Politics 101, Prediction Markets Win, FOGO | Apoorva Mehta, Alex Spiro, Anish Agarwal, Derek Blasberg

(01:05) - Midterm Election Recap (04:19) - Prediction Markets Win (23:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (25:57) - FOGO (32:16) - Ferrari Raises Its Outlook (36:40) - EU Plans to Downgrade Art Risk (40:23) - Apoorva Mehta, co-founder and former CEO of Instacart and founder of Abundance, discusses Instacart’s resilience, its evolution from a widely doubted idea into a major public company, and the persistence behind its success. He also explores the future of long-running AI agents, agentic investing, and Abundance’s goal of using AI-driven capital allocation to build a highly valuable company that benefits humanity. (01:01:16) - Alex Spiro, a prominent Quinn Emanuel trial lawyer and former prosecutor who represents high-profile founders and celebrities, discusses handling complex public cases, building an authentic legal career, and AI’s potential to streamline litigation. He also reflects on his growing business ventures, partnership with Tom Brady, and the challenges of online misinformation. (01:34:05) - Anish Agarwal discusses his role as co-founder and CEO of Traversal, which builds an AI site reliability engineer that identifies and resolves failures in complex enterprise systems. He explains the company’s focus on Fortune 500 customers, usage-based model, growing integration with coding agents, and recent $120 million fundraise at a $1 billion valuation. (01:42:56) - Derek Blasberg discusses his work as a New York-based fashion writer and his new book on legendary photographer Richard Avedon. He explores Avedon’s influence on fashion, photography, and culture while reflecting on AI-generated imagery, creative originality, and the renewed value of physical art and in-person experiences. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Today is Wednesday, November 4th, 2026. We're live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  The capital of capital.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  All in one place.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Histor- history, historic day, yesterday, of course, 51 days till Christmas. We missed it on the show. Yesterday was 51 days till Christmas. That means today, 50 days till Christmas. 50 days till Christmas. We're counting it down here. It's getting pretty Christmasy right here. Apple is 50 years old, not today, just generally.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  It's generally a 50 year old company.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Happened over the summer. We talked about it when it happened, but reminder, it's 50 years old. We're doing free association here. Uh, no, of course, the midterms took over the timeline as a, uh, the Wall Street Journal cover story, Democrats take Congress in stunning rebuke of Trump. This was confusing to me. This is confusing to a lot of folks in our audience. So, uh, I went over to chat GPT and tried to figure out what's going on. So I asked, what are the midterms? And apparently the midterms are US elections held halfway through a president's four year term. They happen every four years, two years after a presidential election. The 2026 midterms, uh, I guess they were on Tuesday, so yesterday, uh, November 3rd.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  They're called the midterms. This is a fun fact because voters are effectively passing judgment on the president and the governing party at the midpoint of the presidency. And so, uh, now you're kind of up to speed. You kind of understand what's going on with politics. We said yesterday, we'd get into politics, deep dive. And I think we, I think we went pretty deep just now.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Nailed it.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  I think we nailed it.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Uh, no. Deeper than we've ever gone.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Extremely, yeah. Uh, no, we've been, we've been pretty out of the loop, uh, haven't really been covering it, but there are some interesting posts, some interesting knock on effects. Tyler Cowen had a cool, uh, reflection on the election. Uh, said procedurally, it seems to have gone just fine. Uh, and this was a big question because the freezers are getting hacked. There were a lot of questions about like, if the grid goes down now, that would be the worst time for cyber.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were reports of like power outages in Florida. And I was wondering, okay, is this like?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and, and the, the important thing is that the both sides are kind of like Trump's like, yeah, we accept the results and the Democrats are like, yeah, we won. Yeah, great. And so, uh, it's not even that there's like rumors or, or whispers. It's like everyone agrees.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  I don't want to, uh, speak too soon, but it seems like a functioning democracy.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  People were very upset and unhappy. They sort of, you know?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, no.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  And, uh, the results are being accepted.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Which is, uh, is a nice change.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Ron, uh, Al Bahari is in the Wall Street Journal. He's the chief investment officer at multifamily office, L N W. Let's give it up for multifamily offices. He said, I also think equity investors are breathing some kind of relief that the president is going to accept the results. And so, uh, I'm sure everyone's seen, but the stock market is booming today. The Dow Jones is up 3%. The NASDAQ's up 1.88%. Uh, Russell 2000 is up as well. Um, there's a bunch of, uh, positive, uh, news in the market, but the AI trade is still shifting around. Not everything is up. It's not all green. Uh, the, the deck is reshuffling and, uh, Ben Thompson had a really great breakdown.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Uh, 10 hot takes that we can go through in just a minute. But, um, uh, Tyler Cowen in his roundup, he says, uh, rising in status, Matt Iglesias, socially moderate, moderate Democrats did very well. Normie, social science results on campaign finance and, uh, Nate Silver predictions all did very well. Bawling in status, tariffs are on the way out, corruption's on the way out, war with Iran, wealth taxes lost in California, gerrymandering came back to hurt Republicans, given the blue wave. There's actually another name for gerrymandering that hurts you. It's a different phrase. I, I heard it from Nate Silver on some podcasts, but I can't remember it. And he says, and there you go. So fun, fun reflections. Um, the, uh, the prediction markets also held up well.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  We, I, I felt like we were going to get into a debate. Have you changed your position? Are you impressed or unsatisfied with the quality of prediction markets this time around?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Overall, they called almost everything right.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Uh, I thought that obviously Texas was, was a bit of a surprise. Like the prediction market is not that helpful if it looks, you know, one way, you know, for months and months and months, and then in the two hours before results are in, it flips completely.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  This is always the trick, right?

• 4:54Speaker 00

  But, but, I mean, again, and it's hard to process that, you know, if, if something has a 30% chance of happening.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  That's one in three. I'll take those odds any day.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Anyways, um, so yeah, some, some surprises, but, uh, but, but overall, like they seem to be pretty effective. It was interesting. There were, there was a number of people, um, both in tech and tech adjacent.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  That were basically taking the stance of the polls are wrong and the prediction markets are wrong. Like just every indicator that we have is, is wrong.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  And then it turns out they were actually, those individuals were wrong, like way, way, they were way more wrong than I think anybody even thought they were maybe wrong, right?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Don't make it right in this scenario, I suppose. Yeah. So call sheet. Call sheet came in at 95% accuracy, uh, when the polls opened. So you can always look at a prediction market and it's like, oh, right before the mainstream media calls the election, the prediction markets usually have it pretty dialed right before then. But the question is like, what's the predictive power a month, two months before? But even three months before call sheet was at 81% accuracy, whereas, uh, vote hub average was 77%.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Which, which that's, that's, you know, just, just my napkin math. That feels pretty impressive, given that a lot of those markets at the time were not like 80, 20, right? They were, they were more like 60, 40.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  And so it would appear that there, you, you can maybe put a little bit more weight on average.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  On markets where there's like a definitive leader.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So from my perspective, the, uh, people felt this way with, I think it was the Emmys or the Oscars where the prediction markets were on the, were on the screen. And so, you know, the announcer comes out and says, oh, the, the best picture nominees are, and then you can just see like 99% chance that this person is going to win. And I think Polly market called every single one correctly. So it's sort of like ruined the, the thrill of watching it because you're just like, oh, okay. The, again, the one that they put on screen won.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And that's sort of how I felt where I felt like the prediction markets were calling this blue wave for months and.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  It worked. You can put odds on the screen during a football game because the result is not decided when somebody just walks out on the field and reads the result, right? Whereas in some of these award shows, it literally is just like pre decided. Somebody comes out, reads the result, it's over, right?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, it does a transfer.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Going into yesterday, I, uh, I, I was very much like, I, I'm not following it today. I, I, I just, I'm, I, I processed all of the, all of this and all the downstream effects. And I think the market had as well. I think, I think a lot of the selling off in the AI stocks and some of the data center builders, I think that was because everyone was clocking that this was going to be the outcome. And so you don't think so?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  I don't, I, I, the thing, the thing is, I don't recall seeing a single person making the claim that the Texas governor was going to be a Democrat.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  At any point, other than.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  I guess that is sort of a, like a surprise.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Right when the prediction markets flipped last night.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  But I, I, I would say that although the, the Texas, Texas race is important, um, the 40 odd data center bills are probably more important in aggregate.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And so those have been in process that it would, that permitting would become more.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  And the other thing is, it's not like Greg, it's not like Greg Abbott was like, yeah, doing rallies, being like, we're going to build them all here.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  He was also, he was also.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  He actually enacted a moratorium of, of one month. Uh, and so, yeah, it was, it was going back and forth. Um, the, the other interesting, uh, story is, yeah, I mean, compute campuses, big loser, except for in North Dakota, North compute, North Dakota voted in favor. Uh, but Ben Thompson, uh, has 10 takeaways that we can kind of run through. He says, the AI trade got it right. The most obvious reason why the stock market has been rocky over the last few weeks is the tightening of credit markets. Uh, we are needless to say, full on into the equity funding era. At the same time, it seems that this outcome is very bad for the AI trade in the short term, but mu- but much of the pain may have already been endured because we've seen that

• 9:24Speaker 01

  selling off, even though a spot markets, like the value of a, of a GPU hour is increasing, the models are getting better, but maybe there's been a process over the last few months, mostly speculative, that, you know, that people have been digesting the fact that there might be a pullback in new compute coming online. And so more data centers, uh, more GPUs sitting in warehouses as opposed to.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  The craziest thing to me is how little attention it's getting that Prop 40 didn't pass. Like Prop 40, as it was written, was going to destroy the model for building technology companies in California. Like I, a bunch of people on our show that have come on our show are like paper billionaires.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Right?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  That would have, if that would have passed, of course, it would have been litigated.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  It, it wasn't like, uh, you know, on November 4th, go to your bank and get a, get a cashier's check for, you know, $50 million and go bring it in. But.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  It's like California, Californians like resoundingly voted against it, right? I think, and I, I think that there were, again, a lot of flaws with the way it was written. There was a lot of incentive for different groups that would normally be in favor of, of attacks like that to, to actually be against it because they weren't going to benefit from it directly. But, uh, but yeah, pretty, uh, pretty good, good outcome there.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  The biggest loser in the California election, the, the jealous senties who are trying to nerf their bean air opponents, right?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Potentially.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So somebody's sitting on $400 million, they're getting money mogged, uh, when they pull up to the private sector terminal.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  The 4D chess there was, was, they were, they were spending heavily on.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  I want to back up the truck to try and nerf my, my rivals potentially, but bad news for them because it didn't pass. Ben Thompson's second take, NeoClouds are on the edge. They've been at the forefront of the credit concerns from a credit, from a certain perspective, being unable to build data centers has a silver lining in that they couldn't, if, in that they couldn't get the money to pay for them anyways. Moreover, NeoCloud's facilities that are already permitted now have an asset that is going to be scarcer than expected, um, which is a very, very interesting, and I think every, every data center, uh, project will need to be reevaluated. Like what is the status of Stargate and, and what's happening in, in Abilene in Texas?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Is all of that permitted and the moratorium will just be on new capacity because the Stargate pitch was enormous, an enormous campus. And I believe a lot of that was already approved and, and, and good to go. So, um, new moratoriums wouldn't reach back to that. So that still would come online. So that could be very bullish for anyone who's involved in that. At the same time, there's, there's a hard scenario if you're a, if you're a NeoCloud that has, that has built a bunch of data centers, but then you sold all your compute on long contracts. So you're not taking advantage of the spot market being in contango and, and being able to sell at higher rates each month after month, uh, to, you know, labs that need compute more than ever.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  So you're, you're, you've sort of reaped all the reward on your first build. You need to go build a new building, a new data center, and now you can't. And so you can't bring new capacity online that you can sell into the spot market and, and make more money on. So that's a little bit tricky. There is a, yeah, there is a, uh, uh, it's just a tough dynamic for some of the NeoClouds where a lot of them have, uh, incredibly talented people that can go and build things, but they just might not have enough money to finance them. And now they might not have enough political power to get them across the finish line. Although there are clearly some states, some areas in the country that are receptive. And they, it's not that they, like, North Dakota is getting called out as a, as a, as

• 13:12Speaker 01

  a state that denied a data center ban, right? But what we're not talking about is the states that didn't even have them on the menu, right? And there are a number of states that have been receptive and continue to be receptive to the point where they haven't even had legislation to ban data centers.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  To me, it's great, it's great data for technology industry to like comb through and look at where, where people are more favorable to data centers and go build them there.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Or at least try to, right? There's going to be some areas where they're pro data center that have, uh, problems getting access to energy, right? And, and other issues that they run into, but, um, they don't all have to go to space just yet.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, the, the, the, the energy I think is, is less of a factor. I think natural gas is pretty abundant, but you still have to build pipelines around it. And then, uh, the big thing is just like the overall infrastructure. Like, do you have big roads? Do you have the ability to move big, uh, materials around while you're in that construction phase? There are certain parts of America where even just building a house is hard because you're on dirt roads and, and that's tricky. So, um, anyway, uh, you, you can see some of the NeoCloud reshuffling happening in the market today. Ben Thompson says hyperscalers are winners. The downside for the NeoClouds, upside for hyperscalers. Yeah, Jeff Bezos is doing well and Amazon's way up today.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  They're more likely to grow their share of AI compute than they were before. Moreover, investors may be pleased if the hyperscalers ambitions are somewhat curtailed. So investors are like, oh, okay, maybe you'll be able to bring the dividend back or return some cash. You're not going to, you're not going to need to tap the deck markets because you won't have anywhere to invest it. This could be something that investors are excited about. Uh, political opposition is an excuse to moderate spending. This is the 4D chess I was joking about with Joe Weisenthal, which all of a sudden is being taken very seriously. I was kind of riffing with him and, and now I've seen a number of people put that, uh, in writing as like their official take that this is good. And we'll see it, we'll see how it plays out.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Sort of an iron law.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Nothing ever happens. Things happen.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  No, nothing ever happens, but.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  No, that's a good point. Yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Uh, one thing, you know, is, um,

• 15:30Speaker 00

  we got a report from, from a friend who was walking up and down Sand Hill Road this morning.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  And, uh, they sent a clip, they heard this song, uh, playing.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  This was playing outside of the venture capital.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  It was playing inside, but it was booming so loudly.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  The windows, yeah, sort of sorrowful moment on Sand Hill.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  They have to delete some tweets.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Delete some tweets potentially. This is of course the song from the W, is it actually in the WWE documentary or is it just overly?

• 16:02Speaker 00

  I think it's just become a, I think it's just become a meme.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Wonderful, wonderful song called Maintaining Love.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  That's going to go in the heavy rotation. I've been listening to more and more meme core on Spotify. I got Queen Street in the heavy rotation.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Full brain rot.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Brain rot. It's great. Uh, let me tell you about Cisco. Great infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Uh, Ben says Nvidia mixed bag, uh, almost certainly a short-term loser. Fewer data centers mean fewer Nvidia chips. But the long-term bull case for Nvidia is that if there's a set amount of data centers that exist and then you can't build them anymore, you have to get the most tokens per watt. You need to be.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  The most efficient chip.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he has a, he has a phrase for that. I forget what it's called.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, it's, it's something good here, uh, making this point. ISO power means that power is the constraint. And so you already have power going to a building, but you're running some older technology, some older chips. There's now more of an incentive to upgrade those to the latest and greatest to get the most out of, uh, a particular power envelope. So.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  There's a real, uh, mask off moment from, uh, Harley over at Shopify.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  He said, you know, US voters just rejected data centers everywhere they got the chance. That investment has to land somewhere. Clean hydro, open land, cold winters. That's Canada. This is a massive opportunity for us. Generational.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Oh, so we're saying the data centers will go there?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's hoping, he's hoping.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  I, I, I thought it was just the dollars would fund, would, would flow into.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  No, no, no. And I'm joking, of course, of course he's proudly, um, based in, in Canada. Matt Spoke says tonight, Canada was given an opportunity to become the data center capital of North America. This is how Canada wins in AI.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I love it. Go get it. Seems like there's lots of, lots of room up there. I don't know. You need the infrastructure, but, uh, probably easier with cooling and, uh, plenty of energy. So, uh, for sure, do it. Uh, the fifth point from Ben Thompson, advantage China says China is in the inverse scenario. Uh, the country has plenty of power, the ability to build a lot more. They don't have leading edge chips, but they've been investing in that. And I think this is the, this is the, uh, the, the broader discussion that will emerge is, okay, if we actually slow down our build, how real is the competition with China? It's been something that's been sort of the, uh, uh, like a, it's been fear mongered about a little bit in the, in the AI debate, a lot of AI.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Can't, can't we just slow down? If we're worried about capabilities, if we're worried about AI safety, can't we just slow down? All of those devolve into, well, we'll lose to China, China will catch up. Uh, we're now approaching that scenario, but we'll see what happens on the other side and, and how we actually react to this and, and, and how much the build out actually slows down. Like it could be, uh, just, okay, we got to build in different states. We got to build in some other, some other areas. There's nothing that really changes in terms of.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, take, take him, shared, uh, some highlights. He says, re-Texas governor election. Let's take a deep breath. We all take a deep breath.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  If companies ask for no subsidies, promise a ton of union jobs and guarantee that water and electricity costs won't rise, plus add supply, data centers can be built under her governorship. This is directly from Gina's website. Hino Hosa outlined her Texans' first data center priorities for the next legislative session, which Abbott could call today, requiring American union jobs, giving Texans a seat at the table to decide if and how data centers come to their communities, creating. And again, like, I think that there's, there's clearly a lot of reasons why a data center, why a community would want. Like, I look at places like Midland, where you land in Midland, and you're just like, in the middle of, the middle of nowhere, but there's oil fields and there's billions of dollars of

• 20:00Speaker 00

  wealth creation, and there's like, you know, kind of rough, but amazingly well-paying jobs, and it's probably a trade that certain communities would make again, in a different context.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Elon is, is, is taking the victory lap, saying data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now. He's like, it was all part of the plan.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  He's probably thinking, space is, seems pretty appealing for me right now.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. But you know, you know who else might benefit in a, in a, in a build-out freeze on, in America, on land? Panthalassa, remember that company?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Ocean data centers. We got to cultivate ocean power. I love that company. It's a huge, huge, bobbing data center in the ocean that circles Antarctica, and it just bobs up and down using tidal energy. Such a cool project. Incredibly difficult. It's like a true mega project. You got to use a crane to move anything around, just to get, build these things. But certainly more near term than getting into space, although the SpaceX team seems like they're firing on all cylinders. Starship, they're going to try and catch it on the next one. So, like, the next Starship launch is like the one to go see, because they're going to send it up, it's going to come down, they're going to try and catch

• 21:22Speaker 01

  it with Mecca, Meccazilla, I think is the name of the, the chopsticks.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Pause.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  What?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  You started saying Mecca.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Wait, it is. That's what they call it, right?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, Meccazilla.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Wow. I now understand how that leaked into the, the post-training, whatever happened. But, um, yeah. So, so, so they're, they're fully coming online with that, and Starship is very much built for Starlink and, and the vertical integration there. We've heard a lot about, like, some of these rockets that SpaceX builds, like, some of them have a little bit of extra capacity, but a lot of them are like, we designed this one from the ground up to just hold our stuff. And so, I wouldn't be surprised if we get some compute online 2028, maybe some test 2027, but it does feel like it's happening, although it won't be, you know, a story of the next six months anytime soon. Anyway, let me tell

• 22:17Speaker 01

  you about Railway. Railway is the only one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite data to deploy web app servers, databases, and more. So, the results are in. Data Center Moratoria went 43 to 1. That was the final score, 43 to 1. All hyperscalers must now converge on Harwood, North Dakota, the one outlier. If you're in construction or real estate, get to Harwood, North Dakota. Start picking up land, go to the gas pump, fill up your tank, do whatever you can to get power in North Dakota. No, I'm sure there are other, there are other cities and states that are receptive, but fun, fun, fun to

• 22:58Speaker 01

  watch it play out. Where, where else should we go, Jordy? We have our, I can take everyone through the guest list. We have a poor of a meta coming on from Instacart. He's the founder, former CEO. Talk about the deal with DoorDash, very excited. Name is Alex Spiro from Quinn Emanuel, our second Quinn Emanuel partner coming on the show, long overdue. Then a new Shaggerwall from Traversal, huge Series B from Kline Perkins, closing out with Derek Blasberg. Should we stay here?

• 23:26Speaker 00

  I needed to, we've talked about merch for so long, but I needed to be able to prove to everyone that it's actually happening. It's going to be next week. What day did I say it was going to be? When's the launch date? I think it's, I think it's Thursday, the 12th. The 12th, we are launching the merch store, and this will be available as well as a bunch of other stuff. Very excited.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Okay. Is Idaho actually voting on a state gun?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  This is real, for sure. So, I mean, you, everyone knows they have state flag, state bird, state flower. I guess the result.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  It was the, I think Winchester Model 1873 rifle.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Okay, the Winchester, Winchester, 1873 rifle. Interesting. Well, fun for them. Funny that, that, we saw someone posting about that, somebody endorsed it in their voter's guide, and in that post, they said it was satirical, that they were just joking around. But I guess they were just joking about them actually making a recommendation, but it was in fact on the ballot?

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Maybe they were joking because, like, everyone knows that it's the Winchester.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Wow, that's like a real ball knower. Yeah, we got caught out, not, not knowing.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  They had to do a vote, but everyone in Idaho knows.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, obviously, obviously. No, they, they had endorsed.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  The Winchester Model 1873 is called the gun that won the West.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a lever action, right? The gun that won the West. When you got a good, like, like subtitle name like that, I feel like you're kind of punching above your weight on the ballot, right? Because, you know, the other ones are just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, a bunch of numbers, a bunch of serial numbers effectively, and then you got one with the superlative, the gun that won the West. It has, it has its own nickname. So, that's a, that's a pretty good, pretty good spot. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context. We talked about call she in polymarket. Joe Weisenthal agrees. Huge win for prediction

• 25:37Speaker 01

  markets. My only, my only take from last night, both in the run-up to the vote and on election night, the prediction markets did exactly what they were supposed to do. A big, confident forecast in the run-up and incredibly timely conveying the data as it dropped. Nick Carter agrees. Prediction markets were spot on last night, and Matt Wong as well. Well, let's move over to what else is in the Journal today, because we got a new term, a new coinage. Are you excited for this?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Fogo. You've heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. Now, you need to learn about Fogo, the fear of getting obliterated in the market.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  I wish that Bain Capital had come up with this one.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Why?

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Don't they own Fogo de Chao?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Oh, they do. Yes. So, Hedge Fund Elliott warns of Fogo, fear of getting obliterated in the market. The $80 billion hedge fund firm posted flat returns in the third quarter and under 2% gain this year through September, and that is almost impressive, given how much gyration there's been. You know, there's been people that have been absolutely printing, just being like, long tech or something like that. And then there's other been, there's been hedge fund blowups and over leverages and all sorts of stuff. But Paul Singer's Elliott Investment Management compared the current state of the markets laden with debt-fueled risk-taking and bubbling with hype over new technologies to the roaring 20s that preceded

• 27:04Speaker 01

  the Great Depression. At present, virtually every alarm bell warning of a substantial bear market ahead is ringing. The $80 billion hedge fund firm wrote in an October investor letter reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. While Elliott is prepping for potential, for potentially historic upheaval, its performance is lagging behind the broader hedge fund industry. Elliott's returns were flat in the first three months, ending September 30th, leaving its gains for the last nine months a little under 2% according to the letter. That trails a composite hedge fund index, as well as the nearly 13% total return of the S and P 500 from the same gain. And even index, even short-term treasury bills were

• 27:47Speaker 01

  doing 3%. So, they're underperforming treasuries. So, are they being too cautious, or are they, you know, seeing the future here? Elliott's quarterly letters are known for their doom and gloom commentary on the dominant themes of the day. Black pill hedge fund, just black pill in every letter. It's October message highlighted risks building in US budget deficits, persistent inflation, private credit portfolios, and artificial intelligence hype, and it warned about market distortions caused by factors it said were more akin to gambling than investing, including traders using zero-day options and betting on meme stocks, which they have come up against, because of course Elliott is the, the famous hedge

• 28:29Speaker 01

  fund that went up against Wall Street bets in the Robin Hood GameStop saga. Singer and Jonathan Pollak, the firm's two chief executives and chief investment officers, run one of the hedge fund industry's largest pools of capital. And a lot of people were assuming that Elliott would be completely destroyed by that saga. In fact, they closed their position. I think Ken Griffin helped out. And they've done well, because they've scaled the firm since that saga, and a lot of people were like, it's over for them. And that was kind of the way they were depicted in that movie, if I'm not incorrect. It avoids swinging.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And Elliott didn't buy a bunch of, like, NeoCloud stocks, like a...

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Six weeks ago.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  They didn't, right?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Hopefully not, because that could be, that could be.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Neo clout are in a tough spot.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Obliteration scenario.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Currently, they wrote they're focused on preserving their capital and being ready to strike if the market runs into turmoil. Over Elliott's five decade existence, fallow periods have existed, but these have historically been accompanied by market turbulence and followed by periods of rare opportunities. Our goal is to be well positioned, protected on the downside, and with capital to deploy into the bargains when the tide turns again in the third quarter. Elliott's unprofitable sectors included distressed debt and portfolio hedges related to gold currencies, stocks and interest rates. Its profitable sectors included commodities, arbitrage and portfolio hedges related to credit. The firm sees opportunities in activist investing in healthcare companies, producing energy opportunities,

• 29:57Speaker 01

  and eventually buying from forced sellers in dislocated credit markets. Its recent activist positions include stakes in PepsiCo and Synopsys, a chip design software maker. So, interesting. I just like the new coinage, Fogo, fear of getting obliterated. The actual quote here from the letter, so many factors have lined up to cause this great boom that it might take disruption in only one or two of them to shift this momentum into reverse, leading to a cascading self-reinforcing unwind of this bull market and an abrupt change from FOMO to Fogo, fear of getting obliterated. So FOMO drives the market upward. Everyone thinks, ah, I gotta get in. I just saw somebody print a 3X on Nvidia, 10X on Micron. I gotta get in. I don't want to miss out.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Fogo, if everyone's getting blown up, doesn't matter what you're in, you're going to sell your dollars, sell your gold, sell your crypto, sell everything. That's what they're worried about. So some blackpilling from the folks over at Elliott.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Well, it's a bull market for the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. The institute's co-founder, Gary K. Mickelson, put a proposition, Prop 38, on the ballot that passed, which gives his three-person nonprofit 4.2 billion from the public.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Really?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Ahmad over at Mercury says something feels a bit iffy about California Prop 38 doing a popular vote proposed by a three-person nonprofit that gives said nonprofit 4.2 billion.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  That's a lot of money.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Is a lot of money. Of course, I'm sure they're going to redistribute, hopefully, like 99.9% of those funds to various research groups.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Researchers who are actually doing stuff.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Still, it seems like this one simple trick, if you're a nonprofit.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  It's like, get it.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Well, the real move would be do that and then do the for-profit conversion, right?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Trace says man raised his Series A via ballot. Honestly, this is more like a Series F.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  More like.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  But if he does the for-profit conversion, he could be paying a big dividend soon, potentially.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Ferrari lifts guidance again on strong demand for car customizations. Fear of missing out is back in force over at Ferrari. The company's order book now reaches into 2028. That's Tesla Roadster competition territory, because the Roadsters not shipping until 2028, but some of these Ferrari tailor-made's are going out to 2028, and it still has two more launches to come this year. What are they going to launch?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  They're going to announce the.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Manual V12 Luce, right?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  No, there, I think they're going to announce the 296 Challenge, the street.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Street legal version of that.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Okay. Maybe F80 variant?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Are they still, do they count the 12C Manwale?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Oh, but that, I think, I thought that would already have been, because that's been reviewed. Like, I've seen reviews of them.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  I just don't know what the journal is counting as a launch.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Versus like a release or a leak or like a showcase. Yeah, whatever. Well, let's, let's get some context on Ferrari. Ferrari again lifted its full year guidance slightly as demand for car customizations remain strong and deliveries of newer models is ramped up in the third quarter. The Italian luxury sports carmaker said Tuesday that it expects revenue of around 8.56 billion this year, up from a previous estimate of around 7.6 billion euros. It forecasts adjusted earnings up to 2.29 billion euros. Margins are at 30%. They're going up.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  The company says it's benefiting from stronger personalization than initially expected. Lower currency headwinds and newer, more profitable models. Deliveries of our F80 Supercar and personalizations led by the Ferrari 296 Speciale family support our robust financial growth. Our order book now reaches into 2028. We still have two more launches to come. It shipped 3,368 vehicles to customers this quarter, 33 fewer than a year earlier, but I'm sure the average price is up. So deliveries of its Amalfi, the 296 Speciale, the 12-cylinder Spider and the Pro Sanguay increased,

• 34:33Speaker 01

  while the 849 Testerosa and the 296 Speciale Aperta continued to ramp up and the 849 Testerosa Spider started deliveries. Shipments of the F80 also progressed in line with plans. What is your take on the 849 Testerosa? It's an SF90 under the hood, but do you like the styling?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I think it looks amazing.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  You think it looks amazing?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  When it's specced right.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  I think, again, I've said this a bunch of times.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Or whatever?

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, the way they spec them for announcements, I think, is.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Rough.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Really rough.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  But then as soon as actual clients start specing them, they look amazing.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, we saw it with the Luce too.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Of the Testerosa on the street, and when you, when it's black on black on black, it looks like.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Looks really good.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Meanwhile, the Roma Spider 296 GTS and SF90XX family of cars were phased out. The largest regional market, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which is all one regional market. Shipments rose by 38 vehicles, while America saw an increase of five vehicles and the rest of Asia saw a 29-unit increase. Shipments to mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan dropped by 105 units. I mean, if they're.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  And is that, is that because the market has just been, like, we're there in, like, deep bear market territory?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the AI bubble popped over there. That could be it. It also could be that

• 35:57Speaker 01

  just local carmakers are coming out with something that competes, at least on specs, with some of these supercars.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  In terms of zero to 60 time.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Local pride.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, they might be EVs, but there are a certain amount of buyers over there who might want to buy a car made in China that has the same specs and is just as fast. And then, and then certainly, if you were in line for the next Ferrari and it's a Luce and there's a BYD with a similar performance specs, you might, you have even less reason to go with Ferrari. But we will see. Anyway.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Let's tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  The European Union is downgrading art market money laundering risk despite heists? What is going on here?

• 36:52Speaker 00

  They're downgrading it.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  They're downgrade, to downgrade art market.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  They're like, don't worry about it.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Money laundering risk despite heists. Okay, so European Commission.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  It's all good.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Experts cite limited EU evidence linking high-profile museum thefts to criminal networks. So they're like one-offs? They're just people taking their sticky fingers they can't resist? Sticky finger? That's a great euphemism. The European Commission is planning to downgrade the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing in the art market, even as a spate of high-profile museum heists across Europe put the spotlight on crime in the sector. So few high-profile cases, but maybe not systemic. Minutes of a January 2026 meeting, that was a long time ago, show the Commission's forthcoming super, super national, supranational risk assessment will downgrade the threat of money laundering and terrorist financing

• 37:45Speaker 01

  in the art market and antiques trade from high to moderate compared with its 2022 assessment. A moderate level, threat level means the sector needs mitigation measures, better awareness and stronger regulatory oversight. The previous assessment had recommended specific measures to tackle the high-risk level. I wonder if some of this is just like a crowding out effect from criminals going to crypto and cyber heists? You know, you see the new obliterated model and you're like, what am I doing, planning a heist?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Why, why am I going to go spend a bunch of time?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  In museums with sticky fingers.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Prompt and.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Clean up on Binance or something. Who knows? The, the Commission's Financial Market Director recommended downgrading the risk, citing limited EU evidence linking such thefts to money laundering or terrorist financing, despite acknowledging persistent vulnerabilities due to opacity and anonymity in the sector. One art expert said the moderate classification was still too high. So someone in the art market is like, we got to send this thing down. It's not risky at all.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  We gotta, we gotta investigate that guy.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  What is he doing? What is he doing?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  In other news, Tyler, how do you pronounce Y O Y growth?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Yoi growth?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yoi growth.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yoi.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Low yield. Lucy says new hire just pronounce year-over-year growth like Yoi.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yoi.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Which I think we should all adopt.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Have you said enough? I mean, there was a moment when EBITDA was probably spelled out and now you just say the, say the name, the acronym.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Pangram is expanding into image and video detection. They already, they already saved me. They already saved me because I fell for the cat with a mullet, but Pangram was to the rescue and had identified that it was an AI.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  You wanted to fall for the cat.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of set myself up for that. I wanted to believe in the, in the mullet cat. But yeah, Pangram, Max Sparrow over at Pangram says, we've been working towards AI image and video detection for months. Now it's finally here. There were a lot of challenges along the way. Feels like images and video should be easier, but I don't know.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  I think it's because there's so many different models and even the architecture.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  True.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  You have diffusion-based ones or you have like auto-aggressive models. I think it's hard to like really capture all.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Oops.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  We have our next guest.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  We have our next guest.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Should we bring him in?

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Let's bring him in. We already.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  First, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. We have a poor meta from the co-founder of Instacart. Former CEO, how are you doing?

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Welcome.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Great, great. Excited to be here, guys.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Great to have you. Massive week.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  And yeah, overdue for this one.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Always good to take a victory lap for YC 2012, summer 2012.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Right, that's right.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  We love an overnight success.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Overnight success. Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Yes, you guys, it feels great. It feels great. Long time coming and

• 40:56Speaker 03

  I just feel just a big sense of gratitude, honestly. There've been thousands of people who've worked on this for a decade and a half. And you know, when we started the company, I'll be honest, most people didn't think we would be able to pull it off. You know, this is Instacart is a business in the lowest margin category of retail, right?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  And then you're like, let's add really complex last mile logistics to that already low margin category. And it sounds like kind of an impossible task.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And it was one of these companies like Spotify where MP3.com had failed and Napster had failed and dot com. I'm sure venture capitalists, when you walked in in 2012, 2013, were saying, oh, I've heard of Webvan. Grocery delivery doesn't work on the internet. The economics are all upside down. This won't work. I'm passing. Was that the experience?

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, that happened so many times. I had a VC who literally sort of stepped out of the meeting while I was pitching.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Classy.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Hey, at least they didn't fall asleep. We've heard that happens too.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Was there an excuse or did he just kind of get up and like slowly?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  He said mad boring, mad boring, mad boring.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  You didn't come back. You didn't come back. I'm still waiting.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  Still waiting, no waiting.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Hey, he might have bought 500 bucks in the public markets at some point, got back.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  If you ever see him announced as a guest on the show, he's still in business, let us know. We'll ask, hey, what did you actually do back then? What was so important?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Surprise, duh, duh, duh, duh, from the top row.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  When did you, when was the moment where you're like, okay, I think this is going to really work? Because when you're getting, when you're in that, you know, obviously you had conviction in the idea. Otherwise you wouldn't have been building it or raising it. But when you get a bunch of smart people that are constantly telling you like, sorry, like, you know, this has been tried before. And you know, it can kind of hurt your confidence. But what was the moment where you felt like it was clicking?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  You know, to be honest, I don't think I ever lost conviction, you know? I always had conviction from day one. There was no

• 43:17Speaker 03

  I remember, I mean, this was, you know, there were lots of ups and downs, right? Like, you know, you obviously had VCs, you know, we had VCs walking out on us. But like, look, like, you know, Jeff Bezos went on stage and he was like, look, it's just unlikely that a model like this is the right solution. And a couple of years later, he bought Whole Foods.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  And you know, everyone's like, okay, this company is done, right? Whole Foods was the largest partner that we had, right? Like, like, I don't know if it was majority, but like a lot of our sales, like 50, 60% of our sales were Whole Foods, right? And

• 43:59Speaker 03

  yeah, and then the company survived it, right? Company not only survived it, thrived it. And we had COVID happened, right? All of our competitors went down. Amazon shut down, Target shut down, you know, so many other companies I can't even remember shut down, right? The team found a way to not only, you know, stay, stay, stay online, but actually sort of, you know, double and triple our growth during that time. Right? And then it survived post-COVID as well, right? Like, I like, which was like, wow, like the, all the growth, right? Like it was not COVID led at this point. It was just, you know, purely organic growth that we were seeing, right?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  And you know, most recently, Chris Rogers was our current CEO, just, you know, you know, did an earnings announcement and this was the best quarter they've had as a public company. Growth is back, profitability is incredible. I mean, you know, honestly, this is just, it makes me so proud of the thousands of people who sort of, you know, could have easily said that like, look, this is, you know, the conventional wisdom, this is not going to work, right? But they said, no, this time is different and actually made it happen. And you know, big, big kudos to the team.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  It's amazing.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, people were

• 45:20Speaker 00

  I love when, I love when, I love when a business like seemingly breaks logic, but then establishes like some new sort of ground, ground truth.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  And it feels like, feels like you guys.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the funniest part of the roller coaster is at the end when people try to kind of stuff you in the SaaS apocalypse narrative. I mean, I think DoorDash took like the brunt of it, but still it was like, and everyone was like, okay, that's not a great example. There's a bunch of legitimate discussions we can have about vibe coding your own SaaS. But a multi-sided marketplace is maybe a little bit further out on the agentic apocalypse curve, I think, but.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is so crazy to think back in 2012, if you could, you know, tell your younger self, like you're going to start this company in 2012. By 2026, you're going to sell it for $17 billion. Then you're going to be like, wow, like, so it was just up and to the right.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  The whole way. Of course, it was in the fullness, in the fullness of time. I'm very curious how, what is your, what is your point of view on on agents? Whenever, whenever like AI agent founders like start talking about how much time they're going to save consumers. I always kind of chuckle a little bit because you guys, you know, the Instacarts, the DoorDash, you know, these other marketplaces have like spent a decade like shaving off seconds, like, you know, milliseconds every single day, making this process like slightly more convenient every single day. And the compounding effect is that it's like extremely fast and easy to get what you want now.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  And seemingly very difficult for agents to like actually meaningfully like improve that experience. And so it still makes sense to integrate with them.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  But yeah, what's been your view?

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, like, if you think about what, you know, what Instacart does, right? Instacart gives people time, right? Instead of having to schlep your groceries, you know, get, you know, find parking, find like, you know, wait at the checkout, right? It just makes that activity, which everyone has to do on a weekly basis, you know? You know, it just makes that, you know, a few taps on your phone, right? So it saves, you know, time, saves like hours for everyone every single week, right? And so now you think about what the agentic opportunity here is, right? Is that like, okay, now the agents can save you those taps, right? And you know,

• 47:46Speaker 00

  But yeah, you already save them like, you already save them like 99% of the time, right?

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  And so it's like, it's, it's not that compelling. Like if you were to pitch this for a VC, it's like, you're not giving me a 10x improvement. Like you guys, the original, the original pitch was like, if you're saving someone hours, like that is like a 10x improvement, right? But saving somebody like 10 taps.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  I don't want to, I don't want to completely sort of, you know, you know, say that agents don't add value. They obviously do and they will, right? And I'm very excited about the agents that, you know, Instacart is building and what agents that Instacart and DoorDash can build together, right? You know, you just imagine, for example, if an agent sort of understands your, your, your whole family's dietary needs and, and, you know, and can reliably figure out what you want to eat and be proactive about that and can make you, you know,

• 48:45Speaker 03

  you know, more healthy and, you know, those things do add a lot of value as well. And, you know, I don't think we've seen that so far, right? I don't think we're, we're very early in that journey.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was telling, I was, I was talking with some folks at a, at a major, you know, financial institution. And I was like, what you need to be picked, what the thing that you need to be focused on with agents right now is that people are trying to, are sending their agents to your product because your product lacks something like very fundamental. And I think that that's like why I am excited for individual applications to think like, how can we make our own software a lot better? How can we make it, you use natural language, understand what users want, make this whole process more convenient within the app? But I'm more bullish on that than I am, you know, the average, like, you know, go, go, go shopping for me, right? Just because.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  That's right. I mean, you know, if you think about like Instagram is the original agentic company, right? You literally do send an agent to go to the grocery store for you, right? It is just a human agent. It is a human shopper who's doing that for you, right? And, but yeah, I agree. I think that there is, you know, a lot of improvement to be made in the, the overall interface. And I think that companies like Instacart that have this, you know, you know, they've solved this extremely hard problem underneath can build those interfaces. And yeah, very excited about, about seeing what that trend looks like.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Do you think we need a new word to differentiate between an agent that you task individually? You give it a task, it goes off and does it and it comes back and it's sort of an asynchronous process that comes back to you versus something that you design that runs continuously forever? I mean, people kind of throw around continuously running agent, but when I think about

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, proactive.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like there are agentic systems that will like go push order, order the burrito button.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And that's a lot less interesting than when do you get the agent that actually knows where you are, what you're eating, what you like to eat? And, and is just basically handling your lunch order every day on an ongoing basis? And maybe there's some

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, like I'm sure you guys thought about this, like putting sensors in fridges to detect when

• 51:12Speaker 01

  You're out of milk.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  You're out of something and it automatically orders it. But, but a lot of these efforts haven't, the hardware side hasn't really worked.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  I look, I don't want to comment too much on Instacart. I'm not, I'm no longer the CEO and I think we have an incredible team there. But like, look, like, you know, I think about agents all day, you know, for my, my new company. You know, we are, we are, we do have, you know, very, very, very long running agents that are, you know, continuously, you know, looking for information, getting better and, and, and, you know, in doing that in a way that is, you know, not only token efficient, right? But also, you know, in a way that is, you know, where every single day that you run it,

• 52:04Speaker 03

  you realize that it is just better. You're getting better results for, for a lower cost, lower time. And, and so, you know, the way I think about this is that like, you know, we're going to have lots and lots of long running agents in our lives. And, you know, if you think about like the, what the, the analog is for, for humans is that, you know, when you, and you onboard an employee, right? And like, they now have, they, you know, you're onboarding them with all the context that they, they, they need. And then over time, as they get more and more context, as they, as they do more and more projects with you, they get smarter and smarter, they get better and better a, at that job, right? But, and so, you know, if you think about that, that is effectively, you know,

• 52:47Speaker 03

  what we're thinking about when we think about a continuously running, ongoing agent, all right? And so, you know, you know, hardware, things like that are just ways to plug in more context for that agent. And so, we're going to see that in the consumer world, but I think we're going to see that far more in the enterprise world. Because there, you know, you know, you're just willing to pay more for, you know, faster information, better information, that gives you, you know, a massive competitive advantage as a, as a, as a company. You know, as consumers, I don't think anyone's really figured out how to charge people for this, all right? Like, I think, you know, we saw that Elon tweet recently where he was like,

• 53:29Speaker 03

  the revenue didn't make sense for, you know, the, the, you know, for the margin that we were spending on it or something like that, like. So I, I do think, you know, this is going to be something that we're going to see, you know, for the next few years, that, that gets solved. But so far, it's far more interesting in the enterprise setting.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. How are you thinking about agentic trading, AI hedge fund activities spreading among other institutions that have frontier model capabilities? Like, Google for a long time, I mean, they're spending a lot of cash, but they've had a huge balance sheet. And there's a pretty small treasury team, I believe, that moves that money around. They've always had the opportunity to do something more aggressive or differentiated with that. Do you think that that will take off broadly? Is this going to be a new trend or would they partner with a fund on something? How do you think that that plays out as the capability becomes more diffuse?

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, so, so this is what's new, right? This is what's new about, you know, AI-based trading, right? The, the reality is that like, you know, have people been using machine learning models? And, you know, you know, algorithms to trade before? Yes, right? Like, that's not new, right? There's like, you know, Renaissance exists, for example, right? Like, you know, but the, the, you know, historically, the primary way they've been doing that is, you know, more what's called stat arb, right? This is more, you know, understanding, you know, statistical, you know, patterns, right?

• 55:11Speaker 03

  And, you know, basically making a call based on those patterns to say, hey, you know, these patterns are going to repeat in, in somewhere or, or not, right? And that's primarily the, the way ML and AI has been, you know, used. But, but for the first time, you can have, you know, reasoning, right? Like, a, a, you know, what Warren Buffett would do, right? Where when they're analyzing a company, they're saying, hey, what are the modes, right? How strong are these modes? Like, how, like, how durable is this growth, et cetera, et cetera? Like, these are very complex questions that are not, you know, you know, you know, they're not necessarily, you know, stat arb. They're much more fundamental, you know, research, right?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  And, and that's what AI trading and, and, you know, AI agentic, you know, you know, capital allocation allows for. And, and so now, your question is, okay, well, is Google going to do it? I'm not sure. These things are still exceptionally hard to build. And whatever you think is simple, right? Chances are, those things just get priced in and that, that, that alpha just decays very fast.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so are you thinking about hardware at Abundance? Because I imagine you'll see the same, like, if you're now introducing like reasoning into this sort of algorithmic trading, you might see the same sort of arms race that, that we saw in sort of traditional high frequency trading playing out with this sort of new iteration as in like, if I can basically, if I, if I can get tokens like faster and like something happens in the market and my, and I just have faster chip, I can probably get a better entry or exit or, or whatever. And so, do you think that's something that like, you're going to need to have like, compute on prem? Or is that like, kind of would be an adjacent strategy?

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's several different strategies, you know, to, there's actually probably like several hundred different strategies here to, to, to play. And now, you know, maybe at, at a high level, right? When I was leaving Instacart, there's sort of, you know, two things that I wanted to do, you know, in my next company. Number one, I wanted to be, to have the potential to be a trillion dollar company. And, you know, I mean, obviously, it's been inspiring to see what Anthropic.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Sound effect for the trillion dollar company.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  That's right. I mean, I love that. I love that sound effect. You know, five years, five, six years, you know, hopefully, you know, multi-trillion dollar company, right? It's incredible, incredible, right? So that was number one. And number two is, it had to be beneficial to humanity. You know, just like, I just care about that and just like something that I wanted to have happen in my, my next company. And with Abundance, I, I believe that, you know, I, I found that. But I guess like, probably, you know, what's even the coolest part is that, is how fun it is, right? And now, we've thought a lot about hardware, like you brought up.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  But I would say, you know, for us, I think we, we have other ways we build advantages. And we certainly do capital allocation in the public market. But, you know, we also do that in, you know, other places where we believe we have, you know, much larger returns, much more durable returns and, you know, and, and much more impactful returns as well. And so, you know.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I was, I was going to say, I was going to say, you're like, I wanted to do something that was just like, good for the world. And then you're launching a hedge fund, which is like a contrarian, maybe contrarian, but it sounds like you're allocating places that you'll probably be able to talk more about in, let's say, like, a couple of years. Once you, once you get a little more established.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Well, you, you don't think hedge funds are doing great?

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Well, I do, I do. I mean, we've been, we've been some of the strongest defenders of private equity broadly.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  We need accurate prices in market.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, like, I, I, I agree. I, I think that there is certainly some, you know, efficiency and liquidity that, that, you know, hedge funds add. But, you know, but yes, I, I, I think you're right. Like, you know, we, we, we, we do think that capital allocation has, you know, a, a bigger part to play than just adding liquidity in, in the market. And, and that, I think, is just, you know, you know, what's, the coolest thing about AI is these new, these lines of how we thought about these businesses are going to completely change, right? Like, you know, you, you would see like, okay, like this is a SaaS company that's just going to do SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, SaaS, right?

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Like now, it's, we're thinking about outcomes, we're thinking about, you know, you know, new type of holding companies, et cetera. So I, I just think that, you know, the, the lines are being redrawn with AI. And, and, you know, we, we hope to, to do that in, in our own sector.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Well, congratulations.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  You certainly, you certainly did it with, with, with Instacart in, in a different way.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Congratulations to the, to the whole team. It's really a tremendous story and yeah, very, very happy for your guys' outcome.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  A classic overnight success. We'd love to see-

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Come back on as you can, as you can talk more about, about what you're doing as well.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  It's very cool.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Definitely. Awesome, guys. Thank you.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Great to hang, dude.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Have a good day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  That was who you're trading against, too.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Take them to the cleaners or play it safe. Do whatever you want. We have Alex Beryl from Quinn Emanuel coming on the show. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing?

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Good, man. How are you?

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  What's going on?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Long overdue. Sorry for taking so long to make this happen.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Are these, what's behind you? Are these the ghosts of your enemies?

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Nobody, exactly. These are people that used to exist.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Great to have you on the show. We're big Quinn Emanuel fans.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Love hanging out with John. We'd have him on every day if we could.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  I think, I think he enjoys it too.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  He needs somewhere to go, so you guys could do it.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, we keep him, we keep him busy.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, we're close by here. Pasadena is just 30 minutes away or something, so he can just hop over.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Exactly right.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Are you busier this year than in previous years, or is it pretty steady state?

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  It's a pretty steady state. I, I change what I focus on and, you know, toggle up and toggle down, but it's a pretty steady state.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. How, how has AI helped or hurt this year?

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  So, so I don't think Alex needs an introduction for, for some people, but it would be great if you could introduce yourself and, and your role in the firm and, and history before we get into the good stuff.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know about my role in history. It's to be written, but I'm a lawyer, used to be a prosecutor, and try all sorts of cases that don't really have a discipline or subject matter. And I advise a lot of founders and interesting people on stuff related to law and business and, and do things in the business world too, which I'm doing more of. But that's, that's sort of how I break down my time.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  How is working with, I mean, you've worked with a ton of high-profile individuals, Elon Musk, Jay-Z, many others. How is it different working or, or fighting a case, actually going to trial with a high-profile person who the jury can't just, you know, table a razzle on?

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  It just becomes more complicated and more three-dimensional because the world is watching, because people have preconceived notions, because the other side is more excitable, more blinded in their pursuit.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  Confused by the, the fame and the bright lights. And so it just has more dimensions and more, more sort of play to work with.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. How does, how does the strategy outside of the courtroom play into some of these high-profile cases with individuals who are going to have to hop on an earnings call, or they're going to have to do an interview for whatever their business is? Like, the, the court case might go on for a long time, but they have to continue doing what they're doing in the real world. How do you, how do you square those two, the risk and reward of continuing business as usual that might flow over to the actual case?

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Their legacy and their story and that of the companies and their missions is far bigger than the case.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  And so many people go through trials and tribulations and they happen in private, or they happen outside of the, the public sphere. When these kind of folks go through this, it impacts every element of their business lives, their employees, their legacies and beyond. And so you just have to be cognizant of that and you have to paint a picture that takes into account those things and thinks, again, sort of three-dimensional and in chapters that would go forward. So I will prep them for speeches and earnings calls and if they have to go in front of Congress or anywhere else in order to sort of assess all of the different business elements, everything going on with them, the case, and try to marry them all together to tell a coherent story.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Do you, do you have a team that can prep people for going to Congress? It feels like there's-

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  It feels like there's gonna be a lot of demand for that.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  It feels like there's gonna be a lot of demand for that. I mean, you know, with the, with the election results, it feels like we've been overdue for the AI safety debate to make its way into congressional hearings and it feels like there's gonna be people on Capitol Hill soon.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  There will, there certainly will be, you know, and I've represented people in front of Congress many times before and I have no doubt that'll happen again. In fact, it'd shock me if it doesn't, but that's part of our system. I've always been a bigger fan of the jury trial system than the political theater system, but sometimes I have to go there too. And if I have to go, I will go.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. There, there's a scene in the, the new Facebook movie, The Social Reckoning, where Mark Zuckerberg is, or the character, Mark Zuckerberg is like prepping for a hearing and it, it, the implication is that they've created like a one-to-one set of the, where he will be deposed. Do you think that that's useful or do you think you can over-prepare?

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  I've never created like a, a complete replica of a-

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  It's like almost Nathan for You level. Like, basically what they're implying is that they're doing like the rehearsal.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  You know, I flew up to Tyler Perry Studios to see it in Atlanta and Tyler has a complete replica of the White House. Not, maybe not a complete, but-

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I think we've talked about this.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can practice in the West Wing if you want to like be president. We could, we could do a scene like that. But of course, you know, a good cross-examiner is gonna, gonna poke at that and gonna say, you were so nervous that you had to create this theatrical because you were worried about coming here and facing me. And a lot of, a lot of hay could be made of that. So I don't know that that's, that's necessary. I think the most important thing is to know the facts, tell the truth, and, you know, tell it the right way.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  From what I know, there's other law firms that, that jump at the opportunity to go up against you because it's, it would be like a badge of honor, even if they're, even if they know they're gonna get destroyed. Talk about, talk about the sort of, not specific to you, but just like general industry dynamics where like a certain, you know, lawyer will develop a, a brand that, that like is almost like a magnet for other lawyers to try to test themselves against.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  No, there's, um, listen, I still save emails from cases where someone will decide I'm interested in their unsolicited advice and they will send me an email saying, you know, listen, I'm a pester, I'm a, you know, I'm a trial lawyer, your father's age, and just so you know, this case is unwinnable, or you shouldn't be going to trial or whatever. And I still have them from various trials that they were, and they were wrong and we won. And I've created a cottage industry of people that used to work for me or have been up against me where I'm told, because, you know, a lot, it's a lot of my friends sort of a one degree that are then hiring people because of conflicts and whatnot. And they're like hiring people that used to work for me, like they, like as if they

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  know, you know, how I take my coffee and how I prepare for trial or something. So, you know, I, I'm aware of this industry, you know, noise, but it just, it, it just makes it more exciting and more arena-based.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's funny because like this happens with athletes, right?

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  Somebody has to win.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Like with, with athletes, you can literally watch the last hundred, 200, 300 games a player has played, right? And it's probably good to be prepared, but it doesn't mean that when you step into the arena that it's gonna go well for you, right? Like I could, there's a lot of tennis players that I could watch and I'm gonna have a very tough time against them, no matter what.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter how much game film you've-

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  What, uh, what advice do you give to lawyers at the firm that are early in their careers that want, that are thinking about how to build their own brands and for better or worse, like Aura, right? Because, you know, it doesn't really make sense for somebody to just try to be like a mini version of you or a mini version of, of John or, or whoever it is. Or, or is that, or is it flipped and you should just try to be exactly like you?

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  No, don't, don't do that. Don't do that. No, I tell them, be yourself. You know, it's, it's, it's a sort of, sounds like a cliche, but it's true. You know, when somebody is intimidating and can act a certain way and bark, it works for them if they are in fact intimidating. If you're not intimidating, you start acting like that. You look, you look like you're trying to do something you're not. You look out of character. And, and listen, there are many ways to be effective. There are quiet, soft-spoken, methodical trial lawyers. It doesn't have to be, you know, the barbarian at the gate. And then if you are true to yourself, if you stay in that character and you win cases, that's a good way to develop a reputation, right? I mean, it's, it's really not a complicated

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  formula. When I left being a prosecutor, these, these, I mean, I always have to tell these stories, but there was one guy who came and he's like, well, I need to see your business plan. And I, and I don't have a business. I told them. I said, I'm just gonna just be myself and I'm gonna win cases. That's, that's the plan. I mean, there's no, that's the plan.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  So, yeah, best way to build a personal brand is to be really great at your craft and win a lot. Don't worry about anything else.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  Well, what I was gonna say before, and I'll, I'll say it here, which is, it's a unique profession when there is a winner and a loser of each battle, you know? And, and that's, that allows the, you know-

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  But what about, what, what, what about, uh, like so many of these cases, they just get settled and both sides can kind of claim victory or there's feric victories that go around?

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Both sides feel like they lost.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Or both sides feel like they lost. Like, how often do you actually feel like you got the full victory?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  If I'm going all the way, I think I have to go all the way for a reason.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  Right? And if I don't think that I'm, you know, obviously I wouldn't settle at the point that I'm settling at or, or resolve the thing at the point of resolving it at it. I don't think it's the, the right risk-adjusted deal. So why ever, you know, you're never really losing then. If you're not afraid to go all the way and you think you, you have some edge, you're either gonna get a favorable outcome, the, the easy way or the hard way.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Uh, do, do you think we're gearing up for, for more cases to go to trial or more cases to settle, uh, earlier because of AI tooling, automated discovery? I don't know what else you, what else you're seeing in terms of, uh, adoption of new technology, but are there any like secular shifts you're sensing coming down the pipe or maybe you're already feeling?

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  I think AI will eliminate a layer of a lot of things, including, including my day job. And by eliminating that layer, it allows you to get to the truth and synthesize it faster. Okay. And if you can do that, then I think you can make quicker decisions on this is something to resolve, or this is something to go all the way on. And if you can, and maybe the way it'll work is a lot of the fat in the middle is going to be cut out. Cases will settle, settle quickly or go to trial. And there won't be as much in-between litigation that is pointless and, and sort of ebbing between the two.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  And if that happens, then maybe there are more trials, frankly, because people just say, okay, this is the one, we just did an analysis of these 10 cases. These nine should settle, this one shouldn't, we're going all the way. And then people don't get that nervousness that they get where some companies, they'll think in their mind, okay, these three are going to have to be tried, but then they end up caving because they're too risk adverse.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And then, and then in terms of actually at trial, how, are you going to be more focused on a particular, a particular piece of an argument or, or, or argument's going to be more narrow or more broad because you, you can, you can fan out easier and it's lower cost to find every possible point to argue, or is that less relevant to a jury? So you want to be more focused? How will that change?

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  I haven't changed my approach to trying cases or how to present in front of a jury in 20 years.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:18Speaker 04

  Like, I don't even think I've toggled.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  One thing.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Slightly.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, the human mind and the, in the human mind, when it is learning, can only follow so many things.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  It is impacted and persuaded by certain things. There are argumentative techniques that work and some that don't. And those human beings in the jury are not changing based on AI. And so I'm going to talk to them exactly the same way. It just may be that the people that get me the information that I distill into my arguments, there needs to be fewer of them, or they have a simpler, more linear path in getting me that information because they have technological tools that make it faster, sleeker.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. How have you processed, how have you processed AI progress? Like, have we solved this hallucin, like, are we still hallucinating court, you know, cases that didn't exist, you know, pulling evidence that's made up? Or, or was that the same kind of thing that people were experiencing with chatbots three years ago, they were experiencing with, with, with law, but, but it's solved?

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  I'm no expert on this. Uh, I think that case law is one thing, right, which may still have these kinks.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Um, distilling documents and pulling information from the document strikes me as not something that's so susceptible to a mistake.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  So, right, if I, if I put a police report file into the, into the widget and it tells me Detective Lamb surfaced three times in this case, January 3rd, January 8th, and January 12th, I doubt that's wrong. I doubt that's hallucinated based on my understanding of where the machine, machine learning is at this point. So it, that factual analysis is going to work in streamlining and getting me answers to questions that I make people run down all day, uh, when I'm investigating something or trying something. In terms of the case law, listen, if they're making up case law or imagines case law hallucinates, the, the team that works besides me needs to double check everything and they do to make sure there's no hallucinations.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Are you, uh, are you worried about clients becoming overconfident in the, in the era of AI? There's this, uh, article on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today, divorce lawyers to clients break up with AI because, uh, this, this, uh, family lawyer, uh, drafted a prenup and then his client sent him 13 pages of revisions. There was clearly, he just dumped it in his chatbot and sent it back to his lawyer and was like, I'm the expert now. And then the lawyer had to say like, actually, like, we did things a certain way and we had more context here. But, uh, are you worried about that, uh, like the armchair quarterbacking getting worse?

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  I, I, uh, represent almost exclusively clients that think that they know more about the law.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  [laughing]

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  It's my specialty.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, there we go. And so I, I, I'm very used to this. I mean, I, I represented lots of CEOs, world leaders and things when I was in my 30s and had to deal with like, what do you know, basically, as I was representing them. I was like, well, you picked me and you asked me to come here. So, you know, I didn't insist on coming to this meeting.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  That's part of it, you know, people, armchair doctors, they're armchair lawyers. I, I think that the old adage of the Goldman Sachs days was, you know, you shouldn't be picking your own stocks. Well, you shouldn't be picking your own legal arguments and, and picking your own, uh, medical procedures. And since the time of Socrates, we have learned that we are not great advocates for ourselves, that we ought to rely on somebody that has some emotional independence from us, that can use judgment, that can make the arguments, uh, the way they ought to be made, um, because we, we can be myopic and they're not professionals. So it, I have said to many, many clients, probably clients that have appeared on, on your show, if they want to represent themselves, I'll just sit here and watch.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  They can, they can give the opening argument. That's, that usually shuts them up pretty quickly.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  No one's taking you up on that yet.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  But you, you like, it seems like you like working with the difficult ones. It's not just because they're, happen to be the most powerful people in the world.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  Well, don't tell anybody, don't, don't tell anybody that you're encouraging bad, bad behavior.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  [laughing]

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  Uh, I, I, I don't like it other than to say that some of the most amazing minds are those that are also the most complicated.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  And I like being around things that I think are super interesting and I'm curious. I like watching the, the world move forward. And a lot of these folks, difficult as they may be, are doing things that are exceptional and unique. And sometimes the cases themselves are just important enough that I think they are worthy of a strong and, uh, uh, important defense.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. How, uh, how, how are you meeting new people? Is it all referrals through previous clients? Are there ever, is there ever a moment where you can see from your perspective that there's going to be a ton of litigation in AI copyright? And so you're actually going out of your way to meet folks in that industry beforehand? Uh, or is it all just comes in when there's a problem?

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm closed. I, I am not looking for, um, I'm not mingling and I'm not looking for nascent industries or industries that I think there's going to be litigation explosion in.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  Um, there are enough companies and people that I'm responsible for shepherding that, um, that I, I'm not going to chase people and I don't think, I don't just believe in that as a system, whether you're a young person looking to market or you're, uh, uh, you know, been in the career a long time, I just do not believe in that. The top hedge funds don't chase people, the top doctors don't chase people. I certainly don't chase people. And, um, yeah, I mean, the way that referrals come in is it's word of mouth. Or they see you, you know, being a trial lawyer is a public thing. There's people that watched the Alec Baldwin trial or the Eric Adams or the Robert Kraft or the Tabo Sevulosa, or I can keep going.

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  And they see you and they think he, you know, hopefully they think they can, that I conduct myself honorably and aggressively and smart. And then they say, okay, I want that guy.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, how do you, how do the best founders think about lawsuits as a, as a tool of business, as an important piece of the puzzle, as you as a potential team member as opposed to, um, like, like a headache, something that needs to be just dealt with on the off occasion? It's something that's more in their business repertoire that they are, that they are good in this capacity?

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  Some of them are more adverse to that chaos and the scariness of the war. And some of them can't get enough of it.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:20:15Speaker 04

  And what you try to do is modulate the ones that want to sue everybody that walks the earth and the ones that are afraid that if somebody sends a letter, we've got to shut down the company.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  And, uh, you know, I'm using extreme examples, but you get the point that they, that some people run too risky and some people run not risky enough. And there's a, there's a balance. But I mean, you can't be afraid of a fight or everyone's going to know you're afraid of a fight. And if you're doing something cutting edge, either competitors, that the world is a jealous place, regulators that don't understand what you're doing, short sellers, uh, who knows, right? Um, you know, more money, more problem. So you can, all sorts of things can start happening and you cannot be afraid, you can't blink, you can't panic, and you got to fight through whatever storms come.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Uh, talk about, you know, the sort of transition from what seems like at one point in your career, like pure, purely practicing law to now being on the business side, being on boards. Is that something where, you know, it's 50, 50 now and 10 years from now it could be, you know, 90, 90, 10? Like, what's most interesting about actually, um, being in the arena, uh, at least on the other side of the table?

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  The decision to go to law school made at, uh, 21 on a whim. Uh, could have easily ended up, uh, you know, an intern at a bank or something, but, but once I started doing it, I realized that the, that the importance of it, the thrill of it, the combination of, of forces in the arena, I don't think there's going to be anything like it. And I've yet to find a business way to replace it. That being said, I've been doing it for a very long time, longer than I expected to. It's time for new chapters and those are starting to begin and we'll see. I mean, if I look at my legal career in the second or third inning, uh, it would, it was where it was. Uh, my business career, um, is not as long as my legal career is.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  And so it's, it's forming on its own timeline and trajectory and it'll, it'll take up more of my time as time goes on. And maybe if I'm on your show in 10 years, nobody even remembers I was a lawyer.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Do you wish that, uh, business was more zero sum?

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  Like I've given, given your history, like it seems like you enjoy the fact that it's you, you get to win and the other person gets to lose. And one of the problems in business is that you can win and your competitor, your, your, your, your rival can also be winning.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  Uh, even if it's on a smaller scale.

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't know that I want the other side to always lose so badly, but I, I hear your point. There's something about the case that has a star, a, a, a star at a middle and an end and the finality of it and the binary nature totally that grips me. And I often have said to, you know, the Elons and Jeffs and the great entrepreneurs of our time, I don't have the patience. I don't know that I'd be, I, I would have been a great entrepreneur anyway, but I don't know that I would have had the, I know I do not have the patience to have sifted through it for 10, 12, 15 years to get to the pinnacle. So maybe it, I, I chose this path on purpose. There are business things though, that, that

• 1:23:35Speaker 04

  are exciting, that create outside value when you put two pieces together the right way. I've got activist a bunch. That is the same sort of muscle memory. Um, and there are cutting edge things that people can do. Once businesses are ripe, right? Not at the product and engineering stage, I don't know how to do that, but as, as they get riper, that, that I think you can take and make magic with and do something that is very unique uh, in the capital markets and in the business world that, that strikes me as, as awfully similar to the things that I enjoy about my current craft.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, talk about a little bit, a little bit about the relationship with Tom Brady. Uh, how'd that develop? Where do you see that relationship going, uh, over your business career?

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Well, we're partners in, uh, sports and health and wellness businesses. We don't live too far from each other in Florida, so we get to see each other every week and talk shop. Um, you know, he's the GOAT. He's one of one and he's a complete class act and fun to, fun to work with because it's working with a close friend. Um, I think that a couple of the businesses, the sports teams speak for themselves and there are more coming. Uh, the businesses that we have that are adjacent to sports, I think people will soon learn are just as interesting. And I'll flag one for you, which is the company Escape, which is a robotic massage company. So you can go into Equinox, we're in a bunch

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  of gyms, hotel chains, um, all over the country. You can book it online and you can go in and you go in and rather than a, a human massage therapist, a robot will give you a massage. It's the Tom Brady protocol. They are trained by his liability coaches that kept him playing for 23 years and seven championships. Um, it has a unique method that keeps you limber and keeps you lean and keeps you fit and keeps you healthy and upright. And it's remarkable what it can do. It's the only one of its kind. Uh, it, they're the only robots that are trained to interact with people this way. Most of these robots are trained to stay away from people. And I'm, and I'm telling you, if it, this company as it continues to grow is going to change healthcare because it's

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  an overlooked aspect of healthcare and everyone's going to be able to get Tom Brady level massages in the coming months and years. And I think that this company is going to be a very special thing.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Are you a believer in the, uh, kind of like this barbell effect that's happening in, uh, a lot of venture capitalists are investing in like AI and the most frontier technologies, then also sports teams. We see this with Thrive, uh, and there's this excitement about, uh, something that can never be disrupted by AI, something where you have to go to the sports stadium. Is that, is that an overarching thesis for you or something you, you, you agree with?

• 1:26:21Speaker 04

  I don't know that it's an overarching thesis, but it's obviously a fair enough hedge.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  I mean, my view on that is, is more, more, maybe more simple, which is beachfront real estate and the, the unique blue chip sports team should continue to go up in, in value as this generational wealth is both created in this AI technology boom and is the transition of wealth that's never been seen before happens the next 10 years. And so if you own the beachfront real estate or you own the N of one sports team, you would think that there'd be more people that are in a position to afford it as long as it doesn't get, you know, valuations don't get too extended. You would think that they would keep going up because it's a finite supply.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, makes sense. Supply and demand. I love it.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Uh, what is your, like, we're a very interesting time on the internet. Obviously our favorite platform is X and X is going through something right now that I imagine a lot of your clients are frustrated with, which is that like, you know, fake news travels, you know, all around the world in like 10 minutes, uh, and can do real damage to individuals and brands, companies, whatever. Um, before you can slap a community note on, on something. And usually by the time something is community noted, a million people saw it already. And I'm curious, like what, like, is there a solution there or is it the new normal? And you know, brand, your, your brand, whether you're an individual, you know, you could

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  be an athlete, a celebrity or a company, uh, it is just going to be harder to manage indefinitely.

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  Cause I'm assuming, I'm assuming you got, you get like messages here and there from somebody that says like, hey, somebody just posted this thing about me or my business. It's completely fake. And then right now there's effectively no recourse. You can get, you know, posts can be taken down, but, but, but, you know, the, the original poster still has a lot of, um, authority around it.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get that email every day and, uh, it is complicated. I will say that I talked a little bit about juries before and how I talk to them. Human beings have never tried to decipher this much information, noise or otherwise ever before, right? I don't know why anybody thinks that the human mind can keep track of all of this information, disinformation, fake, bot or otherwise. And so the question is, is there become a tipping point when it's not really free speech, it's chaos.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  And what to do and what to do about. Um, because the other thing that happens is these nameless, faceless voices, um, are harder to also not just decipher how many of them there are, but, but the veracity of them because they're not in front of you. You know, we, we are very good when we can eyeball somebody and we can say, okay, this person, I mean, we do this automatically as people. This person is put together. They do not seem to be under the influence of any substance. They do not seem to be in a cognitive dissonant state where they don't know the hell they're talking about. They seem like they're somebody that might know what the hell they're talking about. And we judge this quickly. On the internet, you can't do that. And so the combination of

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  all of these things I'm describing leads to a steady state of chaos. And what the answer is, I'm not sure. What I think has happened collectively is we've all basically decided that we're not going to cancel culture people as quickly as we might have in an era 10 years ago.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  And because we're just going to take everything a little bit with a grain of salt and forge ahead. Um, and so it is unfortunate when that happens with businesses. And if there's real life consequences, I think you gotta do something about it. I mean,

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  I know, but there's no, but there's no solution. It's like, what? You're gonna go, you know, one of your clients, you know, somebody, and again, right now on X, it's particularly bad where you can scroll now and unless you're in the community note program, you don't know that everything is getting community noted. And so 99.9% of people are just like seeing stuff. It's like viral. So maybe there's some truth.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  And then there's the stress.

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  And what, and yeah, and what, and what do you do? You know, they, you get, somebody sends you a, a post or whatever, and it's, you can't litigate a million cases. I'm sure you'd love to, but you don't have the time.

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  Well, no, I wouldn't love to. I would not love to. So, so I, I got a couple of suggestions. Okay. First is I'm not on social media. I've never been on social media. The second thing is put it away and don't look at it. If you don't like what you're seeing, it's not good for you. It's not good for your

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Close your eyes.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  Mental health. It's not good for your productivity. Put it away. And then third is what I say to people honestly, when they can't do those two things is if it's having a real life impact on your business or your life, um, then you know you have a problem. If you're not seeing real world impacts from it, it's just noise. So for example, if nobody, if everybody refuses to go on your show and all your advertisers cancel because of something on the internet, then you know, like, listen, this is not just bothering me. It's actually not catastrophic thinking. I am having a problem, a real world problem because of this issue. Then you gotta solve it.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  You gotta say some why.

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  And yeah, fortunately, yeah, fortunately we haven't had this issue, but it's just like, I think every, every celebrity is going through this. Every, a lot of, a lot of tech companies are going through this where an account, like in accounts, accounts are just incentivized to share the most inflammatory thing possible every single time. And one, they directly make money on it now, right? They're directly profiting off of it. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. It's a, not a, not an easy solution, but.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  What, what you are describing has been a problem since the advent of media in lesser degrees, which is just that the more controversial, the car crash, the more incendiary, the more clicks, the more voices, the more eyeballs. And so, you know, what is the solution? I mean, we have a, a hundred years of modern media history to look at it. There's been places that it becomes state owned and then they try to make it flatter, but then it's state owned. Every time somebody wealthy buys a media organization or social media company, everybody then questions their undue influence and on the oligarchy of it. And when it's left to shareholders, you have then the burdens of shareholders and you need to make the prices go up. If you make the price go up, it means more eyeballs. If you need more eyeballs, it puts a burden on the system. So we have been tinkering this

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  as, with this as a society and frankly across the world for a long time and we have not. Figured out.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've been dealing with it for hundreds of years and it's only gotten worse.

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  Right, there you go. Well, you know, people, people forget, I mean, we may be at a chaos point where it's definitely worse. But, you know, there was a time when the ability to connect with each other wasn't, was, was more important.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Than the downsides you're describing, when people in countries that didn't have internet until recently, were able to learn information, were able to see that there's a bigger, brighter world out there that their customs and cultures are incorrect about. There were beautiful things that happened because of it and because of social media, it kept people connected during COVID.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  And, and, and offset loneliness.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

  It, it, we may be at a point, as you are suggesting, of, of too much of it. And it may be triggering loneliness, it may be triggering too much of everything you're describing. So I, I, I, I hear you and um, I wish I, I wish I had the perfect answer.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  But I, but I, I agree with your point, like at the, at the end of the day, find the ground truth. And if it's not, if it's just noise, it's just noise. And so you, you can deal with that uh, pretty easily. But, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great day.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  Great to hang.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Great to hang.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  It's been an honor.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  Have fun out there.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have Anish Agarwal from Traversal, the co-founder and CEO, in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and L3 Dominique.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Here he is.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  How you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:34:14Speaker 05

  Good to see you both.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Welcome back.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Crystal clear audio, sounds great.

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, your team's cooking.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Welcome to TVP.

• 1:34:21Speaker 00

  Good light, good lighting, good audio, good hair.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Gong has warmed up, but let's start with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  Awesome. Good seeing you both. So my name is Anish, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Traversal, and Traversal, we're building an AI site liability engineer. So when your system goes down, like a bank, you know, kind of a hundred thousand people can't log in, we help try to figure out what broke and how to fix it.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:34:46Speaker 00

  And that seems like might be important right now.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  It seems very important right now. Uh, when, when did you start the company? Like, what's the journey to get to today?

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like the, we started the company in Jan of 2024. So I come from a totally different world. I'm a, I'm a researcher uh, by training in, in my heart. So I'm a professor at Columbia University.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  And a big part of why I decided to start Traversal as my co-founder is we felt the best research is now actually happening in companies.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  And the best companies are getting informed on AI research. And so that was really what got us going. And then our research is in a very specific niche field called causal machine learning. So we've always, we've all heard this phrase, like correlation isn't causation.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:25Speaker 05

  So our whole study was how do you get these systems to think about cause and effect relationships from data? And that turns out to be super important for this problem of how do you troubleshoot incidents? Because when something breaks, everything breaks, it's like an epidemic that's flowing through your system. And so finding root cause is like finding a needle in a haystack with fake needles everywhere. So uh, so that's, that's how we got started. And I'd say uh, we met when we just did a series A about a year and a half ago. Uh, after that, the problem turned to be way, way, way harder than we expected. We thought it would be off to the races, but uh, it just turns out to be a way, way, way more hard problem than anyone would expect, especially for like large companies. So I'd say we were working through the desert, just trying to figure out how to get something to work since the A. Uh, we finally did, I'd say about a year, six months ago.

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  And since then, we've been scaling and it's been uh, way more fun.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  And has the nature of that scaling been more Fortune 500 logos, bigger companies onboarding? Or just uh, a huge volume of smaller company startups? Like where has been, what, what's been driving the adoption and growth the most?

• 1:36:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think part of what was difficult when we started is that we got pulled by very large companies very early in our journey. So like companies like American Express or Pepsi. And we, this problem really shows up at scale. So when you have a company of that size, you have every tool under the sun, every ability tool under the sun.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:44Speaker 05

  You have thousands of engineers, each of them with limited context, that, that fragmentation of people and, and tools and data is where the problem really shows up. And I think that's where also typically you can't just Claude code something yourself, you have to go with a specialized solution. So we started building for them right at the start. And so that's part, part of why it was so difficult from the start because of the scale we had to deal with. And so I'd say the, the, what we found is just usage really started upticking with these companies. And, and the repeatability of what we're doing started really showing up. So uh, we focused on them from the start of the Fortune 500. But now I'd say that, that, that pull from them is also here because they understand the, the, the difficulty of this problem,

• 1:37:25Speaker 05

  especially with now the coding agents are in place, they all have their favorite tools, they're all using them. But the CIOs are not really seeing the ROI because everything gets stuck. Is because they're all now really scared about, is this going to work in production? Is it going to have, am I going to have a security incident? Reliability incidents?

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, talk about how like, just, just how on edge, like, these sort of Fortune 500 scale clients are around cyber right now? Because I imagine like no one really feels safe, you know, you could be in, you could be even in, you know, consumer packaged goods and, and still on edge.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, I think like right now, every incident you have feels like a real heart attack to the entire company. Because you don't know, did I cause it?

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:08Speaker 05

  Am I getting breached by, by some sort of frontier model that is acting like the way they shouldn't act? Is it some agents that some age, someone has deployed within the company and they're over pumping my, my database? So you never know whether it's a reliability issue or the security issue, because the symptoms show up in the same way. People can't log in, the slowness to my website, et cetera. And so that, that's what really puts people on edge because they don't know. And people are not writing the code anymore as well. So the context that these companies are happen, have are dropping. So you put all these things together and everything feels like red alert every time. And it's exhausting for these uh, for these folks, especially with now Mythos as well.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:44Speaker 05

  Right? Because if you, that, so many more issues are, pretty much every incident you have is a result of change.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:38:50Speaker 05

  And a big source of change is patching. So every time you have a Mythos issue, you'll patch it, that patches the change. Typically only think about the issue from a security perspective, not reliability perspective. And so you, and so these, these, again, fragmentation of purpose and context is leading to way more incidents. And, and security is, is a big source of that and also a big source of fear that these people are having when any sort of incident does happen.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Um, how, how different does a relationship, a business relationship with Traversal look? If you're Amex versus Pepsi or, or, you know, a bank versus a consumer company? I mean, I know, I understand that Pepsi obviously has a lot of infrastructure, but like, being able to log into Pepsi Rewards is not exactly as high stakes as, you know, as spending Amex cards that you got access to. It's slightly different shape of a business problem. But are, are, are these companies uh, buying from you on a consumption basis? Is it driven by the scale of their infrastructure or their employee headcount? Is it seat-based? Like, how are you thinking about um, scaling your pro, your, your, your product to the size of company you're working with?

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, so what we found, even with Pepsi, for example, they're one of the largest supply chain organizations in the world. And so for them, when something breaks, it's typically in the factory.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  Where now they are, you know, their networking is not working. And then suddenly you have, you know, tons of Pepsi bottles that are getting to, to, you know, a 7-Eleven or something like that. So uh, they have some serious incidents too, um, that they, you know, or, or uptime is really important for them as well.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:19Speaker 05

  For us, the good news is the problem is the same from our perspective. You have to talk to the code, you have to talk to your, your data dog, your Splunk, whatever the telemetry is. And from our perspective, we sit on top of these systems and, and investigate when any sort of abnormality happens.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:34Speaker 05

  So it's all usage-based pricing, they pay as you go for the number of investigations that are

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  are, are, are running. Uh, one thing that has changed, I'd say, is when we began, we very much focused on incidents. So we're like, that's the top of the house problem, that's the heart attack a company is having.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:49Speaker 05

  Now I think what we've realized is, probably my favorite quote when people talk about Traversal is they're calling the Claude code moment for SRE.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  I think what we're seeing now in the market is that people want a flexible platform, not like a point solution.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:01Speaker 05

  And so they want you to be used, the second code is being written, to figure out, is it going to break in prod?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:06Speaker 05

  Right? And then when alerts get created, can you tell me, is it going to be an early warning system to something's going to break? So they want you to kind of deal with these issues the second you can fix it versus waiting for something to happen. And, and so it needs to be quite flexible in how it's used. And uh, and so usage-based is typically the most uh, common way. And probably, actually, the biggest users of the product now are becoming the coding agents themselves.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  So they call Traversal all the time.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:41:32Speaker 05

  To figure out, hey, if I deploy this, is it going to break something? Is it going to cause a security exposure, et cetera?

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  And so that's actually quite interesting, is that's been probably the one, the first-class citizen almost now for, for Traversal.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, that's great. Uh, will you raise some money? How much did you raise?

• 1:41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, talk about the round.

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

  Yes, this is my favorite part of, we raised a hundred twenty million dollars.

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  One B, one B. Alright, well, I just have one ask. Don't be a stranger, okay? I don't want to wait another year plus for you to come back on the show. It's too long. You guys are cooking now, so let's get, you know, quick, fast, quick, fast follow. At least, at least, at least. But quarterly-

• 1:42:11Speaker 05

  I'll be back whenever you have me. This is my favorite part. I've been waiting for 15 months, so this is my favorite part.

• 1:42:15Speaker 00

  Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm glad you made it through the wilderness and-

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  The wilderness.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  Nisha's words, not mine. No, you said, it's like, you came on, it was excited.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that's true.

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  You made it through, so you can celebrate.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  It's really, really fast growth. It's really good.

• 1:42:33Speaker 00

  No, it's amazing. Awesome, dude. We're great to catch up.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Have a great day.

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:42:38Speaker 00

  Congratulations to the team on the milestone.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And let me also tell you about Codex. Codex is the 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. Grab a seat. Welcome to TBPN. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  You just asked me where my suit is.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I gotta wear a tuxedo. That's what we decided. If I, he always goes one notch down from whatever I'm wearing. So if I wear the tuxedo, he'll have to-

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  I did, I do, I do have somewhat of a defense, which is that I put on a lot-

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  It's bulking season. It's bulking season. That is a really good excuse, actually. Putting on masks, it's looking good.

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  But not perfect. I do have a couple that still fit.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  We'll get you one of those really oversized 1980's bodybuilder suits, and then you'll have no excuse. You can fill it out all you want, you've got plenty of space. Anyway, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself for everyone.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Derek Blasberg. I'm a New York-based writer, and I'm here today to hawk a bunch of stuff.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Let's hawk, baby. What we got?

• 1:43:50Speaker 06

  I have a book coming out-

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Let's get it.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

  -called Richard Avedon. It's about his years at Harper's Bazaar. And then tonight, Jordy's coming tonight. I don't know what you're doing tonight. You've, you're-

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  I thought it was last night, and I was getting also-

• 1:44:02Speaker 00

  Not invited.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Now, I guess I didn't get the invite.

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  Not invited.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  But what is tonight?

• 1:44:07Speaker 06

  So tonight, so Richard Avedon, I should probably start with who this guy is. Richard Avedon-

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  Wait, can you start with who you are? You don't need, in most rooms, in most rooms, you don't need an introduction, but I think for our niche technology audience-

• 1:44:20Speaker 06

  You don't think I'm big in tech?

• 1:44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, math-

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  After this.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  After this.

• 1:44:25Speaker 06

  As of today. I don't even know how to start, I guess. I'm a New York-based fashion writer. I do a lot of books and magazines for Larry Gagosian, the world's largest art dealer. I have a column in every issue of Harper's Bazaar, which is a fashion magazine. I'm a special correspondent at Vanity Fair.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Are you a twin dad?

• 1:44:44Speaker 06

  And I have two kids.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Twins?

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  Twins, yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  Five-year-old, how old are your twins?

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Two.

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  We met briefly at this dinner party in New York-

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:44:53Speaker 06

  -that our mutual friend, Telebit, organized. And we talked a bit about the twins.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  But I couldn't remember, you had, what were your-

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Boys.

• 1:45:00Speaker 06

  Two boys.

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  Twin, two-year-old boys.

• 1:45:02Speaker 06

  And they're identical?

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:45:04Speaker 06

  No. I have a boy and girl, so you'll be surprised to hear they're not identical either.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Twins are just great. I love twins. I'm just a fan of twins.

• 1:45:09Speaker 06

  I started kindergarten in this, which was-

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:45:13Speaker 06

  Traumatic, you know?

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 1:45:15Speaker 06

  How quickly it comes. And they're both going to single-sex schools, and it was stressful.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Okay.

• 1:45:19Speaker 06

  Anyway.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  That's a lot for drop-off.

• 1:45:21Speaker 06

  Anyway, tell us about Richard Avedon. So Richard Avedon was by far the most important photographer of the 20th century. He was a high school dropout and joined the Merchant Marines at the end of the Second World War.

• 1:45:33Speaker 00

  As most fashion photographers do.

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  As is a real fertile, educational, traditional training ground for fashion photographers.

• 1:45:41Speaker 00

  Pointing and shooting.

• 1:45:43Speaker 06

  Sorry?

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  Pointing and shooting, yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 06

  Well, it's interesting. So what he did in the Merchant Marines was take pictures of all the incoming Marines, sailors, and so he shot them all on a white background.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:45:55Speaker 06

  And a lot of the images, you may not recognize his name, and watchers and listeners may not recognize his name, but a lot of the most iconic images-

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  JFK's official president-elect portrait, Marilyn Monroe, the sad Marilyn Monroe. You know, a lot of those pictures were taken in a style influenced by the early passport pulls of the Merchant Marines.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 1:46:17Speaker 06

  So at 21-

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, every time, I mean, I feel like so many of those pictures are just amazing, you know? You'll be like, looking through old, you know, family photos and things like that, and you're like, this is an amazing picture, you know?

• 1:46:27Speaker 06

  And you know what? They're for sale tonight, Jordy. We can put some of that in cash.

• 1:46:31Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  We can have a little piece of history. There's, you know, amazing pictures of the Beatles. This was Jackie Kennedy.

• 1:46:39Speaker 00

  Wow. Iconic.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can see.

• 1:46:42Speaker 00

  Seamless.

• 1:46:43Speaker 06

  And so Richard Avedon, I'm a huge fan of Richard Avedon. I've done a lot with the Richard Avedon Foundation. He died in 2004 when he was 81 years old. He was on assignment for The New Yorker. And on a day like this, where we've had such, you know, incredible and surprising election results, in 2004, he was doing a project called Democracy for The New Yorker.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  And it was at the start of Bush II, was that?

• 1:47:07Speaker 06

  That was, it was right after the Democratic National Convention. So one of the last portraits he took was of a young senator called Barack Obama.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Barack Obama, yeah, okay.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  So he has, he has an incredible portrait of Obama at the end of his career-

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Horrible, yeah.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

  -with no gray hair. You know, this was, you can date it by the grays.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Speaker 06

  And he actually, he woke up with, with like, you know, a pounding headache.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:47:31Speaker 06

  But he got, and he was supposed to shoot, he was supposed to shoot a young, a teenage girl who was pregnant and was going to be denied an abortion. So he was like, he was documenting like, real America who's being sometimes overlooked by the-

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  System.

• 1:47:45Speaker 06

  By the system. And he got the shot, and he went and laid down, and it turned out he had had a, you know, a-

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Brain aneurysm.

• 1:47:51Speaker 06

  Brain aneurysm, yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:47:53Speaker 06

  And he passed away. But he always said he wanted to go out, you know, with his boots on.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Working, yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 06

  So, I mean, sadly, bittersweetly, he did.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Just to close it to the story.

• 1:48:02Speaker 06

  And then I was told that you've got some film major people in here.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:48:07Speaker 06

  Or some, yeah?

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, the whole production team.

• 1:48:09Speaker 00

  So I don't know if they all graduated, but-

• 1:48:11Speaker 06

  Well, if they graduated, they wouldn't be here.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  You can't really call them a film major, you know?

• 1:48:17Speaker 06

  They majorly liked film.

• 1:48:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  We got a lot of film fans there.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  So Ron Howard-

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:24Speaker 06

  -who's an academy, there, I'm getting some, some fingers. I think they're, I think they're thumbs? Is it a middle finger? No.

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, two thumbs up, four thumbs up.

• 1:48:32Speaker 06

  Ron Howard directed a documentary about Richard Avedon, which will drop on, that's what we say still? Do we still say drop? Do I sound like a middle-aged dad if I say drop?

• 1:48:42Speaker 00

  No, we're dropping all the time.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Drops are good.

• 1:48:44Speaker 06

  So it drops on Netflix on November 11th.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:48Speaker 06

  So all fall, all Avedon.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Speaker 06

  And-

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Take me through a little bit more of his, his legacy, the style. Like, if I'm looking at modern photography, modern fashion photography, what am I seeing that triggers, oh, that's Avedon-inspired?

• 1:49:03Speaker 06

  So a lot of, a lot of the things that we credit Avedon for establishing is, number one, in, in, in post-war Europe, he established Paris as like, the fashion capital.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:14Speaker 06

  There's a famous picture-

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  I thought that went back like, hundreds of years or something. I don't know.

• 1:49:18Speaker 06

  Well, there, I mean, obviously, Rand Twinnett famously got her head chopped off for being a little too closely aligned with fashion and excess.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:49:26Speaker 06

  So there's definitely a precedent for that. But, and, and, you know, after World War II, so much of European businesses and even culture was so decimated.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Speaker 06

  So Carmel Snow, who was the editor of Harper's Bazaar, really commissioned him and challenged him to return and capture the opulence and inspiration and, in Paris. And the most, if we measure success around here in dollars, the most expensive fashion photograph ever sold at auction was Jovima and the Elephants, which was a picture he took in post-war Paris at auction for over a million dollars a couple of years ago. And one recently resold in private hands for more than $2 million. Just got a lot of money for-

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Is that starting to be a new trend in art collecting, fashion photography, reaching into that Christie, Sotheby's world a little bit more?

• 1:50:18Speaker 06

  So he, Avedon's really credited with a couple of other photographers, including Irving Penn, which was sort of his frenemy. They, they sort of came up at the same time. He did a lot for Harper's Bazaar, while Irving Penn's entire career was spent at Vogue. Avedon joined Vogue later with Diana Vreeland. These are, there's maybe one or two people who are following me on this, on this name-dropping journey of fashion.

• 1:50:42Speaker 00

  TBPN of fashion would have been putting up like, traded for these moves. That's what I, that's how closely I'm following.

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  Prediction market for how long Avedon will stay at this magazine.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  In a different world, historical prediction markets, for sure.

• 1:50:56Speaker 06

  But he was one of the first guys to try and establish photography as a fine art medium.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:51:01Speaker 06

  And it's tricky, because of course, when there are negatives, you can duplicate things-

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:51:06Speaker 06

  -in a different process than, say, a painter.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 06

  So when he dies- His estate prevents the posthumous printing of photographs. What's like,

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 06

  So like the show, when you come through tonight, you'll see the pictures have all been printed by him in his lifetime and signed. So there is like this a finite amount of images. And there are other photographers who have since passed away after him, who have modeled their estate and their,

• 1:51:33Speaker 06

  you know, their market value on that sort of pretext. But there's other photographers that when they die, they sell their negatives and their rights to their images to like Getty Images. And you can go on Getty Images right now and buy a Slim Aaron's picture of the bathers at the Hotel Ducap in the south of France for like $15. That will never be worth more than $15.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Might be a steal.

• 1:51:55Speaker 06

  But maybe.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Might be nice.

• 1:51:57Speaker 06

  But the Dovima picture, hopefully that someone bought for $2 million will not be worth $15 million.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Of course, of course.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  What's, what surprised you, if anything, about the explosion of AI imagery? Sort of interesting, at least in my experience, the things that I never would have gone out of my way to hire a great photographer for, I'll make images for that. But all the stuff that I historically would have hired a photographer for, I'm still hiring the photographer. I have no, no demand at all to like replace those like really special moments or, or things in my business with.

• 1:52:31Speaker 06

  Do you use AI to create like special moments or do you use?

• 1:52:34Speaker 00

  I'm saying, I'm saying like I'll use AI as a joke. And then, and then, and then anything, anything, anything that I, anything that I care about, I'm like, well, obviously we need to get the real image, right? Because it's like, it's capturing, it's capturing because it's like so emotional, it's like a, it's a memory, whether it's in like, you know, a family photo shoot or in a business context, right? And so I have like no demand for what I would call serious imagery in an AI context.

• 1:53:00Speaker 06

  Or maybe precious.

• 1:53:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Speaker 06

  So like when we were, when we were working on this book, you go into his archives and he would be shooting Marilyn Monroe, for example. And there would be like a finite amount of negatives. Cause at this time, in the early 60s, she died in 1962, so he, he shot her just before she passed away. He also shot her in the 1950s. Film was expensive, processing was expensive. And the biggest difference that I see when it comes to AI created images and the golden age of photography is that we have, I have like 160,000 pictures on my phone. I've never printed them. They're totally disorganized. But the difference between then and now is that that was, you know, you, sometimes you would, you would draw a picture before you took it. You know, you would, you would not waste the film. You wouldn't waste the click.

• 1:53:46Speaker 00

  You're like, let's test this, basically.

• 1:53:48Speaker 06

  And now I think some photographers use AI to falsify the image. Like if I'm taking a picture of Jordy.

• 1:53:55Speaker 00

  Oh, and then try to recapture the real thing.

• 1:53:57Speaker 06

  And I want to put you in a suit and try and, you know, dress you up a little, have a little respect.

• 1:54:03Speaker 06

  I would, I would import the image and say, you know, put this guy in a navy blue suit, put him on Sunset Boulevard. And then we would try and recreate that image, but hopefully better and more realistic. And now without like those weird facial disfigurations that you get in, in AI.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 00

  Fashion media feels like it's completely rejected for the most.

• 1:54:24Speaker 06

  Going great, don't you think? Everything's going great. Magazines, paper products.

• 1:54:28Speaker 00

  Well, well, we, we actually, no.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  Completely rejected AI?

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  Completely rejected, rejected AI. And I can think of a handful of campaigns I thought,

• 1:54:39Speaker 00

  I remember watching Gucci come out with this thing that looked like GTA inspired. I thought it was very weird. And I thought it got like the right reaction from everybody, which was like, why? Like, it made no sense to me. But the area that, the area that I've heard is completely disrupted is like e-commerce photography.

• 1:54:59Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 1:55:00Speaker 00

  And specifically impacting like LA, there's a coal industry here of like, hey, we have, we made 100 new pieces of clothing. We need to get it photographed in different styles, models, et cetera. And I think like that is just like, there's, you know, a tsunami there.

• 1:55:16Speaker 06

  The bigger influence of AI on the fashion business, and this is not media specific, it's, designers used to make a shirt, right? And you would have a team of people resizing and rescaling, what does that look like? What are the measurements and the sample sizes in a small, medium, large, extra large? Now you can pump all those numbers into OpenAI and get.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:55:37Speaker 06

  You know, the idea, the, the scale and sizing is faster, quicker, easier, cheaper, less human labor.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  I'm sure a lot of like the back office tasks and all that.

• 1:55:46Speaker 06

  And all, and all that stuff is.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the inspiration is still with the, with the designer.

• 1:55:51Speaker 06

  And I also think a lot of designers now will sometimes, and I don't know if this will be

• 1:55:56Speaker 06

  ultimately beneficial to the creative process. And this is something that you could have a designer on here to argue with you about. But like, let's say if I'm a fashion designer and I'm inspired by, you know, Silicon Valley, JFK in the 1960s. Sometimes you could import all this stuff in, into whatever OpenAI or.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've seen some odd, odd dynamics playing out in the, in the car world where there's, there's one Lamborghini that people are speculating like, might have been designed with AI and, and they think it doesn't look as good.

• 1:56:29Speaker 06

  Is it that Mark Newsom one?

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So, so that is Ferrari. And that is very clearly not designed with AI. And when it came out, everyone was making AI versions of that car and saying, they should have just done this. And it looked like the most generic Ferrari possible. And that was what people expected. And then the car came out and was clearly designed with, Mark had been working on that design, going back with Ford for like 20 years, 30 years or something. So it clearly was not an AI inspired design. But a lot of people were like, no, I want the AI version. But then it seems like another company might have actually given them the AI version and they had organ rejection when they did get that because it wasn't bold enough. And so the, the taste can be so, so odd that people can be longing for something that doesn't break the rules too much.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  But they don't want the thing that actually is just the perfect middle average that the AI produced. And so they wind up in this.

• 1:57:21Speaker 06

  And how frustrating for car manufacturers or Mark Newsom that now using AI, every, everyone can.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Everyone thinks they're a designer of everything now. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything now, for sure, for sure.

• 1:57:33Speaker 06

  Armchair experts.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Thumb, thumb base.

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  But what about the health of the, let's call it coffee table books? Aren't sales great?

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 06

  Do you know how much this book costs?

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  How much?

• 1:57:45Speaker 06

  150 bucks. And I'm going to give it to, I only brought one, so you two could fight over.

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

  We can fight over. Well, let's.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Take it Tuesdays, Thursdays.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  Cut it down the middle.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Bring it to work and I will take it home. We'll alternate weekends, okay?

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  Alternate weekends, co-parenting.

• 1:58:00Speaker 06

  But I definitely think, yeah, and also tonight, this exhibit, I actually think that the value of building in-person exhibitions that you, that you have to go to, to see will become more valuable in a, in an increasingly digitally.

• 1:58:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's so many, we've had this, this, this happens like multiple times a week now where we have an idea to do something. And we just think like, well, like everyone's just going to assume it's AI. And, and it's like, it's sad because like a lot of like cool things are not going to get done now because people will just assume that it was AI. Like we even, we had, we had pretty, so we had, I'll give you an example. So we had pretty serious Halloween costumes on last week. Dressed as Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. And if you missed it, I'll, I'll show you, I'll show you a picture.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  It was about four hours of prosthetic makeup, starting at 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM.

• 1:58:57Speaker 06

  Oh, wow. You guys were dedicated.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  With 10 Hollywood makeup artists here doing.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  This was us.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  The three of us.

• 1:59:03Speaker 00

  Wow. And so I, we sent, we, we sent videos before the show started to a bunch of friends.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  And I would say at least half of our friends just said, just said, like, they, they responded like, haha, that's funny. And then as soon as we went live, then they texted again and said,

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  I can't believe.

• 1:59:25Speaker 00

  Oh, I thought this was AI. Like that's, you guys are completely insane.

• 1:59:29Speaker 06

  Or I thought it was like a filter.

• 1:59:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, they thought it was a filter.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  On the, on the single video that we sent.

• 1:59:33Speaker 00

  And so going back to this like IRL thing, it's like, we should probably do a live show.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:39Speaker 00

  In the full.

• 1:59:39Speaker 06

  Oh, that's probably it. Halloween should be our live show. I think that's good. That's a really.

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  Was it hot and sweaty in there?

• 1:59:45Speaker 06

  It's terrible.

• 1:59:46Speaker 00

  Oh, it's horrible.

• 1:59:46Speaker 06

  It's insane.

• 1:59:47Speaker 00

  Horrible. It feels like you're.

• 1:59:49Speaker 06

  It feels like you're suffocating. It feels like you're being buried alive.

• 1:59:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it feels like you're in a submarine and a submarine.

• 1:59:54Speaker 06

  This is great. I actually demand the live.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  You want to come on the Halloween show?

• 1:59:57Speaker 06

  I want to see.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Come on the Halloween show.

• 1:59:59Speaker 00

  Or the April Fool's show.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  We'll get you in full Richard Avedon makeup.

• 2:00:02Speaker 06

  Or maybe you should do this like seasonally.

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  We don't want to leak too many plans, but we have more.

• 2:00:08Speaker 06

  We need like a turkey this month.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Oh, turkey.

• 2:00:13Speaker 06

  Santa Claus, but also a menorah. We have, we have to really.

• 2:00:16Speaker 00

  Turkey is insane.

• 2:00:17Speaker 06

  We need two turkeys in here.

• 2:00:19Speaker 00

  Turkey is insane.

• 2:00:19Speaker 06

  Or maybe one of you can be Donald Trump and pardon the turkey.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  Ooh, okay.

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  But, but isn't the, isn't the, isn't the, the coffee table book industry like doing better than ever?

• 2:00:30Speaker 06

  I think anything you can touch is now becoming better.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:34Speaker 06

  I saw you guys have.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Because you can't get an audiobook of that and you can't get the summary of that and you have to enjoy it. The only way to enjoy it, I think no one wants the chat GPT summary of that book.

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  I also think it enriches your coffee table experience.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 2:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is art. It is art. It is art. It's a way to, it's a way to signal, it's a way to signal too, to your house guests that you're more sophisticated.

• 2:00:53Speaker 06

  You know who Richard Avedon is? I saw in your lobby that you have the Vanity Fair sports issue. And in that issue came out a couple of months ago, I wrote an article about how live sports. You know, I'm sure you guys have, well, it's been well documented here that the Lakers are sold for 12 and a half billion dollars. Like I think the, the live sports industry has exploded because in a post-COVID, post-AI world, those in-person experiences have become so much more valuable and enriching. And not only for us who, who like want to see people and be out, but also even to the point about the, the costumes you guys did. Like you guys, people are now going up because they want to take a picture of themselves. They're looking for content.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know it's real because you were there.

• 2:01:37Speaker 00

  It's real. Yeah, Friday, Friday night, I, I was walking by someone and I overheard them say, I don't even want to go to this party. I just want to get a picture and then we'll leave. And, and I was like, that's actually, that's actually a good use of AI.

• 2:01:53Speaker 00

  Like you really save yourself. No, but they're, they're like, I want, I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to fully LARP.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:01:59Speaker 00

  I just want to partially LARP.

• 2:02:02Speaker 06

  Well, maybe that's another business, guys. Maybe the, the be there.

• 2:02:06Speaker 00

  LARPing as a service.

• 2:02:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Speaker 00

  We'll send people there.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09Speaker 00

  With it, yeah.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Get me up to speed on the golden age. You mentioned the golden age of, of fashion photography. Like what, what years are we talking? What were the iconic moments?

• 2:02:19Speaker 06

  So probably post-war was really great.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  This is a boom of magazines, so that's where people are consuming this?

• 2:02:26Speaker 06

  And also, this was a moment when you could really shift culture in magazines. There's, there's an iconic portrait in here of a model called Chino Machado, who's an Asian model. And Richard Avedon took her picture, submitted the, submitted the film. And the publisher of Harper's Bazaar called and said, reshoot these pictures on a white girl.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:02:45Speaker 06

  And his contract was up for renewal, and he said, I will not renew my contract if you don't run these pictures.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 06

  And so this woman became the first non-white model in a nationally syndicated fashion magazine, not because a magazine was suddenly progressive, it's because this guy was gonna quit. They were blackmailed into doing that. He also, you know, the, the Beatles, he shot Bob Dylan, he shot, he, he was obsessed with, with young people, with youth.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  What was the crossover there? Like, why, why are the Beatles and Dylan relevant to the golden age of fashion photography? Was this the moment when the musicians were becoming fashion icons?

• 2:03:20Speaker 00

  I think it's when- Weren't they always?

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:24Speaker 06

  Well, sure, Beethoven, you know, he was obviously a-

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  Mozart.

• 2:03:26Speaker 06

  Another great costume, guys.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30Speaker 06

  Think of the wig.

• 2:03:31Speaker 00

  Think of the wig.

• 2:03:34Speaker 06

  I'll come back for the wig, for the wig show.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:03:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Speaker 06

  Unbelievable.

• 2:03:41Speaker 00

  You're good at this. You're good at this. In another, in another life, you were a technology, you know, live streamer.

• 2:03:47Speaker 06

  Or a New York Post headline writer.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Ooh, yeah.

• 2:03:50Speaker 06

  With like the worst puns.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  We try and, we try and channel that every time we can. It's always the best. Puns are so good.

• 2:03:58Speaker 06

  I think in the sixties, like, youth quick culture, suddenly all of these influences

• 2:04:04Speaker 06

  were smashed together.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06Speaker 06

  And that's what I think, for me, anyway, and the argument that we're making in this magazine.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:10Speaker 06

  That was sort of the golden age of photography.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  What's coming back right now in terms of fashion photography? Because it doesn't feel like we are in a moment where everyone's ripping off Richard Avedon right now. Maybe that'll happen in a decade, maybe in two years, maybe it already happened. I don't know if there's been a revival movement yet, but what is the trend currently? What, what is the trend calling back to currently? Do you have an idea?

• 2:04:35Speaker 06

  That's a great question.

• 2:04:39Speaker 06

  When you think of fashion photography now, you actually think of multiple deliverables.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Speaker 06

  So like, when Avedon was taking these pictures, he would take 10 shots.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:04:47Speaker 06

  And now, if you're booked for a job, you're taking 10 pictures, you're taking, you know, a couple cut down reels to put on social. Maybe you do a hero video for the YouTube page.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 2:04:57Speaker 06

  So there's, I don't know if the, you know, so much of Avedon's work with the white background. Do you guys remember when we were young, I think we're, I'm probably a little bit older than you, but we're probably the same generation. Do you remember the, the early CK1 ads, white background?

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:05:10Speaker 06

  That was, you know, that was-

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:12Speaker 06

  Avedon's work, which Calvin Klein has, has recycled.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 2:05:16Speaker 06

  Even after his death. So there's definitely callbacks to his influence. But did you guys see the, the Gucci holiday video that broke yesterday?

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:05:27Speaker 06

  It's Mariah Carey.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:28Speaker 06

  It's Mariah Carey walking into a house party, singing a lot, like, and-

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  It's Christmas themed?

• 2:05:34Speaker 06

  It's, what's, um-

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  I'm in. Say no more.

• 2:05:37Speaker 00

  Sounds brutal.

• 2:05:39Speaker 06

  What was the, she has a famous holiday, the-

• 2:05:41Speaker 01

  All I want for Christmas is-

• 2:05:42Speaker 06

  There we go.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:43Speaker 06

  Um, that was a test. I just wanted to see if you-

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's 50 days. I'm, I'm warmed up.

• 2:05:48Speaker 06

  Um, and-

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  I've been on the road to Christmas for two months already.

• 2:05:52Speaker 06

  And I think that that is sadly what, well, not sadly, because I-

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  The kitsch revival? Camp revival?

• 2:05:58Speaker 06

  I, yeah. Did you, did you see Matt Damon and David Letterman doing cameos on the Gilded Age on Sunday night?

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  No, I didn't, but-

• 2:06:05Speaker 06

  I think the Easter egg, the kitsch revival, the sweet nostalgia, I think we're-

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where, we're having fun.

• 2:06:12Speaker 06

  And maybe that is because the, the world, maybe until last night, anyway, the real world has seemed so scary.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:06:19Speaker 06

  That we are searching for our-

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Release.

• 2:06:21Speaker 00

  Are there any new ideas in fashion?

• 2:06:24Speaker 06

  Because, because it's funny, because I saw there was a, there was a founder of a, I'm gonna leave this very general, apparel brand.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  They were just completely crashing out, writing this super long, all these, all these were, all these words complaining that like, people were copying their photography style. And I thought it was funny-

• 2:06:46Speaker 06

  The designer was complaining about the photography?

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, just like the presentation of their product.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Founder of one brand is saying, founder of other brand is making their website photos look like my website photos.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Our, our brand, you know, basically, basically just mimicking.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  But the photos are-

• 2:06:59Speaker 00

  Well, I thought it was interesting because like, they clearly had just found like, from the archives, like, a specific style that had been done by someone else. They were the first to adopt it.

• 2:07:09Speaker 06

  So the complainer was already mimicking.

• 2:07:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  Because they were talking about something brand new. It was like, wow.

• 2:07:15Speaker 00

  There's this idea, there's this idea of like, being, if I was first to it, then I own, like, I, like, which, which I don't necessarily agree with. Like, we've had plenty of people take inspiration from TVPN, and I'm always kind of, you know, however-

• 2:07:28Speaker 06

  You should write them a long email.

• 2:07:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I haven't done that because we didn't invent television.

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:07:33Speaker 00

  As much as I would have liked to invent television, we didn't.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Speaker 00

  A handful of people got there first.

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:39Speaker 06

  Isn't that sort of the problem with AI, though, is that it's, it's written entirely in existing stuff?

• 2:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I feel like all new ideas are based entirely on remix, like, when, have we had a new idea in like, the last 80 years?

• 2:07:51Speaker 06

  Work it out in the remix. That's what you should tell your friend who was complaining about.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  Work it out in the remix. I like that phrase.

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, but, but that's the thing, like, like, AI is just drawing from all these different inspirations.

• 2:08:03Speaker 06

  That exist.

• 2:08:03Speaker 00

  That exist. That's also exactly how, like, all the most creative people I know generate new things.

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Speaker 00

  They're just like-

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Take inspiration from-

• 2:08:14Speaker 00

  Pulling from the archive, pulling from something that's new.

• 2:08:15Speaker 06

  But that's not specific to fashion or photography. I think we see, you know, anytime you see a new film, there's always a, oh, they nicked this sequence off of-

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  You, you mentioned, uh, Richard Avedon had a contract that was up, and that was a, a one-to-one relationship, effectively? He, he was only working for Harper's? Is that right?

• 2:08:34Speaker 06

  And this was also a time when you could afford to keep photographers on exclusive.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  This is changing. So I saw someone, uh, talk about how, uh, I think it was New York Magazine and a few other publications.

• 2:08:46Speaker 06

  Interview Magazine, Elle.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  They hired the same photographer, and the, and the cover photos looked identical because it was the same photographer, because the photographer needs to work for multiple publications.

• 2:08:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  And so it's harder for Elle to have their look, and, and New York Magazine to have their look, or whatever the examples were.

• 2:09:03Speaker 06

  That's a little new, that, that photographer doesn't have an agent.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, because they would have sold an exclusive for this period of time or something?

• 2:09:10Speaker 06

  I don't know, I don't, so that story was everywhere, especially in my little, in my little world.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  So maybe tell what actually happened.

• 2:09:17Speaker 06

  A lot of people were horrified that, that this guy, uh, accepted commissions from so many competing publications, and his style is so distinctive.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 06

  One would assume an agent would have been like, maybe you say yes to Elle or Vogue.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:29Speaker 06

  You don't say yes to Elle and Vogue and Interview. I think there were five or six.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  There were like four. And, and one of them, or one pair even had like, the same clothes.

• 2:09:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, the same Chanel dress. Look at you.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  Hey, Ken.

• 2:09:39Speaker 06

  Like, okay, alright.

• 2:09:40Speaker 00

  You stopped it.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  You take my job, I'll take yours.

• 2:09:44Speaker 00

  You guys are-

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  We're on a switch. We're both-

• 2:09:45Speaker 06

  And when I dress up as Warren Buffett, no one really knows.

• 2:09:47Speaker 00

  You're right. Why don't you just dress up as John?

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. We'll get the man.

• 2:09:51Speaker 06

  And I don't spoil it.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Um, but, but yes, uh, so, so it was mostly just a mistake, lack of agent, because an agent would have intermediated that a little bit more?

• 2:10:00Speaker 06

  Yes, and I think, um, historically, like, uh, even as far back as the nineties, as recently as the nineties, most, uh, publishing houses locked down photographers.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Speaker 06

  So, for example, Annie Leibowitz only shot for Vanity Fair.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:10:14Speaker 06

  Um, and Vogue. You know, they had these million dollar contracts.

• 2:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:17Speaker 06

  And now, uh-

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  It's changing.

• 2:10:19Speaker 06

  Because of the diminished fortunes of the publishing world.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:10:22Speaker 06

  And especially in fashion magazines, you can't lock down this new, hot, I think he's a Polish photographer. His name is very, there's like, a lot of consonants in there.

• 2:10:30Speaker 00

  Oh, do it.

• 2:10:30Speaker 06

  I'm not even gonna attempt to-

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  He seemed like he had a really cool style. I thought the photos were beautiful.

• 2:10:35Speaker 06

  And of course, he has a super unique style, so when you do that unique thing, the same dress in several publications.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:42Speaker 06

  It became a, but it's also not uncommon now to-

• 2:10:44Speaker 00

  Let's bring him to tech.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  He's the so-hum-

• 2:10:48Speaker 00

  Tech people, tech people will not have seen any, any of these things. He'll be in the clear.

• 2:10:53Speaker 06

  He could do all the headshots and the very distinctive, there's a great picture of him with Willem Dafoe.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:58Speaker 06

  Having like, a dollhouse on his head.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:11:00Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 06

  So it'd be very unique tech world imagery, but-

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Take a founder, build a house of cards on top of their head.

• 2:11:07Speaker 06

  Guys, wow.

• 2:11:10Speaker 06

  Far today.

• 2:11:11Speaker 00

  No, I, I really wish that, I really wish that we had a magazine, because we, we, like, there, there's no one in, in this sort of like, no new media, um, businesses and technology truly understand the gap between a good photo and a great photo. Um, and I think-

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  They're not backing up the truck.

• 2:11:31Speaker 00

  Clearly-

• 2:11:31Speaker 06

  Maybe that's what we can do together.

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  That'd be fun.

• 2:11:33Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 2:11:33Speaker 06

  Maybe that's, maybe that's our next project.

• 2:11:35Speaker 00

  Let's do it. Let's do it. We're, we're ready. I mean, there's a lot of people-

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:11:40Speaker 00

  That need a good photograph in this industry, that have an interesting story to tell.

• 2:11:45Speaker 06

  Or I can just face tune them, you know?

• 2:11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  Just the sloppiest AI. I mean, we've been laughing about the, this idea that, uh, people will eventually be nostalgic for the AI art of 2023, the six fingers, the sloppy-

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  Did you see Katy Perry wore a sixth finger on the red carpet of the Met Gala?

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it's already coming back. It's already being adopted as, as camp and ironic.

• 2:12:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  And I, I think that, uh, as much as everyone really hated that era of AI art, uh, they might come to remember it fondly because no one was getting fooled.

• 2:12:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  It was so clockable. Every time you'd say, oh, art station style, sci-fi style, oh-

• 2:12:24Speaker 06

  What's fascinating about that, though, is how quickly that cycle comes back.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:28Speaker 06

  In fashion-

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:12:29Speaker 06

  In fashion, we sort of joke that the, the 1980s was just the 1940s on cocaine.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:34Speaker 06

  Like, it was, it used to take decades for, if you, and if you think about it, babies were all big shoulders in La May, which is what the post, uh, you know, after the depression, when people were rich again, they got back the big shoulders.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Speaker 06

  So it took, it used to take decades. Now we're nostalgic for the sixth finger that popped out.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Speaker 06

  Much more recently.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:53Speaker 00

  Do you, uh, do you have, wearing skinny jeans at all yet, or is that like, next year for you?

• 2:12:59Speaker 06

  You saw that Prada show with the really super, super skinny jeans?

• 2:13:01Speaker 00

  Well, I know, it's obviously, it's obviously back. It's just, it's just whether or not you have the guts.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Because I just picked up on the big pant trend like, six months ago. Jordy was like, stop wearing the skinny jeans. Those have been out of style for six years.

• 2:13:14Speaker 00

  No, you were so close. I should have just let you.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:18Speaker 06

  I was wooly, I was there.

• 2:13:19Speaker 00

  I know, I should have just let it-

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  I gotta go through the, the-

• 2:13:21Speaker 00

  I honestly couldn't, I honestly couldn't do one more meeting, though, with John and just a pair of skinny jeans. I was like, I reached my breaking point.

• 2:13:29Speaker 06

  A broken clock is, is right twice a day.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, twice a decade, maybe.

• 2:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, twice a century.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Twice a century.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  But they are allegedly back, but I don't know if I'm gonna do, I don't know.

• 2:13:40Speaker 00

  Well, let's both, let's go, let's go, after this. No, after this, let's go get a pair, and let's, let's take the leap together tonight.

• 2:13:48Speaker 06

  Okay, fine. Yes. It's the date.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 2:13:53Speaker 00

  Amazing. Well, where can people get the book? Where should they get the book?

• 2:13:56Speaker 06

  I mean, the book's on Amazon. Um, the exhibition is at Beverly Hills. It opens tonight.

• 2:14:01Speaker 00

  Can't wait.

• 2:14:01Speaker 06

  It's in through, on through the holidays. And on November 11th, Ron Howard's documentary about this photographer, Richard Avedon-

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Is on Netflix.

• 2:14:08Speaker 06

  Will premiere.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:10Speaker 06

  Will drop.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  Drop.

• 2:14:11Speaker 06

  Will emerge.

• 2:14:11Speaker 00

  Will launch.

• 2:14:12Speaker 06

  Will launch.

• 2:14:13Speaker 00

  I like launch better than drop. Drop is like, going down. We want to be going upwards.

• 2:14:18Speaker 06

  Up. Right. Oh, okay. Wow.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Speaker 06

  So nuanced. Okay, Jordy.

• 2:14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  Launches on Netflix.

• 2:14:22Speaker 06

  Launches. Magically appears.

• 2:14:25Speaker 00

  Magically appears.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  That's some great Netflix content. I love that.

• 2:14:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Amazing.

• 2:14:30Speaker 00

  Amazing. Well, we're gonna have, we're gonna close out the show with us.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  We're gonna do something- Sign up for our newsletter.

• 2:14:37Speaker 00

  That you may not have seen. It's called a flashback.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  On TVPN.com. See you tomorrow.