Energy is a big space. Power energy is a fascinating space. Great one. Yeah. Awesome. Oh, great to meet you there. Congrats. Thank you so much for coming by the show. We'll talk to you soon. And we have our last guest of the show. We got Ashley Vance from Core Memory. He's the founder, he's the CEO, he's the podcast host, he's the documentarian, he's an author, he's a multi hyphenate. He is a friend of our show. We were excited to announce his launch of Core Memory a little over a year ago. We made a sportscenter type hype reel. Amazing. You said a lot of crazy things about some legacy media companies that I probably wouldn't say now, but we all had a good laugh. Didn't we say death knell Death now for Bloomberg short the stocks. Like we were going crazy. Time may tell. We'll see. Yes. But how are things? What's most interesting to you? What are you tracking today? You've done so many different things. Tours of Abilene, you've been tracking this AI talent war. I feel like pretty well with the Mark Chen interview and Jerry Turek as well. Yeah, Jerry Kylie Robinson, join our team. She's killing it. Pickup. What do you call her? A scoop. We scooping like a Baskin Robbins employee. Yeah, that's what we call. We have a whole list of scoop related puns that we will be slowly trickling out as more scoops hit the timeline. So I don't want to leak them all. Okay, I'll send them to you. Hold on. It's so cool to be here, man. Welcome to the show. Amazing. You were recording. We're filming you filming us filming you. I'm recording on my face, all the cameras. I think I'm the first person to do a metawaka, I'm told. I love it. And. Yeah. So. Well, what are we doing? Well, first of all, you're in a Quonset hut. Yes, we are. This is near and dear to my heart. You guys know Silicon Valley began in a Quonset hut. I didn't know that. No way. Tell me. Yeah. When we figured out how quickly you can actually build these structures, we were shocked. Yeah, like extremely evil. And there's that one startup that's doing like the inflatable ones from some Belarus technology. But yeah, no Quonset hud. William Shockley invents a transistor at Bell Labs. His mom lives in Palo Alto. This is like, why Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley. His mom's not doing great she misses him. He wants to move out. So he moves to Palo Alto, sets up Shockley semiconductor lab in like 1954 maybe. And it looks exactly like this. It was right in Mountain View on San Antonio Road. It no longer exists. It's amazing because we always get like, why aren't you in San Francisco? You know, is this a real tech show? It's like we recreated Silicon Valley here. Right here in Hollywood. No, I saw it. I saw it that it was. How is sf? Do you go to robot fights, like daily now? Is that a weekly thing? Do you have a season pass hourly? Yeah, it's a lot. We just went to one this Saturday. Rec had one at Khizar Pavilions. It was kind of like their biggest one yet. We've been filming like, oh, my meta glasses died. We've been filming a documentary more or less. So kind of like from the very beginning of the robot fights all the way through. So. Yes. How do you think of the timeline? Is this a 10 year project? Because my expectation, I haven't been yet, but my expectation, tell me if I'm wrong, is that it just sounds like the craziest, most awesome thing ever. And yet the robots today are still kind of making progress. And so the actual action in the moment, it's probably a fun place to like, hang out with friends and watch, but it's not yet, like, oh, I'm, I'm sweating. This is like better than ufc. It's a little, little comical at times, but, you know, it's getting better. The idea is that the documentary would, would show over time. Yeah. And then. Well, I think we want to do. This is like, this is kind of the cool thing. So we make, we do make films for Netflix, hbo, all that stuff. But I think we're going to try something different here where it's like a documentary that's, that's living and ongoing. Yeah. So I think we're gonna, we're gonna take what we filmed for the last six or seven months, put that out as like chapter one of the Rise of the Robot Fights, and then just keep following it along, which is, I mean, we have internal, not like fights, but just the best strategy on how to release some of this stuff. But I think it's kind of cool. I think you can do different things now that we have our own distribution and kind of play with the format. How do you actually, like, how do you actually process watching robots fight? Is it like scary, Doomer? Are you actually entertained? It's pretty fun, man. Everybody, like, at this last fight, you could tell there were a lot of people who had never seen one before. I mean, it's the spectacle of it all. There was an element where the first round went and then a bunch of people cleared out because I think they were just. Once they've had their fill, it has to get better. Right? But they. Well, I think what they should do is do the robot. Like extreme sports. I think before you get fighting, it's like robot cliff jumping. Watching a robot jump. Or BASE jumping. Right. Watching a robot hurl itself off a cliff and then be like trying to pull a parachute. And like, if. Whether it works or not, it's like pretty, pretty cool. I'm with you. I do think. Or big wave. Big wave surfing robot. Big waiting is pretty good. That the fight is getting, like, better pretty quick. And now. So, you know, when it first started, they had these little miniature robots and that was super because they barely hit each other and fall over. But, you know, now they're getting taller. This year in the next five months, we'll see like the 6 foot 2. Did you used to go to the Battlebot shows back in the day? I have some good memories there. Those things were lethal. Those things. Those things. Like, even I just jumped from 4 11. 44 to 5 11. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty tall. Yeah. So we just filmed. It's kind of. Well, I won't tell the backstory, but we have filmed. There is a six footer in America. Six footer in America. That I think is the only six footer in America. Yeah. Does that make you feel the AGI? The AGI more than visiting a big data center? I mean, the cool thing. I. Okay, I just. I find this cool as like a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, totally. San Francisco sort of art meets tech kind of thing. But then I do. It resonates with me because it is this physical instantiation of AI. And even though it's not as cutting edge as some AI solving a physics problem, maybe there is this. You do feel the AGI because there's like something to it and there's this energy and that's what, like, drew me to the story. That's awesome. Are documentaries just like a get rich quick scheme, break down the business model. Cannot count all the cash, man. I always laugh because people are like, well, it sounds. It sounds like, oh, I work with Netflix, I work with hbo. You sound like a. Like, you sound like you're in mogul mode. But the reality is like, you have to invest years of your time and it can, you know, obviously it's a business, otherwise you wouldn't be investing in it. But break down the realities of, like, what it actually takes to create a documentary, sell it, monetize it. It is hard. It's probably harder than ever, maybe. I mean, we went through this, the glory years of all the streamers lighting up, and then they couldn't get enough content. They were overpaying for everything. And so you could actually. You don't make money like a scripted project that really hits, but you could do pretty well with a documentary if you really had something good. And now it's brutal. Netflix, most of the streamers kind of cap what they're willing to pay, and it's not a very high number. It's like, call it like 2 million bucks. And so you have to get your budget under that. You're following something for could be one year, it could be six years. And to spread all that work and money over all the time. Yeah, Some of the best stories. I mean, it's so hard because there's companies today where if you knew where they'd be in five years or 10 years, you'd be like, we need to have a camera on this team every single day. But then they could just peter out and it doesn't become interesting. And then you've just kind of lost. Which is what we kind of try to do. I mean, we try to place these. Best, but you're kind of an. You're acting as like, an investor, basically. Yeah, because, like, the robot project, I'll go as a reporter first and be like, oh, there's kind of something here. And this character, this person is really interesting. Let's, like, follow it for a bit, and then we can do sort of shorter episodes. And then, you know, once you really think you're on it, something, you can go all in a bit more. So we have, like, our own money to invest in the projects that we really care about and then sometimes partner with other people. Have you. Have you cared at all about what's happening with Warner Brothers Discovery? Do you think that actually impacts the documentary market? Does it consolidate? Yeah, I mean, it's more consolidation. They're going to be like, hey, it was 2 million last year. Now it's like one and a half. Is that kind of the concern? Yeah, I mean, continued consolidation is a real problem. Then. I mean, there's this. There's this part where, like, tech companies own every major media company now. And it's a real issue for some of the stuff we want to cover, because it's like, does it Compete with this? Is this offensive to all the tech people? And so it really limits, you know, to some degree, the scope of what you can cover. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But even. Even, like, if you just want to make a documentary about, like, the Apple Vision pro, how it was made, whatever, and it's like, if it looks. If it looks damaging to Apple and then you sell it to Netflix. Well, like those two companies compete and then they could. Even if there's no comp. Even if there's no true conflict of interest, people could be like, well, you know, was there. You know. You know, is Netflix gonna buy some doc about Apple? Oh, yeah, they might not want to glaze Apple. Then you have. You're always after the most interesting people, right? Yep. So you've got this list of whatever, the top 20, 30 tech figures that you might want to follow for a doc. And then it's like, who. Whose alliances are they on and who hates them? You know, who fits in where you're just trying to make a movie and have people watch it. Yeah. Talk about scoops and the importance of scoops in making a documentary that feels like they can help a lot. You also have these multiple touch points. So I could imagine you, like, interviewing someone and then being like, that would go well in a documentary. Maybe I want to hold that. How does scoops work in this? That's horrible. I mean, because I do books and documentaries and it's like, so you get. Good scoops and then you have to wait a year. I know you're sitting on some stuff. You're like, you have to sit. And then you just. When I see these OpenAI. You gotta hide your notes well, you gotta hide your notes from Kyle because she's like, that's a scoop right there. No, no. Now you're on the same team. We're on the same team. We'll figure all that out. But no, I mean, it is really hard. Like, sometimes you're sitting on something and, you know, I remember when I did the Elon book, you know, there was this anecdote where Google almost bought Tesla. And I had that, like two years before the book was gonna come out. You're just like, praying to God nobody happens upon this in the meantime. And the documentaries are the same way. In a perfect world, if you do manage to, like, ride through that, then, yeah, you know, you have not only this long form piece that's. That's revealing a lot about these people, which you've got some news with it to help when I. When I released that story ahead of the book on Bloomberg. That's what shot the Elon book, like, up the Amazon charts before it came out. How do you think? I've always been struck by the fact that in the Netflix app, in the iTunes, like, Apple TV app, it's very hard to, like, screen, record and share because they don't want you stealing the whole thing, which makes sense, but it also hurts. Like clippings. Yeah, yeah. Whereas if you share a story, you could screenshot it, and that can go viral. With books, it's very important to pick a good excerpt and then run that in a magazine. Right. Like New York Mag. Got the first chapter of this new book, and they distribute it and whatnot. I'm wondering how you're thinking about how documentary promotion might change in the future. I mean, it's funny because we're living in these two worlds right now where we're doing stuff on YouTube, on our channel, and the doc world. And the second you go into the doc world is a lot like the publishing industry. Things get very traditional very quickly, and there's a lot more reluctance to try things out. And they. Once you've signed over to Netflix, I mean, they kind of own your thing, and you're a little bit at the mercy of how they want to do it. So it's not something, honestly, that I've thought a ton about, and I haven't seen an incredible amount of creativity yet on embracing that. Are there any traditional Hollywood executives that look at your YouTube experience as a feather in your cap? I'm just thinking about that Neuralink documentary that you did. Well, it was a YouTube video, went super viral. And the structure of that video was amazing because it was all the great stuff about Nashley Vance, like, documentary video production. But then it had a hook. It had. Oh, Elon's gonna call. It had, like, it opened loops. It was, like, also a MrBeast video, you know, and it was the best of both. And I imagine that you probably saw Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Rogan talking about second screening and how more and more Netflix executives want you to retell the plot 25 times. But if you're coming from the YouTube world, you can say, like, hey, if it's holding retention on YouTube, like, I know I can edit like that with you, and you'll have similar retention. Is that interesting yet? Well, I mean, I think there's a massive clash going on right now. I mean, like, the guys filming us who make our show, we sort of. At Bloomberg, we learned how to make a TV show that was like an Emmy nominated sideshow for way, way, way less money than Netflix or Hulu would pay for a similar show. This was hello World. That was hello World. And then obviously we're doing that at Core Memory. But, you know, there's this economics that I think we figured out. They work very hard is one part of it. But the second you sign up with a Netflix, the budget expands. Everybody's padding. Like, you'll get line items on a budget for landlines of like $15,000. Because people are just trying to. This is how Hollywood works. It's very strange. So you have these. You've got this clash of finance from the old world and then the model of the new world. And so, you know, when I talk to more traditional Hollywood execs, some, I think are not paying as much attention maybe to YouTube as they should. But then there are some really big producers. The second we started the company, they called and they're like, dude, we want to kind of do what you're doing, or we want to be part of what you're doing and rethink how we go about things. And so, I mean, I still think YouTube, if, you know, it's been around what, like 20. I still feel like this is very early days for how this is going to play out, because I think that is where you have the most flexibility and the distribution of the entire world. It still beats everything. Yeah. How do you think about it? Yeah. And it would be nice if they bought documentaries. They're like, we'd love to buy your documentary for this creator payout. We floated this idea. No, but I think, I mean, one of the challenges of building a modern media brand, I think, like, you have the substack business, you could roll out if you could potentially lean more into YouTube at some point and build out a subscription business there. And you're kind of like splitting. Splitting attention, which can be tough. It's hard to figure out. And substack. Substack's been great. Our stories do great. But it so far, I would say, is like not a visual first platform. And so putting stuff behind the paywall, it's been tricky, but that's. There has to be some way to figure this out where you are. You can't just give everything away. And that's. It's kind of fun now because we have all these different levers to play with and try to. Try to see where this goes. Yeah. How did you react to the different super bowl ads? Well, thank you guys for putting The Core Memory logo. I think we snuck it twice through some sort of missing. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm like, I was just happy that. You actually snuck the ad on Fox Business yesterday. I saw that. So that ran there and then it snuck onto the billboard in Times Square as well. It's been there. Like, I think we're going to the Olympics next. Everywhere. You're coming with us. Everyone could see it. And I'm not just saying this because I'm in the ultra double. You guys are just marketing geniuses. I mean, it was so smart when I woke up on X that morning, it was just every single person was pushing it along. And then I did the same thing. And no, I mean, I liked. I don't know. I kind of like the world ad. I think people are so torn on world and how they feel about it, but. But I actually like that one. Yeah. And then I. The Claude OpenAI. Yeah. I don't know. Wait, worldcoin ran it at. No, no, the world. Yeah, world. I mean, it's world now, but yeah. Tools for humanity. I didn't even see that they ran. It was one about. It was like, you know, are you human? Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's somewhat of an optimistic message in a time when people are sort of AI skeptical. So you have a little bit of wind at your back when you go into the super bowl where people are probably like, this AI stuff. I don't know. I have a question. Can you go to China for like a few months? I'm trying to figure this out. So we want to do like, I want your. I want the. I want to. I want. I want to feel like I toured China through your eyes. I should have got me like 99% of the way there. Only you can take me across the finish line. So I appreciate you saying that. We are trying to do this. I mean, we felt the hello world in China. When I was at Bloomberg, we had some difficulties with China that made it. Made it harder to get a visa for a period of time. And so now I've been trying. I actually want to get in touch with iShowSpeed because I want to know, like, what the visa YouTuber first pure journalist visa situation is like. But yeah, no, I 100% want to go to the humanoid robot factories and want to go to byd. I want to do all that stuff. Very cool. Yeah. Be great. We're definitely going to go to India this year and shoot an episode which is already lining up. Yeah. Talk to me about storytelling. When you're in information capture mode, you're doing reporting, you're getting a ton of different facts and scoops. But then at some point it needs to boil it down into usually a three act structure. Do you think in the hero's journey, do you think in the eight part story circle, do you think in Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, and then you're trying to map things to that or are you just hunting around and then when you get lucky, you're like, okay, the third act has happened. I'm feeling it, I'm ready to publish. There's always sort of an arc. I don't know, it's not always the hero's journey. But yeah, you're not wrong. I mean, a lot of the people I'm chasing are these eccentric inventor types on the quest and trying to figure something out. I usually when you do the magazine features, if it's like 5,000 words in length, those usually my first thing I think about is the character spending time with them. And then you know, those break down usually into like actually four, five, six sections. And for each section I always think about it like a documentary or a TV show. You want something to open, you have to like keep momentum for the reader because you're asking them to stick with you for a while. And so those are the bits that I always think about. So, you know, you set up the state of play in the first act or you're, you're taking someone into some really weird world through an anecdote and then, and then, yeah, you're going on this, this journey where you're getting into more in more detail. I always, it's like my fatal flaw maybe. I short shrift the end. I spend so much time on the beginning. And then you should obsess about the ending as well. But I always kind of just get there and then figure it out on the floor. Well, it's really hard because like in many ways the third act of the Elon Musk story is like the SpaceX IPO. Like that's the final boss that would be. That ties it in a bow in some ways. Yeah. So if you're like, well, I'm not going to wait 15 years. So we're finding a different third act. I found this with the. I did a piece on Parker Conrad and rippling. Incredible. Act one starts Zenith or starts Zenefits. Right? Yeah. Gets fired, got revenge story, starts a second company and then it's like, okay, well they're building, building, building. And it's like what's the third act? They got to take the company public. Hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it'll be successful, but it doesn't tie itself in a bow with the dramatic third act. It's the hardest thing about the. For the long form stuff we do, whether it's a book magazine story or a documentary, is you're doing real time reporting on tech and it's always changing so fast. And then like on the Elon book, I had to pick. You just have to pick a moment where you're like, okay, this is. We're going to button this up. Same thing on the last book. And so, no, I mean, that part's really hard. But I battle with this all the time. After I finish the Elon book for a whole bunch of reasons. I was like, I'm only writing about a dead person next time. But then I only get excited about. Well, the Shockley book is ready to go. You know it off the top of your head. That one, that one is good. There's a couple people have swiped at that one. But yeah, no, I mean, I get excited when I walk in places like this, when I walk into factories and I kind of feed off that. So I have. It's like, it's like I have no choice but to chase what I'm interested in. But it's hard to figure out. The Elon book is a biography. What is when the Heavens went on. Sale, which is in your lobby. I signed it, I bought multiple copies. That's how we first met. I sent him a picture. So we made a movie based on it called Wild, Wild Space, which is on hbo. But it's a book. It's kind of like a book nonfiction book tracing the underbelly of new space being born. And so we go along with a couple rocket companies, some satellite companies, but it's less Elon, less Bezos. Is it on an ensemble cast? Is it a tour of an industry? There's like four. There's four distinct sections that would for sure tell you some of the history of space and then fully bring you up to speed on the rise of commercial space. But yeah, we go with Rocket Lab, which is after SpaceX, the second most successful rocket company. Planet Labs, which changed the face of satellites. Firefly is one of my favorite stories in the book. I hang out with this Ukrainian dude, we go to Ukraine, we're drinking scotch at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Down the road, all kinds of adventures. And then Astra, which is still going, God bless them, and was trying to make the smallest, cheapest rocket possible. And so I spent six years on that with Astra. I was there. I was with Astra when it was like four dudes in a room trying to get the engine to burn for the first time all the way up to where, when they flew to orbit for the first time. So I think, I mean, mostly that book is meant to like immerse you. Yeah. Did the moon, Mars to moon pivot from SpaceX? Did that surprise you? Or given. I'm wondering if. Given you guys. I'm still like processing this in some. Ways, I mean, but like it didn't come out during the biography. No, no, no. The conversation. No, no. I mean, Elon, even until recently, is full Mars, you know, and do you. Think it's because they're going public and you now, as a public company or a soon to be public company, you can't be messaging like, we're going to Mars, we're going to Mars. But then we're actually, I think Elon. Probably could still keep messaging that because he. Yeah, yeah, the roadster. But yeah, 10 public markets are less excited about what you're gonna do in, you know, a decade or two decades versus what you're gonna. What are you gonna do for me right now? Take me to the moon? I mean, oh man, we could talk about this for a long time. You know, the Mars thing was always part of Elon's genius, I think, because it sounded completely insane to most people. And yet if you were into space and you were young, there were a lot of people who actually wanted to go do that. And it was part of building this religion, this very aspirational thing that made you want to go to SpaceX. That filled you with like all this passion for what was going on. Even Gwynne Shotwell, I mean, she co runs the company with Elon. That was like her quest. That's what she wanted to do. And so it always had this like mystical overtones, you know, just the same way with Tesla, of creating this big climate change sort of revolutionizing technology. So in some ways I feel like he's come, you know, pardon the pun, back to Earth a little bit with, like, with, with this. Right? Because it's slightly less, I mean, it's still. You're building a colony on the frigging moon, but it's, it's, it's like, it's slightly less aspirational. It's much more practical for all the reasons you lay out. I mean, clearly the US government wants to try to beat China to The moon, although I don't think we will. But that's where the US government's attention and money is, is on the moon. And with all the space data center stuff, I mean all this interplay between building these layers of infrastructure. So I think he's chasing money and what makes sense in this near term. Yeah, it's more pragmatic, less sci fi. It made me a little sad, man. Like canceling the Model S, stopping production on that along with this Mars thing. I mean it is. As someone who is his biographer, it's a massive philosophical change and the Model S just represented. That was the moment that Tesla actually became real and electric cars became real and shocks. It sold so many more than anyone had expected. So these are really momentous things. I think Elon's really practical. I think he's all in on AI. He needs money to fund that. SpaceX is like this sexy thing that people get excited about and you can use it to raise money for other things. And so I think he's just being very, very practical. And I think he probably. It's the pressure and the immediacy of this AI race that might be making him make statements and decisions that normally he could put off. I think. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Time to plant the bomb. We're getting out of here. You can close the show out with us. I want to hit the gong. Two best selling books. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Go to tbpn.com for our newsletter. Go to corememory.com for your newsletter. For your substack YouTube channel, do it. Follow Ashley on X YouTube Podcasts everywhere. Go buy the books. Go buy the books. Buy them all. Buy 100 copies by yeah. We will be back tomorrow at 11am Goodbye.

Wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just rol. Market clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go, go. The retriever mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe Coded. Founder. You watch the TVP. Today is Tuesday, February 10, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We're not slopping it up today, Jordy. We're in full force with ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Thank you to Ramp. They took us to the Super Bowl. We hung out with a bunch of folks in sf. Very smart people. Dwarkesh, Dylan Patel, Trenton Sholto, Mark Chen. There were a ton of AI, really Frontier, the people who actually know what's going on with the labs and the progress came away extremely AGI pilled. Then I had to wait two days for the photo that we took to work its way through the NFL software system. Yeah, they had on site photographers. An on site photographer. The guy, I mean no disrespect to the guy. He took a nice photo, but he was very funny because when he was taking the photo, it felt like the camera had recoil or something. He would take the photo and be like. It was like first day with the camera. But he had a phone attached to the camera. And I was like, oh, it must be connected to the camera real time. It uploads immediately. Then you get your photos and you can post them while the game's live. And for some reason, it took like two days for us to get the photo. It was a watermarked way to buy it, and I guess it makes sense, but we got monetized. It was just a funny, funny situation. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. NA in the chat says the photo quality was not great as well. Well, first time. First time. There's a whole bunch of interesting news. We're gonna talk about Michael Grimes today. What? Apollo's doing some new humanoids out of China. There was one piece in the Journal that I wanted to read for you. Streamer Braden Peters suffers awkward encounter with Arizona State fraternity leader. Video of the interaction has drawn widespread attention. Braden Peters, the online streamer known as Clavicular, found himself at the center of viral attention this week after a brief in person encounter with a fraternity leader at Arizona State University left him visibly diminished. This is news just today. Video of the exchange, which has circulated widely across social media platforms, shows Mr. Peters appearing noticeably uncomfortable as the unnamed fraternity member dominated the interaction through sheer physical presence and social confidence. Viewers noted that Mr. Peters, despite his considerable height, appeared to shrink during the exchange, struggling to maintain composure as the other man controlled the tone and pace of the conversation with apparent ease. The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times now, with commenters largely agreeing that Mr. Peters was, in the parlance of his own audience, thoroughly outclassed. Neither Mr. Peters nor the fraternity leader could be reached for comment, but we'll be following that story, of course. Anyway, moving on. Michael Grimes, he's Elon Musk's banker and he might be the most important person in the SpaceX IPO that's probably going to happen this year. Kevin Kwok summed it up. He said, Michael Grimes moving back to Morgan Stanley is the strongest signal so far that SpaceX, that the SpaceX OpenAI anthropic IPO Jubilee, it's a real thing. We're going to dig into it. First, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So why is no one talking about. Why is no one talking about Michael Grimes? Well, a lot of people are actually very familiar with Michael Grimes. He took Facebook, Google, Tesla, uber, Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, and literally hundreds of other tech companies public. He was involved or lead banker on those. He's been in the industry for decades. He has a reputation because he, he becomes a customer or user. Oh, yes, that's a fun fact. Of the different products, as during the kind of bidding process. Yes. Y talked about playing farmville. How many hours did he play farmville? He didn't say how many hours he played. At some point, we'll have to ask. He just said played hours of farmville in the lead up to the Facebook ipo, saying, look, I don't just use Facebook, I use the. It's a platform. I understand the full business case. I understand that there's whole other companies like Zynga that are building products like FarmVille on top of Facebook. And to understand the IPO thesis, the investment thesis for Facebook at that time, you had to believe that other businesses would be built on top of Facebook. So you had to understand. Yeah. So you would expect him to like, you know, spend hours talking to Annie, you know, for the SpaceX IPO, for sure, for sure. Yeah, definitely. He also actually drove for Uber before taking uber public in 2018. And so he likes to dig in. He also has just a very, a very like perfectly aligned background for tech and tech banking. So he did the traditional investment banking thing. He was at Sahlin Brothers, then Bear Stearns, then Morgan Stanley. But before that he studied electrical engineering, computer science at Berkeley. And so he was never really boxed in as this pure finance guy. And there's this interesting full circle moment where many people could comp elon Musk to Howard Hughes, who started Hughes Aircraft and sort of created like the aviation boom. And Michael Grimes actually interned at Hughes Aircraft in the space and communications group back in 1985. And what is SpaceX? It's like a space and communications company. And so you have this like very full circle moment, which I thought was cool. But the real fork in the road for Michael Grimes was when he was at Morgan Stanley and he's working with Frank Quattrone, who now runs Catalyst Group, big investment bank focused purely on technology companies. And Frank Quattrone was like a heavy hitter in the Menlo park office for Morgan Stanley. And he had a bunch of associates. And Quattrone bails. He's like, I'm out of here, I'm leaving. He goes to a different bank, eventually starts his own bank, but Grimes stays. And so that allowed Grimes to really grow into his role. I think he became the co head of west coast investment banking, co head of global technology banking in 2005. And so he had like a basically a two decade run with all those IPOs that we mentioned. Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Salesforce, a ton of companies. His office is. You can't put down a coffee cup because it's all deal toys. It's all deal toys. It's one of the craziest offices I've ever seen. He's like truly a deals legend. So then he did a brief stint with the commerce department and people were wondering, is he gonna be able to stay out of going back to deal? Like there's so many good deals on the table right now. You got anthropic, you got OpenAI. Well, there's SpaceX, there's deals in the government, but it's just a different environment. You know, there's so much red tape. And famously at Morgan Stanley, Michael Grimes was set up in a way that he at least reportedly was not really required to deal with all like the firm wide strategy. What's going on with the rest of Morgan Stanley? They were like, go hunt. Like you're a killer. Just go do whatever you need to do. Go fish. Go fish. And so he had a lot of. He had a really like broad. They sort of cleared the agenda to just let him go do what he did best. And he obviously was extremely successful at that in the government, you know that there's going to be 25 different committees and stuff. So it's just going to be a different environment. I don't know. But he got pulled back to Morgan Stanley and he got a promotion. So now he's the chairman of investment banking, which is I guess higher than co chair of Global Technology Banking, which sounded like the top, but there are levels and he's even higher now. And it makes sense if SpaceX, they're on track to raise $40 billion in this IPO. Nothing's really confirmed yet, but that feels reasonable in the range. So what are the investment bankers going to have to do? They're going to have to talk to literally everyone with money because putting together that size of a deal is huge. Pricing, it is very difficult. And. And the investment banking fees could be like $400 million. And so right now people are thinking those will be split across the four lead banks, Morgan Stanley, bank of America, JP Morgan and Goldman. And Kalshi actually has a prediction market on who's going to be involved in the SpaceX IPO. I believe Citi is sitting around at like 50, 50, so they might be. Yeah, they're at 56 right now. 56%. But the major bulge bracket banks that everyone knows and loves, Goldman, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are all sort of locked in. In that 89% being the lowest of that group. Exactly. And so either way, you got to get ready for the roadshow of a century. It'll be interesting. What will Michael Grimes do to prove that he's ready to go to space? Will he go to space personally like Jared Isaacman did? That would be pretty cool. I want to see some stunts. I want to see stunts pre road Elon. I fell in love with Ani. We're starting a family. I think he's got to go to space. He's got to do the Jared Isaacman thing. Put me on top of the Dragon capsule, get me into space. I want to do a civilian spacewalk. Jared did it. He got up there, he got back safely. Put Michael Grimes in the rocket. Let's do it. Do it. And I mean, you're going to be so. It's so much easier to underwrite the deal if you're like, I've been, I've been to space. It works. I, it's nice. I've driven for Uber. I think everyone I played farmville. This is the best technology. Going to space is better than playing farmville or driving. What if he says, put me in the mass driver, Put me in the little. Yes. Too early for that. Let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to FIN AI. So the Wall Street Journal has more coverage on Michael Grimes. By the time Musk finally decided to take SpaceX public, and this was sort of a surprise to people, people thought, okay, Elon has run the AB test. He took Tesla public. He kept SpaceX private. He had a much better time with SpaceX doing secondary sales and fundraises very easily. He could do whatever he wanted. Really like much more control Tesla. He's getting sued by shareholders. All these different things like regulations, SEC stuff, it's a headache. But the stock's doing really well. And at a certain point, maybe you cap out what's possible in the private market. So all of a sudden Elon says, I'm going public. I'm merging everything together. I'm going now. I've made the decision. And so Grimes is working in the Commerce Department. And he had actually followed elon to Washington D.C. in many ways, Grimes found himself watching from afar as colleagues, former colleagues, pitched for roles on what could be the biggest IPO of all time. You're just like I want, get me back in, put me in. This week's Grimes put himself back in the middle of the action and in line to reap millions of dollars of fees. Morgan Stanley said Monday he was rejoining the bank as chairman of investment banking, a promotion from his previous role as head of global technology investment banking. According to an internal memo, SpaceX has long been considered a golden goose by IPO bankers. It skyrocketed to a 1.25. Let's give it up for all the golden geese out there. Golden geese, may they never be slayed. They must just continue laying eggs. Emerged it with the AI company xai, which we know Also interesting, there's all this news about the XAI co founders leaving. But you're post acquisition. Of course the co founders leave, right? That's pretty normal. Well, I think the reason that people care is because it was happening for quite a while now. Yes, that's true. And there's also this question of just like how much research do you need at this point we were debating this, this Morning Tyler. About. Okay, do they need to just be near the frontier or do they actually need to be doing research to advance the frontier? If they wind up, should you think about XAI more like a NEO lab that's trying to solve continual learning or some unsolved problem in AI research? Or should you think about them more like a hyperscaler, like an AWS or like a core weave or like a lambda, like a NEO cloud that's just like capacity and more of an engineering task. And if they're able to build colossus and then build 10 more Colossus and then build a bunch of space data centers and they just have a lot of capacity, like who knows, maybe they wind up working with Anthropom. I forget at what point last year we started talking about that possibility. Yeah, but as the consumer products and the enterprise products have kind of fallen behind or failed to, you know, fully. Catch up, I don't know. I'm seeing a breakout in Grok in the comedy category on Instagram reels. You can go check them out. There's some funny, funny interactions. It is really wild. Yeah, you really have to find the different modes in the product, but finding the different characters going to the unhinged setting, it is about five times more unhinged than I would expect. Totally, totally a product like this to be. So yeah, it talks trash about Elon. It goes all over the place, honestly. Some of it is genuinely funny though, which is like high praise. It's a new benchmark for AI. It is sort of like doing it's a cheat code because someone else is. Part of Humor can be truth seeking. Right Seeking or just saying what no one else can say or be unexpected. You don't expect the computer to talk. About it, but sometimes people can't say that there's certain topics you can't say the truth. And yeah, the unhinged mode is certainly truth seeking. It's certainly unhinged as well. Anyway, if you want a more healing hinged voice AI experience, head over to ElevenLabs. Fully hinged build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs will depew shared A little hack for everyone who's into Chipotle. We reposted a clip that is truly evergreen. Jordy quote. I used to get 90% of my calories from Chipotle at certain times in my life. It was something I would look forward to. But the last time I pulled over to get Chipotle it was like, this is going to be rough the quality has degraded. I'd rather. I'd rather fast than eat Chipotle. Taking shots at Chipotle? Yeah. A couple of the. The younger guys on the team were saying, like, what hat? Like, what's wrong with Chipotle? And I started shedding a tear. Like shedding tears explaining how you. Back in my day, it was the purest. When I was a boy, it was. It was so. It was more fresh than the farmer's market. Yeah, I love your. But Will has a good hack. He says, I bought a Chipotle hat on ebay once, and I would walk to the Chipotle in Ann Arbor and wear it when I went. And they would just give me the employee discount every time. I didn't even ask. It was a $2 hat. And I saved $7 on my $15 order every time. This is thinking outside the box. He says. I used to be so into budgeting in Chipotle that I'd measure everything in Chipotle meals. Rent was four Chipotle meals a day. A nice hat was two Chipotle meals. I also groked it. And in case this is fraud, it was more than six years ago. So pass the statute of limitations. Can't get me. On second thought, I need to atone for my sins and repay chipotle the $21 I stole from them by purchasing $21 of their stock. I am sorry, Chipotle. That's very, very funny. Moving on. We talked about this briefly. You. Another resignation has hit the timeline. The co founder of XAI is out. You want to read through it? Yeah. So he says, I resigned from XAI today. This company and the family we became will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the war rooms, and all those battles we have fought together. It's time for my next chapter. It's an era with full possibilities. A small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible. Thank you to the entire Xai family. And Elon, thank you for believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime. So I wonder if he took. Some of the executives at XAI were offered cash instead of staying around. You remember this? We talked about this, I think last week. And so it's possible he just said, cool, time to move on. Did you see Jack Clark's post about this? Did he take it down? He said something about Himanshu says, this isn't looking good. And it's the original XAI co founders. There was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8. There's three remaining. Elon plus Manuel and Toby. Yeah. Jack Clark, the anthropic had some post but it's disappeared. But he was basically like if you're. Oh, it is in the timeline, I don't know where it is but. And someone said now do OpenAI and this Himanshu says Sam was always ahead of his time. And you look at the original list. Yeah, there's Sam Altman and Greg are left and you had, you know, very long list of others. Yeah, Jack Clark here, he said people leaving regular companies. Time for a change. Excited for my next chapter. People leaving AI companies. I have gazed into the endless night and there are shapes out there. We must be kind to one another. I am moving on to study philosophy. Well, this was like in reference to. There was an anthropic researcher that just left and it was like this whole essay and then he ends it with this, this poem. Yeah, yeah. People get deep at these companies. Yeah. It was saud over at Klein said head of Anthropic Safeguards research just quit and said the world is in peril. And then he's moving to the UK to write poetry and quote, become invisible. Other safety researchers and senior staff left over the last two weeks as well. Probably nothing. Yeah, I think there's multiple factors going on. You can't discount the fact that many of these people maybe made something in the range of $100 million in the last two years. And if you're AGI pilled enough, you believe that that will be many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many lifetimes worth of wealth. And so why not go to the UK and write poetry? There's obviously more dystopian sci fi vision where when this period of our lives gets turned into Hollywood blockbuster movies, this will be a moment where the safety researchers start peeling off and going all over the world to write poetry. I just want one AI co founder researcher to leave and be like, look, I got an allocation of an F80, I got a bus down coming, I'm good. I'm Gucci. I don't need. I quit. I quit. Shalom says probably burnt, probably burnout from organizational dysfunction and moderate to severe safety as I'm one shotting. Hmm, interesting. I don't know Paula. Says guy who can't quit his AI lab because he's bad at writing essays. Just like deathly afraid of Pangram labs. Just one shot by Pangram and you can't, you can't post slop really quickly. Applovin profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Before we move on to the next story, let's pull up the LINEAR lineup and show you who we got today on the show. It's an absolute murderer's. It's a bar burner. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. First, Vincenzo Landino, nominee to break down NASCAR. Landino. Ethan Thornton from NASCAR has a new campaign. They. They did something that I'm mad that we didn't think of, which is they broke the world record for the loudest billboard. Oh, okay, that's cool. It appears to be an engine built into a billboard. Like an actual gas engine that just runs. Yeah, yeah, so we'll talk to him about that. I want to ask him about the new. The new Ferrari. Get his thoughts there. Oh, yeah, that'll be great. Ashley Vance in person. Danny Grayson Thornton is coming in person. Cristobal Valance. We got the CEO of AI dot com. Oh, yeah, that's going to be. Basically owns AI. He controls it. And I want to ask him about the whole super bowl debacle and how everything went down. And then you said already. Chris Valenzuela from Runway. And then, yeah, we'll close it out with core memory. Can't wait. Fun sometimes. Moving on. Apollo says it avoided the pain of PE peers by steering clear of software holdings. Software? I never heard of it. What's that? I don't touch it. You know, people are saying the SASS apocalypse or Sass Magedon, but assassination was right there. And I don't know why we're not just calling it the Sassination isn't that bad. I think assassination would be like SASS is assassinating something else. Okay, but you know, it's like your fun got assassinated. Assassin. Like I would think it got killed by Sass. Yeah, I guess you're right. SaaS Apocalypse is maybe better. Apollo says fees rise as company reports record quarter for deployment of capital doing well. Mark Rowan said the group's decision to avoid heavily investing in software companies during an era of strong. Of soaring valuations will bolster its growth as investors move their money to firms that avoided a sector now threatened by AI. Rowan said he believed private capital groups would seek a dispersion of returns depending on their exposure to software companies, following growing fears of AI disrupting many IT businesses that triggered a recent sell off. Apollo would benefit after largely avoiding such deals within its private equity portfolio and curtailing, leading to the industry to the industry over the past decade, helping to bolster its performance versus many rivals, he said during earnings call. I expect that we will be, along with a handful of other managers prettier than we have been historically. I like that. I saw a bunch of Apollo's leak returns. Yeah. Remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I sent them to you. Are they good? I think they're just very, very consistent. That's the whole point of like this function. But I don't know. Yeah. Sitting prettier kind of implies that they're going to be outperforming at least their own. If you're in a bunch of software that's selling off, then yeah, yeah. Their most recent Bio fundraise in 2023 has generated a 20% net return and has already returned about a third of investors capital. Love that significant outperformance versus the broader PE industry that has struggled to exit investments. And wait, what? What have they actually been investing in? Non software industrials. I'm trying to. It's failing to mention that. So they cut its exposure to software loans as it grew increasingly be about the sector's prospects in the wake of rapid inroads made by AI. The decision appears to have been validated by a recent sell off in software stocks and the loans of many large IT companies amid rising AI fears. Rowan's comments came as Apollo reported better than forecast fourth quarter earnings that included nearly $30 billion of net inflows during the final three months of the last year, pushing its AUM to almost a trillion dollars. Apollo, which manages private funds and owns insurer Athene, said it had a record quarter for deployment of capital, which helped lift the management fees it charges on its funds. So called fee related earnings rose 25% from a year earlier to $690 million, eclipsing Wall street expectations. That was boosted by a 27% jump in management fees and a 41% rise in the fees it earns by originating and syndicating deals through its capital markets arm. Net income fell 55% from a year earlier to 660 million. The earnings were impacted by 592 million income tax provision. The company also announced its board had approved a $4 billion share buyback plan. Annuity sales to everyday investors moderated from last year's highs, with Athene reporting $34 billion in inflow through retail annuity sales in the year, including 7.3 billion in the final three months of the year. The insurance unit Every time we Every time one of these companies has earnings, I Just it's hard to wait for at least one venture firm to get out into the public markets. How fun would it be to listen to Marc Andreessen on an earnings call? It'd be so good. I was so optimistic that it was gonna happen last year or maybe this year. But it just feels like that was total. Just like head fake from both General Catalyst and Andreessen. It never really went anywhere. They're like, I don't want to go public, but I don't want my rival to go public before me. Maybe, maybe. But I don't think it's happening. I don't think we'll see it. Although aren't there some. There's some venture funds that might be traded on the public market soon, so you might see some of that. But it'll still be tricky. It certainly won't be like a proper venture fund that we know on the markets really quickly. Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era Unlock seamless real time experiences and new. Value with Cisco, Monday.com had earnings and the stock went down 21% after they flagged AI agents as a competitive threat on their earnings call. Anyways, what did they say? What did they say? Trying to pull up what they said exactly. Issued weak guidance as it grapples with rising concerns that artificial intelligence is disrupting software business models. I imagine it's seat based right now Monday.com and they have to transition to some sort of consumption base, some sort of usage base, something outcomes based, I suppose. Yeah, you'd think at least some would say like we actually love the seat based model. In the era of agents, every agent will require a seat. You might have, you know, again, you might have 100 employees, but then a bunch more agents. Maybe you can't charge nearly as much on a per seat basis, but we'll see how this nets out. Yeah, it seems pretty easy just to be like you have one agent that goes into the software and does everything that it needs to and then brings it out to your organization. It's like I need to use the tool. There's one agent whose sole job is to pull it. Yeah, everyone gets a prompt box and then that agent has one seat and uses the tool and brings you back the results. That's risk. Buco Capital is out for blood. He's you worried about stock based comp me? These businesses only need half their employees. Oh, so he's bullish. I believe he thinks that the SaaS apocalypse is overstated. Headcounts for assorted company Salesforce is at 87,000 ServiceNow 32,000, Workdays at 23,000, Zooms at 12,000, DocuSign Famously Large at 8,000, OpenAI's at 7, Octa's at 7,000, UiPaths at 5, Sprinklers at at 4 and Anthropic's at 4,000. Yes. UiPath still has more employees than Anthropic. Infer from that what you will. The flip side of this is that the companies do need employees to go deploy AI and actually lead about change management and get the. They certainly need to talk to the NFL's photographer about the software that they should be using to upload those photos a little bit faster. Tyler over at Pelion says, correct. Tabucco I have a strange amount of conviction that they could cut up to 40% and not impact growth. Bucho says, in fact, it would accelerate. Yeah. Peter T. Peter. It's a fake. Peter Thiel account. Peter T E A L. Okay. Says really only 10 to 20% of X is a good case study. How much, how many is that actually did X really only cut? I think they cut like 70% of the workforce. I thought they were up at like 5,000. They went down to like 1,000. But while you look that up, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I am pulling this up. I think it was like 80%. Yeah. 80% reduction. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. Did it accelerate? I'm seeing 80 pre acquisition. Late 2021, they had 7500 to 8000 employees. As of late, they have 20. At late 2024, they had 2800 employees. It was so. It was such a chaotic time. Like they were changing the business model. A lot of advertisers were boycotting and pulling out. There was political considerations. There were all sorts of things that were going on. So I would hesitate to say that they accelerated the top line, but they certainly right sized that business very, very quickly. Yeah. Derek Thompson is giving a shout out to Matt Levine. KPMG is trying to force its auditor to accept less money, since accounting work can be significantly automated by AI. But KPMG makes money from accounting, so this looks like a company accidentally announcing to the world that its business model is under attack. Matt says auditing can basically be done by AI, so why should we pay for it? It's not a crazy thing for most companies to think or to say to their auditors, but it's a crazy thing for an auditing firm to say to its auditor that is, that is wild. KPMG should be paying Grandpa Thornton more. In these crazy AI times, everyone needs to pay more for trusted human auditing. We'll go first. I guess that's what Grant Thornton said. I bet we should negotiate a discount. Wait, they're saying they're going to want trusted human. Well that's Grant Thornton. Like a different, a different group. Yeah. It seems like they'll have to switch to value based pricing too like everyone else. And the value, even if it can be one shotted with a prompt by some superintelligence, is nonzero zero. Like it is very valuable to have an external party verifying. Yeah, verifying your work and the numbers that you're reporting. So it's definitely non zero. But yeah, price wars all over the place. Price wars because for, yeah, or, or. I would say the, the other dynamic is you have like basically legacy. You know the big brands in the space, they adopt maybe a more Coke and Pepsi model where like Coke and Pepsi both could, you've talked about this, get in an insane price war, cut down, compete on price so aggressively that there's just no money to be made anymore. But they have sort of like somewhat of an equilibrium where it's not really in any group's interest to compete prices to zero. And I would say like brand is still going to matter in this category with auditors specifically. And maybe that's where you find bull cases within the broader sell off is do they like Coke and Pepsi? It's a duopoly, not an oligopoly. So there's no third player that can be oh, we're 5% of the market, there's so much to gain. Let's go be the bull in the China shop. Just doesn't happen. And then also there's lock in around the brand and then there's also lock in around the distribution because Coke and Pepsi have trucks that go to every, every store where it needs to be distributed. Auditing might not be the same structure. I think it's more oligopolistic. I think there's more firms in the market and there's less of like you have to use this auditor because they're in this particular distribution channel. Anyone can pick up a phone, call the new upstart auditor that has the same level of quality at a lower price and if you're getting a good product you'll just go there as opposed to if you're at a gas station and they only have Coke or Pest, you're sort of out of luck really Quickly, Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider user agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Let's pull up this clip of Gerstner on cnbc. He hosted CNBC last week. Yes. I tuned in to as much of it as I could from Altimeter Capital. Great host. Let's see it. Why is this happening to the degree it is? As we've discussed on numerous occasions, Is it overdone at times you've said? Yes. The last time we were together, you said something like 90% of the companies, the software companies that were down the way they are, deserve to be those, I think, were your, your exact words. Words. Where are we? So when you and I were together on January 6, I said, you have to understand the difference between earnings and revenue, new and stock price. Okay. And what's happened in software is hard for people to get their head around because the stocks have been cut in half. But that's not what it's got. The market is looking into the future and saying in the past three years ago, I could, I could buy 35 years worth of Salesforce's free free cash flow into the Future, give them 35 times free cash flow. Because I had that level of predictability. It was like a government bond. It was a sure thing. You definitely were going to get those. And then we have. I do what I's done over the course of the last several months and people just said something very rational. I can't see as far into the future. So I'm going to pay less for the terminal value. I'm going to pay less for those future free cash flows. I'm not penalizing them because they're missing their numbers today. I'm just putting it in the too hard bucket because I can't predict those future numbers. So the only way that reverses, Scott, is those companies have to accelerate, accelerate their core revenues and show that they are beneficiaries of AI. The companies that do that, Databricks, is accelerating their core revenues. I think this quarter they grew over 60%. Snowflake, Clickhouse, these are companies that are accelerating their core revenues because AI relies on them. I think they'll do fine. But application software, where I can't see into the future, they're going to have lower multiple. I'll tell you, this week was especially acute in some of the moves on the news of this updated tool from Anthropic, which you're an investor in of Course, that speaks to me of the marketplace and the investment community doesn't necessarily know even yet how to assess the level to which software is going to be disrupted and by whom and by how. And even a simple, what appears be to, to be a simple update or an upgrade from an anthropic causes software names to go down. It causes private credit names to go down because they're exposed in their loans to software businesses. We're still trying to get our arms, it feels like around this exploding technology and the impact it's going to have. Right. And it's exponential the rate of change, the rate of improvement of these models. We had a popping any bubble he. Can get his hands on in December. Now a lot of good points. I mean I think the real SaaS apocalypse might not start until you have some of the labs public and people can actually really rotate out of software fully and say I don't want to own this thing, that I don't fully understand how AI is going to impact it. When I could own the disruptor. Right. The anthropics, the OpenAI's, et cetera. So yeah, people were asking like where, where will the 50 billion come from? Where will the hundred billion of capital come from? And we see this in China too, where one company will go public and you actually see a drop in the previous Baidu's or whoever the legacy company is because there just isn't that much liquidity in the market. So it needs to come from somewhere. Sorry. Yeah, I just don't know how the narrative around SAS flips positive because the models are not getting worse. Right. They only get better. Yeah. We actually need to see some type of plot like SaaS would benefit from a model plateau. Right. It's like, hey, there's sort of a set, we have a set of capabilities. SaaS companies can deploy this. But if the models just keep getting better and better and better and agents get better and better and better, where's the bottom for SaaS other than some type of minimal free cash flow multiple? Well, it's like refocusing on a narrative that has durability even in a world where software R and D is essentially free. I guess what I'm saying is Brad's right. If you see a business actually really accelerating growth, accelerating, then it's possible to get excited about that one company. But it's hard to get excited at any point about SaaS broadly because the models are just going to keep improving and that just seems to be more and more of a threat. Yes, but within SaaS there will be companies that reveal to the market and correctly message that they are in fact like AGI resistant because of ad networks, because of lock in effects, because of regulatory moats. There will be a number of categories that emerge. Like when we talk about the payment rails, those feel like yes, you could maybe vibe code it, but are you going to vibe code your bank charter and all these other things that you need to do and get all the customers like the distribution, the lock in. So I think within SaaS there will be things that are pretty easy to just rip out and replace with something directly like a model. And there will be other companies that are old and are legacy, but you're just like oh yeah, that's actually. That can't be assaulted by a model. It's impenetrable because it's actually a different thing. And so those companies will wind up sort of rebounding, I would imagine. Yeah. Anyway. New York Stock Exchange want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York stock exchange. When? 1792. 1792. That's when they started. That's when they started. Overnight success. We created the country and then almost immediately we decided time to exchange some stocks. Got a start. Michael over at Quiet Capital is quoting buco says for 50. Buco says for 50 years we treated the supremacy of asset light businesses as a permanent economic law. But if AI commoditizes asset light businesses, we'd just be reverting to the historical mean where value accrued to atoms, infrastructure, energy. It would be a 50 year blip, an anomaly. Interesting. Michael says this is one of the most underrated observations in tech right now. If AI commoditizes software, what's actually safe, regulated, liability bearing businesses? Someone has to be on the hook. Oh sure. Anything touching the physical world, hardware, manufacturing, energy. That's the kind of Tesla narrative. Yeah. These are the subcategories of things that are sort of SaaS businesses now but will reveal themselves as being not actually that. Asset light. Yeah, proprietary data sets. AI makes your data more valuable, not less. Marketplaces and businesses with network effects, liquidity greater than software. Operationally intense businesses, the bad businesses become the best ones. And cybersecurity and physical security. More AI equals more attack surface. Yeah. Equipment share. I wonder how they're doing. They went out IPO'd at this, I guess it was a week or so ago, January 23rd. They've done well specifically because they have so much supply on the platform that they actually own. And we're just so far away from anything like an optimist being able to like hey, make me a bunch of heavy machinery, don't make mistakes. Carried no interest in the reply saying how is this underrated? Most have been talking about this for over a year. I'll say it again, an H Vac business is not vibe coding a Service Titan competitor. That's true. But you know, there's still the risk of the software vendor for H VAC businesses now has 25 competitors that can vibe code competitors and there's just a lot more fragmentation, a lot more or competition in the space. Yeah, that's interesting. Service Titan serves pretty wide range but they also serve a bunch of SMBs. And those SMBs, if you went to them and say hey, I can build you service Titan but I'm going to cut your bill in half because I can use AI. Exactly. That is a real risk to the bottom because a single owner operated business might just say like yeah, no one's getting fired if I choose the wrong software. It might be a little bit annoying, but if I choose can save a lot of money, maybe it's worth it. So I think there is some risk. Yeah, there was a good comment in the chat earlier. Someone was saying it's the famous Bezos quote, your margin is my opportunity. And so small company comes in, sees high SaaS margins, can actually go attack them now and can instead of needing to raise a billion dollars and do five years of R&D, they can raise 10 million and do one year of R and D and have a competitor that's ready to go, you know, head to head on a battle card against an entrenched like public company SaaS Company. And maybe they're only earning 30% margins instead of 60% margins, but they're happy with that because hey, it's a new business and they started it from nothing. And if they make $10 million, they get to take a lot of that home and stuff. And so there's a lot of opportunity for these new companies. But then that's obviously a threat for the incumbents really quickly. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more with great customer service. You want to go next. SHIELD says the greatest rebrand in enterprise software history is calling consulting revenue forward deployed engineering. I do wonder if a year or so from now we'll see companies that, you know these companies that went from 1 to 10 or 1 to 20 million in revenue really quickly it just turns out like hey, like you were just kind of like doing a bunch of they were doing about $10 million worth of engineering work. And it wasn't actually again, a lot of them are setting it up. We're like, hey, we're going to come and build a bunch of software for you and then we're going to charge on an ongoing basis or based on usage. But still, I'm sure there's some examples where it really is just like effectively consulting or you're running a software development agency. Yeah. It's funny thinking about OpenAI. I think they're at 8,000 employees and wasn't the report that they're hiring something like 800 for deployed engineers? So you're going to have 10% of an AI lab that's focused on AI research. Curing cancer is going to be like four deployed engineers. And you have to imagine that was basically zero five years ago. I mean, I guess Greg Brockerman was out there paying people to use GPT2, which I love. But. But it is going to be a very interesting shift for that business and I think the forward deployed engineering is going to be important. The AI diffusion question, it's a lot of sticky systems. It's a lot of people that don't have time. The fact that we see these spikes in attention during long weekends and holidays, that's when people have time to go do the new project and stop doing the the same system again and again and again. And a forward deployed engineer comes into your organization and just is able to do that hard work that you don't have the slack capacity for. Brian says, did you guys see that guy who offered in person open claw setups for people and accidentally realized it was a seven figure business? No, I did see this. It was like, it was kind of like a Geek squad thing. That's really cool. Yeah. I wonder. There are plenty of people who are like, I don't want to open the terminal ever. Like I feel like I'm hacking into the matrix. It's just not for me. I don't know I'm going to mess up. I don't know any of these commands. And so I mean that's why the labs are launching desktop products around that are wrappers for the terminal agents. But yeah, there's going to be a lot of bull market for, for deployed engineers in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler? I was going to say that's like Ben, Ben's scared to use the terminal. Oh, called out, Called out. He's not even here. Where's Ben? He's practicing T Mox or CrowdStrike. Your business is A.I. their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures A.I. and stops breaches. China is going all in to beat the US on humanoid robots. Beijing is showering companies with support. But some fear of bubble. Where's our bubble gun? Oh, yeah, we don't have the bubble gun. But look at, look at this. Look at this terrifying bleed. Do you see this? So it has. If you scroll way down in the article, you can see the comparison of the different humanoid robots. And they're getting taller. Chinese humanoid robots are getting taller very, very quickly. So the Unitree G1. The Unitree G1 is the robot that most people think of when they think of Chinese humanoid robot. The Chinese. The Unitree G1 has 23 joints and it's 4ft 4 inches tall. 4, 4ft 4 inches tall. That's something you can drop kick across the room. It's probably pretty safe. But they're getting taller. The you. The Unix AI Panther has 34 joints and is 5 foot 3. The Ubtech Walker S2, it has 52 joints and it's 5 9. We're getting short king status. Now then. Now the AI Squared Robotics AlphaBot 2, 5 11. Wait, that could be some regulation that I could get behind. Yes. All humanoids should be capped at a certain height so that if any people out there are a little bit on the shorter side, they get to feel tall. But in general, the average person should mogulate. Yes. Yes. On Dwarkesh, Elon said The Optimus is 5' 11 as well. 5' 11, that's a very reasonable height. So the AI squared robotics AlphaBot 2. 34 joints of freedom. Yeah. Let's give it up for the degrees of freedom. Let's give it up for Trey. Yes. Give it up. It's five' eleven. It has wheels. But it's starting to look intimidating. It's starting to look. Ashley Vance was at the latest robotics. Fight. Fight. We gotta ask him about that later. Yeah. So the Wall Street Journal has a whole deep dive on what's happening in China with regard to humanoid robotics. China's going all in to beat the United States on humanoid robots. Of course, they have a ton of industrial advantages. So Elon Musk has been telling investors for months that Tesla's optimist humanoid robot will revolutionize the world and create a new mega industry. But most of it could belong to China. He has warned China is an ass kicker. Next level. Musk said in January, to the best of our knowledge, we don't see any significant competitors outside of China. China is moving quickly. Shots Fired at figure and 1x. But I mean the supply chain is nothing. Oh yeah, true. Yeah. He talks about this in the context of are you going to be able to make a million? Yes, yes. He's thinking about like massive scale gigafactory status. So China's moving quickly to dominate the industry. Humanoid robotics companies are sprouting up from Shenzhen to Suz with more than 140 and counting. There's 140 different companies. So you got a market map over there? We have five and they have 140. They're tapping a vast ecosystem of parts suppliers and engineering talent. They're starting to produce humanoid robots at. Scale and actively running a bit right now. That's how you run. You ever go through TSA and they make you take your shoes off? What's the deal with airplane food? They're actively introducing them into real life scenarios in factories, hotels and offices. Yes, Grok. Unhinged voice mode in an optimus. Very intimidating. Hanging out around the office, just running benzos. It would actually be hilarious. It would actually be hilarious. Get ready. I mean you're gonna be able to do that in like two years. That's gonna be very viral. Is that like skin over a humanoid over. Not a fan of that. I think I like the Terminator more than the humanoid with the skin. That is odd. Setting the broader industry direction is Beijing, which has identified embodied AI, the fusion of artificial intelligence with physical systems, as cutting edge technology. As a cutting edge technology area China wants to own in the coming five years. It's in the latest five year plan. Local governments are showering companies with land and discounted office rent. Banks are offering favorable loans. Since late 2024, Beijing, Shenzhen and other cities have established investment funds totaling more than 26 billion. That's right. That's a thousand times as much as France is investing to inject capital into the industry. Just kidding. France, we love you. Government agencies and state owned companies are serving as early adopters, buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums, at events and on the street as Robocop's performing traffic control. The deployments are helping firms build a market and collect data to make the robots work better. Yeah, Bill Bishop was saying next week China has some seasonal celebration that they're doing and there's going to be hundreds of robots on display. Totally. They're very good at effectively like scripted dances, maneuvering. I have been surprised that, I mean China was very early with the drone shows then. We've seen a number of drone show companies come to America and do sort of bring that technology to America. I still. Have you ever seen a drone show in person in America? I've never, like, run into one like, you know, oh, they're. Oh, like I'm driving in LA and like the Chargers Stadium just has a drone show. Gotta go to Katzenburg. Yeah. Or like, if I live near. I live near the Rose Bowl. So, like, I would imagine I see fireworks from the Rose bowl every once in a while. They have concerts, but I've never seen a drone show there. That certainly is getting diffused into America. But the humanoid robot shows can do whole level of just like bizarre thing and it works particularly well there. As opposed to a truly unbounded. Like just be a, you know, be a worker at a restaurant. Right. It's like, you know, just dance in the scripted really quickly. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So the moves closely track the way in which China built up other industries, such as electric vehicles, which benefited from incentives from buyers to help stimulate demand. Now China has many of the world's most notable EV makers, including brands that are eating up the market shares of General Motors, Volkswagen and others. In the. The people doing the. I'm outside in the byd. Oh, yes. Is that a Drake line? Did he actually say. He says, I'm outside in the amg. Oh. And they changed it. So there's like, if this is a campaign by byd, because it's always showing off the features like you're crazy. It can, it can. The way that it can automatically park, like parallel park where you. Not just like a normal parallel park, but it can like shift. I don't know. It's like the Hummer ev. It has like the crab walk, right? The wheels turn off the axis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can sort of tank turn where you're spinning the car without moving forward or backwards. And then I think you can also tilt all four wheels so you can drive in at a really aggressive angle. But I feel like I saw one. Maybe it was AI that was like even more brain breaking than anything I'd seen from an American car at all. Yeah, it can do really crazy U turn. And there were also. I saw one video of someone driving a BYD on like sand dunes. That was really crazy. So people show it off in snow. People show it off all over the place. Good marketing. Good marketing. We'll see what they do with the humanoid robots. China is once again Mobilizing state support, supply chain depth and rapid commercialization to build a new strategic sector. Success will depend on who can best solve the myriad technical problems associated with humanoid robots. The industry is still in its early days and it may take years to take off if it ever does. Skeptics say humanoid robots are a bubble and may never find a true use case. What? It's like the most obvious use case. You don't have to reach that far to be like, put the E commerce package in the box. Like, they're already doing it. Yeah, like anything a human can do. I can't think of any good use. Who said this? Borsch says cars may be a bubble. Bad news. China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoid robots. Government agencies and state owned companies in China are buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums. That's an interesting place. It does feel like we'll be in an era of like, the Optimus is already deployed into a lot of Tesla showrooms, which is like just a cool thing to see if you're at a. But I was at the Americana brand in Glendale, went into the Tesla store and it was just like, there's Lucid Air store and there's a Rivian store, but the Tesla store has a robot. And so you're like, oh, I want to go see that robot. Tesla Diner has one. Oh yeah, they do. I drive by that every single day and I still have never been because I pulled in the parking lot one day and I felt so uncomfortable because it was all electric cars and I'm sitting there with a supercharged V8 just being like, I don't belong here. I don't feel welcome. And so I shamefully like, drove away. Yeah, I have so much respect for Tesla and yet I've never wanted a food product from Tesla. That is a big part of it. I mean, it's like a stunt marketing. So let's go into US worries. Even so, China's momentum is a source of concern for US policymakers and tech leaders. The White House has been working on an executive order aiming to boost the development of American robotics industry. Among the US's concerns, many American robotics companies will rely on China's supply chain. Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis has talked about this a lot. Like, if humanoids become a thing, like, China has the supply chain almost exclusively. Tesla's optimists will count on Chinese suppliers for components such as roller screws for robot joints and motors for robot hands for mass production. The US still leads one key area, the foundational AI models that serve as the brains of humanoids. Companies including Tesla, Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have made advances tapping cutting edge technology from the likes of Nvidia and Google. But China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoids, including sensors, batteries and other components. With the ability to source so much locally, Chinese humanoid companies are able to make design changes easily and at low cost. It is a hassle buying from China and waiting two weeks while something ships to you. They don't have to do that. They just walk right across the street, pick up whatever they need, bring it back. Yeah, we're in the process of shifting. We did some sampling for merch and. We'Re refactoring our supply chain. Exactly. Our merch supply chain. I would say it's looking like 80% of the merch that we make for our upcoming drop will be made right here in Los Angeles. Yeah, that's exciting. I mean, I do think there's probably some cool things you can do with delivery of humanoids. Right, because if you're buying it from China, you could just like, have it go on the plane and just like. Sit down, sit in the seat, walk over, have it swim. Yeah, it needs to learn to swim. Give it a windsurfing board, a paddle board, give it a foil, and it can paddle all the way here. I mean. Yeah, I mean, Palmer's talked about that with Anduril. Like, they want the planes to fly from the factory straight into the battlefield. Pretty crazy. Chinese makers of humanoid robots, which include human like, human like machines with wheels, as well as those with legs, don't have to have legs to be a humanoid robot, apparently announced orders worth more than 300 million in the second half of 2025. So the Chinese humanoid robotics industry is at a $600 million run rate. It's not bad. It's not. Not tiny. Like, that's pretty significant. That's not. That's more than just, like, demos. I mean, sure, there's like a lot of museums and random places where you just want to show something off, but that's getting. Isn't. It's hard to, like, you know, take every Elon projection at full face value, but he's talking about being able to make up to a million humanoids in the. What is it, the X and S facilities in Fremont. I have no. It's so unclear where these are going to price still. I think you can look at. But you can look at Chinese companies for, like, some type of comp. Like it's going to be hard to really compete. But Morgan Stanley has, let's see, 100,000. So that's very interesting. So the run rate right now is $600 million. Morgan Stanley is predicting up to 100,000 humanoids shipped in 2026. If you, if there's not significant increases in price for these, that would be $6,000 per humanoid. It must be higher. So I would expect, based on this Morgan stanley prediction of 100,000 humanoids shipped in 2026, you would expect revenue for the industry to be in the billions for sure. Because I have to imagine that the average selling price of a humanoid is like, more like 20,000. It's more like a car. You can get a unitree G1. How much on their site for $13,500. But they're gonna charge you for delivery, John. They're gonna charge you $1.44. Wait, really? $1.44? They're like, sorry, our margins are so bad on this. They're actually negative. We can't afford free shipping for this shipping, this human sized thing across the ocean. We're gonna have to ship it in the spookiest coffin possible. Awake from the dead. Very macabre. Very, very spooky. Anyway, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers, the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI adjusting bed sheets on a recent weekday at Unit.

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