Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell, Duo on Arrival, 100 Really Difficult Phone Calls, Norwegian Gold Scheme

Not that long afterwards, Wiz, which is a subsidiary of Google, also discovered a second vulnerability in PHP, which they also disclosed to us. And I think in this case, Google's team and OpenAI's team did exactly the right thing. They quietly worked with industry leaders like Cloudflare to say, hey, we found this problem. How can we clean it up? And it wasn't just us. They went to Automatic, which is the creator of WordPress. They worked to the PHP Foundation, which maintains PHP. They reported it to the United States government. And over the last two months, there's been a concerted effort by lots of organizations to say, how can we get in front of this particular risk?

And so at Cloudflare, we implemented for all of our customers for free, quietly behind the scenes without really letting anyone know, a level of protection. and that was true for even our free customers because we think it's important to make sure that the internet stays safe no matter what that help protect against that and that's effectively like a band-aid you know if you break a bone you want to actually get the bone fixed but in the meantime you might put a sort of a bandage on it Cloudflare had provided that bandage to help buy some time but anyone that's running a web server today you need to be, if it's running PHP, you need to be updating that. It's critically important.

The NSA has issued guidance that if for some reason you can't issue the patch, it's actually better to take your server offline than it is to run it naked right now. And we went from seeing before, it's clear that some details of the vulnerability got leaked, which if you're reporting to that many people, the fact that it was kept secret for as long as it was. Yeah, I was going to say, isn't that somewhat of a miracle that this has been going on for two months and it required coordination between people in tons of different countries, at different organizations? Like, honestly, some, you know, restore some faith in humanity that people can keep that big of a secret.

And it was, I think they did. And it was just in the last, you know, 36 hours that we started to see an uptick where clearly something had leaked. Interesting. And that then prompted the PHP Foundation to release the patch. The problem is the minute you release the patch, it gives enough detail and people can figure out how the exploit happens. So we went from hours before the patch was released, we were seeing thousands of attacks across our network. At this point, we're now seeing millions of attacks per minute across our network where people are trying to compromise servers. And again, you know, Cloudflare's protection is helping, but the real key is if you're running a server right now, get it updated with the latest version of PHP.

It's free. It should only take a few minutes to do it. If you're using managed software like WordPress, often it will do it for you automatically. But that's the most important thing that you can do to stay safe right now. What about in the consumer realm? I've been sort of, you know, I've run into other people who have been like, oh, I've heard about this. Do I need to update my iPhone? or update my Chrome tabs? Is there anything that breaks out into the consumer world? Or is all of this just for webmasters, people who are actually serving web services, running servers? Or does anything bleed over into consumer just yet?

People are saying cycle your social security number. Oh, yeah. Rotate your social security number. I saw that. Yeah. I mean, I think that in this particular case, you know, the PHP vulnerability really applies to businesses and people running web servers. So there's not as much for the consumer. But, you know, it would, as if Tiesto and the Chainsmokers and Common and one of the worst vulnerabilities the web has ever seen wasn't enough for one week. We also had other vulnerabilities that were disclosed this week. There was a Node.js vulnerability. That's also something that probably consumers don't have to care about.

The one that consumers should care about more is that it was discovered that one of the key root servers that powers the encryption behind the internet, they're supposed to be secured with these very long, complicated passphrases. They're supposed to be 328 bits at a minimum. Instead, an Indian company that was running some of these root server, root key servers, instead of using 328 bits, they used literally the number 4. So their password was less secure than your ATM pin. And the problem with that is that because of that. Can we give them the benefit of some 4D chess? Who would think to guess that?

No one would think if you were going to try to brute force it, you would pick a number at least in the four digits and then go from there. They had, I think, I can't remember if it was six or eight of these key root server certificates. The most secure password they used was the number 136. So they did, you know, they, again, almost to your ATM. pin at that point. They call that security through obscurity. And they just rage quit the product category. Did I see that? Yeah, they did. You can't fire us. You can't fire us. We quit. How you can ever be trusted is tough. But this is actually one where consumers do have something because these certificates, if somebody could get in the traffic flow, they could pretend to be Google. They could pretend to be your bank.

They could trick you into doing a bunch of things. And so what the industry has done is as soon as this happened, your browser, your operating system distrusted these particular certificates. But until you upgrade your browser, until you upgrade your operating system, then you might still be trusting these certificates and your browser could be spoofed. So I think that right now is a great time when your phone says, hey, do you want me to upgrade overnight? The answer is yes. when your browser is harassing you to like, you know, upgrade, like, just do it takes a few seconds, you're going to be much more secure. And I wish I could say that like, this was a, you know, unusual week, and we're not, we're never going to see another week like it.

I think we're going to see a lot more weeks like this. I think the next two years are going to be, you know, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly fraught with, again, are these new tools that we have that have infinite patience to go look for vulnerabilities, finding real problems across, across the internet. And it's going to feel scary. It's going to feel like the sky is falling. It's going to feel like there's nothing we can do. And I think there are going to be stories that characterize AI as the bad guy. AI is not the bad guy here. AI is the good guy. AI didn't create these vulnerabilities. AI found them. And I think the question is like, if you're living in a house that's got deadly monsters living in every closet, but you don't know they're there are you are you in a in a better place or a worse place than if you start like going through the closets and finding the monsters and killing them like it's going to be a lot more frightening to go through and kill the monsters but you're probably going to get a lot safer and so i think we're going to see some very scary stories but um there you go scary monster music uh we're going to see some very scary stories but the good news is that you

You know, OpenAI, Anthropic, the Frontier Labs, and then in partnership with companies like Cloudflare are actually killing the monsters off. And I think the internet is going to get more secure. How are attacks evolving? Like, are you seeing, like, swarms in a way? In a way that's, like, swarm is obviously, like, this sort of, like, it's a real thing, but it's also, like, kind of an idea. It sounds like something out of, like, the Matrix. Yeah, like something – is it that different than historical efforts when there's this kind of vulnerability? Because I imagine you can just, like, get effectively a directory of every possible website that might have this vulnerability and then run a program.

Yeah, there's something called a rainbow table. It's basically, like, every possible password. Yeah, every possible password. Yeah, but that was easily mitigated. Are you seeing rogue swarms of powered by open-weight models that are driving a lot of this? Or is it just, hey, there's vulnerability that impacts 70% of the internet? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, you don't need AI to take advantage of the vulnerability in this case once it's been discovered. So the people who are trying to exploit this now, they're not using models to exploit it. They're just running fairly simple scripts that are just trying to check every single server, every single IP address online to see if it's vulnerable to take it over.

What I think has changed is the rate at which attackers can figure out what they do when they find themselves in an environment. So about a year ago, there was a very, very, very popular plugin. that plugged into Salesforce that got compromised by a Russian hacker. And it was so broadly deployed that it effectively gave the Russian hacker access to a huge portion of Salesforce's infrastructure and Salesforce's customers. But what was interesting was when you actually studied what the attacker did, they clearly weren't in enterprise sales, so they didn't really know how Salesforce worked. And so they kind of bumbled around, like not quite knowing what to do or the fact that they'd stumbled on what was an incredible treasure mine.

And as a result, what could have been just a disaster of a hack wasn't nearly as bad.

Matthew PrinceWhat we're seeing now is if that same hack happened today, the attackers are using AI to say, OK, I found myself in Salesforce.

What what stuff should I go looking for or stealing or trying to do? So the ability to very quickly, you know, figure out I'm here, what can I take advantage of, you know, is gotten there. What we're not seeing yet are, you know, I think that the example out of OpenAI with the hugging face compromise, I mean, that again makes, I mean, it's almost out of science fiction, some of the things that are happening there. But I think the good news is that the cost of running that type of attack, an agent swarm like that, is still extremely expensive, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for that.

And so an organization like OpenAI that's got those resources, the good guys have more resources than the bad guys. And so for now, I think you're actually seeing kind of a very naive use of AI by at least the sort of typical cyber criminal. I think it's probably different when you're looking at nation-state actors. I think that if you look at China or Iran, the NSA in the United States, that's a different case. But right now, I think that AI is actually helping the good guys more than it's helping the bad guys. We're finding the monsters that are hiding in the closets. What advice would you get?

So over the last week, we had open code ran into issues and reported being attacked for basically days on end. uh obviously the attackers were going after the token theft yeah effectively token theft the modern version of railway railways had had massive issues over the last 24 hours i know of another big inference provider that has been like under attack and like viscerally viscerally feeling that for the last three four days wow um and that that that people that everyone everyone would know And what this is probably, what a lot of these are symptoms of are the attackers are like, wow, we could do a lot more if we had more compute, if we had more AI models.

And so stealing tokens, you know, hacking inference providers, that's giving them access to tools. You know, you'd see this before. Like it's, for a long time, Cloudflare was an Okta customer, and Okta kept getting hacked over and over again. And Okta was an identity provider. I mean, the reason why was they were going after us and they were going after Coinbase, which was another another one of their one of their customers. And again, I think attackers are trying to find their way to whatever is valuable that they can that they can get to online. And and I think right now the ability to have more inference, more tokens is something that attackers are very much longing for.

And so they're going to go after a bunch of those those providers. And then, you know, to your question of what to do, like, you've got to just stay up on all of the security patches that are out there. You know, I don't know the details of, like, the railway attack, but my hunch is it's probably based on one of these, you know, latest vulnerabilities that was out there. And so it's just, you know, you talk about, like, an ODA loop, which is, like, how quickly you can adapt versus your attacker. And so at Cloudflare, we're just sort of saying, how can we make that auto loop faster and faster and faster and faster so that we can adjust incredibly quickly?

And part of that is using AI tools and using things that can actually, you know, proactively, you know, have a swarm of defenders that are looking out for the swarm of attackers. And that's exactly what we're doing at Cloudflare and what we're doing for all of our customers. Do you think that ski resorts are ready for this new wave of cyber vulnerabilities? I'm joking, but I'm joking, but I'm actually... Yeah, people have been talking about bringing down the grid. Yeah, but I'm like, ski resorts, if you're out getting a couple laps in and the lift signs to a halt, your first thought might be, oh, is this kind of like a ransom attack?

Or the snowmaker turns on when it's not below freezing and just sprays water all over everyone. It could be horrible things. And I think that I have some insight into a certain ski resort operator called Vail and some of the board meeting conversations with the activists. And one of them, an alternate person for the slate, a guy named Bryce Roberts, who's a great VC. I think you've had him on. Yeah, we love Bryce. He's up to be a candidate on Vail. And he said, have you guys thought about AI at all? like in terms of that, because it's something like, you know, 30% of questions to AI are about trip planning. And like literally everyone in the room scratched their head and said, oh no, we haven't thought about that at all. There's a lot of industries that need some serious modernizing and a lot of management teams that need some serious modernizing. And I might point at Vale as being one of them. Yeah. Last question for me. It seems like the balance between attackers and defenders is going to be increasingly infrastructure driven.

And I feel like this might change the discussion a little bit, maybe not on a national level, just around the AI data center build out, because there's a certain amount of just if you have a bigger data center with more GPUs running more inference to secure systems and you're going up against a smaller data center with a similar model or a distilled model that's three months behind, like you want as many advantages as possible. And I'm wondering if you think that, like, raw compute power becomes an important discussion in, like, the geopolitics of cybersecurity. Yeah, you know, I mean, maybe at some level.

And I think that, again, I think I'm encouraged that it's the good guys that have more resources than the bad guys. And I think that's going to help the defenders stay in touch. But you've got to have great partnerships between companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and companies like Cloudflare and others in order to make sure that this is going forward. At some level, the whole thesis of Cloudflare from the beginning was that if you got enough internet traffic flowing through a system and then you could use machine learning to look for patterns and attacks and threats, that you could see things and stop things.

And I think we're really good, whether that's an attacker working for North Korea or it's a swarm of agents at identifying those things and staying in touch with it. And I think that's why we're seeing such just real demand for our services and more and more people signing up for Cloudflare. And again, I think it's important to us to say that you don't have to pay us in order to stay safe online. We want to make sure that everyone has the resources, regardless of what their budget is. And so, you know, we continue to be committed to this. And again, I wish I could say that this was like a really unusual or bad week.

But I think for the next two years, we're going to basically have kind of a week like this on average almost every week where big vulnerabilities are getting released. We already know about a number of substantial other vulnerabilities that will come out over the coming weeks or months. and the good news is that we're ahead of them and we're protecting them and if you want to make sure that you're protected using a service like Cloudflare is one of the best kind of you know you're not making a prediction it's like you see the pipeline so you know this is going to happen And then it also, like, the more high-profile this trend gets, the more motivated people are going to be to find the next one.

And at least one of the security researchers that at least claims to be involved said that it was found originally by type prompting, find bad vulnerabilities in PHP. No way. That's really it? Someone's claiming that who claims to be involved. That's crazy. Who knows? but yes but it's it's again like and it's it's it's gonna feel really scary we're gonna find a lot of monsters in a lot of closets but the monsters were there already yeah like they were they were they were just waiting to come out and kill us when we weren't expecting it i would rather we actually be turning it over and and do it so i think do you think there has to be there has to be some groups that are really upset because they had found these vulnerabilities and have been exploiting them people they're like they didn't want no they didn't want it to get out It's got to be there. I mean, I've talked to folks at the NSA that are like, this sucks.

I was using this to spy on the nation's enemies. And so and that's and that's again, I think that that's a I think that's a that's that is a consequence of modernity. Yeah, that's all good news because we're finding the monsters. We're killing the monsters. It's going to feel very, very scary. Yeah, it's going to feel like the sky is falling.

Matthew PrinceBut I think we're going to come out of this, and two years from now, I think it's going to be almost impossible to write buggy code, at least in terms of the sort of classic divide by zero or off by one or unconstrained memory glitches.

There'll still be business logic code that people will get wrong or machines will get wrong. But already, we see how many of the errors AI is helping us correct. And so even though I think we're going to have a couple of years of really, really, really bad stories, I think that the real trend, the real story that's not going to be popular to say but is true is the Internet's going to get a lot more secure, and we're all going to be better off because of these tools and how they're helping protect. That's amazing. That's amazing. I have one last question. Just a couple more years of the most bullish headlines for Cloudflare.

going to be. There was a lot of debate throughout the year over the pros and cons of these staged rollouts. Mythos goes super viral, definitely draws people's attention, but a lot of people are like, ah, I want to use that for my business. Then Fable comes out and it's sort of nerfed in cybersecurity. Then Daybreak comes out. There's different ways, Glasswing, there's different ways to get into these programs. Looking backwards, it feels like I like the idea of everyone gets amazing ai but i also like the idea of everything getting patched before uh the before the negative things affect me i don't necessarily want to need to you know inference the most advanced model just to like use the web myself and write a hack into the service that i'm using to patch it before i give it my social security number etc like are you happy with the current flow of intelligence breakthroughs staging out getting to you a couple weeks early before something else happens is is the current model sustainable? Is it, is it correct or does there need to be a rejiggering there? Yeah. I mean, I, I would say that, you know, from our perspective at Cloudflare we have loved the partnerships that we've had with, with OpenAI, Anthropic, the other, other leading

frontier labs. I think we've, we've gotten trusted access to a lot of the models ahead of time. And then we've been able to use that to help, you know, protect more of the web and, and work in coordination with that i but i but i do think that it's it's a tough problem like when i meet with european um you know banks or leaders and they're like well why don't we get any of these things i mean they feel very vulnerable and it's it's a tough this is a it's a tough thing to figure out exactly what you do in this in this particular case there are a lot of people who are like well why don't you tell me about this php bug earlier and and it's and it's hard to get that perfectly right. The more people you tell, the more access that you give, the more risk there is that it falls into the hands of, of, of someone who will do real harm with it. And so, um, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a game of trust in a lot of ways. And I remember when Cloudflare was a small startup, you know, we were always like, why aren't you telling us about the new security vulnerabilities? And now we're a much bigger company and we do get those things.

And I get calls from startups like, well, how can I get it too? And I think it's tough. I don't know that there's a perfect answer. I will say that the fact that this was disclosed almost two months ago, that it gave a lot of organizations the ability to get in front of it and patch it, that's going to have mitigated what could have been just an unmitigated disaster. And, again, hats off to the team at OpenAI, the team at Google and Wiz for how they handled this. And I think there will always be people who will say you could have done something a little bit better. But I think this is – we're not going to be perfect, and this was pretty darn good.

Well, what is your third final – what is your answer to our third final question? What is your most – a mutual friend of ours texted me a minute ago asking me to ask you, What is your most outlandish prediction for the internet in a decade? The business model is going to change fundamentally. So, you know, we're about to have this massive tragedy of the commons problem.

Matthew PrinceSo, you know, if current trends continue in five years, automated traffic, agent traffic is going to be a thousand times human traffic.

Um, and, and to give you some sense, the internet almost collapsed when during COVID, uh, traffic doubled. So a thousand X, it's going to be, it's going to be, you know, somewhat there's, there's a lot more servers. There's a lot more routers. There's a lot more bandwidth that has to get provisioned in order for that, in order for that to work. And the question is, who's going to pay for it? Because if I, you know, go to my, um, you know, chat GPT agent right now and say, Hey, where should I have lunch? It might check a thousand different menus across a thousand different restaurants. And that's burning resources from all of those different places.

And yet it only is going to send me to one of them. And so my hunch is that something's got to change in terms of how the Internet works. And my hunch is probably some version of micropayments that every time you access a resource, your agent pays, you know, a ten thousandth of a penny to be able to see the menu. And then there's probably some sort of a trade where if you are willing to tell the restaurant what it is that you're looking for, what your agent is doing, you're willing to reveal something, that that price goes down, maybe even is free. In some cases, the site might actually pay you to come visit it.

But that will then lead to this kind of going to be the next version of advertising, which is how do you advertise to agents? If I know that an agent is coming to my travel site and they're specifically, you know, on behalf of their user looking for, you know, a Hawaiian vacation to a five-star resort, and I know that there's, you know, a five-star resort on Maui that has availability and a good price, like matching that together, I think, is going to be a resource. And that's going to be, I think, a big part of how we solve what is otherwise, you know, just in a massive tragedy, the commons problem.

Because otherwise, like, why wouldn't your agent check literally every website on earth to come back and say, you know what, for lunch today, you should go to Wendy's. And that's not a good use of time. So I think that's going to be the most interesting thing to figure out. And I think the most interesting question, certainly in the next five years, I think we'll probably have to figure it out before the end of the decade, is what's going to be the future business model of the Internet. And that's what we're spending a lot of time. That's exciting. I love that. That was very exciting. I had a funny moment the other day.

I was doing some research on. on this car and i went to check the source like i was doing it in chat i went to check the source and it was on like recipes 365 and clearly someone had used ai to just like generate content for like a specific niche and i'm realizing i can't i can't lean on this hey they're cooking up the recipe for a great car now at least you're looking at the sources i mean it's we're seeing that fewer and fewer uh people going back to the original sources and like for for like journalism like journalism matters. Like what you guys do matters. And, and, uh, and, and someone's gotta, someone's gotta pay your bills. And again, in your case, like it's OpenAI. Um, and, uh, but I, but I think that's probably going to be the case in a, in a lot of cases, like how you still, you're still going to need reporters that are going out there and feeding it. And we've got to have some system that, um, that allows the people who are doing that work to get compensated. Cause I think you guys deserve to eat. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming. Great to see you. Great to hang out good luck out there i'll see you soon goodbye let me tell you about mongo db what's the only faster than your bit than the ai market your business on mongo db don't just build ai own

the data platform that powers it uh tyler had to beat there i know he really warmed up yesterday by the end he was dialed well let's check in with the markets if we can pull up this video okay okay yeah the show yesterday was good uh but i think i think tyler got a little bit of a yeah we'll watch this rjc says just another day yeah and as that i like how matthew prince is like it's really important that you guys do serious journalism and make sense of what's going on what's real what's fake you got to tell people and we're like let's pull up an ai slop video uh this is uh iconic the muse mascot of course dancing and uh firing off a pistol this is uh this is the latest alexander wong i assume uh it's great this is it really the meme has just grown so much this is the benefit of funny mascot anthropomorphization of ai it was debated for a week there alex wang said no thank you i am going full anthropomorphization let's anthropomorphize these ais uh yeah the the show yesterday was good tyler did a good job but i think he had the deck stacked in his favor you had a stacked lineup you got nikesh aurora on Aiden Smith from Flapping Airplanes, Oculier, Max from Lagora.

It was easy mode for Tyler. I want to see Tyler do a show with just Jordy, tier list of a mansion where Jordy doesn't want to say his true opinion because he knows the guy that owns the house. That's what makes a great co-host. If you want to elevate from sub-host to co-host, I think that's what you got to do. You got to put the screws to Jordy when he doesn't want to give his true take and get him to crash out. That's what I want to see. But no, fantastic job. Yeah, you didn't get me to crash out. No, no, no. But you know who did crash out? You've got to beat him. You know who did crash out? Who?

Who? Trevor Milton. Trevor Milton. Oh, yeah. Crashed out in the— You crashed out. I crashed out, and he responded. Yeah. So we had a—we talked about Trevor Milton's new jet company. He had an announcement, a launch, an event. An unveiling. The plane on its wheels or potentially sticks. Yeah, so the plane was like a full-scale mock-up. It was not meant to be a real plane. They have a real plane separately. This is a build of the new plane. Yes, yes. Okay. And anyway, so we posted the video, and what did Trevor actually say? He was firing off in the comments. He responded to our video saying, haters are going to hate.

We already have more than 50 on order slash LOIs by real buyers. Not bad. It might be the most successful jet launch to date. Keep on talking smack. It makes us work harder, and we love the trolling hate. Okay. Living rent-free. In your head. He was also going back and forth with some other people in the comments. A lot of people were saying, definitely not buying a plane from Trevor Milton. And he responded, we wouldn't sell you one. And I go the other way. I think finally a plane exists for the thrill seeker. You know, flying private is such a luxury. But we know that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you've got to put it all on the line.

You've got to climb Mount Everest. You've got to be risking it all on the track skydiving. You've got to be into extreme sports. So a plane that's a little rough around the edges is going to bring you back down to earth. It's going to give you some thrill, some excitement, get your heart racing. And for a certain buyer, that's going to be very attractive. So I think that's actually probably a risk to the upside in this case. I think you've got to be greedy when others are fearful. You've got to be greedy when others are fearful on these planes? Okay. Another media company, the VIP seat, said we were there for the unveil, posted about how poor the presentation was, and he started attacking everyone on X.

And then he came over to Instagram. You're the only clown who would be dumb enough to allege that. Literally, the entire NBAA has been raving about us by the thousand and landed almost a billion in orders. What else did he say? A billion in orders. Keep posting your Tesla troll wannabe comments, and we'll keep building an incredible plane that you only wish you could fly. Your hate fuels us. Living rent-free in your head. So he's living rent-free in a lot of heads. The plane was supported by a post, and again, this was a mock-up, but when Trevor Milton responded to the picture of the post and said, you're literally misleading the world, see the real picture, at least report honestly LMAO, and he posted a different picture of the plane.

Different picture of the plane, but most importantly, understand the aesthetics of what he just did. This is elite posting because he should have photos of this plane saved to his camera roll. He didn't. He went to what appears to be Google Images or something, found a horizontal, a landscape picture of the plane, took a screenshot of it in portrait mode to make the image of the plane extremely small, didn't crop it out so you can see his battery level and the time at which he took this screenshot. that is just a level of unk posting that you very rarely see on the internet these days most people even if they go for the screenshot they'll do the courtesy crop before they share the screenshot and maybe they won't crop out the maybe not a perfect crop yeah occasionally some of the chrome some of the extra buttons might get in there a little watermark might sneak in but you're still doing the person the courtesy of cropping it down so they can see the the image basically full screen if they want he didn't do that he drops the portrait screenshot of a landscape photo that's elite on posting i don't know how else to totally agree i was somewhat confused because the picture was posted by preston holland uh and he said you're literally misleading the world see the

real picture at least report honestly lmao uh and i was very confused by this because it seemed like he was implying that that wasn't how they presented the plane but i went and checked and saw actual video of the plane in the post and so he seems to be alleging that this poster the vip seat slash preston is misleading the world when in fact that is just a real picture of the presentation maybe the wing had a post it could be a conspiracy where someone went to the presentation took a video of the plane without the post took that video loaded into after effects cinema 4d houdini an advanced 3d modeling software modeled a post composited that into the video and then uploaded the final product after blending it in perfectly we got eyewitness reports um zach dabo says trevor is like the kid in school who always tries studies all the time and just never passes the test and trevor says except i did and built the first he did pass the test um except i did and built the first ever production hydrogen and better electric semi truck from the ground up that went from idea to priloduction five years before yeah the priloduction that is another elite misspell priloduction five years before tesla built six companies three

successful and three not broke the world speed record for light jets as a pilot that's sick Can we fact check that? We got to fact check that, but if that's true. And launch the most advanced light jet in the world. Incredible history and achievements. What have you done? And Zach just replies, you're chopped, Dunk. Which I thought was a little funny and a little rude. Trevor can come on the show. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Trevor can come on the show, but I really think that he should spend time with Nathan Fielder. Oh, yes. It needs to be coming to you. You can fly anything because Nathan's a pilot.

Nathan can fly it. It's literally the perfect. It's the perfect. You can see everything, too. Oh, hopefully. Trevor, you're welcome on the show. But we do have to live with you for two weeks before you come on the show. So for the record-setting flight, I think he was on board. Oh. He was not the pilot. Wait, what? He said he was the pilot. Dude, this guy is constantly lying. That's the little fib. He's constantly. I'm not going to go and say he's lying. Maybe it's a white lie. I'm not going to say he's lying, but he's veering towards fibbing, at least on a couple occasions just in this one stretching instagram thread stretching the truth a little bit i want to see him behind the sticks yeah stretching the record stretching the truth twice how much can you actually set how much can you actually push a plane when you're the pilot can you can you just like floor it and go a little bit faster than you should is that an option can you go up high and then go down and put the engines on max and just like it's dangerous but you can actually break the speed of sound in a gulf stream if you try if you're if you're risk on is that possible I don't know.

No idea. We'll find out, because we're going to make Tyler do it. Anyway, let's move on to CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Meta is introducing new Class C stock. The plan is to distribute one Class C share for every existing A or B share at the start of the next year. So it's basically a two-for-one stock split. It's not a fundraising opportunity. It doesn't make Zuckerberg richer. and it doesn't dilute anyone's ownership percentage, but it does have a bunch of interesting knock-on effects. And basically, there's two wildly different narratives.

I sent you both of these posts, and I was like, it's the same story, but the New York Times and Semaphore have completely different rationales for what's going on. So I wanted to get to the bottom of it. We'll do this quickly before Kevin Wheel joins at 11.45. So this is not the first time they've proposed this Class C stock. It happened in 2016. Meta, which was then called Facebook, of course, proposed creating non-voting Class C shares. The reasoning back then was that Mark Zuckerberg said, hey, I'm doing the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. I'm giving away a lot of my money. I'm doing a lot of philanthropy.

I want to do both. I want to be able to run Meta as the sole decision maker with the super voting stock and be able to not be fireable and be able to have control over the company that I founded, and I want the super voting. But I also want to be able to sell down my economic position or donate it to Chan Zuckerberg. They can sell it to fund philanthropic initiatives, build hospitals, do a bunch of great stuff. And so he tried to do this, actually got challenged by shareholders. There was a Delaware trial that was scheduled, but Facebook withdrew the proposal in September of 2017 before that trial.

And after the trial, Zuck was like, I don't even need to sell because my stock's ripping. He actually said this. He said the share price appreciation in Meta has allowed me to fund everything with the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, which is probably true because at a certain point, you're just like, oh, I have to deploy $50 billion in nonprofits. It's like there's only so many projects you can do before stuff gets unwieldy. And so he was probably in a pretty good place. But it was still an interesting motivation and didn't go through. So the goal, the overarching goal, hasn't really changed in the last decade.

The goal is to allow Zuckerberg to sell or donate or pay taxes with the economic portion of his meta stake without losing control over the company that he founded two decades ago. So in the intervening years, things have come up. tax bills, philanthropic opportunities, AI build-outs, and Zuck needs to manage his control against these issues as they arise. And so the NYT tells the story as basically entirely tax-related, which is interesting because there's obviously a lot of different things going on. So the New York Times said, Mr. Zuckerberg has been negotiated with Meta's board since July over dinner with board members on September 9th. He effectively gave them an ultimatum. If a deal wasn't struck, He would sell his home in Palo Alto and the listing would be public.

And so I assume what he was doing here was like all the other Meta board members have huge homes in Palo Alto. And if he sells his, it's going to tank their real estate prices. So he's saying, I'm going to do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. I assume that that was the that was the veiled threat. Do you think he's trying to have his cake and eat it, too? I think he is, actually. I think that's exactly what's happening. I think this might serve multiple purposes. Yes. But the market will probably say, yeah, go ahead, have some cake, eat it too. I don't think they'll care because for a long time, you bought meta class A shares. So he has class B, which have 10 votes per share. You bought class A shares, which have one vote per share. Now you're going to get class C that has zero votes per share.

Never mattered because you were never going to get more than 50%. The votes never really – like they never really sold meaningful voting stock. And so when Meta goes to the market, investors just say, what is the economic opportunity? What is the economic return? And so in theory, you can go to the market with something that's preferred plus a board seat. We do this all the time in Silicon Valley. We say, yeah, we're selling 20% of the company. You get a board seat. You get information rights. You get pro rata. You get a million things. It's so much value, and we're only going to charge you $100 million for that or whatever a startup's selling for.

Meta will do the same thing. Sure, the shares might be slightly less valuable because they have zero votes instead of one vote. Realistically, the buyers of this are only interested in the financials. They don't care about the vote. So it doesn't really matter. So what's your takeaway? You think he wants to scratch two itches at once? uh yeah i mean he i i do think he cares about the billionaire tax and i do think that it's completely rational to get out of california before it hits and i'm surprised that this is even a discussion i thought that the reason he bought that florida home was that he was going to claim residency outside of california as of 2026 it seems like this was mostly going over throughout the year but if the tax passed it would be retroactive he would still be on the hook for it but at least he could challenge it in court but it's funny because yeah it would be bad when it would be litigated and then during that time he would leave and so that you would have this like worst case scenario that one time five percent but the interesting thing is that like the google co-founders have done the exact same thing they've done a stock split and they've maintained control voting control while relocating to florida avoiding the billionaire tax potentially

but um the the no one really cares because sundar is the face of the company uh the interesting thing is like the board the way the new york times frames it is like the board wanted zuck not to sell his palo alto home because it would be a negative signal to the employees not the fake reason i was joking about no no no what are you laughing at i'm just laughing at trey he wants both birds in the bush to be in his hand yes um but but as let's say you're a board member. Do you care? If Mark Zuckerberg can't spend more than 180 days a year in the headquarters where all the researchers are, where they're building MSL, where they're building Muse, does he need to be on site?

I think he has to just want to be. He's the only, not the only, one of a very, very small group of people running a company at that scale that is truly in founder mode. No founder, no elite founder that I've ever met says, yeah, I love working remotely. I love being away from my team for half the year. And he probably travels a ton. So it's much more like the board is probably like, yeah, kind of do whatever you want. Yeah. Like live wherever you want. But you can imagine he's the one being like, I want to be in the office as many days as possible with the team. That was not the NYT report. The NYT report was that he wants to avoid getting diluted past 50%, losing control of the company because he has to spend 186 days a year in Florida and can't be on site in Menlo that often and would have to be more remote.

And he's like, look, if it's between being in the arena, in the Menlo office a ton and losing control because of this tax, I'm choosing Florida. 305. Yeah. Mr. Worldwide. He's being Mr. Worldwide, potentially. That was at least the debate, the way it was put to the board. And now it's a non-issue because they are going to issue the Class C stock. So if he does get hit with a 5% tax, he'll sell the economic stake, not the controlling stake. And he'll be able to stay in TBD labs in the building. I don't know why you're laughing. But it's interesting because both of these rationales are completely justifiable from, like, the PT lens of framing, which is like, of course, leave California if they're going to tax you and you can just go to Florida. Uh, and then also like, of course, issue a bunch of equity. If you have a really, uh, if there's a new technology that you can actually invest against, make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Yes. Yes. Without issuing some new equity, but this was the critique of Google.

They have a hundred billion dollars in cash. They don't, they don't spend it. They're just returning to investors. The, they are stagnated. They're out of ideas. Now we're in the era of, there's tons of new ideas there's tons of new new new ways to deploy capital at a high rate of return uh go and invest there's a debate over meta's roi on ai capex but like at least the company is thinking like let's go big let's not be the stagnation company and let's not just buy back our stock and pay out cash to shareholders let's go pursue the next great thing let's go try and do something bold and so both of these stories are framed at least a lot of people oh it's bad but i see them both as like yeah totally rational and very good for a leader to be doing that in tech anyway um we have our next guest here uh but first 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 kevin the founder of warp sciences launching warp sciences get that gong ready kevin how are you doing hey guys welcome back Good to see you again.

Good to see you again. It's been far too long. It's been way too long. Congratulations. We've been busy. Yeah. Seems like it. Cooking. Huge acceleration. Talk about the vision, the mission of the company, what you're building, and introduce the company to us. Yeah, I'd love to. So Warp uses AI and robotics to help the world discover new medicines faster. We're building robotic labs to do science at scale, and we're doing it here in America. There are two big things that we believe. The first is that robotics and robotic labs are going to accelerate science, partly because you can just run more experiments when you have labs operating 24-7, but also because these kind of labs can generate data at huge...

scale to train amazing AI models for science. The second thing, we need to reshore scientific capabilities from China so that we don't lose our pharma industry the way that we did solar drones and manufacturing. And there's one solution to both of these things, which is we are building a next generation preclinical CRO, a contract research organization. We're doing it here in America. It means we don't develop drugs of our own. We're building the infrastructure for everybody else who does so that they can go faster yep what's what's happening like over the last year i i heard some number about how how much like u.s and and and sort of allied uh pharma companies and allied countries are are spending on uh like chinese licensing chinese like pharmaceutical advancements like what what more can you share on that front just how much of like the drugs coming down, our pipelines were actually made outside of the country?

I mean, almost all of them had big parts of their programs that happened in China. It very much rhymes with what we did with the manufacturing industry, where in the early days, it's like a bunch of sensible local decisions where you're like, oh, well, this is low-skilled labor. It can happen more cheaply elsewhere, so we'll move it out. And then over time, it becomes not just low-skilled labor, but, you know, there's innovation that happens and suddenly our muscles atrophy. There's grow and all of a sudden we can't manufacture a lot of the things we need. There's this amazing quote from Andy Grove from like years ago when he was running Intel. He said, abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry. It happened exactly in manufacturing and it is on the way to happening in pharma and we can't let it. So with, with manufacturing, I remember the story of American de-industrialization as driven by two factors. One is what you said, lower labor costs abroad, but two is it's dirty, nimbyism. I don't want the smoky steel mill in my backyard. Let's put it halfway across the world where I don't have to see it or worry about it or think about the pollution. With CROs, is nimbyism a factor whatsoever? I feel like no one would care, but

how has that played into it or has it been a non-factor? I don't think that's a huge factor here. I think it's been much more of the first that you identified. It's the cost and it's this feeling of, oh, well, maybe this won't be so strategic. And then, of course, it turns out that it's massively strategic. We don't want to lose the ability to turn ideas into medicines here in the United States. Yeah. So then on the labor cost, it feels like by leaning into higher volume tests, testing driven by robotics, you can be more competitive on the economic side. So I would imagine that within, I don't know what your timeline is, a year or two, like on a cost per experiment, you would be competitive internationally very quickly, correct?

yeah and so the like just to step back because i bet a bunch of people don't know how these processes work so let's say the three of us go start a biotech company we're going to develop new medicines we're going to try and cure a particular form of cancer you usually start with some biological target right we might say it's usually a protein so we might say you know maybe because of jordy's grad school research we've got uh you know you either want to like yeah you either want to like uh you either want to accelerate or inhibit some protein Sure. And and you've got that idea. You find a molecule that that maybe sort of does it, but it probably is toxic or it's not soluble.

So the body can't process it the right way or it's not potent. So instead of taking, you know, a tiny amount of it as a pill, you have to take a kilogram of it, which, you know, all of these things disqualify it as a drug.

Kevin WeilAnd so the next step in the process is we would go through three to five years of making variations of that molecule to try to optimize it, to make it more potent.

to make it more soluble, to make it less toxic. So there's this like three to five year process and that entire process is outsourced to China. And that's the problem. And that's what we're bringing back. And the only way you're going to bring it back to your point about economics is if you do it a different way. You've got to use AI and robotics and that's what we're doing. Talk about like how you see demand over the next couple of years. I can imagine in the same way that we're seeing an explosion of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, We might see an explosion of new, like pretty promising, even like concepts or ideas for new drugs.

Do you imagine you're going to very quickly be, you know, even as you're expanding capacity, like turning away a lot of opportunities just because of how many opportunities there are? Yeah, I think this is the this is the exciting thing about where we are. This is a real existing industry. Billions of dollars are going right now overseas to these players to help develop every drug that you ever see or take. And so there's already a big market for it. And every player would prefer to have that done in the U.S. where they have strong IP guarantees and everything else. And to your point, you've got lots of exciting new players in AI.

Every one of the frontier labs is getting involved, which I think is amazing. And you've got all kinds of new startups that are using AI to do bio. I think that's only going to accelerate. So there's not just a big market today. There's a big and growing market going forward. On the robotics side, what is the opportunity to pull stuff off the shelf? I'm assuming there's a ton of companies working specifically on that. and you can sort of acquire existing robotic tools or I imagine a big part of this will be building your own, but what do you think your view is? Yeah, there'll be some of each. There is a lot happening.

I mean, this is one of the reasons why, this is like the why now for this company is robotics is just at the beginning of the S-curve that we've seen AI, you know, more broadly go on. And so like the capabilities are increasing at an incredible rate. For us, we're going to be super pragmatic. If there's something that we can build, that we can buy, that helps us go faster, helps us automate more of the process, then for sure we'll do it. But I don't think that it's all out there ready to be bought. I think this is going to have to be a build from the ground up, which is why we are totally vertically integrated.

We have chemists on the team. We have roboticists. We have mechanical engineers. We have AI researchers. And I think that's the only way that this company is going to be successful. Can you talk about the shape of that S-curve? My intuition is that we saw sort of a fast takeoff in software vulnerabilities because you can run PHP in a virtual machine and you can hammer it with a ton of different exploits that you're inferencing pretty quickly, inferences pretty fast, and everything can be done in this closed loop that happens so, so quickly. And right now in bio, maybe it's a week to run an experiment, get it back.

Maybe you bring that down to a day, maybe an hour. But even if there's a few minutes of timeline, you're looking at an order of magnitude slower than software. So I would assume a little bit slower of a takeoff. But am I wrong about my intuition there? I think this is exactly why, even as we're seeing AI completely remake software engineering, and you're seeing AI do things like solve Navier-Stokes and make progress on the Riemann hypothesis, we haven't seen the same level of of sort of mastery in the physical sciences in chemistry and biology and material science it's exactly the reason that you say yeah and that's one of the reasons that it's so important that we develop robotic labs right it's it's both we need to restore this from china and this is the way that you generate data at scale All right.

that will allow us to build the next generation of incredible scientific AI models, right? And because there's nothing, I can't think of very many things more important than seeing that kind of acceleration that we've seen in software and math, but in biology and chemistry and drug discovery instead. And it might be multiplicative. Like if you shorten the time for the loop and then you're applying the models faster, you actually get an exponential there that you see results very quickly. Exactly. I mean, the thing that's going to come when AI is able to develop and to design more drugs is then we're going to need to test way more drugs.

And that will, I think, invariably require a physical component. But that physical component also generates really valuable data. And so there's absolutely a loop here. How did you – did you ever explore the idea of what Ravi Gupta is doing where he acquired a business? Like you're able to raise a lot of money. You have a storied career in Silicon Valley. Did you ever go down the path of maybe we should buy a CRO that already exists or buy some company and turn it around or expand it in some way versus build everything from scratch? Did you do the build versus buy analysis before embarking on this journey?

Yeah, it's a really good question, and we did. We talked about it. I just think it's very tough to sort of remake and re-outfit a business that has worked a particular way for decades. Sure. Like I said, I think this is a very, most CROs aren't hiring AI researchers and roboticists. So I think you just need to build from scratch with the idea that you're looking to automate this from day one and that you're trying to find these different, these loops and scaling laws in the process to get there. Well, I want to hit the gong. How much did you raise? Tell us about the fund raise. We raised, oh wait, go for it. We raised $215 million.

you're usually on for product releases and stuff that might be your first gong hit on the show yeah i was gonna say i think it's my third or fourth time on the show i know first gong yes yeah we raised we raised 215 million uh lightspeed led we had folks like ivp mayfield luxe menlo ventures scribble ventures a bunch of amazing folks and then a bunch of angels that i have worked with and worked alongside Fidji Simo, Brian Armstrong, Mark Chen, Alex Korski, Sarah Fryer. So it's just, we get it. We feel really lucky. We get it. We've got a lot of amazing people with us. Well, now we got to go build, right? Now the important part. Of course, of course. I'm so happy you're doing this. It's really, really important work. And I can imagine your phone's going to be ringing off the hook. This feels like squarely, this just feels like the need right now as so much of the industry is now focused on, hey, how do we, how do we apply this technology, uh, in a way that, that hopefully we'll get a better response from people than, um, you know, short, uh, AI videos and things like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, the response today has been awesome, but now we've got to put our heads down and go build. And I hope we get to come back

and talk more when we do. Yeah. Can't wait. Congratulations to the whole team on launch. Thank you, guys. Great to see you. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. Our next guest is joining in just a minute. But we have some big news. The iPhone Duo will allow you to scroll Reels and TikTok concurrently. It was long speculating. I was thinking, look, when I started seeing some of the images come out, I thought it was Duo on Arrival.

But seeing this, I think there's a bit of a chance. Sager and Jetty ordered one. Just for this feature, right? No. Oh, yeah. No, his thesis was that he will actually be less addicted to scrolling content. because it's more inconvenient to actually open it up and that you will use it it'll have some dumb phone like features and then when you open it up i don't know what do you think you think that doesn't make any sense because there's still a screen on the front so you can use it while not opening but it's a smaller screen and it's a less convenient screen so you'll be like i don't really why is it less convenient oh because it's smaller and it's like more square it's not as like easy to just have in your hand like a phone that's what i i don't know um uh daniel storm has a call back texting is really nice on the duo do either of you get this reference so this is this is texting in an excel sheet this is from a music video from like the 90s when maybe 2000s when uh there i i actually don't know the full reference but uh this is from uh i think it's a nelly video where uh someone if you scroll down uh you can see someone texting on a nokia keep going keep going you'll see the phone keep going ball knowledge elite there that's one this is a

screenshot from a music video i believe in nelly video uh where the the the female character in the music video is supposed to be texting where you at hollow when you get this but is just in a spreadsheet because the the crew was like we need to show her texting and they chose an excel spreadsheet which is kind of a crazy feature for this nokia phone back then who knew that you could be doing dcfs on a on a yeah that's crazy pretty crazy advanced technology i don't even think excel works well on an iphone no this is so like the the stagnation is absolutely brutal yeah it's insane anyway uh we have mc later from cognition industries new initiative from cognition joining us here we go welcome to the show the new head of cognition industries thank you so much for taking the time to join us uh please since this is your first time on the show kick us off with an introduction on yourself. And then I'd love to take everyone through Cognition Industries and the strategy. Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me on. So I'm a longtime fan of the show and also a friend of Dylan of the show with whom I worked at Uniswap. So really excited to be here.

Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah. So I've been in frontier tech for a long time. I'll tell you about my story. I was president of Uniswap, started a stable coin company, sold it to Coinbase. And And then as I was thinking about what was most exciting in the world, I felt like that Cognition was one of the most powerful and exciting companies to be part of. I'd known Scott for a couple of years. He'd actually been like a beta tester of Uniswap products. And they asked me to come start. Yeah. That's wild. Yes, we had some of the biggest market makers in the world. And there's one guy in a basement.

And that was Scott Wu, who now has a very big company not in a basement. Wild. And he asked me to come start Cognition Industries. Okay. So what is Cognition Industries? I thought cognition was the cognition industries of cognition, but it seems like there's a new initiative, new group, new sub company. What is the structure? What is the mandate? What is the goal? Group of industrialists. Yes. There are plenty of industrialists in the world who are all trying to figure out how they can change their businesses with AI, right? As well as small startups and emerging companies. And what that looks like is a little different for every company.

And so what we found is that you guys talk about diffusion on this show all the time. And so what we found is that this diffusion needs partnership. It needs everything from partnership and what security means for a financial services company versus a health care company to how you can reimagine vertical software in a completely different way and build totally new products. Now you have software abundance. So I'm hiring a team of former founders to lead each industry vertical and really reimagine what could be possible in an industry that they've been building and selling in for a long time. now that you have thousands of agents at your disposal and the world's largest distribution ready to drive change.

So, I mean, that makes so much sense. There was this recent report in the Bank of America hired a ton of people just to patch like mythos-related bugs. And there were, and there's clearly unique needs. needs in all different industries. You're hiring a bunch of founders in each category. I think that's a brilliant strategy, very modern, but what will they be doing? What is going to be replicated across cognition versus siloed in a particular vertical? Is it product changes? Is marketing go to market? What needs to live within a specific pod versus be shared across the entire organization these days? Yeah. So we'll start with go to market because there's a lot of just like showing up like you understand and know an industry, right? And I think that's really important, right? So if we're kind of in this era of enterprise adoption where it's like the world's best university appeared next to your company and you welcomed in all the interns, but you didn't like give them projects and like direction on what to do. And so we're now showing up and saying, look, I want, you know, our team and Cognition Industries show up and be like, someone built a business in telco. They built a business in healthcare. They have a sense of

what providers versus payers versus life sciences companies want and need. And we'll start to build out, starting with go-to-market, sales and marketing, and then really packaging the primitives of Devon to build industry-specific products. But it's not a separate standalone conglomerate or something like that. We are not competing. It is all serving customers and helping them grow, not building a separate business. I'm sure some people shuddered and thought, I don't want cognition in my industry. I can't hear some of the customers. But yeah, I just feel like the biggest thing is Like, right now, AI is exciting to most people, also very confusing to most people, especially outside of tech.

And so if you don't have that vertical approach, any customer that you're speaking to is probably getting pitched, like, a million AI for XYZ industry, like, verticalized products. The product itself might be inferior, but that person is leading and saying, this is, like, this is our focus. This is what we do, right? And so I think it makes sense to have somebody that can lead that and actually speak the language and bring experience from the industry. How does – how do you think about the long tail of industries versus like the ones that are going to drive power law results? I can imagine that finance technology-enabled firms or huge buyers, the long tail of florists is probably a smaller opportunity.

But how deep do you want to go down the long tail? Yeah, it starts with businesses where software is central to the business. I haven't thought about florists yet, actually. There's a bunch that we haven't prioritized yet, but florists definitely wasn't even in the below-the-line list. Super intelligence for flowers. Let's make it happen. Dog walkers, other niche businesses we can think about. Oh, I got the most niche one. Which one? Ski resorts. We need to secure our ski resorts this winter. I'm actually worried about cyber attacks on ski resorts. Yeah, you don't want to be stuck on the chairlift.

Yeah, a bunch of people on a chairlift and it gets taken down. I can't imagine the average ski resort is like that secure. So that's the most niche category that I can throw at you. There you go. But that even has a system that's probably operated by software. So there's still something in it. So you just go after this aspect. No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. Imagine the kind of software like a ski resort is running. I guarantee you it's not like they haven't, they're not staying on top of every little detail. We need to get to the bottom of this. I want to know who the biggest software vendor is in the ski industry.

Because I imagine that there's a company that vends software to multiple ski resorts. And there's probably some business that's been built there. And they might be a great customer, even if it's not direct to the state resort. I don't know. But I'm sure. But I'm thinking about like energy is like a massive. I don't know how you're thinking about that as like as a category. But especially this week, everyone's worried about the grid being taken down and sort of that as an attack vector. And it just feels like there's so much code that needs to be written to like modernize. even in that one category.

Yeah. Totally. I mean, this week, just thinking about all the critical infrastructure and services that people rely on that have security exposure. So energy is a priority vertical. We're starting with 14, and it's basically the 14. Yeah, so you can think of that as the 14 largest industries in the global economy, but also where software is pretty central. So financial services, healthcare, energy, auto, travel. I could go down the whole list. I won't give you the full 14. Give me the full 14. I'm waiting with baited back here. I love this. Also, kind of stings to be number 15. Number 13 will shock you.

Kind of stings to be number 15. You almost made the cut, but hear Cognition saying, look, you're going to have to wait. 2027, you know? Baitens are just getting faster and more powerful. So we'll get to Flores and Ski Resort soon enough. What is the ideal shape of one of those teams? I mean, it sounds like you're going to be overseeing 14 teams pretty quickly. Do you have a two pizza team philosophy? Do you have a, you know, you want a CEO type role, a leader in each of those industries? Or is it like six generalists or maybe 60 generalists or 600? Like, how do you see the shape of each pod evolving?

Yeah, well, I'm starting with, obviously, with the leaders. And I think that it will be a little bit dependent on the different industries. So, for example, in some industries, like airlines is one example, there are opportunities to build new software that different companies all use but maybe want to update. And you can think of an initial kind of like new product that could have much more of like a new application out of the gate. Whereas like financial services, Cognition has a lot of existing customers. And that's like a lot more collaborative. And then, of course, different financial services need different things.

So initially, I'm looking for people who, like I said, ship product and sold into an industry or opinionated about what AI now makes possible and are excited to come do that with really the full force of cognition. So we'll still work with the deployed engineering team that's already present existing cognition customers with sales, with marketing. We're using the whole force of the company to deliver for customers, but pretty small teams within Cognition Industries and just like killer, killer, killer, killer, former founders and operators who have a perspective. You said former founders are acquires on the table.

Are we going to see some deal making? Open to it. Open to it. Do you have anybody in mind? Do you want to let me know? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, we talked to some founders who, I mean, I can imagine someone who's built a product in a particular category but wasn't quite able to find product market fit and be the leader in that category, wanting to partner up in a really positive way. I don't know. It seems like there will be talent that would fit this role very, very quickly. I don't know. What do you think, Jordy? Yeah, it makes, I mean, every category you're going into, you're going to be going up against like a vertical player in that space.

And I think a lot of them would much rather partner with you and Scott and the rest of the team than go head to head for two decades. I agree. It's a great pitch. It's a great pitch. Yeah. And that's part of what brought me here. I mean, I had a, I just sold a stablecoin company. I was thinking about what to build in AI and financial services. I've been building business in FinTech and FinTech Services for a while. And it is intimidating to be going up again. In this particular moment, for this next 12 to 18 months, when things are moving so fast, and look, I still think amazing new companies will come out of the next year.

But if you don't have the thing that you're so passionate about that's like taking off, to come do it across a bunch of different companies and still have like a vision for new products come to life. That was exciting to me. And hopefully 12 to 14 new people for the next six months until we get to ski resorts. I love it. I love it. Number 15. Congratulations on the new gig. Thank you so much. Great to meet. And congratulations on the new role. And keep us posted as you start knocking down these categories. Yeah. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses. Our next guest is Dylan Baxter from PlantSwitch, the co-founder and CEO, raising a Series B to expand Compose Zero into coffee cups, paper coating.

There he is. Dylan Baxter, welcome to TBPN. How are you doing? I'm doing great, guys. Thanks. How are y'all? We're doing great, dude. You solved straws. Straws are solved. That's right. We went through like, basically, it feels like 60% of my life, straws had just completely, they were over. The category was dead. We were just all going to sit there. Well, they were great. They were great. For 50 years. What is the history of the plastic straw? When was that invented? How long has that been around? Pop quiz. Pop quiz. Do you know your industry? It's been a while. It's been a while. It's been a while.

How long have you been around? I've been around 29 years. What? Probably longer than me. No, the company. Oh, no. You started this when you were five years old. The company's been around since 2020. 2020, okay. He was just a boy. Maybe, maybe, you know. No, it's cool. Introduce the company. I jumped right in. I couldn't help myself. I'm so excited that you did it. Yeah. oh thanks it's a beautiful intro so i started the company back in 2020 to try to fix the straw problem amongst many other problems and disposable plastics and it's been one of those things it's been kind of a consensus of hey we need to get away from plastic um both environmentally which was the original push for the paper straw everyone had the paper straw the straw in the turtle's nose and then you had to suffer through paper straws for a decade but then looking out beyond that we're starting to learn that microplastics are this huge issue and we're finding them in our brain and our hearts and our reproductive organs and so we're trying to replace plastic throughout packaging everyone is every major company the question is if not plastic then what um no one wants paper no one wants wood um many of the other substrates i would want

mahogany personally wait wood sounds pretty good actually until you get a splinter when you're potentially i would mine mine would be sealed nicely yeah you want a nice varnish on there yeah anyways continue it's an expensive fork but uh you got expensive taste that's fine i like the metal straws occasionally but yeah it's the official wood of business so yeah maybe just for important meetings uh what about an inconel or something inconel straw so you went with plant based alternatives what was the what was the actual build out i mean are there co-packers for this or did you have to set up manufacturing on day one so we set up a fully fully vertically integrated production site so we do everything from the raw material to the finished goods which is you know i think we're the only ones that are doing that for a whole portfolio of products today so we started off developing the material and we got to something that felt and functioned like plastic but biodegraded like a plant so you can throw our material we don't recommend it but in ocean or in your backyard it's going to biodegrade naturally with no microplastics and so truly zero waste really just goes away like a plant does but is that like a multi is that like a few years i

remember i would get biodegradable airsoft bbs as a kid um and i would find them years later making some progress okay but there's a little green wash in there i think but ours has been tested to biodegrade in just a few months in most environments. Oh, that's pretty good. Okay. That's solid. So what's the sales strategy? Are you going to like restaurant supply conferences? How do you actually get this into the stores that I've seen these sold at? So originally we just wanted to make the material and then sell it to manufacturers because it can work on their equipment and that didn't work.

Dillon BaxterWe tried, we had, you know, a bunch of big enterprise deals we were working on and nothing ever really got to the finish line. And so that's when we said, you know, screw it, let's just go fully vertically integrated.

We'll do it ourselves. We'll do it ourselves. We'll make a whole food packaging business. Let's learn everything there is to know about food packaging, which I never really expected to do. and now we've gotten you know pretty decent at it so we sell through food service distributors we work with companies like walmart we work with event companies like live nations and legends global and then we're partnered with distributors like imperial brady and bunzel where then they go sell into the restaurants for us which a bit more of an efficient way to do it so we had to take a little crash course in the last few years of how to build a food packaging business on top of a material science business.

Yeah. How's the business been scaling? I see, I see the product everywhere. So I, but I also live in Southern California, which is probably like one of your bigger markets. Yeah, definitely one of our bigger markets. It's been scaling like crazy. The straws and the cutlery, which are what we got started with, you know, we're starting to see those everywhere, which is a lot of fun. But then with the series B we've now developed the technology for this new product and technology I think is going to be by far the biggest one and the most game-changing product, which is our new coffee cups and lids.

Most people don't know, but every coffee cup you have has a plastic lining on the inside. So every time you're drinking, it's leaching microplastics into your drink. Gross. Yeah. Not great. Known that for a long time, but there's really no, there's no other option. It's like, I'd rather have microplastics than not have coffee. What about like a ceramic cup? That doesn't have plastic. Bringing the aura loss from bringing a mug into a coffee shop is just, again, I'd rather have the microplastics. Yeah, if a plastic fork gets stuck up a sea turtle's nose, this company goes to a trillion dollars. I'm not kidding.

It's going to be crazy. No, the thing that I appreciate is like this. It's just an unmitigated upgrade. Well, the thing that I appreciate is, like, the solution came after all of the sort of, like, drama that was happening, like, at this point, like, closer to almost a decade ago. It feels like maybe, like, eight or nine years ago was, like, the peak of this sort of, like, focus on we need to switch away from plastic. But then, again, there was that gap of, like, five years where you were just using paper straws. it still shocks me that more people, maybe a bunch of people did try to go after this category and just didn't come up with great solutions, but you clearly did, and I'm not surprised that the business is ripping.

Thank you. When am I going to order Erwan and get one of your coffee cups? I'm under NDA. Okay. So you raised $8 million. top secret coffee cups. What are you using the capital for? Is it building more manufacturing capacity, hiring more people? What's the use of funds? Yeah. So a couple of things as we got in. So we had the kind of base technology. Now we've developed the ability to extrusion coat paper, which opens up this massive new category. So we have to fund manufacturing to get into this new lane. And then we're also expecting a huge boom in sales with some of the distribution partnership. So this will help with some of the working capital. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I'm glad you have the money. $8 million. Thank you so much. Thank you for your service. Thank you for getting rid of paper straws. He did it. He did it. This is an American hero right here. Somebody had to do it. Thank you for everything you've done.

Have a great day. Great to meet you, dude. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Rich Starson from Stelios, founder and CEO. Our next guest, Fix made a new microwave. Okay. Tell us about it, Richard. Jared, thank you for joining TVPN. How are you doing? I'm doing excellent. Gentlemen, thank you so much for inviting me. It's hard to imagine a better place to launch a deep tech company than TVPN.

I've been a huge, huge fan of the work that you are doing and excited to be with you. Take us through it. Introduce the company and the product. Let's do it. Yeah. So we started Stelius with the vision to build the future of high energy power systems in America. Like we in the United States, we actually pioneered all of those technologies from directed energy to HPM, high power microwaves to compact fusion. But many of those industries were allowed to atrophy over the years and we are bringing them back. We are innovating, bringing, making them better, more compact, more powerful and making sure that we're building those systems here in the United States.

It's a full vertical integration with domestic production and making those systems affordable and readily available, essentially, for our warfighter, for the country. And eventually, with our fusion business, we want to make sure that America leads in compact fusion and next generation energy sources. So you are making microwaves to microwave people? Hopefully not people. No, but defense is like the first category that you're focused on. What are the different applications? Yeah, great question. No, I just want to be clear. It is an important question to clarify. Yes, high-power microwave, so megawatt class, gyrotrons, glystrons, they have a wide range of applications.

The vast majority of them today are driven by defense. If you've got thousands of drones flying at you that are extremely cheap to produce, you want to be able to take them down without expending extremely expensive munitions. And megawatt-class microwaves are uniquely conditioned and capable of taking down those large swarms of drones. So that would be the biggest application. Counter-electronics, frying electronics on drones, on humanoid robots, or satellites as well. There's space domain as well. Yes, they can be used for area denial for anything, and they are non-lethal to humans, but this is not the driving force.

yeah interesting what about what about um with drones like obviously you're still you know developing and improving the technology but what about like range and how much area can you cover if a drone you know a drone swarm is uh or the operator is aware that that this technology is out there i'm assuming they would you know spread out the drones over a really wide area so like what are the different trade-offs obviously microwave tech would be a part of a broader system of sort of drone denial but like where where does it shine that's this is exactly right it's one of the components of a layered of a layered defense system right so if you've got an area of, let's say, a few hundred meters of that a swarm is approaching you you can configure the beam to take them down simultaneously and this is the range that we're targeting is

Richard Starsonone to two miles for complete area denial and then disruption at further distances and jamming at further distances this is where going into megawatt class microwaves is so important so

So basically, with solid-state technology or with lasers, it's really hard to go above tens of kilowatts, hundreds of kilowatts. The devices that we're building are more configured for 100 kilowatts to a megawatt class of operation. And so the more power you've got, the longer range and more defensive capabilities you build. So what does powering that look like? I mean, a megawatt, is this like a shipping container-sized diesel generator that's on a truck and then that sits next to the array of microwaves? Yeah, it's a great question. So for 100-kilowatt-class devices, they can be mobile on mobile platforms.

For megawatt-class devices that are more stationary, they will be protecting things like forward operating bases, data centers, borders. And as we all know, data centers are becoming a big target for UAS. And we've had some interesting discussions in the Middle East, right? Yeah, data centers all over the world. And I mean, even going back to like, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, there was a drone attack on some oil and gas infrastructure in the Middle East. Exactly. And even in the recent conflict, one of the first targets that was hit was a data center. in the middle east so is this not useful for high flying drones like if there's a if there's a drone that's more than a mile in the air and then and then it it maybe it's disabled as it's coming down but then it's just falling and it already has a warhead you need a different solution for that type of attack you would need you would need a layered solution you would need a layered solution but uh the more we advance in uh on the power spectrum and frequency uh eventually we will be able to protect higher and higher altitudes, longer ranges from bigger and more shielded UIS systems.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's all part of the ensemble. And I mean, we've talked to tons of companies that do everything from like kinetics using five, five, six rounds to the Anvil technology from Anderol and running a drone into, you know, all sorts of different technologies are going to be used in concert here. Sorry, Jordy, do you have another question? Yeah, talk about the progress to date. So we're just getting started. This is why I'm so thrilled to be with you guys. Hopefully, it will be the first of many exciting announcements. So we started around June, signed a $2 million contract to build the systems pilot units.

And then fairly quickly, we're extremely lucky to raise the round that converted very, very quickly. How much did you raise? It was $5 million pre-seed. I need to give a lot of shout-outs. If I basically start naming all of the people who supported us, it would take a little bit of a while. But a huge thank you to all of our supporters, Jamie Gall from WaveFunction, Qubit Capital, Mana Ventures, Shurvan Peshawar, and so many others who supported us and believe in this mission and vision. This is the community of support and the output of support that we're seeing around the mission of building high-power microwave systems, directed energy systems.

And also, a lot of people share our vision that America must lead in compact fusion, which is kind of a sleeper for us. We're just getting started on the research. design of a compact fusion system. But once it succeeds, it will change the game in how we move things and from hypersonics to supersonics to spaceflight. This is the future that I hopefully will be announcing with you guys in a few months or a year or a couple of years. Very exciting. Can't wait. Thank you so much. Yeah, really great to meet you and congrats on all the progress. Have a great rest. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Cheers. Let me tell you about cisco cisco is the critical infrastructure for the ai era unlock seamless real-time experiences a new value with cisco our next guest will be going in just a second with brian manning who's on a space systems returning to the show i believe he's here here we go the waiting room so let's bring brian in to the tv pin outro brian how are you doing hey it's not very nice good to be back back good to see you again congratulations on the progress great setup great setup today What has changed since the last time we talked?

It was maybe six months ago, five months ago. What's new in your world? Yeah, a whole lot of things. I think I was sitting a little further over last time on a stool, but it was a pretty empty, empty warehouse still. Now he's got a chair. Yeah, right? There's a little out of screen, but there's an actual satellite sitting over here. The next one that we built, we actually launched six satellites earlier this week to start actually deploying our, you know, the world's first commercial satellite navigation service. You're really built to, you know, bring GPS into the modern technology era effectively and announced this morning a $250 million funding round at a $2.45 billion value.

Thank you. That's always more. So, yeah, a lot of things moving and grooving here. Amazing. Deep SpaceX lineage with your personal experience and Steve Jurvetson, SpaceX board member, leading the round. What can you tell me about how you're co-designing your satellites to work with the SpaceX product portfolio? I was not aware that Starlink satellites sometimes go on specific rockets that are designed just for those. It's not all just free gap capacity. There's a lot of co-design that happens there where the capabilities of the rocket are designed alongside the capabilities of the satellite. What have you designed around?

What have you leaned into? What are you expecting to come down the pipe to unlock new capability? How does that back and forth work these days? For sure, yeah. So the satellites we just launched went up on a Falcon rocket, so they went up with SpaceX. But as we're growing, part of the reason we have the factory here is that we're growing from the point where we're launching satellites as a rideshare, where we only want a small fraction of the rocket. to the point where we're launching enough satellites to grow from you know up to the full 250 that we actually want the entire rocket got it and so one of the things though that we're doing is making sure that we're designing it that it can go on any rocket that's out there oh and i think spacex in many ways really set the standard with like you know the five meter fairing got it but that's been the standard size for most rockets around the world um you know we are looking forward to the starship future also and how to make sure that we are future-proofing ourselves to make sure that we can fly on starship as it becomes ready for commercial companies so with that standard five meter fairing what are the trade-offs that you're making to fill that efficiently get

the most performance out of your satellites is there a sweet spot number of satellites that you want to fit into a full ride when you're at that stage like what are the trade-offs that you're making i the sweet spot is cram as many in there as possible um because it's like you're paying for the whole rocket yeah we'll use it i i was a hockey player so i remember the statement of like you paid for the whole stick you know you got to keep it on the ice and use the whole stick but it's kind of the same with the rockets that um the rocket price doesn't go down if you only fill half of it yeah yeah so that's one of the things the our current generation satellite We can fit in the neighborhood of 30 into a rocket.

Brian ManningOur second generation satellites that we're moving to as we go from kind of ride shareable to full rocket, we can fit 50 to 60.

And so that means you effectively cut your launch prices in half as we go there. And it is taking a lot of lessons from what SpaceX did with Starlink. How do you flatten satellites out and pack them in very efficiently to use up every ounce of volume and mass that that thing can carry. So what does that mean on the manufacturing side? Because all of a sudden, it seems like if there's a particular ride that you're booked on, you got to make sure that all 50 are done by the time launch happens. Do you have 50 manufacturing lines? Do you have an assembly line for this or multiple lines? What has scaling manufacturing looked like at the company?

Yeah, so I'm actually sitting in the middle of the assembly line right now where we're starting to ramp up to even a couple satellites a week. Okay. And as much as, like, you hear 50 satellites in space, that sounds like a really big number. You know, I came out of the automotive world where, I mean, it's like, oh, do you do that on the prototype line next week? Like, it's such tiny volumes. And so a lot of things we've done here is taking lessons on how do we build satellites more like, you know, cars And what level of testing and very much following, you kind of mentioned how do we mirror SpaceX, how do you follow the SpaceX algorithm?

And step one is get rid of dumb requirements. How do we make sure that we're not imposing unnecessary requirements on what we're doing to build these things as efficiently and cost effectively as we can? How do you think about network congestion? I was just hearing about how Starlink is an amazing network, but there are some small pockets where if you have a whole bunch of people in one small Alaskan town, they will actually see some network congestion. And the terrestrial internet providers have done decades of work to make sure that a stadium still has cell connection when there's 100,000 people at a football game.

Is that a factor for you where you might see a lot of demand for this service in a particular area and you need to design around that? Or is that less of a factor for this particular technology? It's a really good question. And one of the superpowers about GPS and similarly the way that our system operates is that it's not bi-directional. It's a one-directional broadcast. And what that means is once you have coverage in an area, you can support an infinite number of users in that area. So it's almost more like radio than it is like communications. And so for us, once we get the critical number of satellites up to serve that area, you can cram 10 billion people into that area and we can still support every single one of them.

Talk about the kind of expanding need for systems like Pulsar. on the spacex earnings call elon was making the bull case for starlink as in like we're going to have just way way way like because of the explosion of robotics that i think we can bank on over the next 10 plus years there's just going to be way more connected devices that that have a bunch of unique needs some of which align with with you know humans just carrying devices but there's a bunch of other use cases. Yeah, I think the company's like, so we came out of the autonomous car world and it was really built to support the world's transition from a hands-on world to a hands-off world. And if you look at what satellite communications are really doing for devices,

Brian Manningthey're answering, I would say, kind of the what and the why, but it's really leaving the where and the when. And so that's our system really fills the where and the when for things. And it

does it at an accuracy level that they need in the places that they need and it's really filling the gaps for gps struggles and so your gps as Great of a system as it is, is a half-century-old architecture operated by the military, built for the military. And most people, like, if you ask a random person on the street, like, hey, what is the value of space? A lot of people say, well, like, well, GPS, that's the first thing that comes to mind. But similarly, you see the, what I call the nuisances today, where if you're, you know, if you're using a Strava app to go running, and you go underneath trees, and it's, you know, I didn't run two miles, I actually ran two and a half.

or the Uber is down the street and you can't catch it because it's just on the opposite side and you're running through the rain. There's those levels of nuisances, but it also is much bigger than that and what the conflict in Ukraine has highlighted where GPS jamming is just kind of running wild because it does disrupt all the military systems that are over there. We're seeing the same in Israel. We saw the same in Iran. And these are no longer just military problems that all the countries around there are getting disrupted. I mean, there's even been civilian airliners that have gotten shot down because of this.

So it is an unfortunately expanding problem that we are really building a solution to, primarily built for commercial, but we are proud of the work that we do with the military as well. On military GPS, I remember maybe like 15 years ago or something when Google Maps was becoming dominant. There was this thing that might have been fake news or rumor, but this idea that the civilian GPS system was less accurate than the military GPS system. And at a certain level of precision, that technology or that protocol was like encrypted or classified. I don't know if that's true or not, but are you going to face similar regulation where a certain capability level of your technology will be restricted?

or are we in a new regime where kind of everyone can have centimeter level access to positioning because maybe it's not that big of a deal anymore i don't know yeah the answer is a bit of both and so in i think it was the 1990s um that they did the u.s actually did degrade the accuracy it was called selective availability that's right yeah and they turned it off for a second i think during like the gulf war and everyone's like wow this is way better than we thought um but then there was a 747 that wandered into a russian airspace and got shot down and killed everybody on board and so that was actually the u.s made the decision that like this is too important like having reliable precision is too important to the world we can't keep degrading it and so they actually made it uh i think clinton made an executive order to that they won't degrade it anymore um and so when you come so the 747 got off track because it didn't have the higher level of precision right interesting it wandered into like that makes sense gps wasn't really being used and so it wandered into unfriendly airspace and if you translate into the modern world like the same the same thing is happening effectively again but it's not as much even around precision

it's about the protection and you know the jam but like how jammable gps is sure and like Like, unfortunately, it was, I think, Christmas of 24. It was in Azerbaijan Airlines. Yep. Like, and it didn't, like, the GPS was jammed. It couldn't find the runway. And so it was doing circles. And it wasn't broadcasting where it was because it didn't know where it was. And so it got shot down. You know, it got shot down. And so, you know, if that was an American Airlines flight, I think it would have caught a lot more news. Definitely. But, like, unfortunately, these instances are becoming more real. And, you know, aviation cuts a lot of attention, but it's happening to drones.

It's happening to time synchronization. It's happening to buses, to logistics, to all these different things that just need a lot better precision, a lot better power and protection than they're able to get with the kind of legacy systems that are out there. Interesting. I have one last question. Go for it. On the receiver side, what is the distribution model? I mean, I can go buy a Starlink terminal at Best Buy. I can buy it online. You have a direct-to-consumer or partnership business development relationships with everything from, like, a Garmin or an Apple or a Google that might make a device that would benefit from this?

Or are you focused on go-to-market with the military first or airlines? Like, what is the plan for catching the data? Yeah, you've probably asked the most important question because satellites by themselves, unless you have something to actually pick up and use the signal, they're just making noise in space, right? And they're kind of pointless. And that's one of the magic of Starlink is that you can go by just a terminal and it is easy to access. Similarly, GPS, we made the strategic decision early on to not try and build our own chipset. So there's 2 billion plus chips being sold every single year.

They're integrated into every phone, train, ship, truck, watch, et cetera. And so that being said, the U.S. government kind of has built the biggest freemium opportunity in history. Where they got 7 billion users hooked on a free service and they never made an upgrade tier for it. One of the things that we cracked and what has really, I think, driven a lot of the excitement and why a lot of customers are working with us is that we designed the entire signal and system around the user equipment. So we didn't start with a satellite and say, hey, OEMs, figure out how to use this. We started with user equipment and said, all right, how do we integrate our service and how do we design the entire network so that it is just a software update away and that it makes it that easy to integrate with everything?

And we've demonstrated that on everything from the tiny little chips that go into dog collars to the big military receivers and aviation ones now. So it's exciting to see the rollout. That is an amazing strategy. I love it. Any power implications? if i turn this on does my battery draw uh you know burn through quicker yep so what we've actually seen is that it gets better uh and so our so there is such a thing as free lunch this is amazing you gotta work hard but then uh then the user gets a free lunch our signal is so much stronger it's just easier to pick up and a lot of the battery draw that comes with gps is you're trying to pick up and find a signal that's a trillion times weaker than a wi-fi signal yeah like it's phenomenal you can even see the thing at all that's amazing um but ours like we've demonstrated how much it can punch through jammers we can even we've done testing to show it can get indoors so we're starting to break that indoor outdoor barrier um and a side effect of that is it actually can reduce battery drain um because it's just easier to pick up that's amazing do we already hit the gong we've hit the gong several times i'm gonna hit it again end. We did, but why not?

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Crazy update. Thank you so much, guys. Really, really exciting stuff. Thank you so much for hopping on the show with us. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. 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. You know who's got to download Figma set up an account? Anyone with an iPhone app who wants it to run on the iPhone Duo, you've seen these screenshots of all the apps that are not uh optimized for the duo yet uh the youtube app is looking kind of rough they they did stretch out the screen but it still has this bar this black bar on the right side it's a new design challenge so uh very doable how do you but yeah as apple yeah how do you release a device without having especially in the era of ai agents all no not even that okay you're launching this device it's the biggest update to the iphone since the iphone got lighter faster stronger blah blah yeah it actually is new it actually is the biggest update to the iphone in since the original iphone yeah right yeah and you don't bother to make sure that youtube and instagram and spotify well do you think amazing do you think it's the opposite

because what happened with the apple vision pro was uh apple said we have this amazing new VR device, developers are going to be able to build apps for it. There's a developer program where you can get the software a little bit early, optimize things. And basically every tech company was like, no, we are not jumping on your new ecosystem. Go kick rocks. Because they were like, you're going to take 30%. We don't want to do you the favor. You're going to have to suffer. Completely different. Okay. Just an extension of the iPhone. Yeah, no, I agree. Update to the iPhone, the most popular consumer, the number one hit product in the history of consumer hit products.

So why do you think it happened? Do you think that the developers of the YouTube iOS team didn't get devices early enough? They didn't get software previews? The Germinator said that people had had access to the device for about a month. The device and? If you're a big developer. And maybe an emulator too? It's like, on one hand, it's the fault of the big companies. But on the other hand, I think Apple has to take the responsibility for it because it's your product that you're selling to customers, and they're having a bad experience. So I think it comes down, the buck stops with Apple. But overall, it's just such an embarrassing launch for Apple.

People have even been poking at the iOS issues with the actual... The actual software. like native native software software is not optimized yet it's not great like you know you'll have if you're running a timer with a certain angle you can only see one of the numbers here so the whole thing was just completely botched and it's super embarrassing because now a billion people have seen like hey if you buy the iphone duo it's going to be this like clunky yeah experience and all this stuff will get fixed in the next couple weeks but massive unforced error we have take here from uh like i don't even think this doesn't the what it comes down to it doesn't reflect badly on like spotify okay i thought spotify was the one that was optimized correctly maybe spotify looked good every single one of them looks bad people are people are it doesn't look that bad for all the different app and they're also dunking on apple like uh this is from tech droider which i assume is an android publication so they're bound to take a victory lap here but they say uh apple literally mocked other foldables at its launch event saying vertical scrolling feels compromised and watching movies means dealing with oversized black bars that make

the screen much smaller now look at apple doing the same thing and suddenly apple fans and some influencers are defending it lmao the hypocrisy is unreal uh but i mean it is a good point like uh to release something that drops black bars on uh on day one is uh is a rough rough here's the one that i was referencing yeah this is apple software call quality in 2026 this is supposed to be a 15 minute timer oh and it's not rendering properly that's very odd so again it's like well is it scrolling oh i guess even if it's scrolling that's like a weird feature but yeah i mean just do 15m instead of 15 min apple's just better than this yeah i'm not gonna do you know i don't think it's on the new yeah see i mean the the the grubinator john gruber over at daring fireball said that it feels like you mean what the gruber no it's the grubinator the germinator and the grubinator the grubinator was saying that uh it feels like he's gotten used to an extraordinary he's gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype but not a finished product that he'd want to buy and carry uh which is not a good review just to go back to back with the vision pro and the duo getting just appalling reviews no getting the getting the it's a good prototype

right yeah getting the it's a good prototype review is just like not apple's standard right I don't know. Patrick. But apparently it's their. He says he's perfected the one-handed flip, and I think this might... Oh, that's a good look. Pull this video up. Apple is no longer better than this. They should be, but they're not. My disappointment is immeasurable in Apple. Yeah, but watch Patrick flip this thing around. Tell me this isn't fun. This is great. Look. Okay. Flips it around. Flips it with one hand. Boom. Slaps it open. That's fun. That's great. You want to do that. Yeah. Click. That's going to be satisfying.

It's a fidget spinner. It's got the same dynamic as a fidget spinner. this is going to be a hit doesn't matter the software doesn't need to run just just brick it give me something just to play with put just brick it and just put one one page of text on there that i can just read my mantra and then that's good enough i don't know uh unbelievable the iphone duo display has been hiding a shocking secret somebody finally dale dare to peel off the mad film covering the iphone duo's display what they discovered yeah this is with the film it It looks surprisingly uneven. Way too dramatic. Who cares?

Don't pull the matte film off. Yeah, the matte nanotexture. I ripped the product apart, and it didn't work as expected. That makes no sense. Anyway, yeah, people are, you know, the polish is not quite there. Joanna Stern's been testing the product. She's folded it. Oh, she built a device or had a friend build a device that would fold it 32,000 times over and over and over again. and it seemed like it it held up pretty well so i don't know take him doesn't like it though he says half baked read this review before ordering the initial enthusiasm on the neat opening duo animation has faded hard it may but all but disappear after the first wave of apple fan early adopters this is a very bad iphone experience i don't know i think the software gets patched pretty quickly these these things uh these things move pretty quickly and i feel like they should move very quickly in the age of ai coding like if you're a small app developer and you're like ah like yeah one percent of my audience is using the iphone duo do i really want to open up xcode and sit there and rewrite all the views and get an objective c or swift and and actually hammer out of uh you know a layout that looks good if you can point an ai agent at

this and get it to get you 90 of the way there maybe you'll do it a little bit faster so i would expect some acceleration towards the software being good and functional very quickly but it does look like after a bunch of folds you can see the crease a little bit more i don't think people really care i don't know the crease doesn't seem like that big of a deal anyway um let me tell you about shopify shopify grows with is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds in store online on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai agents ben thompson has i think yet to review the iphone do i'm sure he'll discuss it he's talked about a little bit but he's also presented by stripe now that's huge news i think we put up a card for it uh very very great to see the techery partnering with a fintech company great partnership because uh stripe is obviously a very successful company but not the the hottest most dramatic oh you got to track earnings who knows maybe they'll never ipo so ben will never be called upon to cover stripe earnings because they will never be reporting public numbers to be analyzed uh but also uh a long lineage of working with ben because he built his entire business on stripe

and so uh very very excited to see that uh and excited to to hear some ads and sure techery finally this has been our mission this is our moment we the first episode as much as this has been in stripes moment it's also our moment yeah it really is we got to pat ourselves in the back here take a little victory lap because uh when we started this show we said uh our goal was to get every tech podcast to have advertising and we're pretty close one step closer pretty pretty close to done i don't know is there anyone that's missing i think tyler cowan conversations with tyler although tyler cowan conversations tyler fantastic show A little low on the ad load, personally.

I don't think I've heard an ad in there ever. Occasionally promote live shows and specific events that are happening. I don't really count those. I want money in his pocket for those ad reads. But he's maybe moving over. It feels like he's moving over to the New York Times hosting Ross Douthat's old show, Interesting Times, with Tyler Cowen now. New York Times, that's an advertising monster. So that's some good news in the world of advertising. You're going to be able to buy ads on a Tyler Cowen product for the first time. You can buy ads on a Ben Thompson product. You can buy ads on an all-in product.

Of course, TBPN product. We've got plenty of ad space. Yeah, lock in. Anyway, anything else that we want to talk about? Let's end here. There were a couple other things going on. Let's end here. Yes. This is kind of a dream daily. This is Eliezer Yudkowsky's car. we finally saw it this is what he's gonna get some sound cuz this thing sounds amazing please someone please be my ops is this real or is this AI I can't even tell this guy I think actually builds a bunch of insane vehicles we got to get him on the show immediately really cool Mad Max C7 look I like the chains on the side that's a really nice touch is this like a moving truck or not a moving truck like a an old uh looks like an ambulance or something yeah yeah dump truck or something but this is the car of the future everyone this is going to be how you get to when the grid goes down this is what you're going to want to be driving get this vehicle lock it in get this get this uh get this going uh anyway anyways anything else you want to talk about today oh one more one product suggestion for uh lucy i wanted you to build i wanted you guys to make this okay gum watch oh this is good i hadn't thought about this this is a hitter

the gum watch this is a real this is a real product called crazy planet this would be a good drop from them i'm gonna send this over to the team crazy planet i'm surprised i've seen a lot of like pouch holders different different ways to hold your your nicotine pouches your nicotine gum but uh in the watch is having it on the wrist having it on the wrist is good i think i think you'd that'd be a hit with you uh and the final post of the day just put the lightning in the bottle bro just do it stop making excuses just put the fries in the bag and then put the lightning in the bottle you've caught lightning in a bottle when you've caught lightning in a bottle it's time to time to double down maximize maximize the the roi and whatever you did that was described as lightning in a bottle it's rare so when it hits you got to go you got to burn all the all the other ships and focus that's a good lesson good lesson anyway that's right leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify tyler got that wildly wrong yesterday he said follow us on apple podcast we don't ask for follows around here we ask for five star reviews if you're thinking this is a four-star show don't tell us keep it to yourself to yourself please keep it to yourself

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