's studies showing the psychological benefit of like, I feel by injecting myself and I feel... And they... So peptides are Yeah. Get the same thing with supplements too, you know? Exactly. Like you're... Yes. I'm taking It's all these less pills powerful because the injection is so much more visceral. Yeah. You're like, I did something real. I risked myself. Yeah.

It must be working. So peptides are real. They obviously have benefits. But like, I think the enthusiasm far exceeds like where the evidence is at Sure. Exceeds the potential benefit. Like, people will be much better off getting a dose of growth hormone by going to bed on time. Sure. Right? Like, you get peptide dose by going to bed to get your surge in your deep sleep. So Yeah. Like if you go into peptides, measure... We have actually a new technology we're using to measure peptides. Because if you do any like the, you know, the big peptides, you can't just do a blood draw and say, is it working? Right? There's nothing you can see in a standard blood panel to say yes or no.

Yeah. You need to look at the molecular profile. So we have a new test. We're looking at doing that. So I think that might change the conversation of like, here's what we're seeing and Yeah. You may want to think twice.

Yeah. It's 01:40PM. You don't have to go to bed yet. Right? We have more questions. Thank you for checking. Space. Yeah. Would you go to space or is there radiation? Is there anything that you're worried about from your health perspective? No.

I don't have a desire. No. No. Just has I'm never going for the tech ego. Yeah. Because I'm putting space in there. Are you? Is that your list? It's got to be there. It's the Blue Origin rocket. You go up past the Karman line. It's it's available. It's something that Bezos pioneered. I wonder if you can do it in VR. I wonder if the same experience. I wonder if you'd have the same... Or what do you call it?

Probably on the vomit comet if you go on the plane. Yes. I've done that. You've done that? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well then, I think you get half check mark. Yeah. What about flying in airplanes? People have said like if you fly a lot, you get radiation when you're up in the up in the sky. Is that something you try and Definitely. Monitor or mitigate?

Yeah. I started flying actually a couple years ago. Got my license. Oh, really? I defy fly myself around. Cool. And so you... The... What kind of plane? Phenom 300. Nice. Yeah. So I got typed in. I did a little Cessna one seventy two Yeah. Then I did a Bonanza Yeah. Prop. Then I did a Mustang, went to a jet Yeah. And then did a Phenom 300. And so, yeah, we...

Did you go all the way through VFR, IFR? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Got types in all the different I've heard that IFR rated pilots are like way safer than VFR.

Oh, man. Like Yeah. So much safer. Yeah. And that's why almost died twice. Woah.

Okay. Yeah. Tell us about the first time you almost died. Mean, these these stories are so dramatic. Okay. So the the first time I flew my prop plane down to South By Southwest Okay. I... And so I made a rule, would never fly alone ever. So I knew the risk. I saw the data, was like, this is this is terrible.

Oh, because if you faint or something Or just like over. Amateur pilots are something like seven times more likely to get into an accident. Sure. Because you jump into playing, but you don't remember everything very, know Sure. You want a professional pilot, they do it all day every day, it's all they think about. So you would hire a a professional pilot to fly with you basically? Yeah. So I'm always in the cockpit. That's so cool. Professional pilot. Makes a lot of sense.

So I've never ever flown alone Okay. Excluding my checkride. Okay. And so we're we're down at South by Southwest. We're coming back to... Was in...

Wait. The checkride, they make you fly by yourself? Yeah. Have to take a solo... You have to do a first solo, your first solo flight Uh-huh. Then your check ride, then afterwards.

And that's for... Yeah. Because they they assume everyone they assume everyone is gonna be... Most people will be flying themselves solo, so they have to like Yeah. You know, validate.

For certification, you didn't. But then was South by Southwest a different story?

Yeah. So he's down there with me. And so we're coming back, and in in aviation, you can look at the TAF. You can say, I'm going to arrive at this airport between noon and 2PM. What's the expected weather forecast? He looked at the winds and he said, okay, I can land on this runway. Mhmm. It's got this, you know, directionality. You're okay. They have fuel, etcetera. And so we were coming back and we were landing somewhere around noon, and he looked at the TAF mistakenly between like two and four. Oh. So we get in the plane, everything's going well, and then we're like a 100 miles out and we're at 14,000 feet. That's like close to the top of this plane before you have to get oxygen. And we get these insane tailwinds, like a 100 knots. We're like, what the hell? Like...

So we're making an incredible time. Okay. Our ground speed is like 250, 300 knots. We're like, this is this is nuts. So then we started getting some weather ports. There's an actual tornado sweeping through the Midwest. Woah. And so I looked at him and I'm like, why are we flying into a tornado? So he basically he messed up looking at the wrong two hour block. Okay. And so after that, everything settled down like the weather is just fine but that there's a tornado. So we were now going to our airport and the winds are... We go into the land and the winds are 35 knots gusting 45. Mhmm. Which in this plane, when you go to put it down, it's too much lift.

Mhmm. So we we try to make our landing and there's too much lift, we can't put the plane down. Like dancing Oh, interesting. Trying to put it down, we can't put it Like, because it's all also gusting. Yeah. So now we have like seventeen minutes of fuel left. So we call... We're like... We call air traffic control. We're like, we need an airport close by. They're like, well, the closest one's blank. And so we we find one that has basically a fire truck, and we're like, we're gonna go down, we're gonna flip. We're probably gonna start on fire. So we need someone to come out and... What do mean flip?

It's like, we probably won't be able be stationed. We'll probably like try to land and then flip the plane. So the wings will off like... We have to go down somehow.

You will... You're crashing. You're planning a crashing. Yes. Okay. Because the wind is still so bad at this other airport that you're expecting that you'll Exactly.

Because they came back, they're like, okay, well within a 200 mile radius, the conditions are blank. And it's just like basically like All bad options. 45 knots, gelsius 65, like Sure. Really really terrible winds for this little small plane. And then we have crosswinds on the plane because we can't find a runway directly into the the air. Yeah. And so we go in and now I'm thinking like, I've got three little kids. Yeah. And I'm like, why did I ever think flying was a good idea in a in a prop plane? So I'm like redoing my entire life. We come in, we're... Is this pre don't die? This is pre don't die. Okay.

You're still like die. Yeah. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die Sunday. Yeah. Someday. I better go down in flames. Ten years ago, I think? Yeah.

Yeah. So we come in and we cross the threshold and like we're fighting for our lives. We're both like absolute ghost white. We are for sure we think we're gonna die. Mhmm. We cross the threshold and for somehow the winds die down. Mhmm. Like we don't know what happens. We come in, soft landing Wow. Scoot off the runway. Both like, Wow. What? And so we get over, we we park the jet and then... The plane and then right we jump out, the winds burst up. We almost fall over. Can't even stand. Wow. But like, we we... Instead of going home that night, we just said, let's just get a hotel. And sleep. Yeah.

We threw it. Tomorrow we'll fly back. Yeah. But that was that was... That was the first time. That was the first time. Yeah. The inventory. Yeah. We'll save...

But flying commercial, flying lots of hours in the sky up high. So we hang out Radiation we fix? Yes. What do think? So my my jet goes to 45,000 feet. It's rated for 45. Mhmm. We hang out about 36 to 38 Mhmm. Thereabouts. So you pay a little bit of a fuel cost by being down lower, but the... I think the trade off for radiation is worth it. Because once you get in... Because it does increase. I think it's... Drag. No. It's like a logarithmic increase. Oh, okay. So when you look at the radiation dose increase, like once you get the high thirties into the forties Yeah. It's a pretty substantial increase in radiation exposure. Yeah. So we make that trade off, fly a bit lower, burn a little bit more fuel a bit.

I'm wondering if any of the jets have, like, radiation shielding as None of them do. No. No. As a value prop, you'd think some people would want that.

Yeah. Is it too hard to put put in your manufacturing line? Sure. Yeah. And then it might kill the WiFi or something.

Yeah, exactly. People want the Starlink. Alright. As much as I like talking about planes, let's talk about Atlanta this weekend. Yeah. You go way back with Toby and DHH. Cool story. We can probably skip that and get right into racing. Yeah. Was it just hearing stories from them about what they're doing that that made you want to go out there? Because with other extreme endurance sports, running and cycling and all these things, it's like extremely apparent that these people are under like stress, right? Yeah. They're like breathing heavily, you can see it, they're they're sweating, they're slowing down, they're they're doing all these things and and racing, you know, it's it's almost invisible. Know, get out of the car and they're usually like so disappointed or so excited that the the sort of tiredness is like not apparent even.

That's right. It's like completely invisible. Yes. Yeah. So Toby and I were at a conference last weekend in Aspen together. Mhmm. And we were catching up and he was telling me about his upcoming race. And we got into the rabbit hole and you... Have you seen the names where like the person on the phone and the dogs right by, they're like, and we're gonna go to the park. We going to play ball? Oh, yeah. The dog's like, what? Yeah. Was saying all my favorite words. Toby was talking about the the biomarkers he was capturing Sure. And the car and the track and the Yeah. And I was like, what? Yeah. This is so cool.

So we went down the rabbit hole and he's like, if you want to come hang just come hang out in the pit. Yeah. And I was like, oh man, in. That's awesome. So I made it a proud... Yeah. So like like you, I I never understood racing. Mhmm. You know, I never understood the fascination with it. Driving fast cars is cool, but I didn't understand what the body goes through and what... They are they are unbelievable. They are elite athletes. Mhmm. Like, unreal. Yeah. So once we actually mapped out the biomarkers, some things I didn't realize. So he's in a a cockpit, a 110 degrees. Mhmm. So already hot. His clothing won't allow him to breathe. He is... His heart rate is one forty two on average. Peaks at one seventy one.

He's sustaining 700 pounds of g force as he makes these turns. His helmet's 70 pounds of g force as he makes these turns. There's no cooling in the cockpit. Yeah. He... His his respiration rate is equal to running an eight minute mile. It's like you're panting. Is all stationary. Yeah. Right? So it's hard to imagine. Like, I understand what it's like to sprint or do a really hard out, but like this is you by yourself Yeah. Experiencing almost like a It's extremely claustrophobic. Extremely.

Like I've been in I've been in certain cars and you have to like fight the cluster of Yeah. Do. Like it's like you're sitting there and sometimes like, yeah, when it when it's hot and, and then you get over it because you're like, cool. I get to go drive around this track. But for a second there, it's like...

Wedging yourself in a bucket seat is it's just so much different than any other car seat.

And then you've got a six point harness Yeah. That basically, they have to strap you so tight because you have to feel the car. Yeah. If you can't be one with the car Yeah. You can't catch all the tiny little tenths of a second. Yeah. And so once you stack up all these things, and then he does it for two and a half hours straight. I... Yeah. And that's just one shift. Yeah. I I really... I struggle to wrap my head around that ability. Like in that extreme physical condition, psychological conditions, you have to be... There's zero laps of focus. You're fighting for tenths of a second.

And do it's you possible to stay focused for that long because your life is on the line? Because there's so much risk that you're sort of forced into flow state where you recognize like you're going, you know, a 150 miles an hour and if you do make a mistake, like you... You know, current... All the different safety mechanisms and the way the cars are built, like they do protect you to a pretty crazy degree. Like, you'll see crashes that the car rolls over eight times and catches on fire and the person gets out and is walking. But it's still like no one wants to go through that kind of trauma and not just just personally and the the costs and losing the race and all these things. Yeah.

But but it feels like you're forcing yourself into this like fight or flight dynamic that allows you to like have a new level of focus.

So when you look at his data, Toby's awesome because he captures all the data. So... DHH is like just like, I'm getting in the car, I'm putting my foot down, I'm not lifting up until I see the checkered flag whatever they're like. They have a very different style.

Yeah. So if you look at his nervous system, it goes to zero chill. Like, Toby, he gets in, it is instantaneous, a 100% adrenaline. Like Wow. Just full on. Even thirty minutes before the race, his body starts racing. So his heart rate went up to one twenty seven b p m Interesting. From from his baseline of like, you know, around fifties or something. So he's able to like anticipate this day. I I was in the trailer with him Mhmm. And like I could see him go from like it's morning day prep to like I'm locked in. Mhmm. And so I think on your list, Toby, he he's so softly spoken. Right? He's one of the most epic founders of our generation. Right? He's an incredible builder.

He... Not only just in what he's built a company, but he leads and how he builds with AI. He's just an incredible human, and... But he's so soft spoken, no one even knows he drives, and let alone what he goes to when he drives. So I wanted to to tell his story like this is a serious sport. He's an elite athlete. And so I I think people would... I think there... He's he's emulation worthy as a founder. People should be like, I want to do stuff like that too.

Yeah. You're getting me fired up at your racing. That that was the goal is. I mean, I think That's right. And Toby's a good one.

What about the... What like, how do you measure it from a... Like, what are the health impacts of... Like, because you can be an elite athlete and be destroying your body. Yeah. Right? Like, you've seen this in in in, you know, people that do, like, really hardcore running where it's like they'll be 30 and they look like they're 40 because of the daily massive amounts of like cortisol and stress. And so my hope because I enjoy driving cars fast on a track is that because the actual periods of like ridiculous intensity and and, you know, doing the two and a half hour stint is so rare that it's not like Yeah. Gonna age you, accelerate aging, but it is so stressful that it can't be all good for you.

I agree. Yeah. Like, all things is probably a trade off. Like, one of the data points I was looking at is drivers are able to do with one breed... Brain region what a novice requires 15. So it does something with the brain which is almost like a neural enhancement. And so, I don't know, on balance, you know, like it may be the case that you're winning. Yeah. You may take some this and that. Like the the noise levels are extremely high. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we had, I had hearing...

Yeah. Last time you had the the the hearing aids on, and yeah, I've been super conscious of sound since then. The issue is when you're in the car, have your monitors in, and I'm sure maybe some of them have noise cancelling elements, but you're still like getting... You're just right there with the engine.

When he takes off, I mean, I think it was something like a 130 decibels. So even though I have...... Sitting right by the... In in the pit. Yeah. When I'm in the pit, when he takes off his run, I had hearing protection in which does 30% DB protection. Mhmm. There's over a 100. Exactly. So like I needed 20 more. So I needed to do this plus that. The cups. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So like I needed like fifty sixty of... But yeah. So there's for sure some trade offs. I mean, I think if you if you look at the joy that Toby gets from this thing, it it lights him up, I think probably more than anything in the entire world. Like, when when he exits that car, it's like, I don't know, maybe that's what Buddha looked like when he achieved a new role. He's like, he's so... Like, he's just omnipresent to reality. It's actually just an incredible sight. Yeah. I was excited to...

No, I've had I've had my experiences in in on the track is you'll you'll be in... I've I've gone from, you know, this intense, you know, flow state which is incredible, and then I think about my email for one second and then I spin out. Yeah. Or like, I'm off track. Right? Like it's it's really binary where you're like in that because you know, I haven't I haven't done like actual racing. Right? And so it's really just been for fun. And not at the kind of speeds that they're doing in like an IMSA race like this last weekend. And so it is possible to be like, oh yeah, I should get back to that person.

And then again, but the second you do that you're going at such high speed that... And the other thing that is so remarkable to me is just like the the level of consistency across that two and a half hours where they they could be trying as hard as they possibly can to go faster and gain like you know a tenth a tenth of a second, right? And then and then yeah. Sim Racing too, did you have a post about that or did that tie into Yeah, I was looking at Yeah, was tying into that sort of act like studying these different brain regions. That made me think like do you think there's... There's been brain games in the app store that force you to activate different brain functions for a while now. I don't feel like any of them have caught on fire. For me, I'm very addicted to sim racing.

So and I and so I sent that that post to my lovely wife about... I was getting a lot of people like that. And she was like, I'm happy for you. Yeah. You probably should still focus on... The issue for me is it comes out of my sleep time because I have like the kids go to bed and I'm like, okay. I can go racing now, and then and then I'm sleeping less. But but do you think there's more games to be built that force people to do these types of things? Is it something that you're spending any energy on?

Yeah. I mean, think I think the world is absolutely sleeping on how fast the Don't Die revolution will happen. Like I I think that once you... Once AI makes the first couple breakthroughs, have our first anti aging drugs, and people feel like there's a hope there's a... I think this society will snap from like wanting to put all of our efforts into status seeking wealth accumulation to don't die. Yeah. So I think that I know. Yeah. I do. I think it is gonna be a snap change in society. Yeah. We'll just revalue. We'll change everything we do value.

Yeah. Were we talking about... To that about... What is going on? That's my... That's my... Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Do you want to pop on? Yeah. Bring him on or or does he not What get health benefits? Is he a knock on? Let it go. Joy? Yeah. Well, so... Katara. Here we go. Hello. There we go.

Hey, baby. That's amazing. I've been away from him for ten days. How you doing, baby? That's cool. Oh, so cute. Yeah. Amazing. Woah. What a smile. That's about a smile. Thank you so happy, baby. Happy boy. That's our show.

That's our show. We can we can close it out. Thank you for tuning in to TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter This might. TBPN.com. Hopefully, it's well trained. Goodbye.