Jensen Secures Top Spot on Naughty List, Rockefeller Christmas Tree Delivered, Timeline in Turmoil | Jonathan Neman, Bryce Strauss, Adam Blake, Adarsh Kulkarni, Josh Payne

(01:29) - Jensen Secures Top Spot on Naughty List (36:28) - Rockefeller Christmas Tree Delivered (39:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (49:18) - LAX's Secret Luxury Terminal (01:02:24) - Jonathan Neman discusses Sweetgreen’s new dinner menu, improving business momentum, and the company’s focus on healthier, trend-driven food. The Sweetgreen co-founder and CEO also covers AI-powered ordering, drone delivery, food safety, restaurant expansion, and the challenges of scaling an emerging brand. (01:26:24) - Bryce Strauss, co-founder and CEO of Nominal, discusses the company’s $240 million Series C and rapid growth providing software for engineers who build physical systems. He explains how Nominal brings AI-powered testing, manufacturing, and decision-making tools to aerospace, automotive, energy, and government customers—even in secure, offline, or extreme environments. (01:36:22) - Adam Blake discusses Mavria, the AI infrastructure company he co-founded and leads as CEO. He explains how its modular, factory-built Terrain data centers can rapidly add computing capacity in repeatable five-megawatt blocks and outlines the company’s funding, Houston production plans, and ambition to transform American AI infrastructure. (01:43:17) - Adarsh Kulkarni discusses Foundry Robotics, the autonomous-factory company he co-founded and leads as CEO. He explains its manufacturing-as-a-service model, recent $100 million Series A, and vision for flexible, high-volume robotic assembly that accelerates hardware innovation and industrial abundance. (01:54:14) - Josh Payne discusses his work as founder and CEO of Coframe, an AI company building self-improving websites and agent-friendly digital experiences. He covers Coframe’s $25 million Series A, rapid customer onboarding, major conversion gains, pricing strategy, and vision for an internet increasingly used by personal AI agents. 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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Today's Monday, November 9th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Altrudome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Insane weekend timeline and turmoil. Jensen Wong, CEO of Nvidia, took the top spot on the naughty list.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Over the weekend.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Pull it up. Just so we have it right here.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Yes. Bloomberg reported this. It's also in the Wall Street Journal.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  The list is looking sparse right now.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Wait, I thought there were short sellers on the naughty list. Oh, we took them off.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  They got dropped.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  I think we got to flush this out, but we're not.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  You almost put the short sellers on the nice list, just based off their timing.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Well, they've done very well.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  The AI trade was over.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  They were sort of right for the wrong reason.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've done very well. Well, fortunately, we have, you know, a small, a smidgen of time before Christmas. We're minutes away, but let's actually count it down. Let everyone know exactly how far away we are. There are 45 days till Christmas. Now it's not a joke. We are actually in the endgame. We're very, very close.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Tanner says.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Forty-five days away.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Jensen is gonna be setting up some coal-powered data centers.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Oh, I hope he's gonna get coal from the naughty list. That makes sense. Yeah, that works.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Anyways, what happened?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  So Bloomberg reported that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Wong admitted that he had an affair with a woman identified in a series of reports as a suspected Chinese spy, plunging the chip colossus into a crisis like none before in its three decades history. Truly, like, the most flawless business execution, right? In three decades, there hasn't, there's never been an Nvidia crisis at all, right? It had been like, there's been like chips selling off. Yeah, small business things.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Things that are, things that are cyclical.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  There's never been like, oh, he put his foot in his mouth and there's drama or like something weird's happening. Like, it's all been very clean.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, super clean. Yeah. So basically, I'm standing, I'm standing in my kitchen yesterday.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And normally when you get, when I get push notifications from like legacy media, it's not, it's like some like horrific crisis overseas.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Some political or something.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  You know, like, like a train accident.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Uh, but this one stopped me in my tracks and I screenshot immediately and I sent to you and, and I was.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  That he admitted it.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Cause that was the.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I was.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Cause it was alleged earlier, but it was like, who knows? It could be some complicated.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Going off of all the pictures that they had together, it looked really, really bad.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  It looked like they had a special relationship. That's all I would say, right?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  But at the same time, if you were doing a spying operation, you, like, part of the spying operation could be, hey, just go get pictures where you're close with him and you pat him on the back, we'll take a picture, make it look like you're having an affair, even if he's not, right? But of course, the push notification revealed everything.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, so we, uh, I believe it was October 10th of last year. We talked about.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Alice.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  We talked about Alice. We talked, we said, we discussed Alex Wong. We discussed her access to Jensen. We highlighted her state media background. We questioned MegaSpeed's activities. Uh, we didn't explicitly say that she was a spy, but it fit the sort of exact.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Like archetype of what, you know, this, this woman who was a reporter, suddenly she's running a multi-billion dollar, uh, multi-billion dollar, you know, Malaysian hyperscaler, uh, you know, impressive run.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  If it was real, but there was kind of cash appearing out of nowhere from shell corporations. Uh, and given that we have a similar background in media, we were just sort of joking, we were just joking like, you know, very like, you know, we didn't necessarily feel qualified to set up a hyperscaler. So.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  On, uh, on one hand, it was, it was very impressive, but on the other hand, there was just like, it was just extremely suspicious, the entire thing. And there was reporting.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  In the New York, like a bunch of reporting about MegaSpeed.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  We talked to a lot of NeoCloud founders and it's like, oh, they've been working in real estate for a long time. They've been working in, uh, in crypto mining for a long time. They've been building things for a decade and now they're having the AI moment. It's very rare that you talk to someone who's like, oh yeah, like I, I've actually never seen a data center in person, but I set one up and I'm doing great. It's a little, it's a little stretch. Uh, the actual like timeline, uh, the Wall Street Journal has done some investigation into Alice Wong's like, you know, background, but it's still a complete mess. I, I'm not at the bottom of it at all. I can read a little bit of a summary here. So she began her career as a state media journalist before moving into finance, including positions at major Chinese financial firms and HSBC.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Uh, in early 2023, she took control of MegaSpeed. And it's like, how? Like, I would love to take control of a big company. That would be amazing. Anybody have a company that they want me to take control of?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  She was handed the keys.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Normally when someone takes control, I mean, either they have a ton of capital and it's very clear how they got the capital, like they inherited it or they made it investing or something, or they raised it from outside partners and now they own the company. Uh, very odd that they just take control, very unclear what, how that happened. Uh, it was a Singaporean company spun out of a Chinese gaming business called Seven Road and she became its managing director, but was introducing herself as the CEO and maybe still introduces herself as the CEO. Uh, and then the basic pitch for MegaSpeed was it was an Nvidia reseller, Nvidia AI compute provider, and it served customers, including Alibaba. Um, although she formally relinquished ownership

• 5:55Speaker 00

  and resigned as director in November of 2023, uh, when a Singaporean businessman, James Tan, took over. She apparently continued exercising significant operational leadership, representing MegaSpeed at Nvidia's California Conference in early 2024, meeting Jensen at Computex in June of 2024 as well, uh, and publicly interacting with him again in Taiwan in May of 2025. A business partner told the Wall Street Journal that she was still introducing herself as MegaSpeed's CEO in August of last year. So she's out, she controls the company, then she sells, maybe sells the company. It's very unclear. Um, and so meanwhile, MegaSpeed, MegaSpeed was acquiring GPUs from Nvidia,

• 6:37Speaker 00

  prompting a US Commerce Department investigation, beginning in late 2024, into whether restricted chips were being diverted to China. Again, I don't even know if you need to divert them, if you can just set up a data center in Singapore or Malaysia and then just do the training or inference over the wire. Uh, but nevertheless, the US Commerce Department started the investigation. US officials also suspected Alice of passing information to Chinese intelligence and Nvidia is investing, investigating whether Jensen was targeted through their personal relationship. Uh, the key unresolved question is whether the November 2023 sale

• 7:14Speaker 00

  represented a genuine transfer of control or primarily a change in legal ownership while Alice continued running the business. It is a bizarre structure.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Definitely like the most sus company in the world.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was saying like, if you went to Silicon Valley.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  At least, at least in tech.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  If you went to Silicon Valley and you were, so this is, this is the actual structure. Seven Road International is a Singaporean subsidiary of a Chinese-owned company that owns Wong Lei Limited, which is Alice Wang's ownership vehicle that's registered in the British Virgin Islands.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Wait, she doesn't own her ownership?

• 7:49Speaker 00

  And that owned Swift Data PTE Limited in Singapore, which is now owned by James Tan from November 23 onward. And that owns MegaSpeed International. I'm just trying to parcel all this out. I, there, there's a lot more investigative journalism that needs to happen to actually really piece this together. This is like.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and credit to, credit to the New York Times and other publications for like clocking this, clocking this over a year ago.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but yeah, I was saying like, you put me as a seed round with this structure. Oh yeah, we're Chinese Singaporean, we're owned by the British Virgin Island, but then it goes back to Singapore, back to China. It's like the most circular structure.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I, this was, this was a, this was a black swan for me.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  It was.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Because, look, it's been very obvious forever that Jensen has not wanted to lose the Chinese market.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  He has constantly advocated for, uh, for selling chips to China, uh, clearly wants to do it. I don't think it's for malicious reasons. I think he sees that China is the second biggest computing market. He wants to be there. I think he knows that China is going to remove their dependency on US chips ASAP, one way or another. And so he's looking at it as, I just wanna make as much money. It's sort of like a loyalty to the dollar. I think he wants to like make as much money as he can in the Chinese market while he can and understand that, that, uh, it will be lost either way over time.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I don't think he, and, and another way to read that is that he doesn't believe in sort of ASI. He doesn't, uh, he doesn't, he doesn't believe in X risk. He doesn't. He's not worried about cybersecurity. He just doesn't, he, he's like, I make computers, I sell them, I wanna sell as many as possible. And there's a lot of ways you can criticize that. There's a lot of ways you can criticize that. Dwar Kesh, uh, is looking, you know, uh, the, the interview where he's pushing him on like, why are you selling nukes to China? Jensen says that's ridiculous. Like, you know, this isn't.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  It's sarcastic there.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the, the, the analogy doesn't make any sense, blah, blah, blah. But you can read, you can read into that as like, this guy does not believe in sort of any, any, anything like ASI related. He's like, I make computers. I wanna sell computers.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  So, um, all that being said, this was like, like, just so, uh.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  So incredibly sloppy and unnecessary. And like, you should have had a million people around you.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  That would step in and say like, you know, this looks really bad.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Just why are you doing this?

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  You run the largest or one of the largest companies in the world. You're, you're under incredible scrutiny. You have to be in DC constantly.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  And there's a There's plenty of demand in America. This was another thing. It was like, you don't even need to sell the G P U's to China because there's so many Americans that want to buy them.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Um, so it was like, basically like greed, greed and lust got him into this.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Situation.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  And I was still, I don't, I don't know. I still going into yesterday, I wanted to believe that Alice was trying and, and they were in the same places at times. But it, it, you know, he was just like, I'm all business. I'll sell you some, some chips. And so

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Seeing him admit this uh, was, was super disappointing and uh, I feel horrible for, you know, his family and, and really everyone involved. It's like out of like, if you had told me this two years ago, I would have said like, haha, like that's a funny like A I twenty twenty seven scenario like the, you know?

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it was a meme like last year, it got to be such a meme of like the C C P G F. Oh, if you're doing anything in A I, like China's going to send a honeypot for you. And a lot of people were saying like, okay, look, that's over the top uh, and potentially offensive. And also dude, no one's sending a honeypot after your like rapper. Like you're not like actually that important. But a lot of people were like, oh yeah, like I like the China would love to get what I'm building, you know? And it was kind of like this ridiculous thing. But the fact that it was like a public meme that had been like beaten to death on the timeline that people, it wasn't even funny anymore. Uh, and then it still happens is crazy. It's really, really crazy.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  No, uh, a, a mistake of uh, historical significance.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Like

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Like, like how, how do you, how do you let, how do you let this? How do you let, I mean, it's just like incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly careless.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, there is an interesting debate from, I saw Joe Weisenthal tweeting a little bit about it. I saw Ben Thompson writing a little bit about it, which is basically if you play back the, the old Nvidia story. A lot of it is aligned with globalism, global capitalism that was encouraged. Like it, we, we, it's very easy to look around at the last few years and say, oh, well, like, of course, uh, competition with China is really serious. Of course, A I is really, really important technology. But if you go back 10 years, uh, it's like, oh no, China's in the World Trade Organization. Like, of course we should sell our, we should try and sell as many of our products over there as possible. People were complaining about Facebook not being able to sell their products over there.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  About, about a lot of American companies not being able to enter the Chinese market effectively. And so, uh, for a long time, the, the mandate and like the cultural goal of America was yes, export everything that we have that is good. Make all the money you can. This is the, this is the social contract around our business community. And only recently has it become very obvious, correct? But also consensus that, okay, maybe we need to be careful about what, how we do business with our geopolitical rivals. Maybe they are trying to overtake us. Maybe they're trying to copy stuff and not let us bring things in and then flood the international markets with their competitors. Right? And so maybe you don't want to bring your best technology up there because they'll disassemble it, copy it.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  There's a whole bunch of other discussions and dynamics that are now in vogue that weren't 20 years ago, 10 years ago. And so if you're, if you're building your business for decades

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Under that regime of like, you know, the government is basically incentivizing you. Hey, they're saying, hey, we will help you export your goods. Like we want the G D P to grow. We want you to be big and you, and you grow up in that, then it, it's not, it's not like this crazy like, oh, America has always been against selling to China and he's like bucking the trend. It's like, no, he's just of the old guard.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Well, and Nvidia, Nvidia has a massive R and D center in Shanghai.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  They've, that they've had, that I'm sure they've been

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And this was like nineties

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Two, two things.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Two thousands peak was like, oh, you're big enough to, to expand to China. You've made it. You're, you're an American hero. Like you're bringing our stuff over there. Bill Clinton said, the internet will democratize China because trying to shut down the internet is like nailing Jello to a wall.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  So, uh, if Alice Huang never existed, never interacted with Jensen, I think he would have been doing all the exact same thing.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And that being said, the fact that she does exist, they had a relationship that he admits to.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  He's cheating on his, you know, his, his wife.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And then he's been doing all this other stuff. It's like, it could not look worse.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  It calls

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Could not look worse. Completely destroys all his credibility in Washington.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I don't think he can, at, at this point, he can't advocate one way or another without looking bad.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Cause if he advocates for, you know, the status quo.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Which is like, you know, uh, supporting, you know, broadly, uh, you know, supporting uh, chip sales, advanced chip sales, all these things. He looks bad because it's like, wait, you've been having an affair with the

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Are you just doing that because?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And if, if he now starts advocating the other way, it looks like he was compromised the whole time.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  So it's like, he's in such a bad spot. And this is somebody who, he is on the road more than any other C E O on earth.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  He's constantly like, the whole Nvidia game has been, uh, Jensen's game has been show up once or twice a day, three times a day.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Every conference, every news report, constant.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And, and you know, constantly be, be spreading the gospel. I don't know that he can do that anymore. I mean, it's like, it's hard to stand up in, in front of a, in front of the same crowds and, and say the, the same things.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Um, and uh, yeah, I, it, it's, it's

• 16:48Speaker 00

  It's a pick up.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just unbelievable.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Like

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, and then also, I mean, we're still in the alleged spying uh, camp, I think with the

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Not really, not really.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  They're still probing. I, they, they, they don't have like a, this is what information was transferred. This is what was stolen. This was what the spying entailed.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  And, and there's a big question there because like, is it espionage, sabi, sabotage? Is the idea getting to Jensen's phone, screen recorded?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  This is, this seems like, this seems like not something, it seems like really bad for, for China's interests if they want chips. Because you had the top guy.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, the one guy you shouldn't

• 17:26Speaker 01

  The guy who's financing everyone.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Who already is aligned to your interests.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, seemed like it.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Seems to be that way.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  But maybe And is, is a, a god among gods, right? Like when he is in a room full of all the top people. He is the one that's going around, you know, like, like he

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Laying down the law. Everyone has to, everyone

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And so

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Trying to get a computer.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it seems bad. And, and, and to me, the disappointing thing is like, he was, he was one of the few people that was just sort of removed from all of the, the pettiness and the infighting, right? He was like, you guys might be fighting, but I'll give you compute, I'll give you compute, I'll give you compute. And let's all be, you know, like, he was one of the few people that was able to be, you know, basically like, as long as you're buying Nvidia G P U's, you're my friend.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  We can all coexist. I'm going to support this, that.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Um, but uh, yeah, truly a, uh, can I?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Historical, historical proportions and like, it's just a very, it's a very sad day for the American technology sector. And like, yeah, I mean, I, I'm surprised the, the stock is not

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Nvidia is getting hammered. Uh, it's down something five percent, especially relative to the NASDAQ, which is up two and a half percent. So there's actually been a broader rally in the market off of uh, Thursday, Friday's turmoil, right?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  It's probably wrote people to some degree rotating out of

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Nvidia into, I, I don't

• 19:05Speaker 01

  A M D's up uh, almost 13% today.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Wow, that's, that's wild. Uh, yeah. Like they were getting some claps for Nvidia.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let me tell you It's just like, you didn't

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  It's not like you needed the most elite security team to tell you that this was a bad idea. You didn't need to run, it's not like you needed to run.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  No.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  It's not like you needed to run a background check and be like, hey, should I be hanging out all the time with somebody with, that's working with? That, that

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  May or may not control the most suspect

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Company in technology.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Even, e- e- even if, even if you, uh, even if you want to do business broadly, it's like, send a 65 year old sales rep. Who's like some just like complete suit who's like, I got the spreadsheet out. If you'd like to buy, let's follow the letter of the law and here's, here's how much you can buy. Uh, having the C E O go over there and, and, and drink wine and take pictures is rough. Uh, it's a, it's a, it's a tumultuous outcome. Um, well, ridiculous day, Anthropic, you saw this, Anthropic just dropped Fable five point two and Mythos five point two.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  This is, this is

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Jensen's like, drop a new

• 20:25Speaker 00

  I, it, it, it's crazy. I mean, I, I imagine that this is just like, they have their plan in the lead up to the I P O. But like, I have a feeling that it's going to be hard to get this to break through today, given

• 20:37Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I think it'll be like the, the A I is a relentless technology.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  And the people involved are relentless and it doesn't care about the midterms. It doesn't care that, you know, the, the, the, the sort of face of A I globally is having an, an affair with uh, an alleged spy. It just doesn't care that the progress is gonna, is gonna continue.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  You don't think the pre-training team at Anthropic was distracted over the weekend? I gotta, I gotta keep reading these Bloomberg articles.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  I, some of this, yeah, just

• 21:15Speaker 00

  No.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  It makes, it makes, uh,

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Some, a lot of the imagery that's been coming out just feels like I just assumed it was AI because it looked so incriminating by itself that there's no way.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think these were maybe pulled from some sort of like Snapchat story or Instagram story or WhatsApp story or something, but she had posted a number of photos. And yeah, they look, it's like really so many, so many photos. Jensen's memo went out to the whole team. We read a little bit of it. There's a very funny, there's a very funny screenshot, which I have no idea if it's true, but it looks like two people gave it the.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  The crazy thing is, like, if you play back the last couple of years and you imagine there's a world where Nvidia, like Nvidia is run by like a manager style CEO who's not a founder, who's just like, we're gonna do, we're gonna invest in continued R and D.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  How would that be different?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And buybacks, like, I don't think, I don't think you run around giving, sprinkling billions of dollars all over the industry backing any team that, that appears to be viable at all.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  So you're not the central bank of AI.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you don't.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  You don't, you don't assume that role.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I, I just think if it's not your company and you don't like.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Like Jensen is incredible in so many ways. And I don't think that this story needs to like take away from that. Somebody can be like very bad on some dimensions, right? Like he's bad on not having affairs with alleged spies. And he's very good at, you know, being the face of, of compute, right? He's very good at, at, at, at, um, at playing that game. And I think the, the sort of scary scenario, at least if you're a venture capitalist is like, well, what happens, you know, I, I, as of right now, unless the story gets like way, way, way worse, which it seems like it's possible.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  I see Jensen staying in this role.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  But I think a lot of people are thinking like, what happens if you don't have this sort of like founder led company that's willing to throw $10 billion here, 10, you know, $20 billion here.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  And do creative deals.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Or do creative deals by companies that, that aren't really working. It's felt for, it's felt for the last year that there, if you were a, if you were an AI company, like Jensen was like past the point of let's say like north of a billion dollars, you're like too big to fail in certain, in sort of like Jensen's worldview. It seemed like he wouldn't, it seemed like he wasn't gonna let a company that had any relevancy fail. And I think that without him in that seat, like, I think that changes, like.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, he kind of loses some of the soft power, which he was throwing around.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Totally. And now, and now it's like he can, he can go and do what he's always done very well, but it's like he's gonna, it's like he's giving a talk with like an insane black eye. And it's just like this, gonna be this like elephant, constant like elephant in the room. And, uh, and again, I'm still, I'm still shocked that we're even having this conversation.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. What did Dylan Patel have to say over at Semyon Analysis? He says, nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. Is there a prediction market for CEO?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so right now, um, the chance that he leaves before July of next year is 31%.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  That's pretty high.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, he has a, like a, I, I saw some reporting about the board structure. Seems like it's a lot of allies. He's the founder, it's.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  No, it's a weird, it's a weird situation where it's like him being chief executive post having an affair seems like bad for Nvidia, but also like the alternative is worse.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know who would replace him. He's kind of a singular figure. Like who's the, who's number two at Nvidia? You don't really have a clear successor.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Son-in-law, I think it's, I think it's a son-in-law right now. But Dylan Patel says, nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. This story will largely die down in media slash finance, but Democrats will call him into Congress. They will investigate the GPU sales to Chinese companies and hammer him with questions. That's when the shoe could drop. So oddly, it seems like the AI safety folks, geopolitically minded folks are maybe breathing a sigh of relief because this will ultimately probably result in on net less smuggling of chips to China.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I think you, I think you default, they sort of, the, the, your default assumption is that they get what they've been asking for.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Who's that?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Like the, the sort of like, say, you know, the, the sort of more, the hawkish crowd.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  The, oh, the China Hawks.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  The China Hawks, get what they want. Because like, how, how can you have your strongest soldier on the opposing side?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Can't really.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  No longer has credibility on the top, is what I'm saying.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  The, the China Hawk side has, look, China really wants these GPUs. They sent a spy for America's top guy.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So if he continues to advocate with what he's been advocating for, it increases the likelihood that he goes like, like.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  In front of Congress.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that, that seems like happening for sure. If he switches up now, now that he's admitted and he's, and he's under investigation and it looks even worse. So the question I have is, um, Ross, uh, Douthat on, on 60 Minutes was asked, was, was talking with Trump. And he talked about like a, a head of a major AI company who he called and said, kiss your wife and kids, uh, and do you like the color orange? Yes. And so I think you can, the, the sort of one, and this apparently happened like a year ago. And so I think it would be safe to assume that that was Jensen at that, at, you know.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And again, it calls into question like so much that's happened over the last year, right?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's weird because when you, when you hear about, uh, Trump being aggressive towards an AI founder or AI leader, you think, you think Daria, obviously, because there was the whole Darfur heart and war battle. But it seems like with what we know now, it's actually much more jostling with Nvidia on the global stage.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there was, there was a question why, at least I had the question, why Jensen was so outwardly like the biggest fan of, of Trump and was constantly in, in taking any, all over the last year, taking any opportunity to, you know, praise and, and all these things. And like, there was a, you know, he's smart enough to know that the pen, the political pendulum is gonna swing back and forth and that going and being the loudest, most outspoken supporter.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  It seemed like kind of a short term, kind of like a, a short term arbitrage that maybe wouldn't be worth the trip.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Didn't Apple just play the Trump two era perfectly?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Tim Cook, they know he's on the way out, so they send him to the Melania screening. And then immediately you get Turnus in there, clean slate, never, never overstep, never overplayed the hand, either way, did what they had to do, you know? But yeah, uh, even, even, I feel like.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  But yeah, now, now it's like the.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Like it being like badass that Trump got shot or something, but other than that, it wasn't so over the top, like Jensen was definitely leading in charge.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but when you look at the, the pressure that, um, the admin is gonna be under come January, combining that with now optically, Jensen will probably be thrown in with a lot of those kind of in, in just general skepticism and investigations where it's like, hey, isn't your, your buddy Jensen is also under investigation for, you know, blah, blah, blah.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think everybody needs to be on alert for, for spies at this point. Tyler, where were you this weekend?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  I was at Michigan, University of Michigan.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  And, uh, are you, are you loyal to TBPN or are you loyal to fraternity culture? Can you say that beer pong isn't fun? Can you say that with a straight face or?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  I don't want to comment on this.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting, interesting. I think he might be deployed by the fraternity industrial complex to keep, uh, keep tabs on some unks. What about, what about Jackson over there? You were, you were, you lived in Texas before you came here, right? And, uh, were you, were you deployed to keep, uh, keep an eye on us Californians out here? Are you working for the Texans?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Okay, interesting. Can you, can you say, uh, the, the F-150 is, uh, is not a great vehicle? Fantastic. I think we're, I think we're safe here, but everyone needs to be on alert. And it will be, I really do hope that the investigation unearths like, okay, like was there spyware as a piece of this?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. That's the, that's the thing. Bill, Bill Bishop is, um, yeah, Bill Bishop has had, uh, some, some great commentary on this. One of the things that he brought up was like, um, if, uh, if Jensen and Alice were ever alone and, and Jensen had any of his devices, it's just like, now you can't, you can't guarantee that, that somehow or another.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  The, the Chinese state apparatus doesn't have more access to what Nvidia is doing.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, there still is the question of like, if you get access to even the CEO of a major American semiconductor's phone or, or computer, like, is that enough to actually speed up semiconductor production in your country? Like, because you might have like a bunch of sales reports, maybe you have access to some schematics and some, some PDFs and design files, but, uh, is that enough to speed up? Or, or do you need machinery that you don't necessarily have access to and you need to get the physical hardware? Um, but, uh, I, I think, uh, um, as much optimism there, as there is around this leading to increased chip controls on China from the China hawk crowd, uh, there's probably

• 32:08Speaker 00

  a lot of pessimism around, okay, well, we have to assume that China has, uh, has way more information about our semiconductor supply chain in America. Right?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Which is risky.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other thing that's rough is like, I think Jensen had given a quote over the last couple of weeks, um, saying to, uh, I think it was Bloomberg that literally saying like, our, my relationship with Alice Wong was nothing out of, out of the ordinary. It was a normal, some, I'm paraphrasing, but some of the effect of it was a normal business relationship. So then it was like, okay, you were just like lying publicly, public, you know, lying to the media, you know, within, um, within, uh, recent history.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, um, what else is going on in the timeline? Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, I do wonder what's going to happen with, uh, Fable 5.2, Mythos 5.2. Everyone was kind of expecting like a 5.5 jump and, and then also Fable's been like expensive. So it wasn't ramping as fast as Opus 5.5. So is the, i- i- is this like, uh, is the, is the goal of this model to get more adoption and, and actual revenue out of it, or, uh, merely use it for the, for the knock on effects that you get from having a great model? But I'm sure we'll see more

• 33:32Speaker 00

  reactions. Discuss it tomorrow. Um, Gavin Baker weighing in, Nvidia's board stated today that it found no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Okay. That's what, that was my big question. As a result of Jensen's actions, they are initiating independent investigation overseen by a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel that will examine all available information. This will be an unbiased, exhaustive and, uh, thorough investigation, given the fiduciary responsibilities of these independent directors. Jensen said that, uh, I support the investigation. We'll cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I'm committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America's national security. I'm proud to and grateful to be an American.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Uh, Gavin says, I've known Jensen for almost 30 years. I simply do not believe he would ever knowingly do anything to disadvantage either America or Nvidia. The only thing he has ever said to me about China is the absolute importance of keeping the American hardware ecosystem led by Nvidia ahead of China. That's it. Um, well, lots of, uh, lots of debate in the timeline. There's also a, a post here that I, I don't know if it's confirmed, but there's something around, uh, this idea that, uh, Nvidia doesn't have a contract with TSMC. I don't know how real this is, but, uh, Prakash Ada Pi, uh, says Nvidia does not have a contract with TSMC. That's really all you need to know. People say it's just like a hand.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the, the implication there is like, he couldn't possibly be removed from.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yep. He has to have the relationship.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Because that, that would, but, but, but at the same time, it's not exactly like, if TSMC was like, oh, one of our largest customers and Nvidia has a new CEO. We, we don't want to give them.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  See how much he wants to buy. Yeah. That's going to be day one.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that was from the Door Catch interview where he said, um, Nvidia and TSMC don't have a legal contract. They just have this mutual trust.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Oh, weird. That's very, very interesting. I wonder what the advantages of that are. Anyway, anything else on the, on the spy? Uh, you can look through this and I'll tell everyone about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows through business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Um, just a couple of days till Christmas. So hit the, hit the Shopify stores, pick up a couple of things, pick up.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Please do. Uh, I'm hoping, hoping that's the last of it. Hoping that it's investigated. It all goes, you know, uh, he didn't have bad intentions.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  It's just a run of the mill affair and, uh, he can go back to being the central bank of.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Ripping checks.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, well, in some much better news, it's 45 days till Christmas and the Rockefeller Christmas tree has been delivered. So let's watch through the timeline because we have the full story here for you. This is the tree that was identified. Uh, this is, uh, from West Edmunds, Edmiston, New York. Uh, couldn't wait for her to reach Manhattan. So I went to meet her in person, says my Christmas in New York. This is one of us. This guy rocks. Uh, this year's tree comes from Chango County and she's 78, 76 feet tall, 50 feet wide. That's a great ratio. Estimated to weigh 11 tons. The crews are

• 37:04Speaker 00

  already preparing her for her journey to Rockefeller Center and I can't wait to follow every step. Let's go. Thank you. My Christmas in New York City. Then, uh, the New York Post actually went and found the owner of the tree and posted a little one minute interview here from her yard to the heart of NYC. Meet Rebecca Decker, whose family donated this year's Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  I thought that he was absolutely crazy. I have a guy knocking on the front door, talking about a tree in the front yard.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  And say, nice tree. We want to put it in New York City.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  He introduced himself, who he was, what he did, who he worked for. Started talking about the tree, had said that he had been looking at the tree since 2020.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  He'd been miring the tree.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Talking about a tree in the front yard. He.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  This is.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Went over the process, how everything.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  It's like being a, a college, uh, football scout. You're just like, watch the game tape. Hey, headhunter.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Everything is said and done. He asked if I would be interested in donating it and I said, yeah. Honestly, I have been thinking about.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  I, I, I was so expecting her to be like, like, yeah, I, you know, I negotiated, brought in a lawyer, wanted top dollar, being ruthless. No, Christmas spirit, overpowered. And the funny thing about the end of that is that she's like, I was thinking about removing the tree. It didn't really work for the property. I was trying to get it out of there. I was worried about it falling over and smashing the house because it was so big, uh, in a storm. And so she was like, I was, I was happy to get it out there. So, uh, her and her family got to go and, and watch it get installed. Um, Lena, New York on Instagram, uh, though wait is over, the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has officially made its grand arrival at Rockefeller Center. Look at this pulling up there. Looking great.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Uh, it's a magnificent 76 foot Norway spruce. A lot of people had their money on Norway spruce. So congrats to you if you picked it correctly.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  In other massive news, friend of the show, Brian Chesky is committing a hundred million to SF Parks and what, uh, Mayor Leary's administration says will be the largest contribution the city has ever received from one donor. We get a gong hit, John?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  For, uh, this hundred million dollars to SF Parks. Boom.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  You know what I'm thinking, John?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  What?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  They gotta put some bench presses into parks.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, outdoor workout equipment, maybe?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Just, yeah, basically a sculpture of Chesky repping out, like bronze sculpture of him repping out 225.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  You want it to be animatronic?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Just, just, you know, him on the bench.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, in every park, every 10 feet or so.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Different, different movements to really show off every.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, obviously deadlifts, squats as well.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, just one, one bronze statue of Chesky.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Flies. Everything.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  President of TVPN, Dylan Abriscado stopped by an open house and they got AI slop inside the open house. I was looking at this and I was like, I don't hate this. Do you hate this?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I don't hate it either. The only thing is I don't necessarily trust it. So if this is telling me, you know, it's a 10 minute walk.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  I would be assuming, you know, plus or minus 30 minutes.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Minus 30 minutes?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Could be negative.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  You get there negative 20 minutes?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  You might be sitting already where you want to be.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it is a violation of your, it is somewhat of a violation of.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  No, I'm, I'm cool. I'm cool with this.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I'm cool with this.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  This doesn't really change the way the house looks in the listing photos. And this was in the open house, like as you walk in, you pick up a floor plan, the floor plan is the real printout. But then they have this little infographic for how you might walk to the town and that's AI generated. Uh, seems realistic, depends what model did they use? What thinking level did they use? They really got to say, hey, we generated this with six pro maxed out thinking. We, we assembled a swarm of agents to make sure every detail was perfect.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  If you just get the turns right, then it's fine. Like the actual, it doesn't need to be, um, uh, you know, the, the units don't have to be like matched up correctly, right?

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Uh, what do you mean? What do you mean, the units?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  So, okay, so if you're going on a path, you only need to know left or right at like the correct roads.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  No, but, uh, what, what I'm saying is like, is like a model with less thinking might just try and guess. Like, oh, okay, this, this house is about 10 minutes. Like a, a, like a model that has computer use and tool use and is really reasoning might actually go and look it up on OpenStreetMap, calculate the exact thing, verify that, round it to the right number and be much more accurate, much less likely to just hallucinate. Because there, there's a difference between like going to Reddit or some website and seeing, oh, it, it it takes 15 minutes to go from this place to this place versus like going to the ground truth of like the GPS data. So what does the model do? That's what I want to know. They should have put the full reasoning trace here. I want pages and pages of reasoning traces.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  These 10,000 concurrent agents.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  10,000 concurrent agents. That's the only way to do it. Why, why is this hot tub hammock?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I want your, I want your product review. I want your product review, John. So John, tell me what you think. Let's pull this video up and then I want, uh, John and Tyler. This guy loves camping and he wanted to make a portable hot tub setup.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  It says the great water color.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Let's, let's start the video over. Let's get some sound.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  The murkiest. It is absolutely roasting.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  All right, start it over. Let's listen.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Hot tub hammock prototype number two. This one is ready to jump in. We've got some very natural river water, but it's steaming hot, straight from the little creek over there. And it's just as natural as the material that this hammock is made from. No microplastics, no plastic at all. Taking the heat from the fire beautifully. You might remember prototype one had some leaking problems.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  I can imagine.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  All solved.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  It's completely black.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  This thing is ready and progressing. You guys had a lot to say about prototype number one. I listened to some of it, but obviously not all of it, because we're back with number two.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  The cowards are like, never do this. You're gonna, it's gonna break through and you're gonna fall down out of the fire, I would imagine.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  You wouldn't trust this?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I would not trust this. Also, how, he doesn't mention how hot the, how hot the water gets. Because the difference between, the difference between 90 degree water and 112 degree water is crazy, right?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  I don't think this is that dangerous because if it breaks through, the water will put out the fire.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  You need to worry about that.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  You still might like hit your back on that cylinder and that might burn you or, you know, at least like hurt you because it's a piece of metal.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  It's just a bit rough because like hypothetically, you know, it does get a little too hot and you pass out from the heat. You might boil live before it breaks through, you know? So there's, I would say like Tyler, I know you, you're looking at this thinking like, I, I could be trusted with the hot tub hammock. I, I'll take, I could, I could go camping.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  I would definitely try the third prototype when it gets to version three.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  You'd try version three?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  I'll try it out.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm also wondering like, how did you get that, how, how many trips to the hammock from the river to fill that thing up?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Is that?

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, what, what, what device? Does he have a hose that goes from one to the other?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Like also, why would you not set it up? Why would you not set it up down by the old river?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of these, a lot of these videos can be sort of like, they bring in a team, all the ancient buildings. Oh, they built it by hand and they have like a, you can see the, the tractor tracks there.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  So is it getting on the TVPN gift gut?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not. Avoid at all costs. Avoid at all costs. Go with an in-ground, in-ground jacuzzi. Alex Kerr made a little iPhone Duo app for exploring surf spots and beaches around the world. Is this going to be what gets you to buy an iPhone Duo, Jordy?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe. This looks like a good user experience.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  I'm excited. I, I love that people are starting to have fun and, and I imagine the vibe coding is helpful here, but also just, uh, having the, having the devices available and people can play around with them.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Somewhat gimmicky, who knows if this is the optimal way to get this information about the surf report, but fun that someone's building something cool like this and, uh, will be interesting to see what, what else people build. Very, very fun. Uh, super local maps. Interesting.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Uh, Sam Gold says hint of lime is an astonishingly dishonest name for a tortilla chip that tastes like it was manufactured during an industrial accident, accident at a lime processing.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Can't even get through it. Hint of lime is an astonishingly dishonest name for a tortilla chip that tastes like it was manufactured during an industrial accident at a lime processing facility.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a lot of lime flavor in every hint of lime chip. It's like, would you have a Cheeto and say, oh, hint of cheese?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Uh, I feel like, I feel like hint of lime is a fair assessment when it's like a Corona, you know, when they mix.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Certain like.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  They don't say hint of lime, like a Bud Light lime is.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Full lime.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  But it's more of a hint in that situation. So it's like, it's inverted.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  What do they call it? BLLs? Something like that?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  They call it the lime paradox.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, yeah. They don't, they, they should call Bud Light lime, Bud Light hint of lime. And they should call the chips just full on lime chips.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Uh, Shannon is highlighting something important.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Which is that Oakland Airport is auctioning off the baggage tugs. You've seen these out the window. Uh, and these look pretty interesting all the way from 1999. They've got Tug Tech M1 830 baggage tractors.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  They get new.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I was thinking, I was thinking these could be cool to have, you know, if you're smart, start kind of like a smaller startup. You got 10 or so people in your office and you gotta do, and you want to make your coffee runs more efficient, you know? If you're going to step out, imagine just pulling out of the office, you know, 10 deep in these tugs.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Where are you going? You're going, you're going to the Brian Chesky bronze statue.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Just around the corner to grab coffee.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Okay, and you have 10 baggage tugs? Uh, I do, I do feel like, uh, these would be great, like, uh, bases for props. If you need to build a float or, or you need to build, you need to do a parade, maybe a San Francisco parade. You can build a bunch of mascots on top of these. They're probably pretty functional as base vehicles for building on top of and creating some sort of fabricated structure, uh, decorate them, livery.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, these look, these look amazing.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  You need a 10th car. You do.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  I do. This would fix me.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  How many cars do you have now?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Jay Leno podcasting right here. I want your review of this secret luxury terminal at LAX. As we were getting on a flight recently, I saw some folks jump in front of us on the, what's it called, the gangway? Is that the plank, walking the plank onto the commercial airplane?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  It was about five feet from the door of the plane.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  It was about five, they were about five feet from the door on the plane.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  It was where sometimes they'll stop you and say,

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, hey, you got, we, we gotta take a bag of you and we're bringing people on that have extra bags. What's going on?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Make it make sense.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  What's going on? Vanity Fair has a deep dive. They got the answer. First, I'm going to tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes. Automate with everything with AI agents. Run training strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. So navigating, as navigating commercial airports grows increasingly horrendous and upper class, and upper class Americans grow increasingly wealthy, one company is betting on members only terminals that allow travelers to escape friction. There are 10 terminals at LAX, although one through nine are for the general public. Terminal one for Southwest, two for Virgin Atlantic, the international hub, the numberless terminal B. Why they did that. Each one is packed with weary, edgy travelers lined up for security, coffee, or meal.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  You arrive at your terminal via ride share and depart via ride share so long as you, as long as your ride is a premium black car. If it isn't, you must take a 20 minute bus ride to a parking lot called LAX It, where you wait amongst the hordes for your Uber X to arrive as slowly, as it slowly inches through crippling traffic. The 10th terminal promises to deliver you from this misery. It's around the back of the airport complex off the 105 in El Segundo, next to several cargo holds and a gate gourmet facility where airplane meals are carted off to various jets on the tarmac. When you arrive, no one asks for your boarding pass. A security guard checks your name off a list and a valet whisks away your bags with care before you're ushered into your own private suite with amenities galore.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Squishy velvet couches and chairs, a coffee table, coffee table books, free iPhone chargers, chocolate covered almonds and gummy bears. A fridge comes with sparkling waters and canned matcha drinks. A far cry from the plastic Dasani bottles found at Hudson News. A private bathroom boasts the Labo Soaps. When you're waiting for your flight, you can get a manicure, a table massage, or even a haircut. That's quite cool. You can request a pair of Normatec Elite Compression Boots to help with your circulation before check off, take off. If you're feeling more socially.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  How does it work with, how late can you show up?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  That's a good question.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Because that feels like the biggest factor. Cause for you, if you could show up.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm the guy that misses flights now?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I did miss a.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  I was like, I, I incepted you.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I had a, I had a, I had a pretty brutal week of flights. So the flight, the flight last Monday. I'm so used to sitting next to you on flights. And I was sitting.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  You mean the flight back to LA?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was sitting next to John went to San Francisco. I'm sitting next to this guy and every time I would look around, the guy would sort of assume that I was like trying to get his attention. So he'd like.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And I was just like, I'm just, you know, looking for something in my bag. I'm not trying to get attention. So yeah, I think funny, funny story with this, with this company, PS. I randomly sat on a flight with the founder of PS.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Probably a couple of years ago.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was, was being friendly.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  We're sharing what we did for work and she broke down a PS and then, and then at the end it was like, we were getting off the, the gate and then she just bounced out the, you know, the secret exit, which.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Wait, so when you land?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I think in some places you can do both because.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Oh wait, well, I mean, I guess if you land at LAX, you could do the same thing. Go to the car that's at the private terminal. So overall, doesn't really solve the major problems of commercial air travel, right? Delays, crowded planes, uncomfortable seats, food, all these things that happen on the plane, but it's not.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Illnesses.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if you're someone who's flying in and out of LAX dozens of times over the years.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  JetBlue, they notoriously don't allow you to, you know, pass back, bring back, you know, a full meal.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  That should be a special membership.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, whoever can solve that.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  If you get the highest status, you should be allowed to pass back.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  How's, how's JetBlue's stock?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Since, since we, since this.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Since we had the mix up.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  But.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Down 73% over, over the last five years since they, since they.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  And that's 100% attributable to the fact that they don't let you pass back steak to your friends if they're sitting in the back. Brutal. Annual baseline membership for this private terminal starts at $1,250. And so if you're flying business class out of LAX and into LAX regularly over the course of a year, you know, a few flights a month, you're looking at probably less than 10% of the cost to increase the, the, the value of your experience.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember learning about the business and being like, this feels like a super smart business. It's like a very much a middle ground for people that, that can't justify, you know, chartering.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Just flying private would be like 10x. This is like 5% more of what you're spending.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, makes it like probably 50% better experience.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I do, I, I, I do wonder if you can get there later. And I wonder if you can check bags later because that's the thing that gets you sometimes is like you miss the bag cutoff. Right? Especially for international. I don't know. Anyway, good to see that they're doing well. Good to see that it's being used.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  What's, uh, what's going on in the world of Scott Galloway and Tesla?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  He's, he's, should be having like a great time. He's rehashing some very, very dark moments.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Let's play this video. I'm curious. The caption can't be.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  It's a true story. I had, I had a Tesla, great car. You started shitposting me on Twitter, so I sold it not before taking.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  All right, we can move on.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  I think I can. I think we can. Oh, ridiculous. Well, hopefully he, hopefully he gets something with a naturally aspirated V12, you know, Enzo or something. Enzo doesn't have a V12, but something, something special. Maybe you should get a Jessica. I saw one of those at a Cars and Coffee. I mean, it's all the terminal, all the turmoil. Unusual whales has an update on the Anthropic IPO. Says just in, Anthropic is expected to begin its IPO roadshow the week of November 9th. That's today. They dropped Fable 5.2. I would imagine that the next week or two are packed with Anthropic announcements. According to CNBC, which is the earliest window available to it.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  SEC's, SEC rules require at least 15 calendar days between a public filing and the start of investor meetings. And the company filed its public S1 on October 16th. It plans to list Class A shares in the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticket Ant with 22 underwriters led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. So very interesting to see where this lands. People are going all over the place on price. Originally 2 trillion, then 1.5 was floated. Now I've heard like 1.2, 1.1 and.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  They're looking for the pop.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and so there was some speculation that like the bankers might want to leave a little bit for the pop. IPO at a more safe valuation. In general, it, it feels pretty comfortable at 1.2. As crazy as that sounds for such a young.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I can, I can, I can imagine going to, going to two.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Very quickly.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Very quickly.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, very, very quickly. But it'll be interesting to see what else comes out. I mean, I don't think we're going to get new financial numbers, but we'll probably get more models and evidence and traction updates and anecdotes about different, different implications of the technology. Very, still like a tough moment because there's so much question about the overbuild and the Nvidia story and all these different things around the, the market broadly. Are the data centers going to be delayed? Will there be compute available? What's the relationship with SpaceX like? But at the same time, like it feels like at least their allies, their investors have had good answers, even though they haven't been addressing them directly because of course they're in the quiet period. So we will see.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Mark German is reporting that Apple eyes autonomous agentic Siri as early as next year.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  And I think 2027 is here.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  It's possible that they'll release it next year. They're watching the category. They're excited about it and it's possible they will release it.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Next year, as early as next year. And with how fast AI moves,

• 58:08Speaker 01

  it's possible that by the time they release it, there won't be an entirely new paradigm that they will then have to try to catch up to.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  I was using Siri last night, calculating the day, number of days till Christmas. It does a good job. It told me how many days until this Christmas. But then, of course, I had a follow up question. How many days till next Christmas? It says, would you like me to search chat? Would you like me to ask chat GPT? You can't tell me, you can't just add three sixty five to forty five. Like, what are we doing here? Insane that it would want to hand that off. And when it does, it doesn't pass all the context still.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I had a great Siri moment. I wanted to figure out what a certain, the title of a certain song. And it has Shazam integrated.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Shazam integration's good.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Underrated.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I don't think that, I don't think that any of the other, I don't think Muse, I don't think Dots, I don't think Opus five five can do that if you open up and say.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  No, I asked, I even, I even asked, I asked Grok, because it was a song playing in a video on X.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, it's really bad at that, which is weird.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Let me, let me pull up.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  But yeah, I, I, I think Grok doesn't always have access to like the underlying MP four file and can like process it properly. And it probably doesn't have like tool you can go to something.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Grok just said that it was,

• 59:27Speaker 01

  they just picked a word out of the caption of the video and, and suggested that it was that song. It was like.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, the, on the new iPhone, you can assign dots to the side, to the action button now, which I think is going to be an, an, an evolution, sort of like a Siri replacement. You can't replace the, this but, the, the button on this side, but you can replace the button on this side. And with the dots call, you can just immediately start the conversation, start back up. And then you can also map it to text dots now, because dots has a, has a, a, an iMessage integration, basically, like text integration. So you can just text it there and it'll just text you right back, which might be good, but there's still these like hard things where a lot of times, like the Siri,

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  pro, like the job to be done with a Siri product is very, very quick responses. Like, I want ultra, ultra fast. I want instant for almost everything.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Because I want to ask, you know, how many days until next Christmas, basically?

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what, what happens with this. And, and, and also just the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Like, we've heard about the Gemini deal. When is that actually coming? Do you need a new phone? Do you need an update? Is it still in process? Like, when is it coming? They'll update the UI and the visual, but then the capabilities don't seem to be updated. And it's all just like very confusing, like, when is it here? And then, of course, there's the question about the Agentic stuff, because it, like, one of the first demos I heard about Muse from somebody who loved it was, sort of a, sort of a necessary task, but he was, he was able to get Muse to set up a Twilio account and go through his contact book and check for phone numbers that were dead and like delete those contacts or delete those phone numbers.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  So you don't ever try and call someone and it's like, oh, they've changed their number. Now realistically.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Which happens like so much, like.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  It doesn't happen that much, but having a nice and clean contact book, maybe that's nice to scroll through. I don't, I don't really use my contact book that way. Usually I just.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  I'd rather ask Muse, how do I turn on my mindset?

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Yes, but like Siri, that, that should be the domain of Siri, right? Siri should nail that. And, and if it can't, that's, that's a feature that needs to be rolled out pretty quickly.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. I mean, we're, we're joking here about Apple being behind on AI, but they're not behind in the stock market. Like, it's the biggest company in the world.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Number one, do nothing when.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Business and they haven't over leveraged themselves in any way. It's, it's doing great. So.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Up thirty percent year to date.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Up thirty percent year to date. So, you know, hate it as a consumer maybe, but love it as a shareholder for sure, for sure. Well, our next guest is here live in person with us. I'll tell you about Figma while he comes in. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System, contacts. And yeah, Jonathan, from Sweetgreen, welcome back to the show, Jonathan.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Incredible fit, incredible fit. I need to get the same, because I'm the more casual guy, as you can see. That's kind of a good middle ground, you know? You could go anywhere, you could go anywhere in that. Whoa, what do we have here?

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  What do we have? So we brought you, we brought you some new things we're launching tomorrow.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  These feel warm.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  These are our new sourdough chocolate chip cookies are launching tomorrow.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Woo.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Christmas came early.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  And then we're the big launch, this is the, this is a small piece of it, but we're launching dinner plates tomorrow.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Dinner plates.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  We brought it for, we brought it for everyone here. So.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  See, some of the new things that we launched, the, really the hero is this new chicken. So really leaning into the protein. It's a new rotisserie, new rotisserie style chicken and it's, it's fifty percent bigger.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  And this has two hundred and fifty grams of protein in it.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  No, no, no, not quite. But, but you'll see it's a lot more chicken, a lot partier.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  So I know you guys are on, on air, but for later.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, this is a stuff to sit here and be able to smell it, but, but not want to eat on air. But, um, you know, it looks amazing. You've solved the, you know, the younger version of me, I wouldn't have had to ask for double protein.

• 1:03:49Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  You solved that.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  For sure. How's the business doing overall? How, how Q three shake out?

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  We just reported Q three, we're seeing a lot of momentum. You know, we saw a lot of disruption from Cyclospora, but I think the, the transformation strategy we're on is working. And we saw September comps get flat as Cyclospora started to fade. October comped five percent and November accelerated. So I think all the things are working. It starts just better customer experience in restaurants. A lot of it's just the consistency. The investments we've made around training, development, how we pay our teams. A lot of it's the menu working and resonating. So Raps, which we launched here, launched six months ago. We launched, you know, a few different versions of it. We had this big collaboration with Molly Baz going this past month.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  Which has done really well. And so, yeah, and I think, you know, the marketing branding has all, all, all been a little bit more culturally relevant. So a lot of good momentum, a lot of good momentum for the.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Have you been seeing any movement in Agentic commerce? There's this post from OpenTable's native integration with.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  I just shared that on our company Slack.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  A hundred and ninety thousand people to restaurants just in the month of September. At the same time, like last week, we were talking about like, oh, wow, Agentic stuff is not taking off because there was some report that like Muse drove like twelve customers to DoorDash or something like that. But what have you been seeing? Like, what's actually happening?

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  So it's interesting to me that we're seeing more in Agentic traffic than companies that do, you know, million, you know, many times. Many more times our volumes. So it, listen, it's, it's still small, but growing rapidly. From June till October, pretty much saw Agentic orders, it pretty much doubled from June to October. And you're seeing that accelerate now.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  It makes sense. The products are so complicated to use. They're buried in other apps and you gotta install a new app or, or figure out the new flow and set it up. And that just takes time.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so it works today out of the box. You know, even the Daily had like an episode about Muse. In that episode, they order Sweetgreen.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  No way. That's cool.

• 1:05:51Speaker 05

  We're now very close to announcing connectors with Muse, with Instinct. You know, we'll play with everyone. We'll also have our own.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  Our own agent where it will be more around the personalization and kind of brand voice that we want.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  Obviously DoorDash and others are going to have their agents. We see this as a very exciting platform shift.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  And that's because you want, you want people to use, you, you prefer somebody to use a Sweetgreen agent. You guys get the order and then figure out how to get it to the customer versus like having it come through an Uber Eats or a DoorDash.

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, listen, DoorDash is actually our partner for the logistics side on our native, what we call our native delivery. But we prefer if we have the direct relationship. We get, we have the data, we can email them and market to them. So we see the higher LTV of that guest. Obviously, we make a better margin for the guest. It's much better because we charge, there's a markup on marketplaces. All restaurants are marking up on marketplaces to make sure the margin works. So coming direct, that, that becomes one of the big opportunities around this platform shift. But we're excited. It's growing a ton. We've set up our, you know, the investments we've made in our technology and infrastructure has set it up where we can move really quickly on this.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  And we're just seeing month and month over month increases here. And I think over time, this will be a pretty big force in the industry.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  What work do you guys do to track consumer trends and preferences around health? When I think like sourdough chocolate chip cookies, like that feels like you're, I've seen that kind of as a value prop, like hero ingredient for baked goods and like, I like the farmer's market, right? When I go near my house. So it's very exciting that you guys are like kind of closing the, sort of closing the loop faster from like, consumer preference to like, here's a product that you can get in tons and tons of, in, in tons of restaurants all over the country. But like, how early is your team working to like identify those trends? Because ideally, it's like you notice that this is something that people are wanting.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  And then you can immediately start R and D and get the product out.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you see it first in the coast and you see it on social media.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 05

  So, you know, we have a lot of restaurants in New York and, New York and LA, but we also have a lot of restaurants in the middle of the country, in the suburbs, in Indianapolis. We have about three hundred restaurants nationally. So we have to, we are watching all these trends and finding out like, where is that right tipping point moment where with our help, we can make something kind of go mainstream. Sourdough is one of those examples, like us getting rid of seed oils was another one of those examples.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Bring it back?

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  Huh? You know what's really funny? We got rid of seed oils. We got, we got rid of seed oils in 2022. And then after the midterms happened, after the election, we had a lot of people, we had a lot of people ask us. I, I had, I had the New York Times ask if we got rid of seed, we, we got rid of seed oils because of this. I'm like, no, we got.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  No, the reason I was so, the reason I was so bullish on that trend is like, there's very few things where it's like, uh, better for you and taste better. Right? And so like the combination of those two things just make it like a very natural decision.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  It's not like you're making this big sacrifice. Like a lot of stuff historically, like if you wanted to just eat, if you wanted to be vegan and then you're eating like vegan chicken, it's like, that's an extreme sacrifice. It's not, it's not going to take, uh, it's not going to taste as good. So, and certain people will, will make that call, but.

• 1:09:18Speaker 05

  You hit our exact, like, what is Sweetgreen in a nutshell? Like, what is our job?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  Is making food that tastes better and is better for you. Like that is like our number one thing that we try to think about how we do every single day. On your question, there's also like a lot of these like trend spotters that we watch. Like Infatuation came out with one today around like trends and things like that. We're always watching those. I'd say my partner, Nick, is probably like a little bit of an oracle as it comes to this, having done this for so long and so tapped in.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  Really can kind of like see ahead on when those things are kind of growing and when they'll crest. There are a lot of now AI tools that are helping us. You know, we use, you know, we listen labs is one that we use for like for, for understanding the consumer. They just got acquired by Salesforce.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  We all, we've also looked at a lot of these digital twin. Companies, you guys have probably seen some of these ones are fascinating.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  If they can act. They're useful for you.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  We're just piloting it, but it's really interesting. We just looked at this one called Simile.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We've had the founder on.

• 1:10:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, so.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  He was, he, we always mess with them where we're like, so how many times have you simulated this conversation? He's like, well, I knew you were going to ask that.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  It's funny. Um, go back to Cyclaspora.

• 1:10:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Sweetgreen was not affected directly, but take me through a little bit of that story and how it wound up affecting you through the second order effects. This is the lettuce contamination that people probably heard about over the summer. But how did you learn about it? Process that story? How did it actually affect the business? Why?

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Cyclaspora is a parasite that, uh, comes through the water typically. And what happened is there was an, there's an outbreak because it was in some iceberg lettuce from a single farm in Mexico that got into the Taco Bell supply chain.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. I remember these.

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  The number of, you know, what people have to know about Cyclaspora is it's endemic. It happens every year. It's happened every year. You just never heard about it.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:11:13Speaker 05

  There's about, you know, there's thousands of reported cases every year, about 10,000 reported cases.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's small.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  It's small. There was a lot of reporting this year. I won't comment on to why, but there was a lot of reporting on it, even when it was small and the hundreds of cases. A lot of people were starting, you know, the media was picking it up and talking about it.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  And I think it was one of those things that, you know, we weren't impacted. Many others were not impacted. You know, most others weren't impacted. It was really a singular farm and Taco Bell being impacted. But the media and then the derivatives of it and the memes started saying, you know, explosive diarrhea.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  You know, don't eat lettuce. At one point they said, don't eat blueberries. And then that, the narrative just got out of control.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:52Speaker 05

  And we did a lot to try to like calm that, talk about, we know where our food comes from. We're not impacted.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  But people were just spooked. I mean, you probably saw it in your own communities. People are just staying away from produce lettuce and all those things. And so, you know, it took, it took almost, you know, over two months of, of that to kind of go away. But thank God.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  That's why I went carnivore five years ago.

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  That was, that was the reason?

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was just terrified of Cyclaspora.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Eat steaks every day.

• 1:12:20Speaker 05

  It was a moment for us to like, talk to our consumers more about, all of a sudden people cared a lot about where their food was coming from.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  Totally. Which is actually good for the benefit because you've already set up all the infrastructure. All you have to go pivot everything.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  No, we got to.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  It's just a messaging.

• 1:12:33Speaker 05

  And we, we have something that most restaurants don't, which is traceability. So we have this fact that we can trace all of our ingredients directly to the farm at the case number. So we know like, you know, at this restaurant, at this time, this food was served. And if there was an issue, we could trace that back. So there's an opportunity to tell that story. But at the end of the day, people were spooked, you know, the, the media, the narrative just got so out of control. And thank God it went away and people are back to eating salads.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, I forgot about it until this conversation. But I do remember at the time, seeing the headlines and, and just texting my wife being like, hey, like, just be mindful.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  Well, the other thing is, you know, Sweetgreen, while we're very known for salads, as you can see here, this is, doesn't look like a salad at all.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 05

  You know, and, and so it did give us an opportunity to really lean into the other parts of the menu. Especially as, you know, we got ready, we knew this was coming, our big plates launch.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  So really pushing into really like the same sourcing ethos, scratch cooking ethos.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  But, you know, hearty food, rice, chicken, broccoli, you know?

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Uh, we had Keller from ZipLine on the show, uh, last week, talking about, uh, it's been fun to talk with him and get, and get updates. Some, one of the things I'm most excited about is being able to access restaurants that are like typically like outside of, so many of my favorite restaurants are outside of delivery range from my house. And, uh, that just feels like something that for you guys, as you're thinking about, you know, what stores you're, you're currently in, what, what new stores you're adding, something to be mindful of. Cause I think at this point, there's enough momentum. It feels like, feels very inevitable that like a lot of the food that you will get delivered, uh, will be through these sort of like, uh, you know, local drone delivery networks.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  But how are you thinking about it timeline wise?

• 1:14:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, I love Keller. I met him, I don't know, 2018 or 19, probably when it's all, you know, what he was building and was super impressed. We signed up to be an early partner with them. I think what it's going to do is it's going to accelerate what you've already seen, which is needing less restaurants to fulfill a demand, a demand. So whereas typically, you know, maybe in New York, you'd have 60 restaurants. Maybe you don't need 60, maybe you need 40 because, because of the omni-channel nature of it. I think drone is just going to accelerate that. It's still very early in terms of the number of orders they're doing, where they're doing it mostly, you know, working. It's not really working much in the urban environment. So it really unlocks the suburban.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  But the, I think the way he's kind of run his business focusing on Africa and like the medical supplies first to really prove out a business case and build a business model around it and then get into food. And of course the partnership was with Walmart was brilliant. So I think I definitely, I'm much more bullish on that than I am like the robots.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Speaker 05

  Like the robots, you know, on, on, that are driving along the sidewalk.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. Obviously DoorDash has their version, DoorDash Air. I think more and more people, but I think the way, uh, ZipLine has built it is, is really clever.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't. Quiet. People will probably be more receptive to the drone in the air.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Well, I just think when, when, uh, when they're ubiquitous, even in certain regions, people are going to just order takeout a lot more. Cause it's like ordering takeout is awesome and whatever, but, uh, depending on where you are, it's like every single time it arrives, it's not in the condition that it should be, which is like.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  And it's, it's expensive.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  It's expensive when you add the tip and everything and this can, this can really actually start to solve for them.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  How have you thought about ghost kitchens? Have you ever done a physical location, a kitchen with you where you cannot walk in and buy something? It's delivery only.

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  So early in the ghost kitchen days, we piloted a bunch of them.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:16:18Speaker 05

  Um, we found that they didn't really make sense because you still have so much of the capital.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 05

  And it turns out that having your sign on the door and having people be able to walk in does drive a lot of demand.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  What we do do is we do effectively build a ghost kitchen in our restaurants.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:16:33Speaker 05

  Some have, they all have at least like a digital make line, but we have probably 15 or 20 restaurants around the country. They're almost like our delivery catering hubs.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  So we have, you know, in kind of super dense areas, you'll have a full Sweetgreen restaurant with its own digital line. But somewhere either upstairs, downstairs, or in the back will be a separate.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  More prep.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  Separate like a kitchen in order for where we can move all the delivery and catering. And that helps us get the delivery drivers and the flow out of the restaurants nearby. So they can focus on the customer there. And for large catering orders, um, they can be very disruptive to the, to the core operation. So we kind of have this like hybrid approach where we build these hybrid ghost kitchen restaurants. Um, I think that there's, there's brands that have made it work, especially if you can work on multiple, you know, work multiple day parts. And the guys that are doing like multiple brands under a kitchen.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, that seems like the more, and that's like knockoffs.

• 1:17:27Speaker 05

  And it's good to, it's a good way to test into a market. Cause you can open for less capital. You can kind of test into it, but you'll see like, you know, even like Goop, like the starters ghost kitchen, they just opened a brick and mortar.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:37Speaker 05

  So it kind of is, think about it like the way like a DTC, like every DTC company will start as a DTC. And if they're successful, they'll open, they'll go omni-channel and open retail. I see restaurants in a similar way where it's a good way to like test your product, be able to iterate quickly. But over time, if you want a real brand, you're gonna want brick and mortar as well.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  What areas or locations or types of retail locations are on the biggest upswing? Like everyone has been talking about like the death of the American mall for years, but what's growing? I mean, we were in New York and there were like lines down the streets for a bunch of stores. Is it more urban environments, wealthier communities, suburban areas? Like where, where are you seeing like an upswing in just retail value?

• 1:18:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, well, it's, it's actually interesting. In the restaurant world, what's, what was totally out of fashion is hot again.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  The, the two of the hottest restaurants right now, public company restaurants, Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 05

  Um, and let me look at their.

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  Well, that's because of the, that's because of the aesthetics in there.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  That's, by the way, I'm curious, I'm really curious to see what happens to their sales. Cause they just reported earnings and it, they reported before the whole White House aesthetic conversation happened. So I'm curious what that did to their sales. The other one has been Chili's.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Chili's.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Cheesecake Factory up a hundred percent year to date.

• 1:18:58Speaker 05

  And look at, and look at Chili's. Look at the Chili's like three year stock chart. They've also done well. So you're seeing a lot of these casual dining type places do really well. You know, I think that younger consumer wanting experiences again. Interestingly, malls are, we don't have a lot of mall restaurants. We have like a handful of them.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  But you are seeing an upswing in traffic in a lot of malls.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  What you're seeing in real estate is similar to what you're seeing in the overall economy. It's kind of this K shape.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Speaker 05

  Where like the best real estate is getting way more expensive and then there's like a divergence for the rest.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I love these chain restaurants, but it's always hard to get a group of friends to go to one because all my friends are hoity-toity and fancy for these things. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, yeah, I want to go to the Cheesecake Factory, but I know you don't want to go because you don't think that it's high quality. But let me tell you, the chef at this one in particular.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  It's like if you know, you know.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  Genius. He's a savant. And it will be unlike any other cheesecake. This one punches above its weight class by a thousand X. So we gotta go.

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  They do have an executive chef in every restaurant. I'll give them some credit where it's.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  And there must be some variation.

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  There's a huge.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  The worst cheesecake factory in the world, in the world, probably 10 times worse than the best.

• 1:20:11Speaker 05

  By the way, we have a ton of variation in our restaurants because if you're making your food from scratch in the restaurants and you're not bringing it in bagged and putting it in a microwave, you're going to have that variance. Like, the biggest thing we worked on in terms of launching this is we had to upscale our, the chefs in all the

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  Sure, sure.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  in the kitchen. So we have, you know, 800 of these chefs, these what we call kitchen leads and over.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Smells so good. Brutal. We gotta, next time, you're only allowed to come, you're only allowed to come at the end of the show.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Can you get that as air missions? We got a lunch break during the show.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  We got like 20, 20, 20 cookies.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  You will be happy.

• 1:20:46Speaker 05

  But yeah, the very, I mean, the variance in skill level really can drive the food quality. And in credit, like shake cheesecake, huge portions, maybe not so good for you in that respect.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  They actually make their food from scratch.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 05

  They're, they are like, do have a, we, we've hired a lot of people from cheesecake.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  And I like hiring them because they know how to deal with a ton of complexity. Like, if you can run, if you can run a kitchen.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Cause the menus is massive.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  With that menu, that massive, like, you can come and run a Sweetgreen.

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I believe that.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  What's the, what's the state of like emerging restaurant brands? Because I feel like you guys, from, from, from what I can remember, you guys prompted like a wave of people being like, I'm going to make the Sweetgreen for X or whatever, whatever, whatever their category was. And so many of them, I imagine, got to like a handful of locations and then real, like, for some reason or another, didn't break out and get to the, to the hundreds of restaurant scale. But like, what do you, what do you, when you're meeting a, a early stage founder that is like, maybe going from one to five locations? What indicators do you look for that they can go to, to hundreds?

• 1:21:54Speaker 05

  So it's really hard, you know, I, I advise a lot of these founders and I, what I tell them is you, you gotta kind of pick. You either gotta stay in the like zero to five, maybe seven or eight restaurants where you can manage the whole thing yourselves and you can make a lot of money. You have seven successful restaurants, you don't need a lot of infrastructure and overhead. Or if you decide to go and want to scale it, it's a totally different game. Cause now you have to build real infrastructure, invest in G and A, and restaurants are so capital intensive. I think one reason you saw Sweetgreens and others growing in the 2010s is the Zerp era helped us all. Right? We were able to raise enormous amounts of money.

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  Where, you know, it's really hard to do that. And most restaurants that get to that point kind of have to scale slowly and scale through their own cash flow.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, this happens with so many, like, in consumer packaged goods, people will be like, well, this company got to two billion of sales bootstrapped. And it's like, well, they did that over 40 years.

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  It's like, and multiple years where they were growing like 5%.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  I'm going to be like Red Bull.

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Pretty sure that guy.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  It took, it took a long, it took a long time. And I think what, to answer your question, there's a lot of brands that I, that do, that are awesome. But the, the big question is always, how scalable is it? Like, if it works really well in like urban New York with five restaurants. Most of the United States is suburban. Like, you have to be able to work in the suburban strip center as well as you work, you know, in Soho.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  How big of a cost is real estate?

• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  Real estate?

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Is it, is it the majority?

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Labor is the, labor is the biggest driver of everything in a restaurant. Like, the, the price of your food is dictated by the cost of labor more than the cost of the food.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  Interesting. I always had this, I always had this question about, why isn't there a, a chain restaurant that is a coffee shop in the morning, a lunch spot in the afternoon, and then dinner with drinks in a bar that goes until like almost 2:00 AM? And so you're effectively willing to take customers' money from six in the morning with a cup of coffee till 1:00 PM, 1:00 AM with a, with a glass of wine or a beer. And the reason is that even though you'd be, you know, amortizing the rental cost or the, the real estate cost over more hours in the day, that's not going to do that much and you're adding so much more complexity.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's the complexity.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, try to find five people that are down to work every night.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  That have the same, the night shift that has.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Who would just work 23 hours a day. And I would show them Jaco Wellings good.

• 1:24:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  This is the path to greatness.

• 1:24:35Speaker 05

  But people, people are trying, you know, like, what makes McDonald's great? Three, three solid day parts.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:24:41Speaker 05

  They're one of the only brands that have breakfast, solid breakfast, a lunch and dinner.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  And it all works.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  All works. Wendy's, you guys have fallen that story, you know, they have the hostile takeover happening right now and everything.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  What's happening with their stock with the Jensen news?

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. What do you think, you didn't start at Wendy's?

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  Up 2%.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  No, it started at Denny's.

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  Denny's.

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  Started at Denny's. Started at Denny's.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Denny's stock doing, that's the question.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  De-listed.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  De-listed.

• 1:25:08Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:25:10Speaker 05

  But, but real estate's about, real estate's about eight. You want it to be definitely sub 10% revenue. Like, if you're good, like a Chipotle is running like probably 5 or 6% of revenue on real estate.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  So your mental model was, couldn't have been more wrong.

• 1:25:24Speaker 05

  But, but you know where you're not wrong? Is you are leveraging the capex.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  And you're leveraging the management labor.

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Speaker 05

  And so those are two big parts of it, but.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

  So you're saying there's a.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  There's a way, like, you know, if you guys have probably been to like Great White here in LA.

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Like, they do a great job because they've, they've really figured out an all-day menu. Like, they do great breakfast, great lunch, great dinner, great weekends, and, and it works. This is why, like, why we're so focused on dinner. We have an amazing lunch. We have like an incredible lunch business, but only about a third of our business happens around after 5:00 PM.

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 05

  And so like for us to win and really like achieve our mission and open thousands of restaurants, we need our dinner to be as strong as our lunch.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. Great to see you as always.

• 1:26:06Speaker 05

  Always great to see you.

• 1:26:07Speaker 00

  Appreciate the.

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  Let's hang soon.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  Let's hang soon. We'll talk to you later. 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. And we have our next guest in the waiting room. We are ready to move on to some funding news.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Here he is.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:26:37Speaker 06

  I am doing fabulous. Um, happy Monday.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Happy Monday. Chaos.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Great to have you.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  And chaos in the, in, in the Wall Street Journal. But fortunately, your business is going smoothly.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Chaotic growth.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  So all good news.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Violently, violently up and to the right.

• 1:26:56Speaker 00

  That's good, yeah.

• 1:26:57Speaker 06

  I appreciate Sweetgreen right before us. We got, we got the real economy as a good theme for today.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, definitely.

• 1:27:03Speaker 06

  Nothing but optimism in the real economy.

• 1:27:06Speaker 00

  Tell us about the.

• 1:27:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, guys, it's, I would love to. It's good to see you again. Um, yeah, we are announcing our $240 million Series C for nominal.

• 1:27:17Speaker 06

  Come on. Big time.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Move my eardrums out.

• 1:27:24Speaker 06

  Honestly, mine too. I'm like, I'm gonna, I need to bring it down a notch, but.

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  It's a good idea. It's been for a long time.

• 1:27:31Speaker 06

  I know, really, really, really well done. I think you like, you really nailed the suspension apparatus to like maximize long-term vibration, which.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Which you can do with nominal.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Boom. Cleaned head with the lights.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  It was warmed up from earlier in the show.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:27:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, actually, I think, I think we just came up with, I think we need to like measure the vibration of that gong and keep you like a live tracker in the back on your all-time gong hits.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Oh, that would be good. If we had a, we had a video play, like a monitor in here that we could actually measure that the power of the hit, that would be excellent.

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  Oh, we can do a lot more than power.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  This is exactly why, why nominal was created.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  Goes ding.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  To solve this problem.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, definitely. Uh, yeah, tell you, jokes aside, talk about the growth of the business. Three and a half X year-to-date, huge. What's driving it? Uh, what, what's on the product development side? And then, uh, where's the customer adoption been?

• 1:28:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. And just, just to reintroduce folks to nominal, think, you know, we build software purpose-built for engineers who are building in the physical world. So think, um, you know, across aerospace systems, advanced manufacturing and energy, all over the place. Like, you know, we are very much in this moment of like, the industrial world is getting just reinvented in front of us. Um, and, you know, nominal has been just an unbelievable beneficiary through all of that change. And, and this has been a very just particular, interesting year. Both like the tidal wave of like the change in the market. You know, I think we've had a, a lot of really awesome success. We've announced in our government business and, you know, what it has looked like to serve the government directly as they make sure the complex things they buy for more vendors than ever work.

• 1:29:07Speaker 06

  Um, but, you know, we're also serving all around the, you know, the supply chain now. You know, people developing in systems, rockets, planes, trains and cars, and all of the subsystems that go into them. Actuators and batteries and all the different things that have to come together in a supply chain to, you know, help you go build those things. And we're just in this moment where like, people want to accelerate. Um, and people need products like nominal to do it. And they're just so dramatically underserved by anything else available to them. So 2026 has been awesome. Um, a lot of this fundraise is actually really about, one of the, one of the really important parts of this year has been, um, we have really just, I'll just say, realized and stepped, stepped into this role of helping this discipline,

• 1:29:48Speaker 06

  helping the industrial sector and engineers in the industrial sector adopt AI. Um, and so you hear about it everywhere else. And of course, like, it's changed the life of every software engineer you know, and every banker and lawyer and marketer. You know, everyone kind of has, um, you know, either the purpose-built thing for them, um, or they have like figured out a way to go build some kind of crazy set of tools around them. But this is a discipline where like, there's just a ton of consequence and a ton of history and a ton of reality, um, where it's hard for agents to make contact with reality in a way you can trust it as a hardware engineer. And that is really what our Series C has been about, is, is stepping into that moment. We're not announcing a lot of things with it.

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's really just all about that very particular intersection.

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  Walk me through, uh, like a hypothetical case study. So, uh, Audi recently just, uh, announced that they're establishing their first US production site in Georgia. They're investing $4 billion, creating 4,500 jobs. That's a production site. Doesn't sound like a lot of R and D there. Is that an opportunity for nominal to plug into, uh, to a manufacturer, an automaker, an automaker at that scale? Or is this just something where you might try and plug into their R and D hub internationally? Uh, what, where, where is the line? Where's the biggest value these days?

• 1:31:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think we did ourselves both a wonderful justice in the market, but maybe a disservice to the broader tech industry by saying we help people test things. What people don't realize is that testing never stops in the life of a piece of hardware. You simulate something, you're testing it. You put it together for the first time, you're testing it. And by the way, as you build it on a manufacturing line, every single step you're having to walk yourself through the core question of is it working in the way I expected it to? Or am I building the right thing in the first place? And so, you know, this was really about us positioning for our customers, how to adopt us. But like, very much like, yes, that is like, manufacturing use cases are amazing for nominal because we can come alongside them and help them make sure, you know, every station is doing what it is supposed to, but probably more importantly, is it getting better?

• 1:31:54Speaker 06

  You know, we're in a moment where like, I think like aerospace hasn't had to think about like volume in a really long time.

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  And so much of our bread and butter business is in aerospace where like, you know, we are coming in and teaching them a lot of like, here's like what's happening at the bleeding edge of automotive. Here's how you can think about not just making one thing go five times the speed of sound, but 100 things go five times the speed of sound and build them really quickly and build them in a way that, you know, you can trust them and maintain them and of course manufacture them.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  How are you guys?

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Should, what's the best mental model for your guys' approach? Is it like a cursor where you are leveraging models from the frontier labs and then, and then making your own, you know, post-training, you know, open source models? Are you guys buying data yourselves? Like where, where is the focus? I think it's like an interesting sort of resource allocation problem because you guys are going to have the trust and the end relationship with these like organizations that need to have.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, like a huge amount of trust because there's like national security implications. I can, I can see how you guys can vend in a bunch of different solutions, but it's interesting like, do you spend the, do you spend all this money and time trying to make your own models when you have to, by this point, you, you should assume that all the frontier models are just going to keep getting better and better and better and, and sort of like weird spiky ways that, that weren't always perfectly predictable, like, let's say like a year ago, two years ago.

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, think we are a purpose-built company. We purpose build for hardware engineers. And so what that, what that, how that comes to life is it is not just about models, but like everything we build, we are thinking about how do we bring that technology the last mile into a way that they can adopt it. So, you know, what informs an AI strategy is thinking about like, well, what constraints are on a hardware team? Constraint number one, connectivity sucks in the real world. You very rarely have a constant and reliable internet connection, even if you're on a manufacturing line floor. Sometimes that's because of IT infrastructure, sometimes that's because of some national security, security constraint. But it doesn't matter if you're building in aerospace or automotive or energy, really

• 1:34:07Speaker 06

  anywhere in the industrial sector, like connectivity is a really big, important problem. And it's a lot of like, why the cloud didn't make its way here. They use it for simulation and they use it for these variety of things, but like, they are full stack in the truest of senses. You have to think about how computers and compute infrastructure is going to work in my organization. So how that informs phenomenal is like, if we are going to build agents for, you know, for these customers, for them to be able to trust them, yes, sometimes we have great access to internet and we should absolutely be using a frontier model in that moment and giving them a really clear picture of, you know, how that model is helping them make a decision and how do you audit that model and give them perfect responses coming back from it. That does look a lot like Harvey and Rogo and Lagor and all of these companies building

• 1:34:52Speaker 06

  these like intelligence platforms like for a discipline. But nominal has a really unique thing where, you know, we have a team of 15 who is only thinking about compute infrastructure. How do we take everything we build and make sure it can work in a, how about a waterproof on a Navy ship? You know, so like, that tells you what you need to do with models. So like, I think our model strategy is not just about like, we're going to go build a frontier model because we need good gross margins. It's like, we're going to build a model that works waterproof on a Navy ship. Oh, by the way, we're also going to go figure out what it looks like to work on a manufacturing line floor when you have gigahertz level data streaming into this thing and you have to make a decision or 30 years of records and we have to make this warranty call. Like, there's just so many intricacies that come in hardware, but it is bigger than just,

• 1:35:37Speaker 06

  you know, asking a chatbot what to do. It's like managing a ton of context and helping them like build in the realities of the compute infrastructure they have.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  Fascinating position and opportunity to make sure that intelligence is accessible underwater, maybe a little bit.

• 1:35:57Speaker 06

  At least accessible to, you know,

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  At least waterproof.

• 1:36:00Speaker 06

  If you're not in, if you're not in New York or San Francisco and you ask someone what they do and they answer engineer, the vast majority of the economy, that is mechanical, electrical, aerospace, chemical engineers, people that build the real world, and we want them to benefit from AI too.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Great stuff, Bryce.

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for hopping on the show and we'll talk.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:36:19Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:36:19Speaker 00

  Goodbye.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  See you soon.

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  Up next with Adam Blake, co-founder and CEO of Mavria, coming on the show. Welcome to the show, Adam.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  What's going on?

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Great, great setup here. You look more high definition than we do somehow.

• 1:36:39Speaker 00

  That's great. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, my name is Adam Blake. I'm the CEO of Mavria and we started Mavria because we believe the next phase of the AI race is going to be won or lost in the physical world. And America's leading today in AI because of our technology and our people, but our physical infrastructure isn't keeping up. So that's the gap that we're planning to close. And we're starting with data centers as a product. So we actually make that infrastructure as a product. Terrain is a manufactured data center that integrates cooling, power, controls and a structure into a repeatable five megawatt block. And we're building the first unit right now in Houston. We're starting with data centers, but our ambition is much bigger.

• 1:37:24Speaker 04

  We want to fundamentally change how America develops and builds the infrastructure behind AI. And then today is like the first time we're coming out of quasi stealth and unveiling the company and talking about our partners.

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  Congratulations. Tell me about the, the, the shape, the size. I imagine this is built in a factory and then delivered on a truck. Are we talking roughly?

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Five megawatts.

• 1:37:47Speaker 00

  Five megawatts, are we talking shipping container size, bigger, multiple pieces that come together? How will this actually be instantiated in the physical world?

• 1:37:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's going to be multiple pieces coming together and we, we made some design decisions that were pretty important. We want it to be standard and repeatable in these five megawatt blocks. So you could put this on a small site, for example, on the distribution grid, or it could be part of a multi hundred megawatt campus, for example. So yeah, there's like, if you want to think about like pure, pure size, you can get five megawatts on like less than an acre.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Speaker 04

  And then, you know, 25 megawatts on like less than 10 acres.

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Not bad. Might have to do that in Malibu.

• 1:38:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:29Speaker 00

  So then, then what are the actual other integration points? I imagine that once you've built this structure, you are then partnering with a NeoCloud and operator who will decide what, what chips are in, are racked, whether they're going AMD or Nvidia or whatever, that's not on you. And then they still need to provide land, power, water? What else are they providing? What are the key ingredients to actually a successful partnership with you?

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. So you nailed it. So we're not a NeoCloud, we're not providing the GPUs, we're partnering with those types of companies. And they typically bring basically power land and then we do, we take care of everything else besides putting in the GPUs. So everything from the manufacturing of the product to the physical delivery and bring up.

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, and then on the water side, is that something that you're doing closed loops? So you can like bring in a truck of water or do you need a well onsite? Like, how does that, how does that fit into the modular story?

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, basically when you use liquid cooling, you don't really need onsite water. I mean, you can truck it in to initially fill the closed loops. And then anything you need on a ongoing basis is pretty immaterial. I mean, you'll typically have like bathrooms and like sinks and stuff like that onsite, like a normal like office building would, but that's really all that you need a water for.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  What, who are, like, what are the right scale customers at this point? Like, I imagine like you might have a customer, like, like if a hyperscaler comes to you, are you set up to be able to deliver at that scale yet? Or would that be almost a distraction because you want to just dial in this like modularity to start and then scale up from there?

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so right now we're building our first unit like as we speak in Houston. That's going to be done by the end of the year. And then we're going to be rolling out in smaller volumes in Q1. And then we're aiming to hit full production capacity of more than a gigawatt per year by middle of 2027 from our Houston facility.

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  Wow, that's huge. Tell us about fundraising. What can you tell us? Who's been involved? And I'd love to hit the gong for you just to celebrate coming out of stealth.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  Oh gosh. So first of all, I'm not a big fan of celebrating fundraisers.

• 1:40:42Speaker 00

  Well, we are. Public enemy number one here.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Good thing, good thing we are.

• 1:40:46Speaker 00

  Good thing we are. I'm going to hit the gong anyway.

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  Coming out of style.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  No, I, I.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  For coming out of style.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm, I'm with you, you know, I do think, I do think you shouldn't celebrate them, but the world inevitably does.

• 1:41:00Speaker 00

  Disagree. Take the whole team to the Bahamas for a month. Take the whole team to a month. Bahamas for a month to celebrate the fundraise. Fundraise every six months, you're working.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  No, well, we're gonna have you back when you're at, when you're at least, you know, hopefully before you're at gigawatt, uh, production run rates, but, um.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  But yeah, so you got Paradigm in, um.

• 1:41:23Speaker 00

  Amp.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Amp. There you go.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're super grateful, you know, to have those guys. It's an honor. So we actually did a $30 million pre-seed, pre-seed round with Ange back in June. That was basically a day one check. So yeah, he was the first investor in, and then more recently, we did this $100 million round that was led by Paradigm.

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  Congrats. Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Last, last question. I know, I know we're like, uh, running behind today, but, um, is, is your thesis that like, like, what are the kinds of businesses that over the next few years are going to be buying this sort of like the smallest version of your prod, uh, product, like a, a five megawatt, uh, mini data center that, and what are the kind of use cases?

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, look, first of all, I think the thesis is that the demand for compute is coming in all shapes and sizes. Everything from, you know, I think you're going to see compute at the residential level, obviously all the way up to the gigawatt scale. And we've really decided to go after this like five megawatt block increment because there are thousands of sites across the U.S. that exist on existing distribution infrastructure. I mean, there's probably a hundred plus gigawatts that if you could use batteries and agree to curtailment, that you could deploy our product on, on existing infrastructure. So a huge difference versus going and building new power generation and building new substations. So that's the market that we're really excited about. But at the same time, this product could be deployed on these like multi hundred megawatt sites, you know, which obviously

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  have been the favorite for, you know, most of these labs and hyperscalers recently.

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, just quickly adding capacity. Uh, makes so much sense.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Very cool.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, great to meet you, Adam.

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Great milestone.

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And up next, we have this co-founder and CEO of Foundry Robotics, Zarch, coming on the show to talk about building stuff again. Thank you so much for taking the time. Please introduce yourself and the company. Tell us about Foundry Robotics.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  What's up?

• 1:43:31Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:43:34Speaker 06

  Foundry builds autonomous factories. We build factories from the ground up. We orient them towards robotics and autonomy. We actually provide manufacturing as a service to our customers so they don't have to pay attention to how many robots are involved. Uh, we are announcing our Series A fundraiser. It's a hundred million bucks.

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:43:53Speaker 06

  The company's 10 months old. It's about 120. Do I get it wrong?

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  What, what took you so long? You've been at it for 10 months.

• 1:44:01Speaker 06

  I know, man. We're, we're going as fast as we can. We need more factories.

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 06

  Uh, so, so we're also unveiling our 130,000 square foot facility, uh, across the bridge in Emeryville.

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 1:44:12Speaker 06

  We're scaling up people. We're scaling up robots. We are doing everything in between as well.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so cool.

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  What's the, so needed. What, what is the, uh, the power law product going to be? What is the most manufacturable product? Cars? Chips? I don't know. There's so many things that you could manufacture. Everything's manufactured, right? Tables, chairs, die-coated cans?

• 1:44:35Speaker 06

  It's a great point. So fundamentally, right, because we build many things and we're flexible, I can build drones on Monday, batteries on Tuesday, and satellites on Thursday. That means, to answer your question, it's not a power law product, but instead more like a power law set of primitives. And so we focus on assembly. We do, uh, precise placement. We do cabling. We do fastening. Uh, and so that allows you to focus on a ton of different products. So like right now, I'm shipping to customers in defense. We do autonomous submarines. We do robot dogs. We do some telecom hardware. We have like six or seven paying customers right now that we work with. It's more about how can I build as many things as possible under one roof that sort of follow the same tenants?

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Speaker 06

  And so for the first time in history, the more products that I build, the better I become at building all products. That's the beauty of it.

• 1:45:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you, does, do you think that robotics are going to basically break the sort of like laws of lean manufacturing, right? Like when I hear like we make this on Monday, this on Tuesday, this on Wednesday, my immediate thought is like, just because you can, doesn't mean that would actually be the most efficient, but maybe, maybe that is the future. If you want, if we want more manufacturing in the U.S., it needs to be more valuable and, and on demand. And maybe it's, maybe it could be wasteful to have a massive facility that's only set up to make one kind of thing.

• 1:45:58Speaker 06

  Spot on. So there's this four block that people talk a lot about, right? There's like high mix, slow mix, and then high volume, low volume, right? And people always talk about, you know, high mix, low volume, or low mix, high, high volume, right?

• 1:46:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Speaker 06

  But Foundry kind of sits at that like section of the quadrant that's normally grayed out, saying it's impossible, which is high mix, high volume, right? And the, and the reason that works, the reason it's desirable, right? I get this question a lot like, oh, you know, when a company scales, if, if I'm a drone company and I scaled a building a million drones a year, why don't I just run my own factory? Well, you're never going to invest the same amount of time, effort and engineering into the factory as I am, because the factory is my product. You're never going to have the same unit economics. It's not going to have the same autonomy and you're not going to have the same data that I do. On top of all that, the underlying sort of CapEx rigidity that you have to deal with when you build your own facility to build the one thing, like I don't have to deal with that. So we, we think about this a lot. My co-founder, Emmanuel,

• 1:46:56Speaker 06

  he ran the Model Y program at Tesla, right? Best selling car in the world. And to launch the most recent Model Y, they spent a billion bucks in CapEx, right? Which is crazy. And so if you think about it, right, like the amount of time flexibility, product flexibility, design flexibility, I can offer my customers by actually being a factory company that treats robots in the factory as the core product. It's actually pretty unique. Even as you scale, you still want to work with us.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  What, uh, yeah, what, what proof points are you looking for with these early customers that that's actually true, right? Cause like, I, I think, uh, when you're, like the, the question becomes like, yeah, I imagine there's a bunch of companies in the Bay Area that want to build, uh, will, basically want to build a low volume of things. And if, and if you, if they can buy that from you at a fixed price, they're like, great. Like you, you're solving a bunch of problems for us. But the question is like, yeah, they do start to ramp one of these products and you, you, you have to be able to retain them.

• 1:47:56Speaker 06

  Here's the good news. Uh, our customers aren't just the startups, right? Like Huntington Ingalls, HII is one of our customers, right? We do work on autonomous submarines with them, which is crazy. That's like an OG product, right?

• 1:48:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's.

• 1:48:09Speaker 06

  That's pretty serious. They're, they're not, um.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  That's the right sound for Huntington Ingalls, for sure.

• 1:48:15Speaker 06

  I appreciate that. That's very fitting.

• 1:48:17Speaker 00

  Spot on.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  But they're, they're not, they're, they're not playing around, right? Like this, this is, this is a serious engagement. And as they think about scaling up their autonomous surface vehicle and autonomous undersea vehicle, USVs and UUVs, right? Like they need a real production solution. Uh, and so a lot of our customers, as it turns out, are not actually that small. Uh, we do have some, don't get me wrong. We, we have some startups that we work with, but they come from all over the place.

• 1:48:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Speaker 06

  Uh, and so the very like real technical proof points we look at is like, are we getting faster with each incremental unit? Are we able to see the improvements in the models across different base architectures and data collection paradigms across different kinds of products? Are we seeing the amount of overlap across the different paradigms? Like, there's always this technical activity that goes into like our data collection program in conjunction with our model fine tuning program, which is actually what allows me to turn around and then on the manufacturing side, go scale up.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  How, what do you, uh, if Foundry is successful, does the idea that like hardware has like more moats, like go away? Because historic, like for basically the last couple years, I think a lot of investors have been investing against this idea of like, well, I want to back things that have some hardware component because hardware is hard and you have to figure out manufacturing and your supply chain and all these different things. But it feels like what you're building towards is like somebody can go to their favorite agent and say like, I want to make this sort of complex product and a smart enough model slash agent or harness will be able to like produce a file that you could then take and

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  theoretically manufacture at small scale quite rapidly, at, at which point like it's unclear if the sort of legacy factory, it'd be, is still like, you know, a moat in, in the way that it's been to date.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  I think the moat for a great hardware company is a mixture of your manufacturing prowess and your design excellence, right? And I think that will skew towards more of the design excellence. I don't build or design drones or batteries or satellites or any of those things. There are amazing companies out there designing amazing products. The way, the way I think the future is going to go is when a company like Foundry is ultra-successful and we have thousands of factories across tens of millions of square feet, is that the speed of hardware design innovation and new products being conceived of, prototyped, produced, mass-produced, distributed, will skyrocket. The

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  way the pace of software innovation also skyrocketed when we saw the cloud sort of take over as the main form of how compute is handled, right? Like, no company, sort of AI aside, coming out of YC is like, "Oh, cool. How do I go buy more servers?" Like, that's not like a thing, right? But today in hardware, if you want to build three of something, it's a total nightmare. And so I think what'll end up happening is the economy will build so many more things, and the moat will come from designing an excellent product, right? Because that's still not what I do. I don't design your product for you. That's your thing. I can advise, I can make it more manufacturable. We have this thing called Design for Robotic Assembly that we've coined. We can talk about making it more manufacturable, but like, there are drone experts, there are robot dog experts,

• 1:51:37Speaker 06

  there are satellite experts. They're going to keep doing their thing. My job is to just build a million of whichever one we need a million of.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  In the short term, is the factory mostly like Kuka robot arms, spot welding, soldering, pick and place, be like putting in screws? Or are there like CNC machines, 3D printers on site?

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  Do you plastic molding?

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  Or, or, or are the parts assembled elsewhere and then you're taking in the parts? It's not raw materials in on day one, right? It's not like aluminum gets dropped off and I get a drone out the other side, right?

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  Are you thinking what I'm thinking, John? We got, we have a little internal hardware project we're working on that's kind of a pretty difficult challenge.

• 1:52:17Speaker 00

  I actually am blanking on what you're talking about.

• 1:52:19Speaker 06

  Send it my way. Whatever it is, we can probably crush it.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  I acquired the base.

• 1:52:24Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. We do have some.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  We have, we have a challenge that if you can do this, I'm going to probably beg you to let, let me invest in the company.

• 1:52:34Speaker 06

  I am almost certain we can do it just fine.

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:52:37Speaker 06

  So, uh, let's, uh, basically today we focus on assembly. Because if you look at manufacturing, there's two categories, right? There's fabrication and there's assembly.

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So like winding a drone motor, that's going to happen somewhere else. You're, you take the motor, but get seated in the right place, put the screws in, make sure it's at the right tolerances, get it all out the door, which makes a ton of sense.

• 1:52:58Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Speaker 06

  Especially because like if you look at the world now, in defense as an example, or if you do a ton of defense, we no longer need like five fighter jets a year. We need like 10 million drones.

• 1:53:08Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:53:08Speaker 06

  Which is very different. And because that's very different, uh, the, the combinator problem of scaling assemblies is what we spend most of our time doing.

• 1:53:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's so exciting. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love, I love, I love that you're working on this. This is like, this is the thing that I, I care most about, is like going from, from digital to physical. And I think that that's, that's where people are going to feel like an Excel, like a real, like, feel the AGI will be when, not when you can get like a really cool research.

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  Industrial abundance is like the most impactful possible thing you could work on, in my humble opinion, but I'm not biased. Physical industrial abundance, oh my God, we can't even begin to imagine the implications of that in society. Like, it's going to be awesome.

• 1:53:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  I love it, dude. We'll come back on soon. This is great. And I will follow up after this with the, with our challenge.

• 1:54:01Speaker 00

  Challenge, TBN bench. You can do it. You're goaded. Have a good one.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Great stuff, dude.

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  We'll talk to you later. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock C, most real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We're going from the physical world back to the digital world with founder and CEO of CoFrame, Josh Payne, building a living internet.

• 1:54:22Speaker 04

  What's going on?

• 1:54:23Speaker 00

  Ready to go digital. Josh, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:54:26Speaker 04

  Good to see you.

• 1:54:27Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 1:54:28Speaker 04

  I'm doing great. How are you?

• 1:54:28Speaker 00

  So, uh, you raised some money. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong. I'm excited. It's warmed up.

• 1:54:33Speaker 04

  25 million.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  Well, we got, I didn't really realize we got this new lighting effect on the gong.

• 1:54:42Speaker 00

  It's good. We got a replay effect. The gong is ever.

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  As a percussionist, I can say, great gong.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Great gong.

• 1:54:52Speaker 00

  Boom.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:54:55Speaker 00

  That's huge, because every time we hit the gong, there's someone in the chat that always gets annoyed that we didn't warm it up. But I always say, the first gong hit is the warm-up.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  It's still rated.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  Comment on your gong technique. Comment on the gong.

• 1:55:09Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay. That's fair, that's fair. Anyway, we're not here to talk about gongs. We're here to talk about CoFrame. Tell us about the company. Tell us about yourself.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  All right. Well, high-level idea here with CoFrame is that the internet is dead. Uh, you know, typically it will take giant teams of people, um, we hate that. It'll take giant teams of engineers, designers, marketers, et cetera, um, to build and optimize the user interfaces that we use every day.

• 1:55:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 04

  And that's a huge problem. It's costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in, in losses every year. Um, and we're flipping the script on that. We, we see a world where the internet itself can have its own sense of life, um, where it can self-improve and become this kind of continuously learning system. Um, and this actually has two sides. I mean, first is on the, the interfaces themselves, the websites, ads, apps, emails, et cetera. Um, that's where CoFrame plays. And what we're already seeing is it also happens on the other side with personal agents starting to use the internet more, in fact, uh, on the rise and starting to overtake human traffic on the internet, which is really cool. Um, and so we're building for that world and we're trying to bring the internet to life.

• 1:56:18Speaker 00

  How, how, uh, how possible is it to actually route an agent that lands on just a dot com in a browser, computer use, all that, uh, into something that feels much more like an MCP experience, like an API experience? If I'm a, if I'm a website operator and an agent shows up, there are some, there are some situations where I don't want that to happen, but there are many situations where the website operator wants to give the agentic experience as much as possible and make it as easy as possible and make it not, uh, consume so many tokens for their potential customers. Because at the end of the day, there's some, they're, they're selling something that's physical. They're selling something that, that they don't mind

• 1:57:00Speaker 00

  if, if an AI is buying or humans buying. They just want to sell. Uh, how, how, how, how capable are you to actually route accordingly? How necessary is it? What does that look like?

• 1:57:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, the, the gap is, is really not that wide. It just really comes down to establishing a protocol that everyone agrees on and sort of a standard operating procedure. Um, from a technical perspective, super easy. The tools already exist, you know? Web MCP already exists. There's personal agent protocol, which is a new proposed one that we're excited about as well. Um, when you go to any website in CoFrame that is powered by CoFrame, or on a site for that matter, and just add .agent to it, uh, it will, it will basically render an agent-friendly version of it that can talk back with the agent, which is really cool. Um, it's really just about like establishing that standard, right? And that's what we're trying to push for here. Um, there's a ton of benefits and, you know, I guess like, this is going to come down to like, what, what are the, what are the incentives here? Like, why would a customer

• 1:57:57Speaker 04

  want to do this? Why would a business want to do this? Um, you already mentioned token consumption. I would also mention speed. Like, when you go and ask Muse, uh, which is amazing, love Muse, uh, Nat Friedman, who leads it, let us see around. So, love, love the whole team there. Yeah. Um, but when you go on Muse and, and you ask it to go book you a hotel or whatever, you're waiting for a while. Uh, and I think that that doesn't need to be the case.

• 1:58:20Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Uh, what, what does actual onboarding look like? Is this a JavaScript snippet I'm throwing on the front end? Is it a Python package I'm importing? Is it something that lives in the GitHub and was reviewing code as it goes out? Like, how deep is the, is the CoFrame integration process?

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. So, we kind of start out, we try to start out really like seamless, um, with customers and that's by design. Um, we'll get in with like a, a snippet that just add to their site and they'll take days. There's this one Fortune 500 company that, um, that we, we did a pilot with, uh, recently and have since converted to a big contract. And they started out and basically implemented in three days, uh, from, from initial contract to on the site. And from there, uh, the value there is that you're able to see tremendous results really quickly. So like with that customer, we were able to see a 70% lifted conversion in less than a month, which was absolutely nuts.

• 1:59:14Speaker 00

  What was going wrong before? I mean, that's good for you, but it's like bearish for them. No offense to them.

• 1:59:20Speaker 04

  This isn't isolated though either. I'll say like, you know.

• 1:59:22Speaker 00

  They didn't have a buy button or something? Like, 70% is such.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, what it, what it, what's like, so when, when you're talking to some of these customers, is part of the pitch really like, hey, there's, there's new companies out there that are really optimized for agents that are getting like the majority of their new cus, their new customers from agents? And you will literally die if you do not, don't like adopt this new paradigm? I think we've just seen a bunch of different examples, specifically with like developer infrastructure products where if you're not like, you know, or people like shipping and paying for whole services without even knowing what they're paying for underneath the hood. Uh, there was like a viral post where somebody's like, like, "How did you ship your app?" And the, the person's like, "I don't know." He's like, "Who did you pay?" It was like, "Codex."

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  And so I feel like it's, this is a big, um, you know, this will be like the probably defining trend over the next five years of like what businesses actually adopt this and which ones are like, still think that humans are going to make these like, the majority of end purchase decisions.

• 2:00:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. What luxury returns.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  A lot of people are thinking about this. It's like, it's something that a lot of people are thinking about. It's not a core driver. Like, it's not on, you know, it's not a light item on a budget yet. Um, so this is really, for us, we see it as positioning and it's something that we've actually talked about and posted about for like the last, you know, two years plus. Like, it's not, it's not new either. And it's, it's not going to be on the budget for another least year, I think. Um, however, it's growing incredibly, incredibly quickly, you know, the, the usage metrics of these personal agents. I think by 2029, the majority of traffic in the US for commerce is going to end up being, you know, agentic personally. That's my prediction. And so people are gonna start thinking about this. But when we go and talk to companies to try work with them,

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

  it's it's more focused on what are the goals and needs they have today? And just trying to have a practical point of view. And positioning ourselves as a partner that's going to enable them to be ready when that transition happens because we do support this. And we are going to be able to allow that seamlessly when it does.

• 2:01:25Speaker 00

  Some of this, some of this product, the value that you're bringing, it feels a little bit like old school enterprise SaaS. Are you just doing subscriptions? Is there a consumption based pricing model? Because I'm sure there's AI involved. But how are you thinking about positioning the the cost benefit to prospective customers?

• 2:01:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, we probably should be doing a performance based pricing.

• 2:01:50Speaker 00

  It was 70%. Yeah. Let me take half of that.

• 2:01:53Speaker 04

  I mean, there's others like like Dropbox, 158% lifts. Like Replit, 110% lift, Cash App, 60% lift.

• 2:02:01Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  And these are all the ones that we talked about, like many, many, many more. Like we're seeing a lot of great results. And if we were pricing on performance, we're going to be a lot higher. You know, it's obviously, you know, very attractive. We're starting out keeping it simple. It's just like we'll come in, try to evaluate the ROI can be able to provide you. Usually targeting like 10x plus, maybe even more. And then we'll just have a flat rate for the for an annual agreement.

• 2:02:27Speaker 00

  Old school.

• 2:02:28Speaker 04

  And that's how we do it today. But I think down the road, it's probably going to end up being interesting for customers. I could see a performance based approach becoming really successful.

• 2:02:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Performance based would make a lot of sense. And then on your side, I imagine that you'll be grappling with like the, well, if we throw a lot more compute at this, we might get better results. But then also, if we just wait a couple of months, like the models will get way cheaper and our margins will be better. So there's a lot, there's a lot that you're going to have to puzzle out. But it's amazing that things are going so well. And congratulations on the on the series A.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  How big's the team?

• 2:03:02Speaker 04

  We're about 45 people now. I don't know. I don't know about team sizes being a key metric, though. I think that what's more interesting is revenue per employee. So that's what I'm really pushing for.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's, you know, it's just helpful to get a gauge.

• 2:03:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just interesting to see in the modern era where something like this grows.

• 2:03:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know, this is said a lot, but companies going public with less than 100 people, even less than 50 people, that's going to be a reality. Yeah, pretty soon here, I think, with, you know, the rise of what we're seeing with productivity. And it's awesome time to be building.

• 2:03:35Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah, thank you.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Next round.

• 2:03:38Speaker 04

  Next round. Yeah, eventually, and I think that this eventually ends up looking essentially like a lab. I mean, we're, you know, one of the things that's been driving a lot of our growth is we're training this transformer based on all this data that we're seeing coming in. Incredibly rich user interactions. Obviously, data that we're allowed to use and, you know, there's a company that has agreements that we can't and so on. But that that's that's turned out to be extremely powerful. And I think that this eventually all of our people are just going to be focused on making that model better.

• 2:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Great to meet you.

• 2:04:11Speaker 00

  Great to meet you.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Great, Miles.

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  See you soon, Josh.

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jordy.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Lulu is highlighting. So Shaquille said, note that Nvidia's spokesman, John Rizzo, has put out multiple statements in recent weeks that we now know are false. Unclear, of course, if he believed them to be true at the time. John said Jensen's interactions with Ms. Wong are not unusual or unexpected. And Lulu says, no serious comms person would ever lie like this. Rule number one is never lie to the press, never lie to anyone. I assumed he believed this to be true. If so, he was deceived by his leadership and made to be a useful idiot and should resign on principle. Palmer says, there is another possibility, Lulu, one that dominates my group chats. Jensen is sleeping with all his customers.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  And so when they say his interactions were not unusual or expected, they mean he is on a rampage, seducing thousands of AI hardware execs with a glance. Anything's possible.

• 2:05:21Speaker 00

  It is. It's a timeline and turmoil day, for sure, for sure. Well, we'll follow the story more tomorrow. And I'm sure there will be more updates on the investigation and what's going on in the stock market. Fortunately, it feels like if you tried to catch a falling knife over the weekend, you're looking pretty good. You grabbed the handle. You didn't cut yourself because the market is firmly up today. The Dow Jones up 2.15%, S and P 500 up 2.35%, and the NASDAQ up 2.74%. So some some good news amid a lot of turmoil.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  But the last, the last story, Richard Sutton, this guy, he needs to read this blog post. He says, brute force computation is not enough for intelligence. Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. I would recommend to this guy, Richard, that he reads this, he reads this blog post. It's called The Bitter Lesson, and it kind of refutes exactly his his take here. But, you know, you know, maybe he knows something that we don't know. Of course, he was the was the progenitor of the bitter lesson. And it's it's interesting to see him not be bitter lesson pill in this particular moment. But we will, we will see where it goes. Anyway, anything else?

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Anyways, chaos out there.

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  You're just looking at the timeline and all the Jensen stuff?

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  No, just just everything.

• 2:06:53Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  Axe. Jensen.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, lots of stuff.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  And it's just Monday.

• 2:06:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, just Monday.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  We will be back in action tomorrow.

• 2:07:03Speaker 00

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  We're live from the studio every day this week, which we're very excited about. And we hope you have the best Monday afternoon of your entire life. It is possible. I know it sounds fanciful, but it's possible. So just go and do it. And without further ado.

• 2:07:22Speaker 00

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Goodbye.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Love you.