NEWSMAX

Distance. How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare any, any software engineer says, oh, I don't write any code, I just review code. Now what, what's the equivalent experience in sales? Where do you think it goes? Yeah, it's, it's a thoughtful question, you know, look, my answer may change 6 to 12 months ago from now. So let me give you the like today answer. It doesn't seem that this sort of customer facing, relationship building aspect of sales is going anywhere. In fact that that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople in some of our customers cases, founders are doing trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with you know, some sort of like agent that is pretending to be a salesperson or whatever it might be. People want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. It's the sort of non customer facing activities that we believe agents are far better at. So I'll give some example, building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you without being customer facing, who are the best companies for you to target and why. Here's your prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list. We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We are going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you as the beneficiary, whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing the way that I'm speaking with you guys right now. And we're going to optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow up. So you get off the call, we have the call transcript. We've written an email for you to follow up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send, it's time for the next call. And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around it's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers and actually emphasizing the relationship building that happens that is sort of customer facing. What's the best way to get.

You see a part powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages. So obviously fantastic business. But get us up to speed on Inertia Enterprises. Absolutely. Well, so Inertia is the commercial fusion energy company. And I know that sounds like, you know. Saying we were selling unicorns or something, but. That'S because fusion energy has been the thing of Myth for nearly 100 years since it was first hypothesized. Because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean, it is safe, it is low cost, it is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022 when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with fusion. And this was a huge breakthrough. And so Inertia is commercializing that experiment, taking it out of the lab and bringing it to the grid. And the way we do that is a few things. Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorn sized bit of fusion fuel with the world's largest laser. You get it just right, you compress it and you create this reaction that releases a bunch of energy. And so for us, commercialization means number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important, right? You want to have science, basic science that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one. Step two, we're going to go build the world's most powerful laser. It is a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use. Overmore national lab. That's crazy. It is big number. 20 times more efficient. It is one tenth the size. So it's a really modern but the coolest laser the humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're going to go do is build the world's first fusion fuel factory where we are making these fuel targets in an automated scaled way. And then last, we bring all that together and we build a grid scale gigawatt scale power plant that is enough energy to be able to power a medium to large sized city, a million homes you can power with this facility. So that's our plan.

Picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. It's a cool sounding word. Like Monaco is just like a nice word itself. The place is associated with, I don't know, wealth and success. Yachts. Formula One. Yachts. A big one is Formula One. A lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up into the right. Oh yeah. And let's see. So the domain dispute, we ended up calling it Monaco really liked the domain. Was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker and get. A domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDaddy. We had Monaco Co and that was a couple thousand dollars. I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees we spent like I don't know, another 8 or $900,000. Dad DM. So we got monaco.co evolved to monaco.com we did use a broker. Shout out to Loomis if they're watching. I love Loomis. Yeah, I've used, I've worked with them on a bunch of domains. Shout out Loomis. Cool. How? What, What? The dispute? Yeah, yeah, the dispute. What actually happened? So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while and we get this like hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain that the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We had never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there's like a regulatory body for domains. Anyway, they made like all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated like trademark claims. We I died to get legal representation. This was like a couple months long process that required all sorts of evidence and more and we ended up winning the case. So all's well that ends well. We are Monaco. It's official. Just coming. Went to war with a country before he even launched. Not many wartime CEO. There we go. What are you learning? We've been covering the SAS podcast.

Dollar companies and watch them go from single digit billion to you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and having to just sit on the sidelines and hold. SAS has been rough, rough for a lot of people over the last year. And I think it's really a continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades. Right. It's gotten harder and harder to go public and at the same time more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company. Yeah. And yeah. Our efforts in the US to stem the tide are Robinhood Ventures which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our N2, which you can think of as kind of S1 for funds. So we're in the strict quiet period for that. So I can't talk about, about the funds specifically, but in the US we're very focused on, on solving this problem and we think we have a path and internationally we're going to push forward on tokenization. Last year we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real, making those products real and tradable for customers and also getting the companies to engage in it willingly. I think we experimented a little bit, but we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as it is to the retail shareholder. If you could rewind, how would you have let retail traders invest in Robinhood? Would you have done it at seed round? If you could have Series A, Series B, would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it? Walk me through. If you could replay. We absolutely would have done it at seed. Not only people know this about Robinhood, but Robinhood was actually, we had kind of a hard time raising our seed round and, and so we talked to probably over 100 investors at one point. Robinhood was live on AngelList, if you remember that platform. And you could invest in Robinhood at seed at a 10 million valuation cap. So effectively think of it as a 10 million valuation and we would take all comers. I mean we would pitch middle aged ex retirees from Nebraska the same way that we would pitch like Andreessen Horowitz or a Sequoia and you know, they would ask us questions and if they wanted to invest we, we typically would just let them invest. So we have, we have tons of shareholders that were just essentially retail. I mean, high net worth. Yeah, maybe, but. But they were just normal people. And, you know, some of them even have messaged us. They held through IPO and over the years and have done quite well. So I. Absolutely understatement. I want to. I want to go back. Yeah, I want to go back to prediction markets.

Audio, Salesforce. Totally different user experience. Yeah, talk about the domain you got monaco.com. talk about the lawsuit. Talk about how you picked Monaco to begin with. I want the full story. Okay. So naming was hard. It took us a couple months and tried a bunch of different names and you can't just pick a name that you like. We couldn't have just called ourselves like sales.com because one, we wanted the.com to be available and two, you can't name it if something already has that name. So I was trying to associate the brand with like Luxury Premium. Was thinking through like what are some names that are typically associated with that. And I came up with Monaco. My older brother who is a co founder, when I told him I really like the name Monaco, his response was that's the stupidest name ever. What are we going to just call it like New York? And so he wasn't a fan but I think like over, over time started socializing it with some other people, started picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. It's a cool sounding word. Like Monaco is just like a nice word itself. The place is associated with, I don't know, wealth and success. Yachts. Formula One. Yachts. A big one is Formula One. A lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up into the right and let's see. So the domain dispute, we ended up calling it Monaco really liked the domain. Was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker. And get a domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDaddy. We had Monaco Co and that was a couple thousand dollars. I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees we spent like I don't know, another eight or nine hundred thousand dollars to add the M. So we got Monaco co evolved to monaco.com. we did use a broker. Shout out to Loomis if they're watching. I love Loomis. Yeah, I've worked with them on a bunch of domains. Shout out Loomis. Cool. How about yeah, yeah. The dispute, what actually happened? So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while and we get this like hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain that the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We'd never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there was like a regulatory body for domains. Anyway, they made like all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated, like trademark claims. We tried to get legal representation. This was like a couple month long process that required all sorts of evidence and more and we ended up winning the case. So all's well that ends well. We are Monaco. It's official. Just coming. Went to war with a country before he even launched. Not many wartime CEO. There we go. What are you learning? We've been covering the Saspocalypse. You guys have the benefit.

Distance. How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare any, any software engineer says oh I don't write any code, I just review code. Now what, what's the equivalent experience in sales? Where do you think it goes? Yeah, it's, it's a thoughtful question, you know, look, my answer may change 6 to 12 months ago from now. So let me give you the like today answer. It doesn't seem that this sort of customer facing, relationship building aspect of sales is going anywhere. In fact that that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople in some of our customers cases, founders are doing trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with you know, some sort of like agent that is pretending to be a salesperson or whatever it might be. People want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. It's the sort of non customer facing activities that we believe agents are far better at. So I'll give some example, building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you without being customer facing, who are the best companies for you to target and why. Here's your prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list. We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We are going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you as the beneficiary, whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing the way that I'm speaking with you guys right now. And we're going to optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow up. So you get off the call, we have the call transcript. We've written an email for you to follow up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send, it's time for the next call. And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around it's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers and actually emphasizing the relationship building that happens that is sort of customer facing. What's the best way to get a job as a salesperson in 2026? Advice for young people, maybe mid career people, somebody who wants to.

But congrats on the progress that Robinhood Social feature. How much of it was Vibe coded? How much of a speedup are you getting internally? What is the software engineering Org look like these days in an era of coding agents? Yeah, I mean, we've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers, perhaps definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021. But one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity and keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI. And there's two things that we sort of like talked about at earnings. When we look at internal operations, the two areas that move the needle are software engineering and customer support. And I think we are at, or at the very least near best in class for both of those. So customer support side 75 percent of all tickets are handled by AI, including licensed cases that would have previously required a licensed brokerage professional. And we thought, I mean, frankly, we thought that would be further away. We were able to get there and deliver a great experience relatively quickly. And on the software engineering side, it's been tremendous. I mean, with every new generation of models you look at Opus 4.6 now, you've got codecs, you can essentially have it running autonomously overnight, checking its own output, debugging itself, and have it do the work that probably would have taken an individual software engineer weeks to do while you sleep. And one year ago that was impossible. So the acceleration from each new generation of models is tremendous. And I think there's going to be lots and lots of disruption. You can kind of see the market starting to digest that. But I think the firms that adopt AI and are actual technology companies, this is the opportunity to dramatically accelerate relative to incumbents and financial services. A lot of our competitors aren't really even on cloud infrastructure anymore. They're still on mainframes. So I think it's going to become increasingly tough. Yeah. Last question, then. We'll let you go if you have another second.

That you could do that. Fearless, fearless. CEO touches cactus. That's great. How's business? What's new in your world? Well, we've got a lot of things going going down. You know, I know, I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future and what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. So a couple interesting things. Number one in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle and eventually this asset class is going to go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. So we're in the thicks of that. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally, private markets and family finance. So through this year, if you look at the end of the year, Robinhood should be better for you the more family members use it. We want to get your partners on Robinhood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family. And we're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets. I think access to private markets is one of the biggest iniquities in financial services today. So we're just working really hard to solve that for people very, very quickly. Yeah, more specifically you guys have a fundamental set up. Like I imagine there's more going on like where, where, where's like private markets as a category going on the platform. Yeah, because like fundamentally, fundamentally the problem of like a lot of people have been excited about these billion dollar companies and watch them go from single digit billion to you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and having to just sit on the sidelines and hold SaaS has been a rough, rough for a lot of people over the last year. And I think it's really a continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades. Right. It's gotten harder and harder to go public and at the same time more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company. Yeah. And yeah, our efforts in the US to stem the tide are Robinhood Ventures, which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our N2, which you can think of as kind of S1 for funds. So we're in the strict quiet period for that. So I can't talk about about the fund specifically, but in the US we're very focused on solving this problem and we think we have a path and internationally we're going to push forward on tokenization. Last year we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year, it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like, a real. Making those products real and tradable for, for customers and also getting the companies to, like, engage in it willingly. Right. I think, I think we experimented a little bit, but we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as, as it is to the retail shareholder. If you could re.

Continue to grow for each of them. What's the status of copy trading? There's a lot of people that are excited about situational awareness. What Leopold's doing over there, how many clicks is it to copy his strategy and how closely is it possible to copy these days the big funds that have generated a lot of excitement? Yeah, well, we have a product coming out, Robinhood Social, which should commence rolling out in, in in just like weeks to low single digit months. So we're kind of putting the finishing touches on internal testing. We just integrated prediction markets which actually makes the the feed much more dynamic. Sure. And when we announced it, one of the features that was like particularly popular was whale tracking. So following Nancy Pelosi's trades span is one, you know, other things like that. So we're going to make it really Nancy Pelosi. It is such a funny world we live in. It's the Nancy Pelosi stock ticker. And yeah, endlessly entertaining category. Always, always new innovation. But congrats on the progress that Robinhood Social feature. How much of it was vibe coded? How much of a speed up are you getting internally? Like.

From Robinhood and then how the industry will have to evolve. Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of disruption by AI. I mean, we're starting to see it already and we have Robinhood Cortex, which really has done well, sort of like helping customers think through their trading, their sort of self directed activity. But we've already begun conversations with regulators about how to bring Cortex to advice. Making. Recommendations and doing ongoing portfolio management. So obviously we'll want to roll that out safely and in a trustworthy way. But it's coming and I actually think on the human advisor side, a lot of people prefer a human advisor. They prefer the relationship. They like to have someone that has the full picture and that they can talk to. So I don't think that's going away. And in fact AI is going to be a really integral part in streamlining the workflow of those people. So that rather than serving, you know, 50 clients per advisor, you go to serving 500 or possibly more. So I think you're going to see both models continue, but costs and efficiency and capabilities continue to grow for, for each of them. What's the status of copy trading? There's a lot of people that are excited about situations.

So we're in the strict quiet period for that. So I can't talk about, about the fund specifically, but in the US we're very focused on, on solving this problem and we think we have a path and internationally we're going to push forward on tokenization. Last year we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways, which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real. Making those products real and tradable for customers and also getting the companies to engage in it willingly. Right. I think we experimented a little bit, but we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as it is to the retail shareholder. If you could rewind, how would you have let retail traders invest in Robinhood? Would you have done it at seed round? If you could have Series A, Series B, would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it? Walk me through. If you could replay. We absolutely would have done it at seed. Not only people know this about Robinhood, but Robinhood was actually. We had kind of a hard time raising our seed round and so we talked to probably over 100 investors at one point. Robinhood was live on AngelList, if you remember that platform. And you could invest in Robinhood at seed at a 10 million valuation cap. So effectively, think of it as a 10 million valuation. And we would take all comers. I mean, we would pitch, you know, middle aged ex retirees from Nebraska the same way that we would pitch like Andreessen Horowitz or a Sequoia. And you know, they would ask us questions and if they wanted to invest, we, we typically would just let them invest. So we have, we have tons of shareholders that were just essentially retail. I mean, high net worth. Yeah, maybe, but, but they were just normal people and you know, some of them even have messaged us, they held through IPO and over the years and, and have done quite well. So I. Absolutely understatement. Yeah, absolutely. I want to, I want to go back. Yeah, I want to go back to.

Bring Vlad into the TVPN ultradom. Vlad, how are you doing? Whoa. Cactus. Cactus. How you doing? I like the. Is the cactus symbolic of something? Well, I love succulents, and I think we live in a dangerous world, gentlemen. You know, you turn around, you just gotta be careful. So it's a constant reminder that you just have to watch your back. With a physical cactus behind you. Yes, you need to physically watch your back. Don't back up during this interview. I have to really be careful here. I love cactuses, too. This is probably gonna inspire us to cacti. Cacti. Cacti. Right. Sorry to be pedantic. No, no, you're right. We'll get some cacti around this. I'm more of a Christmas tree guy. I like big Christmas. No, but I've been having. Some. Plants in the us. Yes. Anyway, sorry, we're not here to talk about, you. Know, what's the thing about this cactus is. Yes, you think that it's very dangerous, but you can train yourself to actually, like. No way. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Alpha, right here. Yeah. It's all about the animal. Amazing. All about the animal. I. Had no idea that you. Could do that. Fearless CEO touches cact. That's great. How's business? What's new in your world?

I had no idea that you could do that. Fearless CEO touches cactus. That's great. How's business? What's new in your world? Well, we've got a lot of things going down. I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future. And what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. So couple interesting things. Number one, in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle and eventually this asset class is going to go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. So. We'Re in the thicks of that. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally, private markets and family finance. So through this year, if you look at the end of the year, Robinhood should be better for you. The more family members use it. We want to get your partners on Robinhood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family. We're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets. I think access to private markets is one of the biggest iniquities in financial services today. So we're just working really hard to solve that for people very, very quickly. Yeah, more specifically, you guys have a fund set up. Like, I imagine there's more going on. Like where's like private markets as a category going on the platform? Yes. Because like fundamentally the problem of like a lot of people have been excited about these billion dollar companies and watched them go from single.

And you're going to be able to just do so much more across the organization and be that, like, you know, thousand X intern, basically. Jordi, where do you want to go? A lot of comments from people asking if AI wrote the essay. Oh, yeah. What's your writing process actually like these days? It didn't stick out to me as. AI, but we definitely didn't. You probably, if you did use AI, you pulled out a lot of the EM dashes. Yeah, sorry. It did help a lot. And I think that's kind of point. A lot of people are like, dunking on me for saying that. And I posted that I used it. Yeah, it's not really a gotcha if. If. If it did insane numbers. Like, whatever, whatever. Like, if you're upfront about it. Yeah, it's like proving the point. It's like people are saying this thing sucks at X, Y and Z, but, like, look, it's 50 million views. Like, yeah, there's a reason that I'm talking about this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think there's, like, little details I get wrong here because this has been a crazy couple of days. But the way that I approached it was again, I wanted to write sort of like a Dario style essay, but for the average person. So what I started doing is I have, like, lists of, like, all the things that have, like, sort of made me think over the years that I agree with, and I have sort of points on what I agree with in each of those articles, what I disagree with, what I think has wrong, what hasn't. And I've kind of dumped this all in. And I use Claude for this, even though I think Codex is way better for engineering. Claude is better for this sort of stuff. Yeah, I dumped all those articles in and I said, okay, here's what I agree with, here's what I don't. And. And then I basically spoke to it for like an hour with my own thoughts and my own feelings and how I wanted to present it and what I think actually makes sense because a lot of these things past kind of are somewhat accurate, somewhat not. And I iterated with the AI for many, many hours, going back and forth until I finally felt like, okay, it's time to write. And I kind of had to put out a whole sheet on how to do this. And then I actually went and I took that and wrote the first draft myself. And then there were obviously parts I struggled with. I had AI come and help. I had it kind of like work on the wording with me. And then once I had a first draft, I brought it back and I had it critiqued. And there's obviously more details. Yeah. But, I mean, I think when people lob this is AI, they think that your prompt was like, write essay.

Engineer now. And so. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all of the departures from xai? Yeah, I mean it probably just seems like more evidence that X is going to be some sort of like GPU reseller or NEO cloud market. Like maybe it's like, okay. Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put like so much like you know, terawatts of compute and space. It's like, okay, if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just like so scaling pilled that you don't actually need to do that much research. You can just build up massive data center and then you just use the same paradigm of models. You just train the biggest model. It's 10x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best models. You don't actually need the insane moonshot research projects. Maybe there's something like that going on. Yeah, a lot of the researchers, they said they're leaving. That's all folks, they said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recurrence of self improvement learning. There's a whole research cycle. It's like a very moonshot research project. That feels like something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting. Yeah. But if xai's whole path is now just we're going to scale up the data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things. Okay. Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane. Yeah. What was the original Elon Musk prediction about xai's progress around like solving something fundamental in physics or one of those like major math challenges? Yeah, I think he said that at the Grok 4 launch. Yeah. Was that navier strokes? Yeah, it was something like that. It's going to develop some novel physics theory. The most impressive product that I've seen from XAI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla comedy mode. It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people. To a lot of people. And I've been seeing posts this week that have like 200,000 likes. Meaning that it's incredibly mainstream. On Instagram and testing out the product, it's like very quick, very low latency. It feels pretty much as close to talking to somebody in a Google hangout.

Will this be and how fast will it be? Is it February of 2020 or is it. I don't know, some other time. 1995. There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already have them muted. But the formula is as such Trunk Fan laid it out. Find a viral post. AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10 plus quotes in quick in a row and hope a few hit between 10:30 and 8 and 10pm yesterday. Cranked out 13 of them. 10,000 words total. All AI slop every day. Unreal. And the and so Trung fact check, spot check them with Pangram and you'd see that it's fully AI generated. But apparently he blocked Pangram Labs. I was laughing because there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes and some of them will just sit there with like one, like two likes, no likes. And so it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, something like almost 200,000 followers on X. It's working. But there's no real audience because if you post something that's just that only gets one like it feels like there's no real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering like how this monetizes. Is this a real business? Where is this going? But certainly frustrating some people at the trough. Ackman makes $2 billion bet on Meta Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in meta, making up 10% of its.

With incredible discipline. Cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rails for AI shopping. And we did things like announce the universal commerce protocol that we co developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our Agentic storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot. And so I think if you, if you kind of think about 2025 as the year that we kind of laid the rails for Agentic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And, and so that I think is really incredible. Back to what we were talking about at nrf, we're talking about some of the brands and how the velocity of growth. We can talk about consumer as well, but just in terms of the merchants, entrepreneurs we see, I'm beginning to think that 2026 is really going to be kind of year one for this next generation of these billion dollar brands. I think there's going to be more billion dollar brands created in the last hundred years. And, and in terms of, you know, if you're looking for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean, we talked, you know, we talked during bfcm, of course we did that. You know, I sort of became one of a couple of hours. Exactly. But look, GMV for the quarter was 124 billion. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400 billion. And so if you, if you think about that as a proxy for, you know, how consumers are doing, consumers are buying, they're buying from brands they love. They're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars. But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them. Talk.

2025, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world help us understand it. All right, let's go. All right, let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think I came to you live from the middle of the national retail, or. Maybe it was. January. January. Federation. And I told you that you asked about how things were Shopify, and I said, wait for the earnings. So, so here are the earnings we announced earlier this morning. GMB was up 29% to $370 billion, which is. Incredible. Revenue is up 30% to 11.5 billion, which is a decade of growth of over 20%. The number that. Actually, I've been in Shopify for almost half my life. And this number is. I don't know, it hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14% of the entire US E commerce market. Which is. Which is. You guys. Did the. You did the 1% of the TAM meme and then you 14 XED it. Exactly. That's exactly right. And actually, one of the cool parts is that we also did it, I think, with incredible discipline. Cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things.

To be, you know, have, you know, insane uptime. Like, I don't see the. I don't see the Vibe coding risk at all. But how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts? Yeah, it's. Look, I did our call this morning, 8:30, and we basically have been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of all, let me just say this. People have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one. We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong, which is kind of fun. I think a couple things. I think AI on the agentic side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially even how they buy. That's what we're building for. We are building for these agentic storefront experiences and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on shop, you're just better positioned. But the truth is AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It will not rewrite the transaction contract. And one of the things that we've been building on Shop, you know, everyone talks about the online store like, you know, the E commerce component of Shopify. The killer feature of Shopify for a very long time has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory and you do taxes and you do analytics and reporting. You launch marketing campaigns and you create loyalty and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue to do really well, notwithstanding some of this Vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are system of records, the ones that are actually operating like operating systems. And, you know, that's Shopify. Yeah, yeah. Just jumping in. Like, I do think that they're. When throughout my history, you know, being a Shopify, you know, customer and user over the years, I would be. If I was operating like a tiny Shopify plugin that one engineer had built and they were charging $30 a month, I would be a little bit worried about Vibe coding because I do remember in, throughout history using a plugin where I was like, okay, this is a nice little feature that I can bolt on and I'm happy to pay for this because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom email cache, you know, yeah, whatever. Whatever that is. So I think I can just. Yeah, but again, that is a, that is a. That's a tailwind for Shopify as a platform because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of like LEGO locks on top of it. So, you know, one of the things we're noticing, actually one of the questions I got on the earnings call this morning was the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're seeing app developers, but also merchants themselves, who historically would hire, you know, a third party to build a tool, do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and these new tools to build on top of is because we actually think having more people build on, on top of Shopify, you know, benefits, benefits merchants. But back to that whole, like, if you are just a feature, I mean, you know, you guys, if I had to Word Cloud, you know, your show, the word wrapper probably comes up as much as anything. I think you actually have to create something of real value. And if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're going to struggle. But companies, and if you look at the apps on, I mean, you know, take some of the larger apps on Shopify, like the Klaviyos of the world, you know, who are, who built this incredible in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing that is very, very difficult to disrupt. So I think the idea of, like, we want to invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that rewrite interfaces will never rewrite real infrastructure. Yeah, Klaviyo is a great example because you could have.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Uav online. Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Five kill. Raw. Cup is up. Wings. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just. Wrong. Right. Market clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Trick1, Strike 2. Activate. Go, go. The retriever mode. Multi clearing order inbound. Live. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TV BN. Today is Wednesday, February 11, 2026. We are live from the TV. It's good to be back. The temple of temple technology. The fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening. His viral essay, 45 million views, completely broke containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back. Vlad from Robinhood's coming on. Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson. Sam Blond, who I worked with at Founders Fund, is launching a new company, Monaco Legend. And John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo day. And so we've only talked to him in person and he's come into the ultradome again. So we will see him in person at 2. Is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like Covid. I have trouble with that analogy in particular. Back In February of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote. The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts, everything is about exponentials. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that just made people much more aware that if Covid got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases. And that of course, held for most of COVID But it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before, there are very few true exponentials in the real world because of course, things cap out, they turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they. And they plateau. Now, will AI plateau? There's been a series of plateaus. There's been a series of S curves. That's the story of technology really. As you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment, you see a number of S curves. You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the Internet and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have sort of, if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau. But then we get the next thing. And so the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while. But you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8 billion people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported Covid cases. But you just can't 100x from there. It's impossible. There's not 100 billion people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. And of course, there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if. If a bunch of people have had Covid, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things. There's a great just jumping in chat. We are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging. So back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Kardashev type 2, like full Dyson sphere, capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI, that we have the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly. And that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky and so I like the framing. You know, it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI. But it doesn't feel exactly like Covid, because Covid affected people. You know, Older people, people who were not online reading Balaji Sreenivasan's post about COVID studying the exponentials, modeling the R naughts. So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, hey, like you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going to get rough out there. And people did and it happened extremely f. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers and they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses. Something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models, knowledge cutoffs. Like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like no, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the Internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaS apocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI, others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden an agent can just do it for you. And you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry. Even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go get, go renegotiate your contract. But when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of code coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about like some of my real world friends, like I'm friends with a surgeon. Like yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I would not recommend him vibe coding his own payment system and his own. Customer relationship compliance system. Yeah, compliance just a headache. He should just maybe cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So find a better tool. Find a faster. Find a newer tool like the humanoid robot that can operate patients and has a trust of patient thing is a way and he's surgical tools and how surgeries are dealt. And then in fact. So compare him to Matt Schumer. Yes. The guy who wrote this. Yes. And Matt has been building what appears to be. We can talk to you about it, but like the thinnest possible wrapper over model and other models. Right. It is, according to the definition, your AI personal assistant, writing and productivity tools. Yeah. So again, like, this is. I don't know, I can see him using ChatGPT. Yes. And claw and Gemini and thinking, what am I doing with my life? Well, if you use the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65. Like on the. Yeah, I agree. It is the AI on the website. It's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations, which you can just get the models to do today. Yeah. When he started this, I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so his business has been getting steamrolled by labs and a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of. Yeah. Sam Altman famously said, rapper, don't build a startup that assume the models will platon capability. Yeah. And then he built Sora. And if, you know, it was a little bit of a violation for that, but sort of in line with what he was doing. But at the same time. Yeah. If you were just building a wrapper and saying, I'm going to. I'm going to, you know, do better citations. That was always message just like, hey, you're going to have a rough time. Yeah. And so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just. Just Rune posted something. It was like, whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good. That's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed, to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible, because that's clearly where the future role is going. But in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I step down, like, I have a friend who's a teacher and I say, hell, like, coding agents are here. You need to understand that this is going to change everything. This is going to be like Covid. It's like, well, for the teacher, like, Covid was important because they could go there, they could get sick, and then they not work, and they, you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like, you might go to. You might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with robots because it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet. And so better then. I'm talking about, like, grade school. Like, it's mostly like, their AI sloth feeds, basically. Yeah. But the actual pro process of, like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and that. Have a. Have a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Like, yes, it will change over the next decade. Like, I'm not. I'm not AI Bear here. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that, like, surgeons change or. Sorry, I got to jump in. I know everyone. I know. We're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Godell terminal says tax loss. Harvesting my audio right now. Is this the. Someone else said, is this the Sea Dance Clang Sora version of tvpn? I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it, and Trey says, already sold all my devices. Anyways, thank you for bearing with us. Okboy. Plunger says we're back. So are we back? Let us know. Whoa. The chat's saying we're back. Chad says we're back. Hopefully AGI ASI is saying we're in the fast takeoff, but we can't get reliable. Wait, cut to John's screen for a second. Oh, you want to test something? We're so back. It still works. At least the graphics package works. Ryan serves as tvpn. Terrible buffering. Personal nightmare. Oh, no. We're getting cooked. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. But crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. All right. Thank you for bearing with us back. Thank you back. Yeah, we will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just. I. You know. Yeah. I just don't think it's bullish on AI. I do think, like, there's the software. Only Singularity. Super real. The Singularity broadly. I Still believe in the Kurzweil timelines, but it's just like, I don't know that February is the year, is the month. February 2026 is the month where, like, everyone is changed. Whether you're like, a car mechanic or, like, I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations. Like, one of the things he had to do was, like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like, there's a crazy video of him, like, jumping over the counter. And, like, it's just like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're still in this, like, slow takeoff, in my opinion. It is remarkable, and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of, like, talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say, hey, like, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up. Like, here, Vibe code your wedding website. Like, what do you want to do? Like, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do, and you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But for most people, it won't be like Covid, where 100% of people were, like, somehow. Somehow affected by it. You know, whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed. The coffee shop I like is closed, or I'm afraid to go outside. I think the question I have is, like, even. Even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake. Yeah. And. Yeah. And even when people kind of, like, started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it. Yeah. It didn't mean all the jobs went away. Yeah, some jobs have gone away, but again, headcounts at, you know, even. A lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable. We had a good jobs report, surprisingly. Yeah. Economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of. But, yeah, the question is, like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain? Yeah. Overall, like, I didn't. I was joking. I responded to the article, and I said, tldr, freak TF out and sell all your money. Immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around. I thought, Jeffrey Said it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay. Quote, unquote, essay implies. So really, really going, really going hard. But again, it felt like something like, you know, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever. Like kind of like high school. Yeah, it was a little bit of like a throwback to the permanent underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation? Yeah, I think my main critique is like, I think with COVID it's like very destructive. Right? Yeah. Maybe you lose your job but like at the very least, like you might get sick. Yeah. Things, everything is like bad. Yeah. With AI it's like this article is like, yeah, people are like going to lose their jobs. That's like kind of what the gist. Like you should be aware that like your job might get automated. Yeah. But like AI is like fundamentally like it's like a productive tool. Right. So I imagine like we're not. It's not going to cause a recession and like GDP is not going to go down, it's going to go up. Yeah, yeah. And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally. Like now it's like, I mean there's probably like hundreds of people on X their entire job. Like their salary is just posting like basically fake AI news and they get paid by. It's not even like sponsored deals. It's like they're just getting paid by X directly. Like that's like completely fake job. Yeah, but like that's going to go up. There's going to be more of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields. Correct. Isn't that the. I mean that was the original Sam Altman formulation, was like if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the Internet. It's like it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business doing ads for Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Should we keep touring the takes, the various takes on this article? Staysassy says I'm exhausted by the omg. This changes everything. AI posts this godforsaken site that I'm planning to Take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly non trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it, vendors tokens acquisition and I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty overly online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news and just be poor. Tell me when the Singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into X. Then logging off apparently states as he works at the nasdaq. Apparently you see Robert Scoble I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple weeks and Stacey says you're building ambient. Nelson says okay, but this one really changes anything. Everything. Please. I promise. Please. Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in says feels like an a non congest tweet. Just vibe coded databricks with a Screenshot in the SaaS market will follow 5%. Cephalopod yeah, I mean if your job is building a wraparound chatgpt like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Firing shots. What did Joe Eisenthal have to say? Joe with a funny post. He says seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else. Such good bait. Incredible bait. Master incredible solid. Bet if anyone falls for this, you really deserve it. Yes, software engineering isn't an easy job and Joe says how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do? That's so good. That's funny. Buco Capital quoted it and said a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock for the hype you read online. It's just really difficult to tell the Difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify evaluations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LM psychosis. I was thinking more about Claude with ads. The Vibe coded drop we launched on the super bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler and said like, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the Claude app interface, same color style guides, fonts, all this stuff like coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but it would be harder. And it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like we could have paid a dev shop 10k to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all, Right? Disagree. Okay, what do you think? How would it play out? I was doing kind of drops, stunts like that before coding agents were a thing and you could just work hard and do that, just grind. Dylan and I, you know, we did, we did one back in the day with party round called helpful VCs. This was during, you know, kind of, this was, I think like May or June of 2021. So it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started. But cryptopunks were popular and we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs. We just put them on a website and said, if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT. Yeah, and. And had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with ads where we just had the idea, we worked on it for a few days, shipped it and that was it. So this kind of thing was. How long was it? A couple days. It was definitely no more than five business days. We got this done in like one. Day, Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping. Yeah, yeah, like obviously, like I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're like incredible. But it's still like I was spent like most like almost all my Saturday, like building now. Yeah, it's not like it's like, okay, we get it, they're accelerating. You took one for the team, you sacrifice your weekend. Like these tools are like employee of the month. Employee the month. Get it? Still, I still deserve it. You know, they're not so incredible that like it can't like literally one shot it in five minutes. You can't just tell cloud code build exact replica. Yeah. And it's. It can't actually like do that yet. Yeah. Without you it would not have happened. Happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different friends, birthday party and stuff and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like. And I just like comparing it to. The example of like new. Yeah. To comparing it to the helpful VCs drop. Like we had to create original artwork for 400 VCs. Yeah. That you would have. Actually that would have been much easier with Genai. Totally. So that was a factor too. But you're talking about. Anyway. Yeah. I'm just wondering. There's the Jevons paradox. We go back to Jevons Paradox here. Is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter and then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus something that we would have done anyway. And it's more just like a cost savings thing. I don't know. It goes back to and forth. But people are. People are debating and people are enjoying the. The AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you got to listen. AGI is here. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal. Bro, bro, listen, the only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription. Bro, I swear. Hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it. That was a funny thing. He. What was the. What is the call to action? I actually missed that part. It's like buy a subscription to OpenAI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like genius. No, he just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. Yeah. I mean anyone who's saying that this is like spawncon for the AI labs. That's ridiculous. That's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. It's just. How nuanced is it? So yeah, start. You start using AI. Seriously, it's not just a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Cloud or ChatGPT. Like you don't. You don't post that if you're for economic gain. So I don't know. Anyway, graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Delicious. Tacos favorite account says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long winded articles on how scared they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder, this didn't trigger my this is AI writ slop, you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this or should we move on to a different story? Because there's a lot going on in the news today. We can move on. Okay. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor. Retail rival. Retail revival Vow burned investors. The Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack Pier one turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the American. The American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering Get Rich Quick advice and self help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like, not that scammy, like kind of a funny, cool thing. I mean, the books were like, very like. He was automating book buying. Basically. A lot of people are popping onto Amazon to buy books they don't read. Yeah. He's like, why don't I, why don't we just set this up on a subscription? Save you the time. Yeah, he had this whole, he had this whole thing about knowledge and how like the original pitch for Here in my Garage was like, look at all my supercars. That grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around a bunch of airport nonfiction. It was like, you know, a bunch of these, like books behind him. And he was like, this book wall is important than anything. Where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is. The Wall Street Journal. So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get Rich Quick advice and self help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads, that when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned The Ferraris or rented them. But like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout. Not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. Very broad, didn't need to be super hyper targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap. Radio shack, Pier 1 Imports. Dress bar, model sporting goods and linens and things with a promise to turn them into E commerce winners. That was always a weird, weird, weird crazy pitch. It was a crazy pitch and it's. Crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Yeah, Radio Shack. All right, I know that one. Pier 1 Imports. I know that one. Dress Barn. Do not know that one. Model sporting goods. Do not know that one. Linens and things. Do not know that one. At least linens and things. I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier 1 sells. Pier 1 imports. And it's crazy because almost every single, every single item that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and Walmart.com@ extremely thin margins. Yeah, I mean it's really like a referendum on the aggregation theory and if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting. Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch. What was that one? Customer database, leading retailer brand. That was sort of it. Yeah, we had one unified E commerce front end but little late to be going after. I mean there were some successful, you know, come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion dollars? That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called but Walmart made an acquisition of an E commerce infrastructure provider that did have an E commerce front end but it never reached escape velocity. But it was like the perfect plug in add on to Walmart's infrastructure and now Walmart's a trillion dollar company. I think it might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return. But I think, yeah, and this is called, you know, first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea like buying old retailers and trying to revive them. Yes. Is not illegal. Yes. But general solicitation. Yes. Very, very no, no. And we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered in the Gap. And you see, you see some startup founders try to get around this by, like, generally signaling on X that they're amazing. But I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing. This totally, totally, really quickly. Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. So he invested. Sean Murphy invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, E Commerce Ventures, Rev, and related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors. You know, we talk about these big funding rounds. We're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the layered SPVs and all the bringing retail into the private markets, but, like, he really did it. Like, the power. You know, we. A lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't have a ton of respect for him in the business community, but he really does have a serious audience of people that have money that they need to invest. So one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret. So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier 1 gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors. Second mistake, Second mistake. These guys lied. He said. They conspired. They led people on. Poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. The payments stopped abruptly in late 2022, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors. So he had the 230 million of equity, and then he also. Yeah, and so the creditors got, you know, control of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners, accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors, and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened. According to people familiar. No charges have been filed yet. So innocent until proven guilty here. But the Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to requests for comment. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So on his podcast, the Tai Lopez show, and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X Never Doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't Ever think you're doomed unless you are dead? All defeat is psychological. Was he talking to himself there? I don't know. Yeah, I guess staying in character. I just can't believe how much the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible. An 82 year old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands. Yeah, you can imagine somebody like this goes offline for 10 years and then just like logs onto the Internet and is like wait, this guy has Radio Shack Tier one imports linens and goods. Yeah, linens and things. Linens, Linens and things. I mean this seems like a winner. So yeah, quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. I mean I feel like it's under discussed how Tai Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to inspire, to aspire, to build like a personal brand. Sure. And he, Tai Lopez's greatest contribution, which I would say is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a, it's kind of like a virus because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel, they realize like hey, like this guy's actually making money with courses. I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and you know, flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle. So yeah, anyways, there's so many layers. The course that teaches you e commerce or drop shipping and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on E commerce and we need to do the final boss, the course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell E commerce or something like that. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com so in podcast, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was in prison for selling cocaine. After high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina he said when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed in an insurance company where he cold called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy firm Google Ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company and later, at a financial services company he founded, he went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled here in my garage in the first. So crazy that that was 2015. In my head, this was like 2005. Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube. I know. I don't know. Yeah, it is retro. In the first, Lopez, wearing a crewneck shirt, glasses, and a scruffy beard, stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge. That was the famous line. Knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought. That video spawned a slew of parodies around the same time. Wait, around the same time. 2015. Tai Lopez launches 67 steps. Six seven steps. He did this in 2015. He created the six seven meme, apparently. This is crazy. He's pulling all the stuff. An online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life. By focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. 67 steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this, How19 details you missed in the super bowl halftime show. Like, the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's, like, feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, 99 cents. That's different than a dollar, right? I was going to say. So in that video, when he pans to the bookshelf, one of the books is called 1001 books. So really he has 3001 books. There we go. There we go. Books inside of books. Layered, I guess. Hormozi took this to the next level, where his new info product. Isn't he selling, like, tens of thousands of books at the same time? I believe there was a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of was that you could buy a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times best seller list. I believe he didn't. He set a world record for most books sold or something like that. Wild. All Sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small. He said in a social media post. He hosted influencer fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In one 2015, video billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house. The two shot hoops and talked life lessons for those who want to be an entrepreneur. What's the best advice? Lopez asked. Find something you love to do, be great at it and sell it. Cuban responded honestly, good advice. Icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that from very high. Should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a tape. He's like, this is such good advice. I can't. I can't just. I gotta charge. Yeah, that's behind the table. A lot of the courses, it is just like it's already been distilled into a 60 second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that 60 seconds repeated 25 times. It's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree. Did you ever buy a course? Yes. That actually changed your life? Yes, yes, yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini. On Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. If you've watched Game of Thrones and you see horses galloping. What was the course title? Was it like how to Get Rich Quick with Houdini? No, it was like, it was like. It was like, you know, like using Houdini and advanced VFX pipelines. So you weren't deep. You didn't just. The course creator was not driving a Lamborghini. No, no. The course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that. That's really cool. And I want to lear. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation, cinema, 4D after effects, like, any, like, skit even you see me like, edit something. You know, all of that is. I did needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff, but none of them were about. You paid to learn how to fish and now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime. Exactly. Because, I mean, I think courses are good if it's a narrow skill. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19. Yep. And I. Even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split. Yeah. Just Learn from any Arnold video. Any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah. And it, it was well worth the money. Even though the information was like, there's something about, if you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it. Yeah. And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all, all information products are bad. No, I completely agree. P90X. That was the workout course that was, that was going viral when I was in college. The ones I do think are like really, really, really bad are when they advertise, like trading courses. Sure. To like, young, younger audiences. Yeah. Because it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account. Yeah, I'm sorry. Like, you're not, you're not going to change, you're not going to change your life. You should learn anything. The crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course which would be like, like buy ETFs. Right. Like, like there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade. Right. And it would be basically like, don't trade. Like buy and hold. Right. Dollar cost average in. Invest a little bit. Everybody get an investment firm. Yeah. Or go pro and go work at Jane street or Citadel, if you have the chops. Internet, a wealth management firm. Sure. The flip side is like a lot of the courses, they weren't even teaching you how to. Okay, well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, the big companies that would be maybe a little financial advicey, but totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like chain, like forex courses. So you were trading, but it was like essentially on top of a random number generator. Like it's like the most complex. Like understanding the trade flows for proper forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend. Like, that is a life's work. As opposed to just being like, oh, well, like I'm a kid, I'm using Uber all the time. Maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like, that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing, in my opinion. Then, okay, well the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern, so it's got.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching. Today is Wednesday, February 11, 2026. We are live from the TV. It's good to be back. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save, both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening. His viral essay, Blue 45 Million Views, completely broke containment that has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back. Vlad from Robinhood's coming on. Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson. Sam Blond, who I worked with at Founders Fund, is launching a new company, Monaco. And John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo day. And so we've only talked to him in person and he's come into the ultradome again, so we will see him in person. Is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like Covid. I have trouble with that analogy in particular. Back In February of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote. The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts. Everything is about exponential. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something, something like that, just made people much more aware that if Covid got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases. And that of course, held for most of COVID but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before, there are very few true exponentials in the real world because of course, things cap out, they turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they. And they plateau. Now will AI plateau? There's been a series of plateaus. There's been a Series of S curves. That's the story of technology really. As you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment, you see a number of S curves. You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the Internet and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have sort of, if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau. But then we get the next thing. And so the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while. But you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8 billion people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported Covid cases. But you just can't 100x from there. It's impossible. There's not 100 billion people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. And of course there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if, if a bunch of people have had Covid, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things. There's a great just jumping in chat. We are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging. So back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Kardashev type 2, like full Dyson sphere, capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI that we have, the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly. And that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky and so I like the framing. You know, it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI. But it doesn't feel exactly like Covid because Covid affected people. You know, older people, people who were not online reading Biology Sreenivasan's post about COVID studying the exponentials, modeling the R naughts. So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them, like, hey, like, you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going to get rough out there and people didn't it happened extremely f. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses. Something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models, knowledge cutoffs. Like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the Internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaS apocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden an agent can just do it for you. And you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry. If you even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go get. Go renegotiate your contract. But when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of code coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about like some of my real world friends. Like I'm friends with the surgeon. Like, yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I don't. I would not recommend Vibe coding. His own payment system and his own. Customer relationship management compliance system. Yeah, compliance. Just a headache. He should just maybe cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So find a better tool. Find a faster. Find a newer tool like the humanoid robot that can operate patient surgical and has a trust of patient thing is a way and he's surgical tools and how surgeries are dealt and then in fact. So compare him to Matt Schumer. Yes. The guy who wrote this. Yes. And Matt has been building what appears to be. We can talk to you about it but like the thinnest possible wrapper over AI and other models. Right. It is according to the definition your AI personal assistant writing and productivity tools. Yeah. So again like, this is. I don't know, I can see him using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and thinking, what am I doing with my life? Well, if you use the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65,000 likes. Like on the AI on the website, it's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations, which you can just get the models to do today. When he started this, I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so his business has been getting steamrolled by labs. And a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of. Sam Altman famously said, don't build a startup that assumes the models will platon capability. And then he built Sora. And if, you know, it was a little bit of a violation of that, but sort of in line with what he was doing. But at the same time, yeah, if you were just building a wrapper and saying, I'm going to. I'm going to, you know, do better citations, that was always messaged as like, hey, you're going to have a rough time. Yeah. And so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just, just Rune posted something. It was like, whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good, that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption, I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible, because that's clearly where the future role is going. But in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I step down, like, I have a friend who teacher and I say, hell, like coding agents are here, you need to understand that this is going to change everything. This is going to be like Covid. It's like, well, for the teacher, like, Covid was important because they could go there, they could get sick and then they'd not work and they, you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like, you might go to you might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with robots because it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet. And so better than. I'm talking about, like, grade school. Like, it's mostly like, their AI sloth feeds, basically. Yeah. But the actual process of, like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and have a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Like, yes, it will change over the next decade. Like, I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that, like, surgeons change or. What do you mean? Sorry, I gotta jump in. I know everyone. I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Godell terminal says tax loss. Harvesting my audio right now. Is this the. Someone else said, is this the Sea Dance Clang Sora version of tvpn? I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it, and Trey says, already sold all my devices. Anyways, thank you for bearing with us. Okoy plunger says we're back. So are we back? Let us know. Whoa. The chat's saying we're back. Chad says we're back. Hopefully AGI ASI is saying we're in the fast takeoff, but we can't get reliable. Wait, cut to John's screen for a second. Oh, you want to text something? We're so back. It still works. At least the graphics package works. Ryan serves as tvpn. Terrible buffering. Personal nightmare. Oh, no, we're getting cooked. 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. All right, thank you for bearing with us back. Thank you back. Yeah. We will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just. I. You know. Yeah. I just don't think it's bullish on AI. I do think, like, there's the software. Only Singularity. Super real. The singularity, broadly. I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines, but it's just, like, I don't know that February is the year, is the month. February 2026 is the month where, like, everyone is changed. Whether you're, like, a car mechanic or, like, I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations. Like, one of the things he had to do was, like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like, there's a crazy Video of him, like, jumping over the counter and, like, it's just like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're still in this, like, slow takeoff, in my opinion. It is remarkable, and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of, like, talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say, hey, like, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up. Like, here, Vibe, code your wedding website. Like, what do you want to do? Like, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do, and you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But for most people, it won't be like Covid, where 100% of people were, like, somehow. Somehow affected by, you know, whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed, the coffee shop I like is closed, or I'm afraid to go outside. Yeah. I think the question I have is, like, even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake. Yeah. And even when people kind of, like, started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it. It didn't mean all the jobs went away. Some jobs have gone away. But again, headcounts. You know, even a lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable. We had a good jobs report, surprisingly. Yeah. Economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of. But, yeah, the question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain? Yeah. And how fast? Overall, I didn't. I was joking. I responded to the article and I said, tldr, freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around. I thought Jeffrey said, it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay implies. So really going hard. But again, it felt like something like, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever. Kind of like high school. Yeah. It was a little bit of a throwback to the permanent Underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it? Yeah, I think my main critique is, I think with COVID it's very destructive. Right. Maybe you lose your job, but at the very least you might get sick. Everything is bad with AI. It's like this article is like, yeah, people are going to lose their jobs. That's kind of what the gist. You should be aware that your job might get automated, but AI is fundamentally a productive tool. Right. So I imagine it's not going to cause a recession. GDP is not going to go down, it's going to go up. Yeah. And so I think my base case is jobs actually get like way more fake generally. Like now it's like, I mean there's probably like hundreds of people on X their entire job, like their salary is just posting like basically fake AI news and they get paid by. It's not even like sponsored deals, it's like they're just getting paid by X directly. Like that's like completely fake job. Yeah, but like that's gonna go up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields. Correct. Isn't that the. I mean that was the original Sam Altman formulation, was like if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the Internet. It's like it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business doing ads for Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Should we keep touring the takes? The various takes on this article stay sassy. Says I'm exhausted by the omg this changes everything. AI posts this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly non trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it, vendors tokens, acquisition and I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty overly on lies online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end I'd rather miss the latest AI news than just be poor. Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into X. Then logging off apparently states as he works at the nasdaq apparently you see. Robert Scoble I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple of weeks and Stacey says you're building ambient. Nelson says okay, but this one really changes anything. Everything. Please. I promise. Please. Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in says feels like an a non congest tweet just vibe coded databic databricks with a Screenshot in. The SaaS market will follow 5% cephalopod yeah, I mean if your job is building a wraparound chatgpt like this guy, then it's not surprising that I can automate that. Firing shots. What did Joe Weisenthal have to say? Joe with a funny post. He says seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else. Such good bait. Incredible bait Master incredible solid bait. Show if anyone falls for this, you really deserve it. Yes, software engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do? That's so good. That's funny. Buco Capital quoted it and said a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock for the hype you read online. It's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify valuations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis. I was thinking more about Claude with ads. The Vibe coded drop we launched on the super bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning and after the show on Friday we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler and said is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the of the Claude app interface. Same color style guides, fonts, all this stuff like coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but it would be harder and it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about, if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? We could have paid a dev shop 10k to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all. Right. Disagree. Okay, what do you think? How would it have played out? I was doing kind of drops, stunts like that before coding agents were a thing. And you could just work hard and do that. Just grind. Dylan and I, you know, we did one back in the day with party round called helpful VCs. This was during, you know, kind of. This was, I think like May or June. Yeah. Of 2021. So it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started. But cryptopunks were popular and we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs and we just put them on a website and said, if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT. Yeah. And. And so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with ads where we just had the idea, we worked on it for a few days, shipped it, and that was it. So this kind of thing was. How long was it? A couple days. It was definitely no more than five business days. We got this done in like one day. Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping. Yeah. Obviously I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're like incredible. But it's still like I was spent most almost all my Saturday building. Yeah. It's not like it's like. One for the team. You sacrifice your weekend. Like these tools are like employee of the month. Employee month. Get it still. I still deserve it. You know, they're not so incredible that like it can't like literally one shot it in in five minutes. You can't just tell Claude, code build Zach replica. Yeah. And it's not. It can't actually like do that yet. Yeah. Without you it would not have happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different friends, birthday party and stuff and wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like. And I just like comparing it to the helpful VC. Yeah. To comparing it to the helpful VCs. Drop. Like we had to create original artwork for 400 VCs that you would have actually that would have been much easier with Gen AI. Totally. So that was a factor too. But you're talking about. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, I'm just wondering, like, you know, there's the Jevons paradox. We go back to Jevons paradox. Here is like, is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter and then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus something that we would have done anyway? And it's more just like a cost savings thing. I don't know, it goes back and forth. But people are debating and people are enjoying the AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you gotta listen. AGI is here. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil DeGrasse Tyson, bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal. Bro. Bro, listen, the only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription. Bro. I swear. Hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it. That was a funny thing. He. What is the call to action? I actually missed that part. It's like, buy a subscription to OpenAI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like, genius, like. No, he just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, anyone who's saying that, like, this is like spawn con for the found for the AI labs. Like, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not. That's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. It's just. It's just. How nuanced is it? So, yeah, start. You start using AI. Seriously, it's not just a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Cloud or ChatGPT. Like you don't. You don't post that if you're for economic gain. So I don't know. Anyway, Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Delicious tacos. Favorite account says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long winded articles on how scared they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder this didn't trigger my this is AI writ slop, you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just I don't know, very readable. It didn't. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this or should we move on to a different story? Because there's a lot going on in the news today. We can move on. Okay. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor. Retail rival. Retail revival. Vow burned investors The Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack Pier one turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like not that scammy, like kind of a funny cool thing. I mean the books were like very. Like he was automating book buying. Basically. A lot of people are popping onto Amazon to buy books they don't read. He's like, why don't we just set this up on a subscription? Save you the time. Yeah, he had this whole thing about knowledge and how like the original pitch for Here in my Garage was like, look at all my supercars. That grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around a bunch of airport nonfiction. And it was like, you know, a bunch of these like books behind him. And he was like, this book wall is more important than anything. Where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is, the Wall Street Journal. So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He was one first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads that when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. Very broad. Didn't need to be super hyper targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap. Radio shack, Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell Sporting goods and linens and things with a promise to turn them into e commerce winners. That was always a weird, weird, crazy pitch. It was a crazy pitch and it's. Crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Yeah, Radio Shack. All right, I know that one. Pier 1 Imports. I know that one. Dress Barn. Do not know that one. Model Sporting Goods. Do not know that one. Linens and things. Do not know that one. At least linens and things. I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier 1 sells. I Pier 1 imports. And it's crazy because almost every single, every single item that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and walmart.com yep. At extremely thin margins. Yeah, I mean it's really like a referendum on the aggregation theory. And if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting. Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch. What was that one customer database leading retailer brands. That was sort of it. Yeah. We had one unified E Commerce front end, but little late to be going after. I mean there were some successful come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion dollars? That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called. But Walmart made an acquisition of an E commerce infrastructure provider that did have an E Commerce front end, but it never reached a skeptical escape velocity. But it was like the perfect plug in. Add on to Walmart's infrastructure and now Walmart's a trillion dollar company. I think it might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return. But I think, yeah, and this is called first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea like buying old retailers and trying to revive them. Yes. Is not illegal. Yes. But general solicitation. Yes. Very, very risky. No, no. And, and, and we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered and the gap between. And you see, you see some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on X that they're amazing. But I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing. This totally, totally, really quickly. Phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. So he invested, Sean Murphy invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, E Commerce Ventures, Rev and related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million. Hundreds of mostly small investors. You know, we talk about these big funding rounds and we're like oh like how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the later SPVs and all the bringing retail into the private markets. But like he really did it. Like the power you know, a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't have a ton of respect for him in the business community. But he really does have a serious audience of people that have, you know, money that they need to invest. So one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret. So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier 1 gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors. Second mistake, second mistake. These guys lied. He said they conspired. They led people on. Poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. The payments stopped abruptly in late 2022, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors. So he had the $230 million of equity and then he also lattered out. Yeah. And so the creditors got, you know, control of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners, accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors, and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened, according to people familiar. No charges have been filed yet. So innocent. Still proven guilty here. But the Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to requests for comment. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So on his podcast the Tai Lopez show, and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X Never Doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological. Was he talking to himself there? I don't know. Yeah, I guess. Staying. Staying in character. So I just can't believe how much, like the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Yeah, apparent. Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible. An 82 year old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands. Yeah. Like you can imagine somebody like this, like goes offline for 10 years and then just like logs onto the Internet and it's like, wait, this guy has radio shack. Tier 1 imports linens and goods. Yeah, linens and things. Linens, Linens and things, I mean this seems like a winner. So yeah, quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. I mean I feel like it's under discussed how Tai Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to aspire to build like a personal brand. Sure. And he, Tai Lopez's greatest contribution, which I would say is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a, it's kind of like a virus because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel, they realize like, hey, like this guy's actually making money with courses. I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle. Yeah. Anyways, there's so many layers. The course that teaches you e commerce or drop shipping and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on E commerce. And we need to do the final boss. The course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell. Courses about how to sell courses about how to sell E commerce. There's something like that. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream go to restream.com so in podcast, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was in prison for selling cocaine. After high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina he said when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed an insurance company where he cold called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google Ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company and later at a financial services company. He found it. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled here in my garage in the first. So crazy that that was 2015. In my head this was like 2005. Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube. I know. I don't know. Yeah, it is retro in the first. Lopez, wearing a crew neck shirt, glasses and a scruffy beard, stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge. That was the famous line. Knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought. That video spawned a slew of parodies around the same time. Wait, around the same time. 2015, Tai Lopez launches 67 steps. Six seven steps. He did this in 2015. He created the six seven meme, apparently. This is crazy. He's seven steps, an online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life by focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. 67 Steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this how 19 details you missed in the super bowl halftime show. Like the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's like feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, 99 cents. That's different than a dollar, right? I was going to say so. So in that video, when he. When he pans to the bookshelf. Yeah. One of the books is called 1001 books. So it really has. He has 3001 books. There we go. There we go. Books inside of books. Layered, I guess where Mosey took this to the next level, where his new info product is. He's selling like tens of thousands of books at the same time. I believe there was a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of was that you could buy like a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. And I believe. Didn't he set a world record for most books sold or something like that? Wild. All sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small, he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In one 2015 video, billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house. The two shot hoops and talked life lessons for those who want to be an entrepreneur. What's the best advice? Lopez asked. Find something you love to do, be great at it and sell it. Cuban responded honestly. Good advice, icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that. From very high. Should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a page. This. He's like, this is such good advice. I can't. I can't just. I gotta charge. Well, that's the. Yeah, that's behind the table. A lot of the courses. It is just like it's already been distilled into a 60 second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that 60 seconds repeated 25 times. Right. It's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree. Did you ever buy a course? Yes. That actually changed your life? Yes, yes, yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini. On Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. If you've watched Game of Thrones and you see horses galloping. What was the course title? Was it like how to Get Rich Quick with Houdini? No, it was like using Houdini in advanced VFX pipelines. So you weren't deep. You didn't just. The course creator was not driving a Lamborghini. No, no. The course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that. That's really cool. And I want to learn that tool. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation, cinema, 4D, after effects, like any, like, skip. Even you see me edit something. All of that is. I needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube video. I was also paying for stuff, but none of them worked out. You paid to learn how to fish. Yeah. Now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime. Exactly. Because I mean, courses are good if it's a narrow skill. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19. And I. Even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split. Yeah, yeah. Just learn from any Arnold. Yeah. Video. Any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah. And it. It was well worth the money. Even though the information was like, there's something about. If you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it. Yeah. And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all, all information products are bad. No, I completely agree. P90X. That was the workout course that was. That was going viral when I was in college. The ones I do. The ones I do think are. The ones I do think are like really, really, really bad are when they advertise like trading courses to like, young, younger audiences. Yeah. Because it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account. Yeah, I'm sorry. Like, you're not, you're not going to change. You're not going to change your life. You should learn anything. The crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course which would be like, like buy ETFs. Right. Like, there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade. Right. And it would be basically like, don't trade. Like buy and hold. Right. Dollar cost average in. Yeah. Invest a little bit. Everybody get an investment firm. Yeah. Or go pro and go work at Jane street or Citadel if you have the chops. Turn at a wealth management firm. Sure. The flip side is like a lot of the courses, they weren't even teaching you how to. Okay, well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies. Like that would be maybe a little financial advice. Y. But totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like forex courses. So you were trading, but it was like essentially on top of a random number generator. Like it's like the most complex. Like, understanding the trade flows for proper forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend. Like that is a life's work. As opposed to just being like, oh, well, like I'm a kid, I'm using Uber all the time. Maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like, that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing, in my opinion, than okay, well, the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern, so it's got to go up. Like chartology or something. What's that called? Anyway, Vibe Co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. Lopez teamed up with Alex Mehr, mechanical engineer who had co founded an online dating app that sold for 255 million. Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami based Retail E Commerce Ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and Mehr was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer, according to the SEC complaint. She previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started. The spokesperson for Maris that he believed in Rev's business models put over 5 million of his own money into the company and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit With a so called severe post pandemic macroeconomic headwinds. Birkenroad is represented by Blah blah blah. Rev's first notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid 5 million for the E Commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn? Crickets. Where's the crickets? Where's the crickets? That's a good one. Team Crickets. Crickets. Sound effects. We gotta add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree. In July 2020, it purchased home furnishing retailer Pier 1 Imports out of bankruptcy for about 31 million, followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains. Sporting goods retailer Models Modals for 3.6 million. Has anyone heard of Modals? Yes. Yes. No. No, oh no. And discounters Steinmart. Has anyone heard of stein Mart for 6 million? And we got another. No. I feel like this is. We got people from all over the country, so I think this is somewhat representative of the average American. And of course, Radio Shack undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for. I have no idea. Okay, there's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Mayer. I had to hunt it down. I'm sorry, I was distracted. First, I'm going to tell everyone about Label Box, reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. Tell me. So Alex Mayer is controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this potentially disastrous deal. Jessica Livingston, founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Stories of Startups Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews. It's basically a whole bunch of podcast type interviews combined. So 37signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal. The interviews in here are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr. Max Levchin at PayPal. This founders at Work template, if you see it, has this like, we should pull it up. But it's like this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it. And then in orange, Founders at Work. And then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's Coders at Work about software engineers and there's venture capitalists at work. And Venture Capitalists at Work is a different book not written by Jessica Livingston. But Alex Mayer is in it because he founded Zoosk, which was a dating site. And, and it's just like a funny, like fun fact that he's in this like, like book that is sort of tangentially like extremely legit. Anyway, we can Move on. Sorry. During weekly zoom calls for investors, Lopez and mayor pitched new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier Rev deals. According to former employees at his self help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in Rev brands. Joseph Bertau, a 44 year old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertau recalled the message, give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off and we can't get them fast enough. He invested about $350,000. So much money. I don't know, I mean, maybe people are. At the same time, when I, when I look back at like my first angel investments, which granted, I was like 22. Yeah. I would, I thought that I was seeing good enough opportunities. Sure. That I would happily invest half of my like liquid network, you're going to say 10%, which, I mean it wasn't that much at the time. Building my first company, I was like very young. I was down to take a lot of risk. I was like, hey, but it's got. To be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement. Yeah. But part of it is like when you start seeing, yeah. When you start seeing private deals for. The first time, it feels special. It feels special. You look at the chart. Yeah. And you know, and in hindsight I'm like most of the worst. Like, there's certainly some people that have come on the show. Justin Mares is a good example. Like you look at the first like three. Oh yeah, Justin did. And they were all like, at least two were unicorns. Like he's, he's insane. But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were like probably in the first five. Yeah. People just don't realize how many companies are out there, how many private companies are out there. Like, you see this one deal, you talk to this one founder and you're like, this is everything. And some of the early angel investments that I made that didn't go well were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting category. And what I just didn't realize was that there was like they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead and there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead. And Sequoia had already backed this one, but they hadn't announced and then Andreessa had backed that one. And so I was in the one that didn't have any of the backing and was just going to be third in the category which was just going to create this like power law difference. And if you don't have full coverage, you don't even know that those deals are happening. And so you wind up, even if you get the idea correct and the team is good, you can still wind up in a really rough. And the other thing Here is In one Pier 1 pitch deck, investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested 1 million, which again is 20% return, which is insane. If somebody tells you they're any sort. Of guaranteed return is usually a huge red flag. Huge risk. Anyways, before we move on, let me. Tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Anyways, I think we can move on this, this story is still unfolding. It is very sad and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible. Indeed. Getting into the jobs report. Jobs report big beat 130,000 jobs. Economists expected 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate. Bloomberg has a live blog here breaking it all down. There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July and revisions trimmed the US 2025 payroll gain to, to 181,000. From Bloomberg. Yes, it's interesting. I think everyone, there were kind of delays with the report. Right. Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal. And now I think the reaction is can we trust the data? Right. Yeah, there's just been so much kind of like FUD thrown around the data and the job market in general that it's hard to believe your own eyes. I was debating with a friend about, he was sending me some economic data and he was saying AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but health care is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and that's where the real economy. There's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets that's very forward looking. You're valuing things based on 2050 cash flow and being like, yeah, I'll pay for that right now because this company's gonna be around. You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for 100 years. Right. And then there's like the on the ground like, do people have jobs or not? And the question of, like, do people have jobs or not? Is much more in the healthcare and services sector. And so Bloomberg has been breaking it down. US Payrolls rose in January by the most in a year, more than a year. And the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continued to stabilize at the start of 2026. And now there's going to be some debate over, you know, how real is this, Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show, and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of, a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs, usually they're pulling back on spending. Discretionary spending revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, like, we announced these big numbers and then we kind of move on and then revise them. This is pretty big, though. You'd be surprised if this, if this, if this flipped negative. Like, maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much, but it still seems like, like there is job growth. Broadly, this seems at least directionally correct. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3%, according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year, which showed market slowdown in hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000amonth last year, down from the initially reported 49,000 pace. Just a bit off. The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring. While economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 2026, more clarity around the impact of President Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve's official inclination to keep interest rates on hold. Now. Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting tension right between, even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these, like, two things, like if you're, if you're pushing for, hey, let's count every possible job that could potentially fit in this category that, well, then it's going to be harder to make the case that you should cut rates. In leaving rates unchanged last month, Chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026. This is welcome news, said Heather Long, chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union. I think Fed Chair Powell was right. The labor market appears to be stabilizing, so Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday, said that the US should have the lowest interest rates globally, adding to previous calls for rate reductions. Great job numbers, far greater than expected, he wrote in all caps. With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarks payrolls to a more accurate but slightly less timely series called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. That data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most U.S. jobs. That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March than initially reported. The figure roughly aligned with that of the BL overall. I think the team that had to revise last year, down by almost a million, now coming out and saying everything's great and we crushed it. It doesn't give you. I don't have any comp like a smart person might think, like, okay, a year from now we're going to figure out that none of this was real. Maybe. Yeah. I mean the market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S&P 500 is up 0.1%. The NASDAQ's completely flat, I guess technically up 0.01%. Comments on Joe's post says and you take these numbers at face value. Question mark Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers. Lol. Almost every single person responding just like anyways. Oh well. What did Kalshee have to say? Jobs numbers. This is for February. This is for February. Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60k. The current forecast is 68,000 and it jumped in the last couple days. Well, you know what is real? What? Bytedance Sea Dance 2.0. The model's very good according to Ethan Mollick. I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about Sea Dance yesterday and how he's thinking about competition from bytedance. But we can next time. Let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which if you ask me is worth the 2 trillion of capex. Is photo real? In the world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter. That's cute. I like that. 12 seconds longer than most. 8 seconds. And someone in the replies shared a grok version of this that it just has a little bit more. I don't even know how to describe it. It's A little bit more blurry, maybe. This video. I don't know if you can see it up close, but it's close. But it's not as close. This is grok. Okay. The audio is also much worse. I think I watched this. In the skies above Alaska, a river. Otter pilots its plane. Its paws expertly handle the control. Yeah, you instantly clock the aud. Yeah, you don't. On the seance on sea dance. It sounds. It sounds for sure, real otter maxing. Lucas is firing shots at actors. Okay, but we can pull this up. Let's see. Let's get some audio. You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal. He was a good man. He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die. And now you die, too. Insane. Insane audio. But. But the. The video. The video. Look, I mean, I can't. You. You. You've watched a handful of movies. I have. More than me. Does this look like it could be in a film? It's close. It's pretty close. What are you missing? I mean, just the length of the shot. It. It's not. It's not fully, like, modern in the sense of the way. The way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either, like, way more cuts and just way more, like, detail shots, like cutting in and out, or they'll try and turn it into more of, like, a cinematic set piece and have, like, a drone shot or sweeping shot. Like, it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of, like, the most modern movies. But it's. But if you were sitting there prompting and splicing it together from different angles, for sure, you could. For sure. What do you think? Yeah, I think I do wonder if there's, like, an interesting comparison to the kind of cloudbot stuff where, like, I think one of my main takeaways from the Cloud Bot thing was that it's going to be hard for big labs to kind of replicate that just because of, like, you can't get the WhatsApp integration. Like, stuff like this, where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly, like, training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Like, the otter flying. Like, that's David Attenborough's voice. Like, you're not supposed to be able to do that. Yeah, yeah. Where, like, can Sora can OpenAI release Sora with that exact voice? Like, probably not. Like, maybe they can try to do it, but they're clearly gonna face some legal repercussions where, like, China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those Yeah a lot. Of the American labs it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like look yes like we know you can prompt Disney characters we are happy to pull that out but also can you want to talk to our business development team. Yeah like with OpenAI you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where very quickly China is not like I'm pretty sure that you can go and see Sea dance. Yes and just prompt like Mickey Mouse you know doing a little dance or whatever. Yeah let's look at this other Sea Dance 2.0 post Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster epic action film scene different cuts. There you go John you wanted good all you had to do is ask. This is pretty real. I like that Will Smith.