Apple Pro and Tell, Genie 4, The Gurmanator Joins | Mark Gurman, Zach Rash, Ben Liu, Amiram Shachar, Jasper Zhang

0:00 You're you're watching TBPN.

0:02 Today is Wednesday, 10/28/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

0:10 The capital of capital.

0:12 Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. How was your morning, Jordy?

0:23 It was great, but this morning is all about you.

0:26 Mine was even better because I got you.

0:28 I was getting a fantastic workout.

0:30 Oh, yeah?

0:31 You were at some computer event.

0:33 I was. I I went to the Apple event this morning. Pro and tell, very exciting. Speculation was all over the place. John Turnis shared a video of a...

0:45 An... A cutout, a spotlight of the Apple logo shining on a wall brightly. You can see this video, teaser. What do you think he's teasing? Christian Reber times in Apple Car. Obviously. They're just gonna drop the Apple Car on you Not on a a Wednesday in a ten minute keynote. No. It was a touch screen touch screen MacBook Pro and it was cool. It was...

1:10 This was my first Apple event in person. Obviously, I've been watching keynotes since I was a young child. I remember watching like the Steve Jobs keynotes in college. It was amazing. And seeing like those clips, we've watched a bunch of these on the show. And we've seen the evolution, the COVID era, the highly produced big keynotes. This is a smaller event. You know, they're they're doing a number of launches. They launched the iPad. But, man, John Turnis.

1:36 The star power is incredible. I'm not joking. Like, he is so good on stage. He's incredible. He's one of greatest ever day. What what are you trying to hit the glass?

1:47 No. I was hitting the the the chat button.

1:49 Oh, okay. I was like, why can't you hear it? No. He's really really good. So, I mean, the whole script was very tight.

1:57 Very quick recap on what they've launched so far. Like, fifteen seconds iPad mini, fifteen seconds on the MacBook Pro with the m six, and then straight into the touch screen. They play a little, example video, which had a hilarious, theme to it, which was, if you give a mouse a cookie. They took the story of if you give a mouse a cookie and applied it. We we we should actually play the the full ad because Tim Cook shared it on X.

2:24 He said, we brought touch to the Mac. We brought touch to the Mac from the new iPad, from the all new iPad mini Kind of. To the MacBook Pro. Let's play this.

2:33 Like a pro OLED. Yeah. A pro LED XDR. So it'll have more vivid colors. Brighter brightness, blacker blacks, razor sharp contrast.

2:52 Then you've got a totally portable reference monitor. So you'll need anti glare and reflection, burn in protection, and real time pixel correction.

3:05 It'll look

3:05 so real, you'll wanna reach out and touch it.

3:09 Boom. Mic drop.... Touch

3:12 it. You can

3:13 swipe and drag and pinch. No. They clearly listen to you. You were making fun. It's always just thinner, lighter, faster.

3:19 Boom. You can't say

3:20 that... Touchable.

3:22 Touchscreen. That's not thinner. That's not lighter. That's not faster. That's a different vector of new features.

3:28 It's our most touchable

3:29 Okay.

3:30 MacBook Pro yet.

3:31 It is. No. I have no idea if this will be useful or I will want the touch screen version. I can't imagine a situation where I want that, and I would be very worried about fingerprints. I'm already, like, constantly battling smudges on my screen, and I don't really like using window...

3:49 With Windex cleaner. I guess I should get the official Apple polishing cloth which is like...

3:54 Full employment for computer detailers. Which we've pitched

3:57 Yes.

3:58 A bunch of time.

3:58 No. No.

3:59 I agree. As a great business. Yeah. At least in San Francisco, you know, schedule different companies, go by the office, take the computer for ten minutes. Actually haven't solved that properly.

4:11 No. Like, we should we should figure out...

4:12 You tried to clean your computer and your hands were burned by like very toxic.

4:16 We got the...

4:17 Something off of Amazon....

4:18 Really skimping on the on the cleaning supplies. I got chemical burns on rants. No. We should should figure

4:24 out So, how yeah. My reaction to the launch is like, why the heck not? You You should be able to touch the screen of your computer.

4:32 Yeah.

4:32 Why the heck not? Seems, you know, seems pretty cool. I don't I don't think I'll care one way or another when I when I upgrade my Mac next if it has a if it has a touch screen or not. Yeah. I don't even know if it's

4:48 an option that you pick. The the actually bigger thing that's an update is the is the OLED display, which if you've if you've watched an OLED TV, like, is brighter. The blacks are darker. It's actually a nicer contrast ratio. And a lot of people have been upgrading to OLED TVs.

5:05 And they're like, yeah, this is better. And so bringing that to to the MacBook Pro makes a lot of sense. It's been... Yeah.

5:11 It's interesting because it... You know, the Mac... The the Pro line

5:15 Yeah.

5:15 You know, historically was for professionals.

5:19 Mhmm.

5:21 Still is. But I don't think any of the like the most hardcore power users are like, yes.

5:26 Like

5:26 Touch screen. Thank you for delivering the thing that I cared about.

5:29 On the touch screen or on the OLED? I I do think video editors, anyone doing important graphics or color correction, especially if they're delivering to an OLED TV. Like, if you're if you're editing Netflix, like, know that a lot of people. So the idea of a portable reference monitor, most people that are doing professional work would normally have a separate monitor to see how it looks on an OLED. And now it's just on the main screen, which is great.

5:53 And like, you will be able to feel the difference in the screen quality. The touching thing, again, like, that's a very specific use case to be playing piano on your on your MacBook Pro. But, yeah, why not? Fun fun feature. Fun feature. They already have the technology super mature in the iPad and the iPhone. Why not put it in the MacBook Pro? Yes. But I would be I would be surprised if apps are like scrambling to, you know, take the most advantage of the touchableness because who who who's really going for it.

6:26 What did you learn about the hinge? Are we gonna be experiencing this? Yeah. Yeah. No.

6:30 No. I I think

6:31 it is better. Is that an error or a pro?

6:33 Pro.

6:34 Okay. Because mine's kinda similar. When I moved it around, it it it seemed not to do the springiness thing. You see how like when I do this, it like springs back and forth? It seemed not to do that.

6:44 So it That's good improved the... It seemed like they improved the...

6:46 Because if you have to hold it, reinforce it while you're touching it, it's gonna be a little rough.

6:51 Well, think the default the default way you'll use the MacBook Pro touch screen will be like this. You put both hands, so you can scroll Instagram and TikTok right here.

6:59 And you're like dry... Like like you're driving.

7:02 Yeah. Like you're driving. Like a huge iPad. I don't know. But John Turner is very very good on stage.

7:07 Whatever he's been doing practicing, it didn't... I think he has confidence monitor with maybe some script, but, like, it felt very memorized, like, and delivered perfectly. Yeah. They really take that seriously. And we've seen a lot of keynotes. I mean, the Tesla Roadster is probably the best example where there's, like, a lot of dead air and, like, Elon was sort of riffing and deciding the top speed live on stage, which is cool. It's like its own thing. But Ternus was very, very dialed in. Like, he knew exactly what word to say, where to put the emphasis, how to deliver it effectively. Really, really great.

7:39 The only problem, little underdressed. So, you know, Steve Jobs is going out with the iconic black turtleneck. I would have liked to see him in black tie. I would have liked to see him with some white gloves, maybe some tails, maybe a bow tie, maybe a three piece suit, something like that, top hat.

7:53 Really make it about him. Yes. Say like, I am the star.

7:56 Yes. The foreground. In the foreground. A little too casual. I think I was the only one in at the entire event.

8:03 But but no. Was great. And we have Mark Gurman from Bloomberg coming on at noon to discuss more of what's going on in the world of Apple, the MacBook Pro moment and everything else that's going on with the foldable iPhone. We haven't talked to him since the duo actually launched. He predicted it on our show.

8:22 He was correct. And here it is. I did get to see a couple iPhone duos. One guy had two iPhone duos rigged together for content creation somehow. I don't know exactly why, but the guy was rocking four screens, which is elite. There was another thing that was funny.

8:40 Did you ask him why he stopped at four?

8:42 No. I have

8:43 I... Like, because if you're gonna go there, why not have more of like an accordion? Yeah.

8:46 Pull out. Yeah. The accordion would be good. No. He's pretty locked in.

8:50 There was one person... What was the thing that you said people said they were using Instagram less because it's kind of a hassle to use?

8:57 Yeah. I did sort of like an informal polling of the iPhone Duo users. And I noticed that some of them said that their screen time was maybe not lower overall, but tilting away from vertical video because they use the phone most most of the time when they pick up their phone. Then this is very common in the brain rot era. You pick up your phone because you got a text message or you need to check something important.

9:23 And then you're like, yeah, I should see if I got a message on Instagram. And then you're like, well, should see if there's a good reel at the top of my stack, you know. And pretty quickly you scroll a couple reels. This is this is the curse of modernity. And everyone's sort of feeling this. And and at least anecdotally, there were a few people that were saying like, yeah, because I don't like the way Instagram looks, it's less addictive on the small main screen. I can answer text messages there. And then if I do wanna watch Instagram, I will, like, open it up and, like, it's like an iPad and, like, watch it. So who knows where that really nets out? I mean, people will be able to see it because Apple's been tracking the screen time for so long that you could export the data and actually look at the before and after and see, on a week to week average, is your Instagram use going up or down, is your vertical video use going up or down?

10:09 There's a few different ways to slice and dice it. But the other thing was that the really elite content creator... So basically, everyone had an iPhone that they were taking videos of the event. Couple people had, like, rigged out Sony cameras. There was that one guy with the two iPhone duos, ultra elite.

10:26 But the but the real the real power move is bring the selfie stick that goes all the way to the sky. There was someone there with a selfie stick that went so so high. I can I can actually show you a video? I'll send it in to the to the team because it is next level production team. Let's see if

10:46 this A bird's eye view.

10:48 It it was it was one of the most aggressive selfie sticks. And it makes me think if I ever go back to this, I need to get one that goes, you know, 40 feet high and requires three tripods. It'll be like Tyler's Yeah.

10:59 In there. Did did they ever sort of pointed at Ternus and sort of like almost like a fishing rod extended out right into his face?

11:06 I mean, they had they had like security screening on the way in, but this was a threat. Started at the beginning. Started at the beginning. So I I... This is this is...

11:16 So they're filming the event as the reveal happens, and then you zoom out and you just get more and more selfie stick until you get like you're truly so far above the crowd. I don't even think you need to be that high, but hopefully good. We got a nice video of Tyler too. I put it in the in the group chat. Maybe we can share that as well.

11:37 How many days until...

11:38 More importantly, chat wants to know. There are fifty seven days. Fifty seven. Keith or Morris? Christmas.

11:45 Fifty seven days. There he

11:46 is. Fantastic. Fifty seven Christmas. Very festive.

11:52 Yeah. It's right around the corner, so get ready. 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.

12:06 Tyler's clapping for that ad. He was also clapping at the Apple event. We can show a video of them going crazy. They set up this little photo booth.

12:16 I don't think I was even in the top 50% of how excited people were.

12:19 No. No. There were people way harder than you. Yeah. This was this was a mild performance.

12:26 The other interesting thing about the the actual keynote was that they didn't put the price up on the screen. Typically, there's like a... Where you do all this and it's a it's a phone and it's a music player and it's a blah blah blah and it has the best screen ever and it's only $1.99 or or $9.99 or $2.09... $22,999. We're no longer in that era because of the memory crunch and the and the price of components going up.

12:52 And so the price was not on screen. You can actually see it on apple.com. Something around starts at... What does it start at? $2,900 for the 14 inch. The 16 inch is gonna be $3,400 to start, which is on the pricier end, but...

13:14 And the way you expect it was... Thousand.

13:17 $6,000. 60...

13:21 Can get... They also have an own nothing and be happy option. You can lease it.

13:24 Yeah. You can lease it.

13:25 Thirty six months.

13:28 I mean, it's not that crazy. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are buying these for work. They're expensing them and so there's a way. Then, I mean, at the price for performance, like you're in the right realm.

13:40 It's not that dramatic. We can talk more about the strategy that's merging with Mark Gurman. The interesting thing was that initial like light shined on the wall. That was a teaser for the fact that the Apple logo now lights up on the back of the screen.

14:00 Yeah. I completely... I I hadn't really been thinking about the fact that that had gone away. Yeah. Seemingly to save money.

14:07 Yeah. Exactly. And now they're bringing it back. And this...

14:10 And it's crazy in hindsight because it's like, yeah, they probably saved a little bit of money Yeah. But it's so... Such an iconic part of the Mac experience Okay. That was just gone.

14:19 You're pro. You're pro having

14:21 Pro bringing it back. Cool. No utility.

14:24 So that might be the thing that gets you this So

14:26 I'm so

14:27 don't want the touch screen, you don't care about the OLED, but the light up back is interesting to you. No. I mean, the the applause from the audience at that moment was the biggest it was of of everything. Even more than touch. Like, even more than anything Yeah.

14:43 Else was what people were excited about.

14:46 Maybe I they're bringing it back because, you know, a lot of people are live streaming.

14:51 Mhmm.

14:51 Sometimes, you know, MacBooks are are

14:54 Oh, yeah. On screen.

14:56 They're not really getting any

14:57 I need to position it like this if I really wanna be nice to Apple comms. Here we go. Boom. Nailed it. That's good.

15:05 Right? That looks great. Now that's... That... Another reflection there. No. People are very excited about this. And, yes, my theory is that it probably cost like $2 per unit to do that. And back when they were selling MacBooks for a thousand dollars, that was, you know, a fifth of a percent of the total price and maybe, you know, half a percent of the total component cost or something. These are very estimated numbers.

15:30 But when the top line price goes up because of memory going up and because of chips going up in price, all of a sudden, like, the the technology that it costs to light up the Apple logo probably hasn't changed in price. It's probably... Maybe even gotten cheaper. It might just be still $2. And so now they're like, well, most people are gonna be specking these at like $4.

15:49 $2 relative to $4 is way less than $22 relative to a thousand dollars.

15:54 Turnus feels like a guy that's like, yes, it's not necessary. Yes, it has no utility other than like sort of brand Yeah. And just sort of like enjoy like enjoyment for the user. Looks nice.

16:06 Yeah. No. And that's worth think that's the premium Apple brand that they need to like stick with and stay with and stuff. So I thought that was that was a nice touch. Anyway

16:17 Google. Got a Okay. Couple new

16:20 First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scale and monitoring and security. What did Google launch?

16:31 Google has a couple new models. Sundar says excited to share Genie four. Today, our most realistic and interactive world model.

16:37 This was really cool.

16:38 Steer dynamic environments in real time, shaping events, camera angles, and actions. Generate native audio, match the world from realistic background sounds to characters who can converse in real time, simulate photorealistic scenes and real world physics, create more coherent multi step events through reasoning from Gemini, And they've started to roll it out as a research preview. Looks incredible. I think that the primary use case for world models for me personally so far is, you know, making me think that it's more likely that we're living in our own simulation. Yeah.

17:13 I don't know. I I wonder, like, who's using, you know, who's using these?

17:22 Well, right now it's mostly research previews, so researchers are using them. And the immediate the immediate thing is like, okay, it could be fun. It could just be something that you want to spend time in. So it's like a video game. It's a substitute for video games or even just a full video game that you wanna pay for or or subscribe to or upgrade your plan to be able to tinker in.

17:44 But the the immediate case for for content creators is like set extensions, virtual backdrops. Like, you can... You could effectively composite yourself into this world and your camera could be moving you around. You've seen those videos of people LARPing with Hicksfield. You've seen this? Where people would be like, look at look at me and it's like that and it's like this is my Lamborghini and they've dynamically replaced the the Honda Civic with Lamborghini and then they're like, and I'm on my private jet and it's actually just their back staircase or whatever. This allows you to do it in real time if it's this high quality because it can it can interpret where the camera position is and then dynamically generate the world. So even if you're... Even if I'm filming you and I have a virtual backdrop on you and I'm like, okay, we're in... We're on the beach and then we go outside, it can it can imagine what's outside and it says, okay, now we're now we're on the boardwalk of the beach and it can continually recreate this.

18:44 So there will be some interesting like real time applications as this Yeah. Rolls out. Everyone is probably familiar with the simulation hypothesis, proposes that what one experiences as the real world is actually a simulated reality such as a computer simulation in which humans are constructs. Everyone's thinking we're in a simulation in a simulation now. You had a different thesis, different hypothesis, the racing simulation hypothesis which is that our world, what we know as Earth, what we know as the human experience in fact exists in a racing simulator run by a higher level organism that exists purely to propagate F1 and the F1 circuit and everything else that we do in service of simulating F1.

19:34 Motorsports.

19:34 Motorsports. Yeah. Motorsports, broadly. It's not just... It's a it's a multifaceted racing simulator.

19:38 Yeah. So you include NASCAR. Include GT three. Exactly. The racing simulation hypothesis is is one that's... It it it is gaining a lot of ground among among the the futurists.

19:50 Yeah.

19:51 And the and the science fiction fans. The racing simulation hypothesis is is getting getting popular. This is cool.

19:57 That's not all.

19:58 Wait. Wait. Really quickly on Genie four, is it available yet? What... Because you've played with some of them before.

20:04 Yeah.

20:06 I I don't have access to Genie four yet. Okay. I think it's still on... You have to like apply to their like early access program.

20:12 Okay. I I'm I'm excited for that to to roll out and be able to play. Jordy, what what is the next Google?

20:18 They got another model. Multiple models this week. Sundar is back. He says, did say we'd be releasing our models periodically, introducing Gemini four Carbon, their next Frontier model, which follows Argon's release just two weeks ago. Carbon shows the pace at which we're pushing the frontier, and it ranks number one on the recently updated v five of the artificial analysis intelligence index at 59.

20:43 And it also leads across cybersecurity evaluations scoring 88.2% on SCC bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities and 54.8% on Exploit Jim. Yeah. So very excited to see the reaction here. Seems like a great launch. Elon says it's impressive. And I think, again, they have to at this point have been learning from the sort of series of of benchmark disappointments that they seemingly have had for Yeah.

21:17 Semi offs About a year. Shots. Right?

21:19 Just about a about a year straight where every single time it's amazing on benchmarks and then the the sort of lived experience that people have is less impressive.

21:30 I think Gemini three. I thought Gemini three had like a good flavor to it. Maybe it was a bit overly bench max, but it felt like it wasn't too verbose. It felt like it sort of answered questions in like one page of text. Yeah.

21:41 And so I could like see it and see the answer and kind of parse it easy as opposed to getting, like, pages and pages and pages and pages with some LLMs do. It could be a little bit much. I was confused by this because it feels like the the the hierarchy... Like, with with, like, Luna, Terra, Soul, Astra, I kind of understand that, like, the moon is smaller than the Earth. The Earth is smaller than the sun.

22:08 The sun is smaller than the celestial bodies. Same thing with, Anthropic, where it's like a sonnet is shorter than an opus. A mythos is bigger. I kind of understood that.

22:20 Yeah.

22:20 This is interesting because they're going in maybe the opposite direction depending on how you rank them. So argon is the eighteenth atomic number whereas carbon's number six. And so does that leave them open to do a a lithium, a high... A helium, a hydrogen model that's, like, bigger? Are they gonna go that direction?

22:41 I like that they have a name...

22:43 Think they're gonna do a helium model?

22:45 Yes. I I think the helium model could be the biggest model from DeepMind in years. It could change everything. It would be the... It would be significantly bigger than their new carbon model.

23:01 And the helium model will sell extremely well. You'll see it showing up on the ramp index any any moment now when they launch the helium model.

23:10 Yeah. But it it does sort of beg the question, yeah, like what is the what what is the taxonomy here? It's kinda cool that they left a lot space between carbon and argon for sodium, magnesium.

23:24 Sodium. Sodium. Honestly...

23:26 Neon, aluminum. I love salt. Silicon's in there. Phosphorus, sulfur.

23:30 I would have liked...

23:31 Sulfur model.

23:32 I would have

23:32 liked some more fear mongering. They could do plutonium.

23:34 Yeah. Fluorine. Well, that's really deep. So in the... This is what I'm saying.

23:38 In the deep mind taxonomy right now, plutonium would sound like a really scary model but it would actually be much smaller than carbon because it goes from carbon's the biggest and best then argon at eight... At the 18 atomic number is smaller and then you go way down to plutonium and it's actually like the least effective, the least smart model in theory. I don't know. It's cool....

24:03 Do Gemini five nuke.

24:06 Nuke. Yeah. We... Wait. Don't you have a button for that?

24:09 I thought we had a button for nuke.

24:11 No. I think we I think we removed.

24:12 I think it's too too too aggressive for the show. Oh, here we go. Tyler has the truth there. Gemini plutonium is coming in any minute now. No.

24:22 The truth nuke is good. Really slow still. The longest soundboard effect we have. But this this all feels like, okay, a year ago people were talking about like the naming schemes at the labs don't make any sense. OpenAI was probably the worst offender with like four o and then like you'd go to four five, which was a bigger model but it was slower.

24:45 And then there was like Omni versus Fast mode. And it was like too much and everyone was like, I don't get it. And then and then it was like five four, five five, five six. And then eventually, OpenAI said, okay, we're we're going to use a human legible, not just purely numbers. We're gonna go Sarah, Luna, Soul, Astra.

25:06 And that, I feel like, makes a lot of... A lot more sense to people. It's just more intuitive. And so I like that OpenAI has adopted that format. I like that Google has adopted that format. And I hope that the version numbers kind of melt away. And you're just in the world of like, okay, like big model for this task, small model for that task. And and it's a little bit it's a little bit easier to just intuitively get a grasp of whatever model is

25:31 capable Anyways. But... Amazing benchmarks. Good bet. Excited to see the reactions.

25:36 Yeah. And... And

25:38 the ramp data.

25:39 Yeah. In other news.

25:41 Yep.

25:42 OpenAI. First, let me tell

25:44 you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Take me through it.

25:50 OpenAI plans to buy Google's chips as part of its AI build out. The new... Like, first we had... So now we have TPUs. Mhmm.

26:02 Last week it was it was OpenAI models on GCP. Yeah. Feels like a start of a new era.

26:10 Yeah. I mean, sort of a new era. I don't know. I mean, yeah. I guess OpenAI was founded because they were like Google's bad.

26:18 Right?

26:19 Yeah. That's what

26:19 I'm saying. Yeah. That's a good point. Now, it's like, they're not that bad. But this is the same thing where like Ethropica and Elon.

26:26 It's like, you know, very very diametrically opposed, you know, politically.

26:30 But yeah. And...

26:31 They got compute and we need compute. Yeah. So Yeah. Business above all. Business solves everything.

26:38 Let's give it up for business.

26:39 Let's give it up for business.

26:41 Business solves everything.

26:42 Dylan Patel says semi analysis clients had this already. Woah. Screenshot.

26:48 A little victory lap.

26:49 AI labs largest lease ever more massive deals in the pipeline. AMD taking share question mark. OpenAI's quarter is one eight gigawatt multi phase commitment in Ohio with NVIDIA backstopping 4.25 gigawatts. It's the largest single leasing commitment we have ever seen. Cool.

27:04 Addition, we believe that OpenAI is discussing with NeoClouds for both GPU a as a service and TPU as a service. We think there's a one gigawatt TPU commitment, and OpenAI is looking for sites.

27:16 Yep.

27:16 Anthropic leased 1.7 gigawatts this quarter with notably 360 megawatts in Queensland, Australia. Let's give it up for Compute Down Under. Signed on September 16 with operations starting in the first quarter of twenty eight. The largest overseas leased by an AI lab this quarter. The 1.7 gigawatts includes one gigawatt backstop by Google, but also a large site where we aren't sure yet who will provide the credits support.

27:42 Do think AI researchers are gonna be okay with doing inference in Australia? That's kind of controversial. Right? Because they're known for throwing another shrimp on the Barbie. That's rough.

27:53 You're gonna have to do a truce. No more throwing shrimp on the Barbie. Just fosters. Just enjoy your fosters.

27:59 Enjoy your fosters.

28:00 And and stick to inference and fosters. No more shrimp. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.

28:09 CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Just to close out that, it's it's just like every lab is using every part of the animal. Like, it's the, you know, they're fully

28:19 They're going whole hog.

28:20 They're going whole hog. They're using everything everything they possibly can. Every lab is using every chip and every data center and every hyperscaler and every neo cloud. They're using it all for all different things and different chips will be better at different models and different part pieces of the inference stack and like everything will be used. Very good for the like if you've been in semis and and you know, neo clouds and all this stuff like Rising Tide will like lift all boats as everything becomes...

28:49 Like there was a moment where it was like, oh, if you made the wrong architectural decision, like you would get smoked. That was the theory. And now it's like, oh, actually these models, at least a piece of the models can be like used in niche areas for different things. And so even if even if one chip is better at something, faster, but but less smarter smarter but slower, like like, there will be an optimal way to to get a model running on that. And with AI agents, it's pretty easy to port to different things.

29:17 I think we saw that from the AMD coverage we did with Lisa Sue where Anthropic Vibe coded their AMD implementation, like, pretty quickly. So good for anyone who's betting on oligopoly in silicon. Rougher if you were like, this will not be a car like market, but still very, very early. Still a lot of dependence on NVIDIA, obviously. So nothing too scary there, but just interesting that everything is getting used by everyone.

29:44 So Yeah.

29:45 That's kind of my update. Anyway, open source

29:50 source... Yeah. So Dax over at OpenCode posted yesterday. He says, to put what I'm saying about demand in context, OpenRouter is successful model model router. You can almost serve a 100% of their deep sea traffic yesterday on a single g b 300 rack.

30:06 This is worth 6 to 7,000,000 even if there's 10 x this demand. Secretly, that's still less than a 100,000,000 of compute.

30:14 This is crazy. This is crazy because I don't believe, I mean, I don't know. Maybe people are inferencing DeepSeek from Neo Clouds directly and not going through Open Router. But I would be very skeptical that there are large enterprises out there that are saying, oh, yeah. We have a million dollars a day of inference.

30:33 Yes. A lot people are saying, well, this doesn't, yeah, this doesn't factor Not people that have

30:40 Their own GPUs on prem.

30:41 Yep. But the the elephant in the room is the the base tens the models, the fireworks, the together AI.

30:49 So it's going through that and it's not going on

30:51 at all? Lambda's, you know, like a very very long list Okay. Of other clouds that can

30:56 Okay.

30:57 That can serve these models. Yeah. So I would expect that that is where that is where the that's where the billions of dollars of of inference spend is happening.

31:06 Sure. Do we have a do we have a reference point for what percent of deep sea inference is going through OpenRouter versus going direct?

31:14 Oh, think it's impossible to know.

31:16 Okay. Well, if you wanna get in the game, there's a 300 rack AI supercomputer powered by 9,600 Nvidia a 100 GPUs. It's on eBay. Can just buy...

31:27 Head over to eBay.

31:28 If you were thinking about starting a Neo Cloud, getting in the token selling business, hit up your local banker. Get a credit line for 60 mil. Go on eBay, click it. Fair market value for this?

31:42 EBay up 16% over the last six months likely because people are realizing that this... It's a compute marketplace.

31:49 Apparently. Yeah. Fair market value for this would be closer to 50, maybe 55,000,000. But you could still...

31:56 I just love to have this screenshot. It says in six carts.

32:00 In six

32:01 carts? Like six carts.

32:02 Only people have added it.

32:03 Added to carts. Two available. Wait. They have two available of these? Wow.

32:09 Yeah. Interesting. Pretty pretty solid depreciation too. This this hardware originally sold for something like what was what was this originally originally went for? Let me let me find it. It's selling for 60,000,000 now. The original hardware was almost 300,000,000. So there is depreciation, but there's still some value there. Of course, there's the a one hundred's a seven year old chip now, something like that. And so, you're banging the table.

32:45 You're you're you're hitting by? Are you bidding?

32:47 I got... Was getting excited.

32:48 Oh, you're just getting excited. Okay.

32:50 You know, very old chip, still worth a lot of money.

32:53 Yeah. Totally. It's the

32:54 price of one dinosaur.

32:56 Oh, yeah. Which Yeah. One would you do? Jordy, which one are you going with?

33:00 Are you going Gus, the the t rex?

33:02 T rex? Or are

33:03 you going these Jeep...

33:03 I think

33:06 I'm still to to my oldest dismay, I'm still going I'm going for the GPUs.

33:12 You're going for the GPUs?

33:13 Just because I think Malibu Inference Yeah. Would be Really good. Great name

33:17 Yep.

33:17 For a Neo Cloud.

33:19 Yeah. And everyone's been making that claim. Oh, like, put the data centers in, luxury towns. And you're like, yeah, got one right here.

33:26 Yeah. You could Literally in my backyard.

33:28 GPUs up in the shape of a dinosaur. Yes. So that you have a beautiful architecture in your foyer. You know, you of course need to add a lot of cooling. Because all of a sudden your entryway is the hot aisle.

33:41 That'd be rough. But it would make a statement. People would come in, they know you mean business. They know they know you do

33:47 That's right.

33:48 You do local compute. You're not paying API pricing, you know. You're saving dollars every...

33:54 On earth does Malaysia have so much compute, John? Can you take

33:59 a Nobody knows.

33:59 It's a mystery. Nobody knows.

34:00 Nobody knows.

34:01 Nobody knows. It is a total mystery.

34:03 This was the first story we talked about on this show. The very first show. Wow. Very first show I opened up the Wall Street Journal and and there was an article right on the cover about Malaysia being the new the new data center hub.

34:18 We gotta send you down there.

34:19 They are the Switzerland of AI. That was sort of the framing was that they can buy compute from The US and resell it in China. And so that was an incredible advantage and they had a lot of power between the different locations there and the government was sort of set up to allow a lot of compute build out. Pretty pretty interesting. They they have a lot.

34:44 It's not that much compared to America. I mean, Malaysia is not the green bar here. They're not the red bar. The red bar is China.

34:52 I'm actually I'm surprised

34:55 They are true.

34:55 The EU has more compute than Malaysia.

34:57 Okay.

34:58 Yeah. You're back. Aren't you?

34:59 No. Because the EU is huge and Malaysia is like a pretty small country.

35:04 I know. But yes. They they... Malaysia seems to be going so long.

35:07 Yeah. Also, Malaysia is interesting because it's sort of like the the AI industrial hub to Singapore. So Singapore is the the global financial hub, the port city. So everything's coming in there. You get stuff delivered through Singapore, Singapore and then you set it up in Malaysia just a hop, skip and a jump over like a small river or small, I don't know, small waterway to get to where you actually need to deliver the final product.

35:33 So interesting. But yes, I imagine that a lot of a lot of Chinese AI lab compute. If they're doing training, they're probably using like a Malaysian neo cloud that's racking NVIDIA chips. And they can because there aren't as many trade restrictions, think. Something like that. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. I know.

36:01 Two Sequoia Capital portfolio companies

36:04 Okay.

36:04 Citadel Securities and OpenAI have teamed up with Sequoia. That's a true sentence. Very... It is almost unbelievable.

36:13 Yeah. It doesn't read like that. It reads like we're Sequoia and we're brokering a deal between two large important institutions.

36:20 No. These are just portcos.

36:21 These are just portcos.

36:22 They're just

36:22 like we got a Portco collab going on. We made the intro at our CEO summit.

36:26 Yep.

36:27 Ken, have you met Sam? You guys should do something.

36:30 You guys really gotta talk.

36:31 You guys gotta talk. Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll intro you over email.

36:34 Sequoia announced no limit a bot building tournament.

36:37 It's cool.

36:38 Hosted by Citadel and OpenAI and Sequoia. Teams of one or two get sixty minutes to build a poker bot from scratch. Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds. Open to university students in recent... Are

36:49 they taking

36:50 a shot at Tyler with that?

36:52 Absolutely.

36:53 It's brutal.

36:54 Because he's neither a recent grad or a university student.

36:56 Neither. He's neither.

36:59 He specifically set this up.

37:01 They could have just said They're

37:02 not allowed

37:02 to They could drop just said young people. Open to

37:04 young people. They literally are like

37:05 Open to young go No.

37:06 No. They specifically don't want dropout.

37:07 They specifically don't want dropout.

37:08 They're like anybody that had a bright future in academia and quit to work on a podcast is absolutely not welcome to to to compete in this. We don't want you.

37:19 I'm I'm sort of offended. I love Sequoia. I love OpenAI. I love I love Citadel Securities. But, yeah.

37:27 Rough. Give us a break.

37:29 No. It's it is really funny. Dropouts, not welcome. Not welcome. Also probably No.

37:34 I'm sure I'm sure they do I'm sure they do allow that.

37:37 Yes. But but yeah. This is this is gonna be very fun. I... Yeah.

37:43 I wonder I wonder where where you could go with that. That's interesting. Sixty minutes. That's pretty quick. And I wonder what what tools you'll be able to use, how much prep you can do, and and also, like, what the actual API is. Because I... I'm I'm increasingly interested in in building these types of bots, but doing it with computer use and and having it only see what the human sees. I want basically a camera pointed at the screen with like a button clicking. I I want as much friction in the system as possible. And I'm I'm unimpressed now.

38:16 I've moved the goalpost since you could just interact with the API. But who knows? This is still very very interesting and will probably be superhuman as I as I anticipate. Anyway, 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.

38:37 Can I talk about Turbo Puffer for a second?

38:40 Yeah. Okay. So Please do.

38:41 So Turbo Puffer. You've probably seen the puffer jacket that Jordy has worn on the show a number of times. It is now available for sale, I believe. I think There

38:52 we go.

38:53 It's only gonna cost you a $100,000,000 of contracted value with them. You need... I think you might need to be a customer, or it might be for sale. But it's a beautiful puffer jacket from Turbo Puffer. There's a great profile on Turbo Puffer in Colossus Mag today.

39:07 It's really cool. It frames Turbo Puffer as, like, the only normal tech company in the world while everyone in San Francisco is, like, crashing out and, like, being, like, AI doom, like, the Turbo Puffer folks are just, like

39:17 They're just puffing.

39:17 We're building the business. Yeah. Yeah. We're building the business.

39:19 Buffers. And we... Yeah. We started working on that probably over a year ago.

39:23 Simon's been on the show a couple times.

39:25 No. I'm talking about...

39:26 Oh. Oh, The puffer jacket.

39:27 Yeah. Started working on it. Yeah. Making clothing is very very hard.

39:30 It takes a long time.

39:31 It's very very very hard. But finally...

39:36 AI will never get a product in Target. It will take so long. They'll just be like, ugh, I lost my context window. I can't I can't get it. Yeah.

39:45 Turbo Puffer is profiled in Colossus. There's some interesting strategies that Simon's employed. He has this term, a coinage. He calls it ambition bullying. So early investors kept asking Simon, how are you going to build a unicorn? You only worked at Shopify before. But he thought it was ridiculous to pretend he could know whether the business would become a billion dollar company. Spoiler alert, it's well on its way, but he calls the pressure ambition bullying. So VCs come and they'll bully you into being more ambitious than necessarily you want to be. Distracts you from actually just putting one foot in front of the other.

40:31 Finally, Lockheed Gurman was the investor willing to accept the founder's plan. The Lockheed nator. Locked it down. He said, work hard to find product market fit but shut the company down if it's not working after a year. And Lockheed said, that's fine. I accept your pitch. And he invested 700 k at a $14,000,000 valuation. What a great investment.

40:53 Printing.

40:53 They also they also bought a fiber line just to avoid seven milliseconds of latency. Like, that's how obsessed they are with performance. So they discovered that traffic was traveling through Seattle, like talking to AWS and then getting back to their servers or something like that on Google Cloud. And this created a fifteen millisecond round trip. So instead of accepting the routing problem, one of the employees at Turbo Puffer located a private Internet exchange and purchased a direct fiber connection, reducing the round trip to eight milliseconds.

41:28 And, yeah, I mean, this stuff matters because TurboPuffer does a lot of search products. It has to be fast. It's a vector database, but it's effective not for like the big inference where you're cooking a pro query, deep research query. It's much more important that it's very quick in terms of knowledge retrieval. Can't be waiting for it.

41:48 Every millisecond matters and that's what the Turbo Puffer team prioritizes. And so now they're doing over $100,000,000 in ARR with roughly 50 employees and so they've been crushing. Traces. So congrats to the...

42:00 Fifteen milliseconds additional is too high. That's the type of ping that'll get you killed in counterstrike.

42:05 Counterstrike. That's true. That's true. You need under ten seconds for ultimate fragging. I agree.

42:10 Well, 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.

42:21 Instinct. Lucas. Oh. Please. The grubber grubber inator.

42:25 Lucas Grubber. Gurmanator. Says Gurmanator. Instinct is currently raising at 30,000,000,000. A 100 to 500 to 2.5 to 10 to 30 in sub one year. If you're still not inside the private market, this should be a good signal to pivot aggressively. Wealth creation is gonna be heavily skewed towards private investors over the coming decade. TBP. Yes. Yes.

42:53 There is

42:54 more risk and there is more reward. And so that's why venture capital firms diversify and Yeah. LPs diversify across venture funds. But it is...

43:03 People people are naturally crashing out over this. Not not even the take that's that's that's embedded in this post. Yeah. Just just that trajectory. Yeah.

43:17 It is insanely aggressive, if it's true. But again, this business has been growing so rapidly.

43:24 Yeah.

43:25 And the interesting thing is like it's very hard to judge Instinct's growth relative to Muse simply because Instinct doesn't have an app. So it'd be really fascinating to see like The App Store where would they sit in the App Store rankings. Right?

43:38 Yeah. Yeah. What is what is Muse doing on App Store ratings right now? Because it was at the top of the App Store for a while. So, it's number one in productivity, but not number one overall because TikTok pro is

44:05 And Vinted, of course. Vinted.

44:09 Yeah. Vinted. I was on Vinted. I I was looking at some stuff. Picking up some picking up some Rick Owens head to toe.

44:16 It's coming. It's coming. Jordy said I couldn't be a lifestyle influencer, but I think if I pull up in the Rick Owens, the Supreme, the Bottega top hat, you're gonna be apologizing.

44:28 I didn't say I just say couldn't.

44:32 I just I just... You literally said you should lean into comedy. And I'm like, and then and then my counter example is just a bunch more comedy. Yeah. It's so unmarried.

44:41 A 100%. Anyway, you can now text your dot. Yeah. So there are a ton of these AI agents that everyone sees

44:47 Anyways. Anyways. So the other thing with NSYNC is like so few people have real information around the business Yeah. That it's impossible to... Everyone can give a take Sure.

44:58 Right? Because the number has... The valuation has grown so quickly, so fast. Mhmm. But it's just really tough when you don't have the information. Right? And so you're just... It's entirely... Investors are making a decision based on what they're seeing in the business. Everyone else is giving takes based on how they feel about the number going up really fast.

45:18 Yeah. And, yeah, it's hard it's hard to hard to see exactly like what... You can only imagine kind of the way that they're positioning the business, how they're... What what Noah's vision is and all that kind of thing. Yeah.

45:34 But... Also highlights like when new capability comes online from a frontier lab, it can be at the frontier of that new capability. But unless there is a commensurate marketing push, it not... It's not guaranteed that it gets adoption. Mhmm.

45:51 Because you only have so much screen real estate in the ChatGPT app, in the Cloud app. Anthropic has Duet now. I saw the announcement, but I haven't seen a lot of advertising around it. And so there's plenty of people that are like, oh, yeah. I have clogged code in my terminal, but, like, I'm a muse guy.

46:08 Or, like, I use GrockBot in Slack, but then I use Codecs for coding. And... Or I'm cursor over here and instinct in my personal life. And there's so much effort that needs to go in. And so instinct is at least focused on, like, let's get this value prop in front of people. And and I think that's sort of, like, the value of, like, maybe it's oligopolistic, maybe it's a big market, maybe there is a winner take all.

46:31 Like Yeah.

46:32 All the investors are still, like, piecing that together, but they're just seeing, like, incredible growth. Everyone we've talked to has been, the charts are incredible. Like, every every month is just huge growth, even on... Even while being attacked by Mark Zuckerberg, being attacked by Dot and and Duet. Like, there's a whole bunch of other companies going after this.

46:49 I have to imagine Google's gonna do something soon. They've launched similar products in the past, and it's so in line with them. They already have your email. They have Google Maps that has all your reservations. They own they own the Michelin Guide, I think, or... It's not Michelin. It's the... Some some star rating service that's like Zagat. Is that it? You know that one?

47:12 Yeah. I don't know. Okay. I don't

47:14 But they bought they bought like a like a restaurant review

47:17 Yeah.

47:17 Like brand. And so they have a ton of advantages there. They have Google Voice. They've done service to make calls on your behalf already like years and years ago with AI. What what is it?

47:28 Zagat? Is that how you pronounce it? Z

47:30 a g a t.

47:31 Yeah. And so they they have so much infrastructure but they're always a little bit slower on the product side than like an Instinct which is just a couple people moving really fast. So...

47:39 Yeah. The crazy thing is to compare Instinct. Yeah. Instinct if they're raising at 30,000,000,000 to where Cursor was when they were raising at 30, which like massive competition from the labs. Yep.

47:51 And some questions around how they would how... Yeah. How they would handle that that competition basically competing with their suppliers Yep. Right, in some ways. But I believe at the time, Cursor had like north of $1,000,000,000 of revenue. Right?

48:04 More worried about the margins. Right?

48:05 Yeah. Their margins weren't great but at least people were giving them, like, billions of dollars. Totally. Right?

48:09 And that's not

48:10 happening. And so with instinct, part of what's jarring is that you have the same level of competition and potentially even more. Right? Because it's like you have the major AI players. The major AI players and then you also have Zac...

48:23 With Cursor, was like Cursor was the lead IDE and then you had Windsurf coming from behind nipping at their heels. But you didn't really have a product that was a direct competitor from OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, really. Right? In like the Yeah. In the smart idea.

48:37 It's cloud code and codex.

48:39 But those were those were terminal agents. And and they did disrupt.

48:42 Yeah. I'm saying they're ultimately competing Totally. Totally. You know.

48:46 But like in terms of like the actual product experience, like if you wanted to at least Yeah. Review some of the codes still be in that hybrid Centaur model, it was really Cursor was far and away number one. And then Windsurf was kind of nipping at the heels. But no... None of the big labs had direct competitor products.

49:03 And then all of a sudden it was like... But flipping it around, if you're looking at the Cursor example, you might say, okay, yeah, they don't have the revenue, but they have the the consumer adoption. And look at what happened with Cursor, felt crazy at 10 or 20 or whatever, but got the acquisition done and you're looking at Amazon and Apple and saying, well, I see the money. They... There's the money to buy this company at a valuation above where I'm investing at 30 and so it could happen if Apple or Amazon make a crazy move.

49:37 Yeah.

49:37 I don't know. Maybe Google too. But the price is getting high.

49:41 Yeah.... From an antitrust standpoint? Like, all these companies...

49:46 It should it should 100% be allowed. It's the most competitive industry right now. It's like not a knife fight for the personal agents. Yeah. Like like, you're going up against the monopoly guy, Mark Zuckerberg.

49:56 Like, oh wait, you're like Amazon, you're you're acquiring instinct to to take a shot at open Yeah. Anthropic and meta, like go go to town with that Yeah. I would think. But Yeah. Again, I can never predict antitrust. So like you might be right. Like they might just say, no, you're big. You can't make a big acquisition.

50:18 Yeah. Period.

50:18 Yeah. Like it it just... It it might be framed differently. But as a as a consumer, as an analyst of the industry, I see them as like this is the most competitive tech category we've had.

50:30 Yeah. So taking out an upstart doesn't actually change the competitive...

50:35 Yes. At the same time, we didn't see Perplexity get acquired. And that was a similar one where where Apple and and Amazon, they didn't really have like a chatbot experience. And, of course, Anthropic launched Claude, that app, and then Google launched Gemini, which was like a direct competitor to ChatGPT, the classic LLM experience, the chat app. Apple and Amazon never picked up.

50:58 Just a consumer home screen chat app, period. So they might not jump at this category either. I don't know. But if they did, if they... Like, if if Apple bought Perplexity, I think there's other reasons why they might not. But if they did a year ago or two years ago, it shouldn't have turned antitrust heads. But again

51:16 Yeah.

51:17 The FTC is very unpredictable on these things. Anyway, let me try.

51:20 And the largest Apple acquisition in history was Beats. Right?

51:24 That's right. Yeah. I mean, just it's not in

51:26 their DNA. So, yeah, it's not in their DNA. Be a crazy...

51:30 Ternus might just be like, I'm a

51:31 But Ternus...

51:31 I'm a wild man.

51:33 He could be. Let's ask... We'll ask the Gurmanator.

51:36 Yeah, we will.

51:37 But yeah, I I think like the the the challenge with with perplexity and instinct is like once you get in the 10 range, it becomes like you... It takes like a founder led company to make a deal like that. Right? We've seen this with Zuck. Yep.

51:53 We've seen this with, Elon. Right? With Cursor. Yep. I agree. And and so like doing these like talent acquisitions at north of 10,000,000,000 Yep. You have to have exceptional levels of control and conviction

52:06 No. That's

52:07 great. And be able to be very bold Yep. And I just don't see that Jassy or Ternus doing anything like that.

52:12 No. I completely agree. Because the shareholders will be like, wait, even if you're paying in stock, you're deluding me and I don't like that. Whereas Elon will be like, I don't care. Yeah.

52:19 Like, I don't care.

52:20 No. It it was an amazing play.

52:23 And, critically, Gurman did not have an enterprise motion. They did not have developer adoption. Cursor gave them that. Gurman has Grok bot. Meta has Muse.

52:34 Like, they don't need Instinct. Yeah. So, yeah. Where where it goes. But then again, you know, maybe the market's so big that they just become a really big player in personal AI agents and they figure out how to make 5% on every transaction through whatever. They do some ads. They do some credit card stuff that we've discussed. They do some, you know, they they they prove Eric Souffert wrong. Agent to commerce does not turn out to be a mirage and then they start printing. Yeah.

53:01 But who knows? Or maybe Yeah.

53:03 People pay for But it's very possible that the... Yeah. The aqua hire horse has left the barn.

53:10 Potentially. Potentially. Speaking of horses, should we get to monkeys?

53:15 I think Well, we're gonna

53:16 bring in Mark Gurman in just a second. But one more fact. So Joe Lonsdale who was recently pictured, we said it was a private jet that he was calling in to CNBC on. We got a correction. We have to issue a correction.

53:30 It was actually a private jet or it was a private bus. He was on a bus with a private jet zoom background. I think that's what was going on. Right? Because it looked like a private jet behind him but...

53:41 You're you're accusing him of LARPing?

53:44 I don't know. All I'm saying is that we call it a private jet background and we were corrected by the media. And so we need to an issue...

53:52 Stand by. I stand by.

53:53 You're you're standing by...

53:54 My original stance.

53:55 I'm going... It was a private bus with a private jet background.

53:59 Yeah.

53:59 Zoom background. That's what's going on. Anyway, he's he's he's breeding monkeys. He's breeding 30,000 monkeys. He's getting in the monkey Do

54:06 you think this this came from like, Sattrini talking about the monkey bottleneck? And he was like, that's a good idea. I'm... No.

54:12 I don't think it was downstream of that. I think it happened simultaneously. I think I think at one point it was like it was like there's a company out there raising. There's rumors about that. Eight VC starts funding it.

54:22 It gets out a little bit more. A couple of people see the deal. And then, you know, semi analysis folks are talking about, the Sattrini folks are talking about and then Sattrini like writes the piece about it. I I I don't think it was like open up your phone, read Sattrini and then like go find... Go incubate a company or something.

54:38 This feels like it's been in the works for longer. I don't know.

54:40 You have to appreciate how this... The title of this article is probably for billions of people the most enraging headline there could ever be. Why this billionaire is backing up.

54:58 30,000 monkeys just to start. Anyway.

55:01 What are they gonna do with the monkeys?

55:03 They're gonna test drugs on them, Jordy. That's what they're gonna do. It's gonna be animal testing. That's gonna happen. Anyway, let me Why

55:09 this volunteer billionaire wants agents, meet the canvas.

55:12 Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system content. And we are overjoyed to be joined by Mark Gurman from Bloomberg here with us live in the TBP at Ultradome. Welcome back.

55:23 Thank you

55:24 so much for coming on down. It's to see you. Grab that controller. I'll grab mine. Have you been playing the new Call of Duty?

55:29 Are you gaming?

55:30 No. I I game when I have a chance.

55:33 Okay. When I

55:33 have time. There's a lot of work to be done with all the Apple Moves.

55:36 Work to

55:36 be done. They've got MacBook Pro this morning. Yes. MacBook Pro yesterday morning. IPad mini Monday morning.

55:44 Yes.

55:44 What's coming tomorrow? What's coming tomorrow?

55:48 I don't know. We're cool. I don't know. Maybe more cracked iPhone Duos. Who knows?

55:51 Oh, how how bad is this? I I saw like five iPhone Duos today. None of them were cracked. Seems like a little bit like people are trying to crack them.

55:59 Okay. Let's take

56:00 a step... How do you rate the durability test?

56:03 Let's take a step...

56:04 Did everything I did everything I possibly could to destroy this item. You

56:12 guys sound like you're owned by Apple right now. Okay?

56:15 I'm not. I'm not open AI. For me this morning.

56:19 It was the best of my life.

56:21 Really? I wanna... No. No. I wanna be clear that I have not been impressed with a single thing Apple has done in in like a decade.

56:29 Okay. Well, anyways.

56:31 I like I I just wanna be really clear. John John is a steel man. He can steel man everything.

56:35 I like the Apple Vision Pro.

56:37 Okay? That's insane. Okay.

56:40 I'm a big... I'm a I'm big home.... Guy. I'm a big...

56:44 Alright. It's my turn. There are people who have done iPhone Duo teardowns. Yep. People have purposely broken their iPhone Duos Yep.

56:51 Pouring a bag of sand on it Sure. Taking to the beach, dipping it in Diet Coke, whatever. Mhmm. Right? Then there are people who've used their iPhone Duo as normal. And they have run into this issue where the display cracks. The way it works, they're using the phone and they're opening it, it feels a little tight. And then they keep going and then boom, there's a big crack. And the cause of this is a manufacturing defect related to one of the components in the hinge where there's this one bar in the hinge that gets stuck under the display and then just punctures the screen and creates that crack.

57:22 Okay.

57:22 Now Apple has come out and said a small number of people have had this issue.

57:27 Mhmm.

57:27 But for Apple, you know, small number, that could be tens of thousands of units. We don't know exactly how many units it is Okay. But there are people facing this issue. This first started cropping up on Twitter Mhmm. Then on Reddit Mhmm.

57:38 And some of the Apple news forums over the weekend starting when this came out on Friday. I saw this and I immediately started investigating. I can't do a story based off of people just saying that this happened. Yeah. So what I did is I put a tweet out Sunday night. You guys may have seen it. I said, if anyone has had this iPhone crack issue, shoot me a

57:56 note. Mhmm.

57:56 I wake up Monday morning, my inbox is filled with people sending

57:59 in

57:59 pictures, videos, stories, proof of receipts, correspondence with Apple support Okay. Lots of... Genius Bar and authorized reseller paperwork. And so I did a story. Eighteen minutes after I put my story out, Apple finally responded.

58:12 Okay. Right? They didn't respond until then. I think they know what's up.

58:15 Feet to the fire.

58:16 Think they know.

58:17 Feet to the fire.

58:17 Think they know who people listen to and call......

58:20 That caught you.

58:21 Standing by. So, yeah. It's it's a real issue. And what's bothered me...

58:24 I've got

58:25 multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. I like I'm at Universal Studios, right,

58:30 like you're going through Jurassic

58:31 There's influencers coming out and making these comments like, oh, yeah. My iPhone's fine because I haven't purposely broke it. Like, iJustine said this. Mhmm. It's completely ridiculous.

58:41 It almost feels like this is something that Apple wants to say. Mhmm. Like, you're folding it wrong. Okay? Yeah. But they look really crappy for saying it. Okay. And they're even coming on saying, you know, this is a real issue. Can go to Apple Care and get it Yeah. But here's the problem. You buy this phone, you wait in line twelve hours for it. Yep. You have this crack issue. You go back to the Apple...

59:01 Hard for me to relate to this because I thought... Right?

59:04 You go back you go back to the Apple store you bought it from. Yeah. You're SOL. We have no inventory. Of course.

59:10 Of course. Right? You can't get a report.

59:11 And these are the most die hard fans because they waited...

59:12 These are the most die So hard

59:14 they're pissed off. Okay. In fact, one of my good friends

59:17 Mhmm.

59:18 He hasn't... He bought an iPhone Duo Mhmm. And his device didn't have the screen crack problem, but it has a broken camera. So from day one Okay. The diagnostic message popped up and said, you replaced the camera on your iPhone Duo with a With a name?

59:35 With a foreign part, with a fake iPhone camera part. And I love my friend. He has no idea how to replace a camera in his iPhone Duo. Okay? So I couldn't vouch for that. He didn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This... You open the camera, it just shows black. And so he goes back to the Apple store to try to get it replaced. They have no inventory.

59:51 Of course.

59:51 Okay? Of course. And then they tell him, we'll reserve an iPhone Duo for you at the Apple store and we'll call you when it comes in. And they've got an inventory since. There's like these online trackers.

1:00:04 You think they've ever called them? Oh. I told him the other day, I'm like, listen, Joe, they're never gonna call you.

1:00:08 Yeah. Okay? You're gonna

1:00:09 have to just return this thing and buy it on your own. So the process of fixing these issues and getting this resolved for people from the beginning has just been a dumpster fire.

1:00:17 Yeah.

1:00:18 But they're working through the quirks and hopefully this gets resolved. At least I'm happy that I've had no issues. Yeah. I love the iPhone Duo. I'll tell you that right now.

1:00:25 I have Oh,

1:00:26 yeah. Okay.

1:00:27 This thing this thing is is is...

1:00:29 What is that? Is it... Did you have a case on there? What's that

1:00:32 matte texture? Is the... Yeah. This is the Apple Duo case. Where's the camera?

1:00:36 Oh, it's really...

1:00:37 You know, don't wanna do free advertising for that. But anyways, I bought the...

1:00:40 You look like you're owned by Apple.

1:00:41 Yeah. Sure. I got the the folio the folio case initially. Okay. Piece of crap.

1:00:46 Okay. Okay. It's... And and that's the official Apple case?

1:00:48 Official Apple... On the official Apple standard case.

1:00:52 Oh, okay.

1:00:52 So if you're gonna get the official Apple case, don't get the folio. Okay. The problem is there's so many features...

1:00:56 Why do you think you need a case? These things are so durable. Fair point. Fair point.

1:01:01 Pretty loose. I bet you won't throw it across the studio right now in front of everyone on live.

1:01:05 Challenge accepted, dude.

1:01:07 I bet you won't

1:01:07 do You're do it. The softest thrower. Yeah. Frisbee. Alright.

1:01:10 Right onto the carpet. Alright.

1:01:12 Under the carpet.... Bang for the cracks.

1:01:13 Under the carpet.

1:01:13 No. Don't do it.

1:01:14 Don't do it.

1:01:16 Oh, did it make it? I believe it. I think

1:01:18 it survived. It's... That

1:01:21 was a good throw.

1:01:22 Eric. You

1:01:22 didn't... Oh, no.

1:01:25 Come on. What are guys doing?

1:01:27 Tyler, why would you throw his phone like that?

1:01:29 Okay.

1:01:30 So It's good.

1:01:32 It's good. No cracks?

1:01:33 Yeah. No cracks. Wow. You're good. Yeah.

1:01:35 Good. Mean, that is

1:01:36 a machine... That that is a product that's been

1:01:38 That is fantastic.

1:01:39 Going strong for twenty years. Yeah. You know?

1:01:41 See? Who throws it?

1:01:43 I can't I can't believe

1:01:44 you I can't believe you did that.

1:01:45 I'm not doing that with my duo. Anyways, the duo has so many amazing features that use both displays

1:01:49 Sure.

1:01:50 Such as taking a FaceTime and showing the person on other side. But that flap on the folio, it just covers that up and makes it pretty cumbersome to use. And so I've had great experience with the cheaper Sure. $80 Apple standard case.

1:02:02 If you

1:02:03 get a Duo, highly recommend that. Cool. I also saw Zag has a nice case too. Yeah. It's like a clear case with a...

1:02:09 What has been your experience on the apps properly getting the iPhone Duo updated?

1:02:15 Well, That was that was my thing. That was my thing. How did Apple allow this phone to launch without all the most popular apps being like at least moderately optimized?

1:02:24 Well, I'm long enough I'm around long enough to know you guys are too. This happens every time there's a form factor change. They went from the three g s to the four. Yep.

1:02:32 But this is the biggest...

1:02:34 Why? I mean, can't they just call all the developers and say here's the prompt that you put into your AI agent to

1:02:40 update Apparently, that's funny. Apparently, the SDK for the iPhone two didn't come out until

1:02:44 like a week or two

1:02:44 before the phone went on sale. Okay. So this was, you know, a pretty

1:02:46 tight Okay. Even if you're even if you're best friends with Apple, like you're Disney plus developer or something and you're close. Don't know if Disney's

1:02:54 Disney plus,

1:02:55 but like...

1:02:55 They were updated from day one. But

1:02:57 how long have we had... Instagram and YouTube?

1:03:00 Instagram day one, YouTube day one. It's been less than a week.

1:03:03 Okay. The big stuff's the big stuff's good.

1:03:04 I can count on one hand.

1:03:06 The number of apps that feel weird?

1:03:07 That feel weird at this point. And so reviews missed the mark Okay. On the iPhone Duo, I

1:03:12 would Jump the

1:03:13 They jumped the gun. Yeah. Things are nonissue because...

1:03:15 You just wait a week and it's all refreshed.

1:03:17 It's pretty much refreshed.

1:03:18 It can't be that hard.

1:03:19 The reviews focused on a few things. The reviews focused on camera quality, the reviews focused on touch ID, and the reviews focused on the app issues. The app issue is BS. It doesn't exist. The cameras are not as bad as people seem to think.

1:03:32 I've done a lot of face times on the interior camera and it's perfectly useful for the for the... For that use case. Yeah. Touch ID has been a complete non issue for me.

1:03:42 Okay.

1:03:43 You can enroll up to five fingers and so I've done multiple fingers twice. Sure. I have...

1:03:48 Oh, yeah. Doing twice. Wait. You did there?

1:03:50 Yeah. Did there. Oh, you got the and so for me, I'm already used to Touch ID after less than a week. Sure. It's a complete non issue.

1:03:57 Okay.

1:03:57 The real problem with the iPhone Duo Mhmm. Is there are some software quirks that unfortunately made it through version one point o and hopefully they fix these

1:04:06 Mhmm.

1:04:07 With a software update relatively soon. Unfortunately, the the cadence of software updates is so slow for Apple compared to what you see in the AI world Mhmm. That they need to shake

1:04:15 that up. Does it have Apple intelligence yet? Like can you ask... Yeah.

1:04:18 It has... Well, you call it Apple intelligence. I call it. It's an Apple not so intelligent

1:04:22 but Still?

1:04:23 You know. But they're

1:04:24 Gemini in there. I I like the Gemini model. Like if I ask you the question like tell me the history of the Roman Empire like, Gemini is gonna give me, like, a essay about that that's gonna be written clearly.

1:04:34 It works. But the damage has been done on the Siri brand.

1:04:37 Okay.

1:04:37 Yeah. That most people are probably just gonna go to check GPT or the Gemini app.

1:04:40 No. They honestly... They they... The damage has been done to Siri, it's been done to Apple Intelligence, they need they need a new...

1:04:45 I don't know why they didn't use Siri AI as a as a sort of fork in the road moment to rebrand their voice assistant to something new. Mhmm. I thought it was really weird. They just tacked AI onto the Siri name. Obviously, Siri is in popular culture but not for a good way.

1:05:01 Yeah. No. It's the punchline.

1:05:03 The thing that the reviews missed on the iPhone Duo are the software quirk. So for instance, there's no picture in picture FaceTime when you have the thing opened. Oh. Which means like I'm... I wanna be using two apps at once and then I want a box in the corner with the FaceTime of the person

1:05:16 I'm video conferencing.

1:05:16 Oh, you can do that on the normal phone.

1:05:18 You could

1:05:18 do that on the normal phone. Interesting.

1:05:20 That's awesome.

1:05:21 I believe you can

1:05:21 do it

1:05:21 on the outer screen on this guy Yeah. But... For some reason it's not working

1:05:24 on the inner screen right now. Hopefully... What

1:05:26 you want to

1:05:26 be doing. Other thing...

1:05:27 I'm FaceTime, Gurman, I want be scrolling reels.

1:05:29 Yeah. There you go. Exactly. And then the other thing I do all the time is I'm doing multiple things and then I get a text come in. Yeah.

1:05:35 Maybe it's from you. And want to just reply really quickly because you do pull down the notification.

1:05:39 I think that's a great feature.

1:05:40 Cool.

1:05:41 Has not worked for me Mhmm. On the inner screen. And so they need to fix that

1:05:44 bug too.

1:05:44 So once they get those bugs resolved, I think they're in good shape. I love...

1:05:48 Thing now though for Apple.

1:05:50 I guess. I would never I would never use a non foldable iPhone at this point.

1:05:53 I'm Really?

1:05:54 Completely sold on the bigger screen. Okay. I think it's absolutely home run product.

1:05:58 And walk me through like...

1:06:00 Let's go.

1:06:01 Yeah. That's that's that's huge. When are you using the outer screen versus the inner screen?...

1:06:07 Probably need a new phone.

1:06:09 Yeah. When am I using the outer screen versus the inner screen? For quick responses Yeah. Quick interactions, phone calls, what have you. But for the most most of the time, 75%

1:06:20 of the time, I'm I'm using the inner screen.

1:06:22 Okay.

1:06:22 I also think the outer screen is not as bad as some have let on.

1:06:25 Sure.

1:06:25 I think it's perfectly useful, perfectly usable. And this is coming from someone who would never use an iPhone mini. I think it's totally fine.

1:06:32 Interesting.

1:06:32 I like the thing. I really do.

1:06:34 Okay.

1:06:34 But the software corks need to be fixed and this hardware issue with the cracked display is a real thing.

1:06:38 Yeah.

1:06:40 And it's pure gaslighting that I've seen from some trying to blame consumers who spent $2 on this thing Yeah. Who take care of their stuff and blaming them.

1:06:49 Yeah. It's crazy. So Some people say that got lucky....

1:06:52 Is always right, but I I think sometimes it cuts through.

1:06:54 So so you basically believe you're lucky, you're in the 90% or 99% that didn't get the defective...

1:06:58 Probably 99.9%.

1:07:00 Yeah. Realistically. And so you you don't think yours will ever break no matter how, as long as you use it normally.

1:07:05 So what we've seen Yeah. And what Apple has also said

1:07:08 Yeah.

1:07:08 Is that if you're gonna have the issue, it's gonna happen pretty quickly.

1:07:10 It's gonna happen quickly. Okay. So I think... This is the manufacturing.

1:07:13 Yeah. I think I'm I think I'm in the

1:07:14 I'm in the clear.

1:07:15 I think I'm the clear.

1:07:15 That's great. What about MacBook screens? Last time you were here in person, you made fun of me because I had the MacBook Air and Jordan the Pro. You said that my screen was not good and, you know, Jordy picked the right one and I...

1:07:30 Well, now both of you have the wrong one.

1:07:31 I know. So talk us through what

1:07:33 Pro led.

1:07:34 What actually happened.

1:07:35 Okay. So this morning, they announced the new MacBook Pro Yeah. And went exactly as we've talked about exactly as I've expected for the last four years. It's the same as this

1:07:44 guy. Yeah.

1:07:46 It's a bit lighter.

1:07:46 So the

1:07:47 one you got there is 4.7 pounds. The new one looks identical, but they reworked the internal, so now it's four pounds.

1:07:52 Okay. Not bad. That's actually a pretty significant saving.

1:07:55 It is. Yeah. That's great. It feels much lighter. Cool.

1:07:57 You know, I've carried it. It feels much lighter.

1:07:59 Wait. And and and you were at the event this morning? No. You don't you don't No. They don't really want you around there?

1:08:05 I don't know. That's... You know, you should send them a request for comment and ask them.

1:08:09 Yeah. You

1:08:09 know you know, we have a we have a really good Hollywood makeup team. So maybe next time I get the invite, you dress up as me. We'll... We we we will bring in three d scanners.

1:08:17 I'll need to wear like shoes with like really thick... Yeah. Lifts.

1:08:20 Maybe maybe stilts.

1:08:21 You've got probably what? Three inches on me? So... Yeah. I mean...

1:08:24 You're six eight?

1:08:25 I'm six eight.

1:08:25 Okay. You've got eight inches on me

1:08:27 then. Well Yeah. That's fixable.

1:08:29 Yeah. That's fixable. You know, the Lakers...

1:08:30 Do the limb lengthening surgery to really pull this off.

1:08:34 What was that movie?

1:08:35 No. Here's what we here's what we do. Here's what we do. We have to we have to all go and then we'll do a reenactment where...

1:08:42 Oh, like Nathaniel... I'll dress

1:08:43 up with Gon Turner.

1:08:44 Okay. Great.

1:08:45 With the full Hollywood makeup. So we'll do a full reenactment here for you. You'll get to be in the audience Yes. Like you're at... It'll feel like you're there.

1:08:52 Yeah. And then we can just we can just do repetitions like that until

1:08:55 will be looking out from the stage and he'll be like, what? What's going on? Did you see the Steve Kerr thing

1:09:00 No.

1:09:00 The other day on Twitter? Did you guys see this? Steve Kerr is coaching the game and all of a sudden he has his doppelganger in the audience.

1:09:06 Oh, yeah.

1:09:06 What's going on? I'm sure people watching this all that.

1:09:09 That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Touchscreen, OLED, which one's a bigger deal?

1:09:16 Oh, yeah. Okay. So looks the same, lighter

1:09:18 Yep.

1:09:18 Couple centimeters thinner

1:09:20 Yep.

1:09:20 And then it has three new features, touch, OLED, and the dynamic island. Oh, yeah. Uses the same m five Pro and m five Max chips from the March ones as as expected. There'll be new m seven Pro and m seven Max versions at the tail end of next year. We're looking forward to those as well....

1:09:34 Upgrade if you're on an older

1:09:36 Yeah. It's a good upgrade. I got one. Yeah. I'm still on an m one max from '20

1:09:41 So that's big jump. One.

1:09:42 Yeah. Yeah. But I got the base version. Got the m five pro version. I'm not doing hardcore.

1:09:48 Local inference.

1:09:49 Yeah. Well, I am but not enough local inference that I need a $14,600 version which is the top end now. 14,000. Yeah. 16 terabytes.

1:09:59 6,000, but I wasn't...

1:10:00 Oh, you ordered one?

1:10:01 No. Not yet. But I was just I was just in the spec here like, what would I actually do?

1:10:05 Yeah. What are you getting? Are you gonna get the m five max?

1:10:06 Well, here's what's crazy. Take take hit Apple with the bruh when he saw the pricing page. So if you want the RAM... So it has 96 gigs of RAM included.

1:10:19 On which one?

1:10:20 On this one. He specced it higher.

1:10:21 It starts with like... No. I'm saying, but but wait wait. So 256 is another $3,600. Oh, you've been way up.

1:10:29 512 is 13,000...

1:10:32 Wait. Are you on the Mac 50 Pro or the Mac Studio?

1:10:34 That's... Yeah, that's got to be

1:10:35 the Oh, is the Studio? That's got to be the Studio. Okay. Okay.

1:10:37 There's no way

1:10:37 you Yeah. Can't get half a terabyte of on the

1:10:41 Mac Pro. Think

1:10:42 it tops out a $100,100 and 120. But either way, so it's now $14 if you want. $14

1:10:46 is pretty high. Yeah. Interesting.

1:10:48 Put out the new Mac Studio today. Yeah. It was like north of $22 Wow. With all the

1:10:53 I mean, some people love that for

1:10:54 Yeah.

1:10:54 Going for instance.

1:10:55 Nobody needs it. I'll be honest with you. There's literally nothing you need it for. It's just marketing.

1:10:59 And it's a lot of tokens on a plan with a with a Frontier lab. It's a lot of

1:11:03 Sometimes you wanna drive a Ferrari to the grocery store.

1:11:06 Sometimes you wanna drive a Ferrari to the grocery store.

1:11:07 I mean, you did go to Air One today, so maybe you did.

1:11:10 Yeah. So if I upgrade, it would not be because of the performance. It would be... Because I did get the MacBook Pro on your recommendation. In March?

1:11:18 In March.

1:11:18 I recommended that? I think so. There's no way I

1:11:21 would have. You just made fun of me for having the Air, which has the LCD screen.

1:11:24 I I probably...

1:11:25 LED screen. Now I gotta upgrade to the OLED screen.

1:11:29 Can we pull up the tape? I must have said something like wait six months and get the touch one.

1:11:33 You probably did. Yeah. Anyway. There's no way I didn't.

1:11:35 I have one of those at home. I would not upgrade just for the

1:11:39 Interesting.

1:11:41 What's better than selling

1:11:42 on the touch?

1:11:43 Oh, I I have no... I'm not gonna sell you on the touch Okay. Because I think that it's going to be little used in the end. Yes. I think people are used to using their Macs with the keyboard and trackpad.

1:11:52 Yeah. However, we're in a new generation. Okay. Everyone's growing up now with touch screens.

1:11:56 Okay.

1:11:57 They had to do it. They had no choice. Sure. It is table stakes. It is spec sheet one zero one.

1:12:01 It is expected. They had to do this. Okay. But there's nothing innovative about it. It's just pinch the zoom

1:12:06 Yeah. Yeah.

1:12:07 Rotate, swipe, etcetera. There's nothing new about it. Spent twenty years gaslighting people about not needing touchscreens Yeah. And then they did it. Yeah.

1:12:14 And they did nothing to solve the ergonomics problem that they are the ones said that existed.

1:12:19 Wait. Yeah. Which is... Yeah. Know,

1:12:21 put it... Let's let's see it. Put your hand on the screen... No.

1:12:23 This is what I've been I

1:12:25 touched it today.

1:12:26 Well, how does your forearm feel?

1:12:27 Feels better. Oh, yeah. Good forearm.

1:12:29 It's a good workout. Right?

1:12:30 Yeah. And you're

1:12:30 a fit guy.

1:12:31 That's a feature for me.

1:12:32 Yeah. Yeah. For a lot

1:12:33 of people that might be...

1:12:34 You're gonna be able to see people with the... If they have a huge Popeye style forearm Yeah. Then you'll know that's a touchscreen. That's touchscreen... Badge of honor.

1:12:43 Badge of honor.

1:12:43 Well, I'm looking forward to taking it for a spin. I got the glossy.

1:12:47 Okay.

1:12:47 So I like the nano matte texture on the iPhone Duo, but I went with the glossy because I think glossy is better for OLED overall.

1:12:54 Yeah. So OLED is a bigger selling point for me because I got an OLED TV. Think it looks great. Yeah. And I could see the OLED being more vibrant.

1:13:02 Yeah. And so while I don't think I will be touching it, in fact, I think I will try not to touch my screen ever because I don't want fingerprints all over it. I want it to be clean. I think the OLED will look better. So that's the selling point.

1:13:13 Yeah. The OLED is the selling point.

1:13:14 And the dynamic island is pretty nifty. You know, we're

1:13:16 all used

1:13:16 to it on our phones and When is it going to finally come to the iPad? You know, I would imagine...

1:13:21 Well, is interesting that it's

1:13:22 in Yeah. Right? Yeah. Please. Samsung has been in the news not for the best reason.

1:13:29 What did I miss?

1:13:30 Smart TV, spyware.

1:13:31 Smart TV is like, you know, like basically like the most insane allegedly, the most insane piece of spyware.

1:13:38 Is this recent? Because I know LG had this issue recently.

1:13:41 Yeah. Yeah. It is feels like like I know... I've I've asked you this like a million times, but like... And I now want a privacy focused TV.

1:13:51 And it feels like Apple's the company to do that. But they're still not gonna do it. They're gonna do a home view which no one ever asked for or needed. Has no real purpose.

1:14:01 I ordered two. You did?

1:14:03 Have you gone all in on the ecosystem?

1:14:06 No. I've... My criticism is like I would love if Apple was like, we're making a product Yeah. That is replaces all of the technology in your home. It actually is Apple.

1:14:17 It's gonna do everything from like light switches to shades to security cameras.

1:14:22 Well, they have that with HomeKit and they've got the new home... Apple Home collection which is basically a starter kit. You've the cameras, all the types of cameras... But

1:14:31 why are they doing it with LG? That's my... That's like...

1:14:34 Who would would you prefer? Schneider Electric?

1:14:37 Well, I think people...

1:14:38 Why not? They make hardware.

1:14:39 I think he's preferring cameras.

1:14:40 They do it. You're preferring Yeah. Apple does These these systems are are...

1:14:44 One of the big gates to getting people into HomeKit is the cost of the accessories. Mhmm.

1:14:49 And if

1:14:49 Apple starts coming out with this stuff and self branding it, they're going to be at a very high price point and they're not gonna be able to get

1:14:55 market penetration.... You have someone over and they're like feeling like the Apple doorknob that you got.

1:15:00 Well, there'll be an Apple camera. There'll be an Apple in home security camera sensor. I don't know if they'll call it

1:15:05 a camera

1:15:05 but that's coming. But working with a third

1:15:08 party was the way to do it.

1:15:09 LG is a weird weird partner though. It's just completely random. Like if you were to list a 100 companies, I would dump... That's what

1:15:14 I'm saying.

1:15:15 All the other ones are bought.

1:15:17 They can't do Ring, that's Amazon. They can't do Nest, that's Google.

1:15:20 Who else would you... Nobody but the stuff...

1:15:22 To me, Apple is at a point where they can no longer innovate. So why not just create like great commodities across the entire...

1:15:31 What do you think of Apple's AI efforts?

1:15:35 I mean, I don't... Like, it's been it's been talked about enough on this show and I believe over time they can make a great experience.

1:15:41 I thought the Google partnership just in that they've worked together on the browser before, Safari, routing to Google search. It makes sense to set up the...

1:15:49 The most painful thing is like right as they're getting around to creating like a competent chatbot, like agents and like Instinct came around and Muse came around and now that's what consumers want.

1:15:59 Muse is really good.

1:16:00 Yeah. And so...

1:16:01 And so... When will they have that? The funny thing is they're not they're not seeing Muse and being like, oh, this is an exciting new paradigm. They're like sigh of relief, you know, sigh, like let me smoke a cigarette because like this is gonna take us another three years kind of thing.

1:16:16 The problem is is that the...

1:16:17 But but but back to my point. Yeah. It's like, I'd be I'd be happier if Apple was just committed to, like, we make we make hardware, we're gonna make the best version of everything in every category. The TV. Like, I'm I'm sitting here as like sort of disappointed as somebody who grew up as an Apple fanboy, who spent my whole childhood in the Mac ecosystem, who would work like...

1:16:40 Would would would starting when I was like probably 12, 13, would be like working my butt off so that I could save up and buy like the best version of every Apple product. And now, I no longer think of them as an innovator, but I think of them as somebody who will make the best version of the home security camera. Who will make the best version of like an app that lets me like unlock my gate when I'm having a friend over.

1:17:08 Yeah.

1:17:08 Right?

1:17:09 So realistically, you should be able to go to Dot or Muse or Duet or whatever AI agent is actually great and say, how many deer have walked in my backyard in the last month? And it can go and pull the data from Apple's camera or or or adjust the screen time limits on my Apple TV.

1:17:26 But but the funny the funny thing about the the home view is like I... My house, I inherited the smart home system and I... As I'm getting it set up, it's like the app has like 10 reviews in the in the app store. And I'm like...

1:17:40 Is it iFindual compatible?

1:17:43 Probably not.

1:17:43 Probably not. Yeah. And I'm not even gonna say it because it's like a small company that makes this like operating system. But but in looking into what the actual cost of the entire system and all the hardware in the home Mhmm. Which again is a tough thing to sell because you have to sell it in when the home is being built and it's like not easy.

1:18:02 But like it would cost me like 6 figures to remove all of it from the house.

1:18:06 Yeah.

1:18:06 It's not worth it. It's not worth it. And and and I'm stuck with this software that's like horrible. It's not reliable. And I actually have to use it every single day.

1:18:16 Just get a new house.

1:18:17 Yeah. Basically. Or no. Almost to the point of like just like I guess I got a vibe code, my own smart home operating system. That's funny.

1:18:26 That's funny.

1:18:27 I saw the home view and I was like, I get that the product is not super exciting, like it's kind of just an iPad on the wall. I don't really want the one that moves around but I I could see... My job. But I would do.

1:18:42 I like the idea. Well, I like it for FaceTime.

1:18:44 Okay.

1:18:45 I like it for FaceTime.

1:18:46 Did you get the mobile one?

1:18:47 No. One doesn't exist yet.

1:18:49 Oh, it doesn't exist?

1:18:49 Yeah. That'll be next year or the year after. Yeah. That'll be the higher So... That'll be the higher end one.

1:18:54 That's like the AI if I Okay. Stupid pricey version.

1:18:57 Oh, I didn't...

1:18:57 One's sort of like the the sort of the the holy grail version.

1:19:00 But Okay.

1:19:02 Apple's had a big year.

1:19:03 Yeah.

1:19:04 The MacBook Neo, the iPhone Duo, Touch MacBook Pro, Obviously, the the the new Apple Watches and AirPods and iPhone eighteens were quite minor, but there was some good stuff. Next year, there'll be some pretty intriguing things too. The smart glasses are the big things for next year.

1:19:19 How competitive are those gonna be with the meta VR glasses which them into gear.

1:19:25 Well, there's no new there's no new Apple XR products.

1:19:30 So you could say like it's speakers you can wear.

1:19:33 It's AirPods in a glasses form. It's AirPods for your face.

1:19:36 Speakers you can wear. Finally.

1:19:37 It's AirPods for your face Be

1:19:38 over your face.

1:19:39 With AI. AI communication. AI cameras. You can talk...

1:19:43 Oh, it

1:19:43 has cameras too.

1:19:44 Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. It's a competitive product to the Meta Glasses.

1:19:47 Yeah. The big question is do you want an Apple designed glasses or do you want Ray Bans? Ray Bans. Right? Who would you trust with a design for glasses? The company that's doing it for the first time or the company that's done it for...

1:19:57 I don't know. How many years has Ray Ban been around?

1:19:59 Long time.

1:20:00 Well. Long time. Decades.

1:20:01 Yeah. Decades.

1:20:02 I'm riding with Luxottica.

1:20:03 Luxottica...

1:20:04 That was super smart on many... Meta's part to partner with Luxottica.

1:20:07 Super

1:20:07 smart. Because nobody would buy Meta branded glasses.

1:20:10 No way.

1:20:11 Right?

1:20:11 I mean, we ran that experiment with Snap.

1:20:14 Well, sure. But I don't think the Snap issues were because of the Snap brand. I I quite frankly think the Snap brand is a is a trusted brand whereas the Meta brand in some cases is not trusted.

1:20:25 Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. I was just thinking of like those original camera glasses from Snap.

1:20:29 Oh, everyone wanted those.

1:20:30 Yeah. But they didn't actually sell...

1:20:32 Wait in line for those as a kid in college?

1:20:34 They sell that well because I think that they looked good like they were designed well but they just weren't an iconic silhouette like...

1:20:41 What do you what does Apple think about like wired hair AirPods or wired headphones becoming like the new thing?

1:20:48 I don't think they're gonna go backwards on that. I really don't. I mean...

1:20:52 I backwards know they're not gonna but they still sell the product.

1:20:56 What are they? $19?

1:20:57 Yeah. It's it's amazing deal when you're looking for me. I have been riding with Wired for years now and I still buy them from Apple, but I like that for the price of one pair of AirPods, I can buy like, you know, five or six.

1:21:11 Well, you know what's funny is they probably haven't manufactured them for years. Right? They probably had like a bunch sitting in a warehouse and like all of a sudden we have to, you know, figure out, where are we building those? How do we do that? And they have to like start the lineup again because you're right.

1:21:24 Bose has them now. It's become part of the zeitgeist right now that people want, you know, these nostalgic Yeah. Products. And I think it would be a bad look for Apple to just like

1:21:33 Stop selling them.

1:21:34 Go nostalgic in that way. Yeah. But I think there's like these little like tricks, bells and whistles.

1:21:40 I think what they should do is make just like a much more expensive version of the Mhmm. The wire. Like just make... Because what I want is like...

1:21:46 Great sound quality.

1:21:48 Like, it never happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It will never never happen.

1:21:51 But what

1:21:51 I'm saying is they can

1:21:52 bring back these little bells and whistles that that, you know, give us some nostalgia. Like, for example, I forgot there's a fourth

1:21:58 new feature on this new MacBook Pro.

1:21:59 What's

1:21:59 that? When you were back in in high school and college, what happened on the back of your MacBook Pro?

1:22:05 Light up.

1:22:06 Yep. Yeah. So these these new boys have the the light up Apple logo.

1:22:10 Why is that happening? Is that because the cost of the laptop and the memory has gone up so much that the relative price of the light up on the back is cheaper now on a relative basis?

1:22:21 My... When I saw that

1:22:22 Yeah.

1:22:23 My immediate speculation was that using the tandem OLED panel, so the the thinner panel. Yeah. The the the brightness benefits.

1:22:32 Mhmm.

1:22:34 You're able to use the display, the back of the panel as a way to light it up. But we'll see when these things get torn apart what happened here. Sure. I I... It's also possible they just did it like I was saying is like a nostalgic element.

1:22:44 Have people been asking for this for a long time?

1:22:46 The glowing Apple logo? No. What everyone... People were cheering

1:22:50 at the event. They were like super excited.

1:22:51 Ridiculous. What everyone was asking for was to bring back MagSafe Sure. Which they did. Yep. Was to bring back ports, which they did.

1:22:57 Yep. And was to return to function over form or at least matching function to form. Sure. If you remember the '26 Mac... 2016 MacBook Pro, they got rid of a lot of the ports Yep. They got rid of the SD card slot, they got rid of mag save.

1:23:12 That one had the touch bar or

1:23:13 no?

1:23:14 That one had the touch bar. They got rid of the physical function row. Yeah. With this one that you've got, the 2021 MacBook Pro design, they fixed the MacBook Pro. Like, is the perfect MacBook Pro.

1:23:26 Yeah. They didn't redesign it completely.

1:23:28 But it's boring because it's just at the end of history. It's like the best and there's nothing you can do.

1:23:34 Maybe.

1:23:35 I... Yeah. I mean, I I I really want the 16 inch iPhone Duo.

1:23:39 16 inch iPhone Duo. Okay.

1:23:40 That would be huge.

1:23:41 7.6 inches is not enough for you?

1:23:43 Yeah. I think you could die... You could daily drive this. Just, you

1:23:46 know, Can you imagine?

1:23:47 You have a big enough pocket, you could take...

1:23:48 A wagon. Does does Ternus have the balls to buy instinct?

1:23:57 How much would it cost?

1:24:00 Over... Dollars.

1:24:03 Know what's really interesting? This kind of went under the radar. I broke the news a few weeks ago that they bounced their head of M and A. Interesting. And his deputy in charge.

1:24:12 And I think there's a couple factors here. Your good friend Eddie Q.

1:24:16 Mhmm. Former guest of the show.

1:24:18 Former guest of the show. That's what I

1:24:19 mean by good friend. Of course.

1:24:20 I don't know if you guys are actually boys but who knows?

1:24:24 We both like cars.

1:24:25 We both like cars. He...

1:24:27 He's with us.

1:24:28 You know, at some point he's gonna retire, who knows, three, five years, whatever. He loves his job, not going anywhere anywhere soon. He needs to have like potential successors in place because services is a big part of of the company. Yeah. And so you've basically now got Oliver Schusser Mhmm.

1:24:45 Who's the head of Apple Music, Apple Sports, Apple TV Business, a few things. He's there. He's sort of kind of a shoe in. But you never want to be in sort of a lame duck situation where you've only got one successor. Mhmm. And then the Apple services business is so big that it may not be a clean-cut replace Eddie with Oliver. Mhmm. And so you may need two people. And so what they did is they moved Adrian Perica, was the head of M and A, under Eddie Q. And he's running a lot of the business side of services.

1:25:12 And so that's one factor why they took M and A away from from Adrian Mhmm. To sort of put him in the services sort of pipeline there as a potential successor. I think more than potential, as a successor to Eddie Q eventually. Interesting. The other factor is that Ternus and the hardware engineering guys and the technology guys, they've had gripes for decades that this guy buys no one.

1:25:34 Oh, interesting.

1:25:35 Right? Joke...

1:25:36 They're like, give us something to work Yeah.

1:25:38 Joke with Apple M and A is they do nothing. Yeah. It's the easiest job in the world. Right? This is how the Yeah.

1:25:45 This is how the hardware guys think of it.

1:25:47 You just have an auto responder.

1:25:48 Basically. Right?

1:25:49 They shouldn't buy...

1:25:50 Well, they do buy a lot but it's like

1:25:52 Small companies. Tiny teams.

1:25:53 They're they're like, you can't announce it.

1:25:55 We want cool stuff. Yeah. Okay.

1:25:57 It's not like... There's a different version of Apple which is like they're buying Sonos and they're buying Nest and they're Ring and all these things and like

1:26:05 Which they

1:26:05 should have. Apple ifying them over time. Yes.

1:26:07 They've done nothing.

1:26:08 They've done nothing.

1:26:08 Okay? And so I think you have the Eddie thing as as, you know, one reason. I think the other reason is that Ternus wanted a changing the guard on M and A, someone who's gonna sort of, you know, get cracking. Mhmm. And so I don't know if they'll buy Instinct, I but think they have a better chance of buying Instinct than they did.

1:26:26 That's actually very interesting.

1:26:26 And they did three months ago.

1:26:27 Feels like they need some way to insert people into the company that can innovate on software.

1:26:33 That's true. The software side of things right now I think is the weakest part Yeah. Of

1:26:39 we had an idea for an...

1:26:41 A little bit too hard on them. Yeah. Just they clearly are... They they make the best devices.

1:26:47 Yeah. But they don't make best software...

1:26:49 Actually, I take that back. Maybe they do make the best software. It's just not as good as as they could.

1:26:55 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So... If they wanna if they wanna expand Apple services, have they looked at Apple markets or some sort of like casino game integration on your phone?

1:27:05 You know, we did a story on Bloomberg Businessweek six months ago or so that said that Apple makes more money from casino games, that type of game Yeah. Than they make on the Mac. Because if you think about how much money the App Store makes Yeah. And what percentage of the App Store is these like casino

1:27:29 Sure.

1:27:29 Type of games

1:27:30 Yeah.

1:27:31 It's like it's billions.

1:27:33 So they could vertically integrate?

1:27:34 Even open a... Vertical integrate. I don't think they would go on...

1:27:36 Open a physical... Go and play roulette.

1:27:40 So apps that that operate markets, Apple can't take a cut when you're doing like a stock when you're trading...

1:27:49 I don't think they can

1:27:50 or do. They they don't. Yeah. We know that.

1:27:52 Yeah.

1:27:52 Yeah. Then it wouldn't... The whole... All the economics would not work.

1:27:55 Yeah.

1:27:55 They should. So what casino what casino game...

1:27:58 Percent of your retirement in Robinhood because you installed it on the iPhone.

1:28:01 Can you imagine?

1:28:02 Would you be shocked there was a headline out? Like Apple bans Robinhood from the app store because it's not using their payment process?

1:28:07 You're not.

1:28:08 Right? That's like... That feels like a headline from three years ago. Yeah. Like a legit headline for three years.

1:28:12 But what what what are these casino games that that are not tied... They're not like... Because sports betting apps, they're not taking a cut they're not taking a cut of...

1:28:22 Well, don't they kick you out and ask for your credit card to load up or take crypto or something?

1:28:27 I'll be honest with you guys. No way.

1:28:28 I don't use any of these apps. I don't use Polymarket or Call Sheet.

1:28:31 Well, you're not doing your job. No. I actually... I I I'm... This company makes billions of dollars from casino games and you're like...

1:28:37 Keeping my job. Those things actually. There you go.

1:28:40 Not even for research. You can't you can't get a $100...

1:28:44 Sports. Certainly, that's not a violation

1:28:46 of Lakers's I I get angry enough watching the Lakers.

1:28:50 Okay.

1:28:50 Okay? And get anxious...

1:28:51 Money on the line,

1:28:52 you'll be open. Need I to add another layer to that.

1:28:55 Okay. Well, I appreciate your your your discipline there.

1:28:59 Very cool that Apple makes billions from casino games. Yeah.

1:29:04 Good... Criticize and say shouldn't exist.

1:29:06 Yeah. The digital economy. They get their cut. Anyway, the house always wins with Apple. Always wins.

1:29:12 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:29:14 I wish we had more time.

1:29:15 Of course. Always. Let's hang out soon.

1:29:17 Yes. See you guys.

1:29:18 Thanks everybody. Sold... I think you sold me on the duo.

1:29:21 Oh. Really?

1:29:22 Okay. You need one now because I see

1:29:23 it's a big...

1:29:24 Yeah. There's a big big

1:29:25 chunk out of this one.

1:29:26 We're gonna need the durability test.... Dude. He's the whistling diesel of technology, Jordy Hayes.

1:29:31 Let's get a... Can we get a replay on that durability test? Do we have... Especially Tyler's I

1:29:37 think the replay is tied to the Gong cam specifically. Let me pull up MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just own the data platform.

1:29:47 Don't just don't just build AI. Own the data platform.

1:29:49 Production team. That's it. While the next guest is with us, let's let's work on getting a a replay.

1:29:55 Because we have Zach durability. From Coco Robotics, the co founder and CEO for his first appearance here on TBPN. Welcome to the show, Zach. Thank you so much for taking the time

1:30:05 with us.

1:30:06 How are doing?

1:30:07 Gentlemen, thanks for having me.

1:30:09 It's great to have you.

1:30:10 How many of these robots you got these days?

1:30:13 We got about a thousand of them, but we have our next robot coming out soon, so you'll start seeing those around LA. What... Delivery?

1:30:21 What... Wait. I have never gotten a delivery from a delivery robot. I see them all the time in

1:30:26 Los Angeles

1:30:27 that I know of. Can can the robots release the item autonomously?

1:30:33 We don't know that that Coco's not live testing humanoid form factors with Potentially. You know, rubber masks that that make them

1:30:41 Potentially.

1:30:42 We don't know. We don't know. That's true. They haven't come out and said that they're not doing that.

1:30:45 But the current the current system is if I were to get a delivery in a CocoRobot, I would go up to it and pull the bag of food out of the bucket. Right?

1:30:56 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, we gotta get you guys a delivery then.

1:30:58 Let's do it.

1:30:59 But, yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, I mean, this is this is what they look like. This is a miniature version of it. But Yeah. It's a purpose built robot designed for moving goods around our cities.

1:31:11 Yeah. And you're expanding to The UK? How did that come together?

1:31:16 Yeah. So we... Here in The US, we work with Uber Eats and and DoorDash. DoorDash had recently acquired Deliveroo, which is based over in London.

1:31:25 Sure.

1:31:25 And so we've been working with DoorDash for I think almost four years at this point. We have a really close partnership and we wanted to bring it across the pond and bring it to London. And so we announced just the other week a kind of a multiyear bidirectionally exclusive partnership to bring Cocos all throughout The UK and bring it to some real scale.

1:31:45 How do you how do you think about... Or how is... How are these sidewalk robots different from the delivery network that you might see on DoorDash with people in cars? Like, is there a specific robot assigned to an individual restaurant because they're just going back and forth? Or is it more like a fleet, a network, it's driving around and it might stop by any random restaurant and the restaurant just has to sort of see the robot and say, oh, I should put this there.

1:32:11 How does that work?

1:32:12 Yeah. They're... So they're shared. So they'll... We'll get offers from the different platforms.

1:32:16 We also work directly with some retailers. Mhmm.

1:32:18 So we get

1:32:19 a bunch of offers coming to our system, and then the robot will, you know, go somewhere to pick up an order, deliver it to the customer, and then go on to pick up the next one. So just in LA, I mean, we have probably a few thousand merchants across grocery, food, retail

1:32:32 Yeah.

1:32:33 That use the robots.

1:32:34 Has there been any movement on getting the restaurants to help do some of the charging and some of the infrastructure sort of like use their back rooms for space? Or do you have to do sort of what Lime and and Bird did where you have trucks driving around servicing things? Like, what's been the solution there?

1:32:55 You had some mix. I mean, ideally, you don't want to be going around swapping batteries because it means you're, you know, doubling... At least doubling your battery CapEx. It takes forever to drive across a place like Los Angeles to manually swap the batteries, and there's not that many deliveries happening at four in the morning.

1:33:09 Yeah.

1:33:09 So, ideally, they go back to merchants. The merchants plug them in, and then they take a few hours of downtime. Right? So you run them twenty hours a day, and then maybe you have four hours of downtime to do cleaning and charging. We do work with some of our merchants to do this.

1:33:22 We work with a bunch of kind of ghost kitchen companies that also are a great fit at actually charging these and helping us do some of the maintenance. And then some of our big retail partners, they have a bunch of space. They might have twenty four seven staffing Mhmm. In which case we can kinda work with them to drive some incremental revenue back to their store in exchange for doing some of the fleet management. So you'll never have a 100% in any one of these categories, but the idea is to kind of work with our partners to reduce the overall cost of operating the fleet.

1:33:48 What's the bottleneck to going from a thousand active robots? Sounds like this new deal in The UK will will increase that. But how how do you go to a million? Like, what what are the kind of things that need to happen?

1:34:00 Yeah. So, you know, we're gonna bring... Coke's in about 10 cities today across The US and and Europe, and next year, we should be in between 40 to 50 cities across even more continents. And, you know, the first step is regulatory. You know, you need to create new policy for this.

1:34:18 This is the new class of of thing. It's not a vehicle. It's not a person. It's it's a robot. And so you need to define laws around how the robots operate in our cities. So you work with different either national transportation agencies or at the state level or at the city level depending on where we're going, introduce policy, and then ramping up manufacturing of our of our new robots. So this is Coco two. It's the next gen robot that you'll start seeing rolling around the cities in the coming weeks. So we're planning on making about 20,000 of those for 2027. Mhmm.

1:34:49 So you'll see a pretty large step up in the fleet size across a lot of new a lot of new territories. And then the path to a million feels pretty inevitable from there. I mean, if you look like, you know, a platform like DoorDash probably has 10,000,000 drivers or something like that working working on the platform in The US, and the volumes on these platforms is still growing 20 to 30% a year. So you just compound this out. I mean, look at the at the end of the next decade.

1:35:15 Right? At the end of this... In the next ten years, you're gonna have you're gonna have to have, you know, 50% of The US working population, you know, driving for these platforms. So it... You you need to find a way of increasing supply without getting human drivers because you're just gonna run out of people.

1:35:31 Awesome. A lot of people in tech are worried about x risk these days. Hypothetically, where is the vulnerable point if I need to disable this with, like, a five five six round? Where would I shoot it?

1:35:45 Can't tell you that, though, but I...

1:35:46 Oh, wow. He's on the side of the robots. This guy's traitor to humanity. Crazy.

1:35:53 What's funny is that... Delivery

1:35:58 over. Send it over. You wanna test it out.

1:36:00 Japan, you actually have to have a big red kill switch button on the robot.

1:36:05 Oh, okay.

1:36:06 Which I feel like would uniquely only work in Japan.

1:36:09 Yeah. Because otherwise everyone pushing back on the

1:36:12 Of course. But separately, jokes aside, I I have no doubt that that you are feeling the benefits of general model progress and AI progress. Like just take an image, identify if there's someone there, you can go straight on this road, all that's probably happening. But what do evals, what do benchmarks actually look like? What metrics are you measuring and what are you seeing in those?

1:36:37 Like how do you know that the latest iteration of your software, of your AI stack is actually improving the experience? It feels like we sort of feel the failure mode, like the hallucination is like the viral video on Instagram of the cocoa robot getting stuck on the curb, but how are you measuring that? What's progress been like?

1:36:56 Yeah. Well, it's it's interesting because I think in robotics, I mean, you see a lot of demos of folding clothes, and then in the self driving car world, have a lot of road driving. Right? Yeah. In a very rule based environment.

1:37:06 Yeah.

1:37:06 The interesting thing about city sidewalks is they're the most complex, dynamic Yeah. Not rule based environment in the world, and every city is different.

1:37:15 Yeah.

1:37:16 Right? Navigating Downtown LA is is is is unique and different than Chicago, which is very different than Finland, is very different than parts of Asia. And so you have different kind of social norms and behaviors. And so the robot actually needs to learn how to be a great, you know, user of the shared space with the public. It has to be a great sidewalk user.

1:37:37 But we also need to get from point a to point b very quickly. So we can't spend a lot of time stopping. So there's this really complex kind of social navigational problem that we have to get very good at. So I think we have, you know, we have millions of hours and millions of miles of driving in these sort of environments, you know, snows, sun, you know, weekend nightlife, all these different sorts of environments. So we probably have one of the largest datasets of this sort of data Mhmm.

1:38:04 And and that's used to train all of our models. But then we've actually open sourced and published some really interesting benchmarks because I think as these models progress, I think some of these big labs might want to be testing, hey. How did their model actually do at navigating the the public realm? How do we actually do it navigating, you know, a Downtown Chicago sidewalk? Yeah.

1:38:23 And so we actually have some benchmarks we've created from these different environments that we've published, and I think that will be helpful to the robotics industry in general.

1:38:30 Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordy, sorry. Do you have any Yeah.

1:38:35 Excited to see more of these around. It's it's an interesting thing. Like, you got... You wanna... As a business, you wanna scale quickly, but I think, like, the the lesson from Flock is that like individual consumers have so much power Sure.

1:38:47 Over over like what's allowed Yeah. To operate in their area. And I think that making sure that, you know, friendly robots are are never annoying. It's like... Has to be like number one priority and and that's such a hard problem versus what you were talking about with like on the roads. It's like we have established laws. When the light's green, go. Yeah. Oftentimes if I'm behind John, I have to honk after the light goes green. It's not getting any greener, buddy.

1:39:14 But anyways, very difficult problem. And yeah, I wanna see the Coco robot in Japan. I promise not to touch the big red button. I I can be trusted.

1:39:26 I imagine you, hiring a couple of these just to patrol the property. This feels like an intermediary. If you if you don't wanna go robot dog patrol and humanoids aren't working yet, just having a a fleet of Cocos circling the property Yes. At all times, that's security. I like it.

1:39:41 Well,

1:39:42 guys, how do we get some lunch orders going to the office, going to the studio?

1:39:45 Well, we'll coordinate. Nick will text you right now. We'll figure it out.

1:39:48 We'll Yeah. We'll do

1:39:48 it. We'll get our lunch delivered with Coco.

1:39:50 Thank you so much. Yeah. Great seeing Zach. Thanks, guys.

1:39:52 Congrats on the rest day. Of

1:39:53 See you.

1:39:54 We do have the phone toss replay live on TBPN ready. Let's see it in action. Jordy...

1:40:01 We got a little zoom in. Jordy... Boom. Oh, that... But I really wanna see Tyler's.

1:40:07 Held up well.

1:40:08 Because Tyler was Tyler comes in. Was bolder because he thought I was gonna catch him. Yeah. What? Let's zoom in.

1:40:13 Let's zoom in. Okay.

1:40:15 We got a little

1:40:16 box here. Let's see what's happening.

1:40:17 Can we see this?

1:40:17 Throws it. Throws it. Oh, gets out of the way. Yeah. When Jordy moves back.

1:40:23 You fell for that one, Tyler. You fell for it hook line and sinker. Our next guest is the co founder and CEO of Formation Bio with Ben Liu launching a huge drug development fund. Ben, welcome. Up?

1:40:36 Let's get this going ready. How are doing? Please kick us off

1:40:40 Thanks for

1:40:40 having us.

1:40:40 Yourself and the organization.

1:40:44 Great. So Benjamin Liu, cofounder of CF Formation Bio. We're an AI native company at building the next generation pharma company with this kind of core thesis that drug discovery is getting more and more efficient. Yeah. And the fundamental bottleneck of bringing new medicines to patients is the cost and time of drug development.

1:41:01 Your stance

1:41:01 on monkeys? You got There's a Joel Lonsdale. There's gonna be

1:41:05 a big shortage.

1:41:06 There is.

1:41:07 They're important. Okay. You know? That national security, we gotta increase the number of monkeys we have. It's, you know, the the similarity between our disease systems to kind of humans is probably one of the best predictors.

1:41:18 Yeah.

1:41:18 Right? So you can imagine like solving like rat Alzheimer's is very different than sucky... Solving monkey Alzheimer's. Yeah. So But, you know, the biggest the biggest bottleneck is drug development in humans.

1:41:31 And so, you know, you have this impedance mismatch where drug discovery is only getting more efficient. There's been a doubling of number of discovery drug candidates in the past ten years, even before AI. The number of approved drugs has kept, like, kind of constant 50 a year. Markets are rational, so discovered drugs aren't worth much till post phase two. So the company, we actually don't do any discovery internally.

1:41:50 We live to acquire drugs that are discovered.

1:41:52 Oh, okay.

1:41:52 And then we've built all the technology, people, processes, AI systems to run clinical trials and drug development more efficiently, but also the best humans and AI systems that know what drugs to pick and what diseases to match them to. Yeah. And then we provide all the capital and capabilities to get the drugs from where they are. It's usually two to four years away from a clinical trial, and we provide all the capital and capabilities to get it post clinical inflection.

1:42:15 Yeah. That's where the

1:42:16 bottleneck is. That's underappreciated.

1:42:17 No, no, totally.

1:42:18 Yeah. What were the pre... Like, talk about costs around drug discovery pre AI, and then where you think it'll go with new advancements and models Because continued it feels like a $600,000,000 fund, I imagine you're gonna distribute it across a bunch of entrepreneurs and teams that are focused on that discovery. But then each one of those individual drugs, if they're promising and they start going through trials, could still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to actually take

1:42:50 Yeah. It

1:42:50 all That's actually the fundamental bottleneck. Right? So you had this like kind of drug abundance in discovery. But once you hit the clinic, you know, a clinical trial can cost a few $100,000,000. Like a phase two clinical trial can be, you know, 60,000,000 to 80,000,000, if not more.

1:43:08 And so what's going to happen is if we don't develop more capabilities around the drug development period, we're not going be able to translate all these discoveries into new medicines. And as you alluded to, you're kind of looking at like all these great discovery companies and, and, you know, getting a drug from, you know, a discovered idea to 90 is now costing just a few million dollars. And that's probably going go down over time. Right? You know, with all this automation and, you know, the the the great work that, you know, folks like Anthropic and, you know, you got ISO CHI.

1:43:40 Like, is getting increasingly commoditized. But what is pretty rare is, like, the ability to prove that it works in a human. So and that capacity hasn't changed.

1:43:49 So historically, what was the origin of the capital for this particular phase? Obviously a lot of drug discovery candidate selection might happen in the in academia. And then Yeah. Once you're post phase two, phase three, you're probably working with a big biotech, maybe got acquired. But is this the sweet spot for companies that might go public, might be traded as sort of like risk on biotech public markets investors historically, and you're able

1:44:19 to That's right.

1:44:20 Okay.

1:44:21 That's right. So either you have to go public or you're raised from a traditional like TradBio VC. Right?

1:44:26 Like a flagship pioneering or something.

1:44:28 Or, you know, an Atlas or, you know, a lot of kind of great funds kind of finance these drug, you know, Arch Capital. Yep. You know, think what separates our fund is we're not investing in companies, but individual drug assets. Okay. And so these are drugs that we put into Inuco.

1:44:45 Yep.

1:44:45 And we not only provide like the 60 or 80,000,000 needed, but all the capital, but also the capabilities. So think about like the ability to run trials cheaper and faster, best in class human drug pickers. So our R and D head was the R and D head at Biogen. Developed the first, you know, genetic medicine for ALS, the first, or a drug for SMA, the first disease modifying drug for Alzheimer's. And we have a guy who also discovered, had a neuroscience at Roche.

1:45:14 So folks really experienced in drug development, but also the AI systems allow you to, like, look at every single drug in the world, match the right drug to the right disease, design the right study, and then be more efficient in getting the drugs ultimately to a clinical balance option. Maybe kind of share a little bit more about how I got started. Know, I trained as a computational biologist, so I think like many, you're really excited about how all the genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic data mixed with machine learning AI can transform discovery. When I was a graduate student, we had the discovery of few candidate drugs in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and just bearing that you believe, we went to some pharma execs and said, hey. We discovered these drugs.

1:45:50 Aren't you guys excited? And they said, know, start to burst your bubble. And this is, like, ten years ago. There's already more good drugs discovered than we could afford to develop. When a single clinical trial in Alzheimer's across all the phases can cost like hundreds of millions of dollars, actually it's 500,000,000 per per shot, we just can't afford to prosecute everything we we discover.

1:46:09 And now with AI, that's probably going to 10, if not a 100 X, right? Yeah. And so if we can't like ultimately solve this throughput, we're not going to get more medicines to patients. And so this fund is dedicated for, you know, let's say a biotech and discover five, 10 drugs. As soon as they have a lead asset, traditionally, all the capital needs to go to that lead asset.

1:46:27 That second, third, fourth month not getting love. And so we're saying, hey. We can provide the capital Yeah. But also all the capabilities to enable that company to take more shots. And if it wins, we kinda share upside. It could be upfront royalties, milestones, and even equity. And so it's kinda a win win for for for the industry.

1:46:45 Yeah.

1:46:45 But it's maybe the counterintuitive thing. I don't think people appreciate that, like, you know, drug discovery has not been necessarily the bottleneck for a pretty long time. Yeah. And it's only going to get more and more acute as you have drug discovery abundance. And and ultimately, it's like how can you get them into clinical proof of concept?

1:47:05 And that's what the market values too, right? Because if you have an abundance of discovered drug assets, you really don't see value until you demonstrate human clinical proof of concept. And that's where, maybe the heuristic to think about this, like a discovered drug isn't worth much. Mhmm. Once it has clinical proof of concept, so in human trials in the disease post phase two, the heuristic is one x peak sales.

1:47:27 So you can sell drug for... You know, if it's a $5,000,000,000 a year drug for 5,000,000,000. Once it's over phase three, past phase three, it's two to three x peak sales.

1:47:35 Makes sense.

1:47:36 And so, know, and this is interesting. Like, we kinda ask the question, like, why hasn't there been a big pharma company really in our industry created since the nineteen eighties? Yeah. And one of the big challenges, if you're a venture... And that's kind of the Amgen's Vertex If kind of of the you're like venture backed company, it takes you like three to five years to get in the clinic, and then two to four years to run a phase one and phase two.

1:47:57 Phase two is only worth 30% of the time on average. And let's say you're fortunate enough after you spend 60,000,000 to run a phase two, and it works, and a pharma company offers you $5,000,000,000 to take the chips off the table. You could, you know, not sell, run a phase three. There's a 40% chance it goes to zero, a 60% chance the phase three works, and then you can sell for two to three x peak sales. Risk adjusted, the rational thing is to sell.

1:48:21 So we're structured as a company, as a hub and spoke, so we can sell in new co without selling the whole company. But if you can only take three shots and you hit a winner, you should probably sell. Right? Because if the expected value is 30%, you know, it's more likely your MOVE and IRR is gonna be diminished if you kind of run those two shots versus just sell off the first shot. So as a consequence, our industry usually has biotechs get acquired before they can become the next, you know, Roche or Novartis.

1:48:47 Same exact thing in consumer packaged goods, honestly. Oh, yeah. Like there there has been like a

1:48:52 new Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:48:53 There's no They new Campbell. Yeah. Yeah. Buy the protein company, they buy the supplement company, They buy the cereal company, but there's no one that's... And there's been super ambitious founders that have gone after it, but all of them That's with right. Point solutions. Yeah.

1:49:08 And and that and to to your point, like, second thing that's important is you take enough shots. Right? Because if you can only take three shots, you should sell for the reasons we discussed. But if you can begin to take more than 10 shots

1:49:17 Yeah.

1:49:18 Your expected value is three out of 10. Now we have AI systems, and humans have dumbed that at three out of 10, but it's better to underwrite considerably Sure. And and kind of exceed on the upside. Once you run 10 shots, you you expect three out of 10. Yeah.

1:49:30 So what the fund allows us to is take more shots, number one. And we can increase the throughput of also the industry, but it also allows us to raise capital and then always have to raise equity. Yeah. So it lowers our cost of capital over time. Yeah. And, you know, like,.

1:49:45 You'll have, like, diversified cash flow so you can actually start scaling, like, the internal mechanism of the business. Like, the OpEx at an Amgen is what makes it a biotech company, a big pharma company. It's not just that they Yeah. Have one Yes, they have cash cow drugs, but they have a cash cow drug every ten years that cycles out so that they can actually sustain the business, get the headquarters, get the teams, get the whole flow flowing. And if you're just like a one trick pony, a one hit wonder, you're gonna see this, you know, sort of up and down round tripping of your cash flow.

1:50:18 Do you think That's that's right. Do you think public opinion around pharma will be better or worse in ten years?

1:50:26 I'm very optimistic it's going be a lot better, specifically because I think we're beginning to pursue drugs that just help you live longer and healthier, and you guys know about the GLP-1s. The GLP-1s. The two top GLP-1s did more revenue than OpenAI and Tropicana, and also kind of did it profitably. And we think we're in early innings of things that just help you live longer and healthier. So things that help you walk longer

1:50:47 Yeah.

1:50:47 Like muscle. Right? That's great. Cartilage, bone density increases.

1:50:52 Yeah.

1:50:52 But I think you bring up a point. Like biotech's really an efficient stay because, you know, you're you're really scaling with humans, and there's an opportunity to build AI systems that do the work work work of entire teams. And so a pharma company is a 100,000 people because in order to prosecute one idea, you need a team of people to go after that. And and so we built, like, AI systems that allow you to exhaustively look at every single drug and target indication pair, and then, you know, design the right try... Trials, run it kind of cheaper and faster.

1:51:18 But you also don't have to create a separate team for each asset. And so biotechs today, like, you almost have to have, like, you know, a CMO, chief development officer, head of quality, and and and they're under leveraged in some ways.

1:51:29 Sure.

1:51:29 So if you can kind of have the best human talent with these AI systems, you can cross queue 10, 15, 20

1:51:35 Yeah.

1:51:35 You know, 50 drugs and not have to be, you know, a 100,000 person company, just a few 100 people. And that's what we're really excited about.

1:51:42 $600,000,000. I'm gonna... Gong. Gong. Gong.

1:51:46 Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

1:51:49 Final last last last question. This is fascinating. Please. You rather have 30,000 monkeys or 30,000 bitcoin?

1:51:59 I think the monkeys will ultimately...

1:52:05 The monkeys. I think they they might... I think the monkey market might rip harder than...

1:52:10 You think monkey... There's gonna be the flipping?

1:52:12 Because... So they

1:52:12 call them flipping.

1:52:13 With with crypto, have so much like just like cyber

1:52:17 Yeah.

1:52:17 Risk right now whereas...

1:52:18 Oh, so if you're so if you're holding on bored ape, you wanna get out of bored apes and get into real apes.

1:52:23 Yeah.

1:52:23 I think that might be the future. A lot of monkey business going on. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:52:28 Very cool business, Ben. Have

1:52:29 Coming back

1:52:29 on soon.

1:52:30 Of your day and congratulations. Goodbye. Up next, we are running a little bit late but we're bringing in the co founder and CEO of Upline. We have Amiram. Welcome to the show.

1:52:41 The first appearance with a massive There is. Series of investor. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

1:52:49 Hey, guys. Amiram here. Thank you for having me. Co founder, CEO of Upland. Yeah.

1:52:55 Very glad to be here.

1:52:57 Amazing. And introduce the business. What is the elevator pitch, the logline these days?

1:53:03 Protects the cloud and AI for the world. Sure. There is a lot of cloud infrastructure out there, a lot of AI usage.

1:53:10 Yeah.

1:53:11 And Upwind has built a platform that secures all of it from the entire life cycle. We've been around since 2023 and growing fast.

1:53:22 Super important. I can imagine you're growing very, very fast. What is the actual go to market motion like today? I mean, cybersecurity is on the top of everyone's mind. Ilya Sutzkever is tweeting about how neo clouds need better cybersecurity.

1:53:36 Is is it just buy buy buy? Everyone just pulling every tool in? Or are you actually going up against other cybersecurity firms for rip and replace? Are you additive? How do you plug in and just wind up achieving the mission of securing infrastructure more broadly?

1:53:55 Yes. I think first is cybersecurity is having a big moment with AI.

1:53:59 Yeah.

1:54:00 Alright. Let's face it. Every, like, person is a hacker

1:54:05 Yeah.

1:54:05 With, like, open source models. Like, you get the damage you can create Yeah. And let alone, like, the people who really wanna create damage. Like, you know, a a lot of enterprises are target for attackers. Yeah.

1:54:15 And we're, like, in a very, like, complex geopolitical situation in the world. So, like, there is a lot of things, like, that are happening on the cybersecurity front, and AI just makes it, like, stimulating it.

1:54:27 Yeah.

1:54:28 So... And the way we're thinking about it is is basically the the way to secure it is is is really about the platform approach because if you think about, like, the average CISO, like, when they need to buy a security tool, like, how much real estate do you really have to deploy all these, like, thousands of vendors? Yeah. So we've been taking, like, a platform approach that can actually take you all the way from protecting your secure development, secure deployment in the cloud, secure runtime in the cloud, and now AI lives everywhere. So we are really coming against, like to your question, against the platforms, like the big platforms.

1:55:04 And we think that's the right place to be because this is what customers really want.

1:55:07 Is your experience at Spot, and maybe you can tell the audience what you were doing there, relevant here because you've seen the nature of enterprise cloud surface areas and so you know what solutions will be adopted most aggressively?

1:55:24 You know, when when I go on a on a call with customers Yeah. And they ask me, what's unique about that point? What's... Can you tell us what's what's the differentiation of that point? So I tell them the first thing is that we're not coming from cybersecurity background.

1:55:35 Yeah. We're building a cybersecurity company not with cybersecurity background. Like, our background is from, like, you know, DevOps and infrastructure. We had a company before called Spot. Io. We helped thousands of organizations to scale their compute infrastructure efficiently on AWS, on on Azure, on GCP.

1:55:53 Mhmm.

1:55:54 And that knowledge of understanding how DevOps people think, how infrastructure is wired

1:55:59 Yeah.

1:56:00 How CloudOps is working, it's helping us to, like like, help security team unlock context of operations that they never had before. And that's actually the x factor of solving... Like, taking a problem from, a, like, a security finding and alert into like a real something that I really understand the risk and I can really fix it.

1:56:21 Mhmm. How is how is... Like, what is the state of vibe coding right now that we we all kind of predicted that, you know, there'd be tons of slop and stuff would might start breaking and it's kind of happening, but it's not even fully... I I I I don't think it's fair to put the blame for some of these cyber security attacks on vibe coding. A lot of people have are breaking into systems that are just like, yeah, actually it's just somebody who was running PHP and the normal like Yeah.

1:56:47 Lamp lamp stack. They didn't vibe code anything because they built it ten years ago and now they're vulnerable. And so when you're talking to CEOs, CIOs, what are the threat models that they're most worried about today?

1:57:01 You know what? I'll just tell you, like, a funny story. Yeah. Had last week. We had, like, a really important feature that I wanted to be deployed as soon as possible.

1:57:09 Sure.

1:57:10 So went to the developer and I said, I'm gonna go on a on a Zoom with you right now to make sure, like, we're deploying it Mhmm. Because there's, like, some, you know, final things. And then I go on a call and he's sharing my... The screen and I tell him, like, change this. Do that.

1:57:23 Mhmm. And then the guy doesn't write code.

1:57:27 He's just prompting?

1:57:27 He's like Yeah. It's just like prompting. Yeah. It's like, change this, do

1:57:31 that. Sounds like somebody should have done

1:57:33 that. So

1:57:35 your job is to take the prompt from the CEO For me. Get it to Codex and Cloud Code.

1:57:39 And I could just dictate.

1:57:40 To the agents. That's true story.

1:57:44 And then I asked him, so, like, so that's what we're doing right now. Okay. So, like, we're just prompting.

1:57:49 Yeah.

1:57:49 And then he said, like, yeah, like, my coding, like, time has dropped down by 90% Woah. But the review time is up by 600%.

1:57:58 Sure. Sure. Yeah. So So part of the midnight oil. So I

1:58:01 think like you have to

1:58:01 be really, really smart on, like, how to review that.

1:58:03 Yeah. I think Carpathi had a take about this where he said, like, Review

1:58:07 this.

1:58:07 Your code Review this, please. Ability atrophies while your code reading ability increases. That's probably more important than ever in the modern era. Fascinating. Well, tell us about the round.

1:58:17 A series c, how big was it? How much did you raise?

1:58:22 400,000,000.

1:58:25 Let's go. Congrats.

1:58:26 He's not playing. He's not playing.

1:58:28 Let's go.

1:58:29 That's... You know, that...

1:58:30 That's a

1:58:31 lot of money. That's a lot of money, and I I I can tell you that this is what's needed

1:58:34 Yeah.

1:58:35 To operate in that very important space. Yeah. Like, it's a super important space. You have to build. You have to innovate.

1:58:41 We have big dreams now. Yeah. Like, we can translate those dreams into execution. We have the right amount of cash. And lots of trust from investors, a lot of trust from customers. And, yeah, puts us as like one of the most capitalized companies on the planet to secure that cloud and AI.

1:59:01 Yeah. We need it more than ever now. We saw it with the PHPN hack. So thank you for everything you're doing.

1:59:05 Super important.

1:59:06 Good luck and thank you so much for your time to come on the show. I'm sure everybody's back.

1:59:10 You guys. Thank you....

1:59:11 Dude. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You're trying to get more than 400,000,000.

1:59:20 You gotta head to the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Jasper Zhang from Hyperbolic, cofounder and CEO. His first appearance on here. Jasper, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

1:59:33 Hey. How's it going?

1:59:34 Sorry for keeping you Thank

1:59:36 you. Great to meet you. For hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

1:59:41 Hey, everyone. I'm Jasper. I'm the CEO of Hyperbolic. Yeah. I grew up doing math competitions and won a Fugal medals at Chinese Math Olympiad, Alibaba Global Math Competitions.

1:59:50 I finished my math PhD at UC Berkeley in two years, which made me the fastest person to finish a PhD in official Berkeley.

1:59:56 What stopped you from doing it in... What stopped you, just out of curiosity, from doing it in one year? Like...

2:00:02 Oh, Berkeley has a residency requirement.

2:00:04 Oh.

2:00:05 Technically, you need two years. Hands retired. That's...

2:00:08 Hands retired.

2:00:08 So without that requirement, you think you could have done it in a couple months? Maybe a month?

2:00:13 With AI now, I think so. Yeah.

2:00:14 Oh, really? Okay. Okay.

2:00:16 Did you... Have you ever faced Scott Wu?

2:00:19 Oh. Yeah.

2:00:21 Oh. Yeah. I mean, I heard about him. Yeah. Haven't haven't met him in person.

2:00:26 No. No. I but meant you guys were kind of competing in different Yeah. Regions, it I sounds was hoping that we could find a video of you guys like

2:00:33 Going head to head. Years old. Yeah. Like like old LeBron videos. Yeah.

2:00:36 Exactly. In high school. Sparring.

2:00:38 Yeah. That'd great. But tell us about the company. What are you what are you building? How how how has it been going?

2:00:45 Yeah. It's been pretty great. I mean, have a bot like where aggregate and turn heterogeneous compute Mhmm. Into one unified platform.

2:00:52 Okay.

2:00:53 So it's a platform where people can just come access computing in a very flexible way. Yeah. They can manage and orchestrate the compute globally and then sell the compute back Yeah. When they don't need it.

2:01:01 How heterogeneous are we talking about? Because we saw a a cluster of 9,000 a one hundreds on eBay earlier today for something like $60,000,000. Then, you know, you got people with a gaming PC that might have a, you know, $50.90 NVIDIA card in it. How low can you go? What is the practical scale to that heterogeneity?

2:01:23 Yeah. Totally. So our technology support any kinds of GPU chips.

2:01:28 Mhmm.

2:01:28 But then, technically, I think most customers want at least that a 100 plus.

2:01:33 Okay.

2:01:34 Chips. We're also starting seeing people using Pro 6,000 for inference as well. Like, we can go as high as to Blackwell and Bariupi.

2:01:41 Yeah. How much, spare compute is out there? Because you you you you... It feels like every day there's a new story about, like, oh, there's such a compute shortage, like tokens are selling, like, you know, the the spot market is in contango and like the... There's so much AI demand and yet you're still finding folks out there that have spare capacity to bring on the platform.

2:02:04 Is that correct?

2:02:06 Yeah. I would say we're not just tackling spare capacity. Even for, like, a big cluster, our goal is to maximize the revenue per GKR.

2:02:13 Okay.

2:02:14 Technically, you can sell off take for b 300, $445, $5. Mhmm. But it's like very low margin business. Mhmm. If everyone...

2:02:21 Even if you're on Neo Cloud, you want like to maximize your revenue to $10, $20 per GP hour Sure. You can work with us.

2:02:28 Yeah. And so are you seeing... Like, what is driving that incremental off take? Is it that there's a company that is renting a cluster and they're doing a training run, then they pause for a little bit to review the results and so you can go do some inference right there or is it you're doing stuff on the other side of the world when everyone's working with the big models during their workday but then there maybe the GPUs aren't on fire in the middle of the night so you can sell inference somewhere else? Like what are the use cases that are...

2:02:57 That that your customers are coming to you for specifically?

2:03:01 Yeah. So I would say what are the other cases I mentioned are valid for us.

2:03:05 Mhmm.

2:03:05 And I would say we start with first helping customers to get access to compute first. So, you know, like, there are more than 300 plus neo clouds. Mhmm. The market is super fragmented. Yeah.

2:03:15 And it's the first time that technology company founder need to start worrying about sourcing procurement

2:03:21 Yeah.

2:03:21 But also the cash flow, the Yeah. Capital, the hatch hatching, and risk management. Yeah. And so, what we do is that we kind of have, like, the system, which is called, Forge, which is a unified control plan

2:03:33 Mhmm.

2:03:33 That allow us to take any bare metal cluster, attach it to our platform Mhmm. And now it can be shared globally with different customers in a very flexible way. So they will start using the compute from our platform. And then let's say if they lock in for three year contract or, like, a few a few year contract Yeah. Then like what you said, if they are doing training run after the training run, they don't need that.

2:03:55 They can also start back Yeah. To the market and the same for this inference too.

2:03:59 So Intel CEO, Lip Buuton, is backing up the truck for this company. What is your interaction with him and Intel? He's backing up the truck investing. But you you know, obviously, he's, you know, an incredibly important CEO in the AI world. But it's not like he's running a neo cloud that needs offtake capacity necessarily.

2:04:23 Like, there's not a super logical business relationship that I can think of. But do you see this growing into a strategic relationship, or is it just you're... You got along great and he had the capital to invest?

2:04:33 Yeah. I would say, fundamentally, like, he's outside of Intel, he's a VC. Right?

2:04:39 He Yeah.

2:04:39 He he founded World and Catalyst, which is the best semiconductor Yeah. VC in the Silicon Valley. Yeah. And so... Yeah.

2:04:46 Like, the business ran very well, and I... He... I think he see the upside

2:04:50 of Fantastic.

2:04:51 Building this aggregation layer, orchestration layer. Yeah. But then our goal is, like, we're trying to aggregate the world's compute. We want to put the world's compute behind the people who are bold enough

2:05:01 Yep.

2:05:01 To change the world. Yep. Right? So, naturally, there's a potentially strategic angle here to leverage other kind of chips.

2:05:09 Yeah. Well, you raised $30,000,000. I'm gonna hit the gong for you. Congratulations and thanks. Thanks.

2:05:18 You guys called this the a one, I feel like you might be back on in, a week or so for the a two. So

2:05:24 For sure.

2:05:25 It's an

2:05:26 exciting time. Have investors putting money for the next round. So

2:05:29 There we go. There we go. We go. Breaking news.

2:05:32 Us a call when you're when you're ready to come back on to announce the the second tranche.

2:05:36 Have a great rest

2:05:37 of We won't name the second tranche but...

2:05:39 And thank you so much Nice

2:05:41 meet you.

2:05:41 For coming on TBPN. Thanks. Have a great rest

2:05:43 of day.

2:05:43 Talk soon.

2:05:44 Goodbye. And that is our show folks. We will be back tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. What did that have to do with what I said?

2:05:53 Show's over. You

2:05:55 can take off your headset.

2:05:56 Your headphones.

2:05:57 Because normally I think about this like I heard something I didn't like but I understand.

2:06:01 Well, people might be Nuance. Yeah. Pissed off that the show...

2:06:04 Show's over. I can't deal with no show. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay.

2:06:07 Got it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN and we will see you tomorrow

2:06:13 It has been

2:06:13 11AM Pacific. It's been a privilege to be here with best Wednesday It's

2:06:18 honor. Honor.

2:06:20 It's been honor. It's an Okay.

2:06:34 Yeah. I'm I am. I I think Friday's show might be fun.

2:06:38 Okay.

2:06:38 Alright. I think we might have a good time.

2:06:39 You gotta tune in. Hit the subscribe bell. Set a calendar notification. 11AM Pacific on Friday is gonna be one for the ages.

2:06:48 That's right. You're gonna want

2:06:49 to tune in.

2:06:49 It's gonna be good time.

2:06:50 It's gonna be great. Flashback. Goodbye. Online. Cheers.

2:06:53 Later.

2:06:54 Journalists on the horizon. Stand by.