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The. Hit the gong. Hit the gong. It would be. Would be an honor, John. Boom. Probably. Probably the largest gong hit. 120 hits. 122 hits. Oh, 122. They upsized the round, remember? They did upsize. Yeah. So take him. Pulled out some of the highlights.

She asked the question, is OpenAI's chief futurist prepping for a major breakthrough or just another hype cycle? And you can go and read this on Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair, the tech publication? Yes. I mean, Julie covers tech very well. Very, very well. There's a lot of good stuff.

You're watching TVPN today is Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. We are live from the TBPN ultradome. That's technology. The fortress of finance, the capital of Apple.

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And basically don't try and reinvent the wheel. Right. Interesting. Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of. Is there a world where it re implements Gary's list in Jekyll or something? Who knows really? I mean, we'll see. It might, I mean it's using a lot of open source software. Obviously it didn't write its own programming language, it probably didn't write its own database. It's using off the shelf tooling there. But the core app, I mean, I guess with, with the right flexibility and the tools that you wanted and the features that you wanted, like it makes sense to it. We're almost. It's not build versus buy anymore. It's like, it's like fork versus inference or something. Yeah, there's like, I mean increasingly you don't even fork. Like, I mean, you know, it's funny, like all of these things are very strange. We're in bizarro land right now. Like we're in mid transition and like all of the transitions are not in distribution yet. Which means like if you try to make a product right now and you ask it to estimate how long the agent is gonna take to make it, it says human terms. So it'll be like it'll take a human a month to do this. And then you have to ask it explicitly, well, how long are you gonna take? And it's like, well, I'll probably take like 15 to 20 minutes. And it's like literally across the board, like I am coding 90, like my output in terms of real products, not just lines of code is like 90x that of what I did when I was in 2013. I made post Haven that year. I made Bookface that year. And it's, you know, I was at a CEO conference last week at JPMorgan 100 and I was talking with a bunch of like former tech, you know, very technical CEOs who like now are full manager mode. And like I was like, good news man, it's time to come back. Time to time. You know you're Peter Parker right now. Time to put on the Spider man suit. Because this is the time. And I was blowing their mind. And I'm like, they're like, oh no, like I shouldn't do this. It's not worth my time. I was like, dude, it is worth your time. Like you can still be the manager during the day, but by night you can be Spider man or Batman. Like you can don the suit, pull out the G stack, a little sleep. Yeah, pull out the G stack and you know, and my pitch to them was like, Look, I am 90 times. I am 90 of myself. Like, that's really good at manipulating time. Yeah. That's remarkable. And you can have 90 of yourself working on things like tonight and be the CEO, Right? It's fantastic. Well, you want a ton of people.

Yeah. What, what lessons from Steve or kind of memories do you find yourself coming back to, to the most in, in the, in the present day of Apple? Well, I think something that, you know, people take for granted. But nobody worked harder than Steve, you know, and these things don't come easy. And he was the hardest worker of anybody I know. How did that manifest? Like, long hours, just. Yes, it's focus. Because it's focus and long hours. What it was, was there are only two things that mattered to Steve. And I think when people ask me, what's the difference between Tim and Steve? The reality is that's not the right question. The question is, what's the same things between Tim and Steve and their work ethic? They worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things, their Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers, believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going, but it was never the primary thing. And so those three things are something that I still take to heart and I feel that's what I try to do and how I feel.

You know, when they're locked in, make something people want. Right. It's crazy. I don't know. I mean, I've been. I feel like I'm at the center of a lot of, like, weird controversy. Like, did the guy lose his mind? What's going on? I've been thinking about it, and it's like, it's not actually about me. It's about, like, people's relationship with their craft, and that has to change. And so I think my response to the haters is like, have Fun Coding at 1x speed, bros. Well, I don't know. I don't know that. I don't know that the haters are not also using the tools and not generally excited about. How are you interpreting? I think it's just primarily. I'll give you a concrete example, please. I noticed yesterday I had a throwaway comment because I created gstack. It's got 60,000 stars now. I'm actually growing faster than Openclaw by stars on GitHub right now. And they had their moment, and I'm on my way. Right. About 30,000 people use GStack every single day. I've been getting emails that are pretty awesome, actually. Like, people trying to start consulting firms, and they just want to feed their kids, and maybe they lost their job, and then they literally are, like, starting this consulting firm. I'd never done this before. I sit down with a client, I just open office hours with Gstack, and as they talk, I type in what we're talking about, and then I'm like, live talking to, you know, and they sign a customer on the spot within, like, 20 minutes of talking to someone. Because of the GStack, like, open office hours skill to build custom software for that. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah. And then maybe, you know, the thing is custom software. You know, I was at Palantir when, you know, Stefan Cohen and Shyam Sankar basically invented the idea of your forward deployed engineer. Right. So everyone's fde. That's what you're doing. Everyone can be an fde. And the thing is, like, if. If you don't know how to do it, this thing is like the training wheels that will teach you. And then it was the training wheels for me as I was learning how to do it. The original prompt, I had posted on Twitter right when I was working on Gary's list and those things, both my engineering prompt to shake out all the bugs and get to 100% test coverage. That was my plan ENG review that is in G stack today. And then the other one was plan CEO review. I call it my Brian Chesky review. Okay. Like, it's like having Brian Chesky sit on your shoulder and be like. I mean, that would be a heavy person to sit on your shoulder. But, like, he's going to ask you, are you in founder mode? Are you moving fast enough? It's like, what's the ten star experience? Right. If you've ever seen him talk about the 10 star experience. Like, that's what having CEO plan CEO review in the Gstack skill feels like to me. Okay. And I really think that that's awesome. Like, I want everyone to have that. And so I was like, having a throwaway thought. Like, one of the core things I made was like,

But I have two questions. One, what was your stack like back when you designed the Palantir logo? Was that a tasteful exercise? Was that, like, what went into designing the Palantir logo? Yeah, I mean, basically what's funny is. Yeah, that was such a weird, formative year. Like, I'll paint the picture like we're in Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. Like, the iconic downtown Palo Alto office we're a year away from even moving into. This was like, across from where I think Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto is now on Page Mill. We only were 12, maybe 10 or 12 engineers at that point. And I was working on the hiring site for palantir tech.net or something, I think. We didn't have the dot com yet. And the original logo was created by my high school buddy, Stefan Cohen, who's still at Palantir and billionaire many times over. And, you know, basically I was like, how do I get engineers to want to work here? The logo kind of like, it was like six hexagons, I think. And people came and they thought it was like a biotech company or something. Oh, interesting. And then we just. Basically, I took maybe, I don't know, a week. It wasn't more than a week of, like, working on it, but we made, like, a thousand different versions of it, which is really funny because, like. And that was pre Gstack. Yeah, yeah.

Every possible category as a child. This is seriously deep alpha. I need to lock up Coogan soon rather than later. T on a roll today says it's never been a better time to be in the fake wood panel industry. If you sell fake wood slats that can be quickly installed in a room somewhere, business is booming with no signs of slowing down. I love the slat walls. We got to get one in here so we can just like step back and go and hang out and do a little slat wall podcast for one of the. Wait, that. That. That would have been the April Fools. Oh, what were we thinking? You know, we struggled with April Fools this year. We think it's a little bit overplayed. It's not that it's. That would have been. It's not that funny. And kind of every single day is April Fools. Yeah. Yeah. We just. Yeah. And there's a lot. It's a good day for us to just get serious. Yeah, right. Get the white skin. Focus on the market. The market's up. We're in white suits. Dylan, be serious. But you know, the. The actual play would have been to rebuild like the typical podcast set with like the bookshelf, the slot walls and. But then make it miniature, right? Oh, yeah. And so we're sitting there. We're sitting there. We look like, you know, giants. Giants. Giants of the industry. Do you know why the slot wall is so popular? Isn't it, Huberman? Yes, but do you know why he selected it? I do not. So when you are recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don't want reverberation. You don't want a lot of flat walls. This. That will bounce the sound back to you and create echo and distortion and hollowness in the sound. You want a nice bassy response. You need a nice microphone. But you also need a sound treated area in the ultra dome. We have some sound treatment over there. We have some sound treatment over there. We do have a hard floor. Maybe that would make the audio quality better. Who knows? But we. For a long time, people would put up that sort of. It's a egg crate style. I don't know if we have a camera. Maybe the reverse PT would do it. But egg crate style soundproofing works incredibly well. And if you're ever in a professional recording booth as doing voiceover for a film or recording a song, you will be. That has a lot of spike. Yeah, it has a lot of spiky. Yeah, you can see it right here. So this sort of egg crate, it creates a lot of little holes for the sound to get caught in effectively and very fun journey. And the problem is that that makes it look like you are in a sound booth. It's not very aesthetic. It doesn't look like a natural environment. And so there were companies that said, let's get the best of both worlds. Something that's aesthetic, but still sound treating. And so they launched these wood slat walls. Of course, the space in between the wood captures the sound a little bit, acts as a little bit of deadening. And then, of course, you can also hide. You can also hide soundproofing material behind the wood wall. And so it was a very logical way to have an elevated aesthetic while still getting the benefits, at least some of the benefits of sound treatment. Then Andrew Huberman did it, went mega viral. And everyone sort of copied it over and did the same thing. And it's become a huge trend. He wound up painting his black, I think. And who knows? People got sick of being. Now, you know, if you're in the black paint industry, that's where the money is, because everyone with the fake wood panels is going to be painting it black. We have yet to do this. I've looked at this in the past, but I've never actually done it.

Be aggressive. Because I loved SparkNotes. It helped me through high school. But how did you think about, like, the moral implications of potentially, like, helping you cheat? Because we just went through this, like, moral reckoning in Silicon Valley last year around Clulee, this company that was like, very, very, you know, in the marketing, like, cheat on everything. Very aggressive about that. I don't remember Spark Notes ever marketing to me as, like, cheat. It was very much like supplemental and additional. Sometimes I'd read the Spark Notes chapter instead of the full chapter if I was running late or late on sleep or wanted to hang out with some friends. But how did you process the trade off or the impact of that business? That's such a funny question. Here's the thing. People who want to cheat are going to cheat. And so what we focus on is let's make the best product, both for the people who want to get A's because they're doing the work. And if you're going to cheat, you might as well actually learn something in the process. And so we didn't give you the paper that you could turn in. We gave you the best path to learn the material. And honestly, if you didn't read Romeo and Juliet, but read the sparknote, you probably understood the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's probably better rather than. And I think CliffsNotes never really did that. CliffsNotes was always about just trying to get you through, and we really tried to make sure that you learned what you were doing. Yeah, yeah. Did you ever think about, like, deliberately how you position it in the marketing? Because you clearly had that philosophy, but you could have had the choice to, like, fly every college campus with, like, cheat, and, like, maybe that would draw people's attention. Did you ever think about, like, clickbaiting, rage baiting, any of that? No, no. In fact, our. Our approach was the opposite, which is try to actually get the teachers to recommend us as the preferred study guide. So there were a bunch of teachers who would write us and say, hey, I've told my students, you can't use CliffsNotes, but you can use Spark Notes. Interesting. And then now all of a sudden you've got the teachers endorsing you because you've made the better product. Yeah. And so what seems like a cheating product gets repositioned as a study aid. And that's really what we wanted to. Yeah. And now teachers, look, there are moral questions in every business. Yeah. How do you think about investing?

In the market, how much of this is how important was sort of beating the depreciation gate allegations, to put it sort of silly, but a lot of people were wondering like, oh those, those H1 hundreds, they're not going to, they're not going to age well. And what we've seen is that there's a lot of data points out there that seems like older aging, like older. They're aging like fine wine from what we've seen. But take me through your did you always know that that was going to play out the way? Was there any unexpected surprise to the and then how important has it been to have more data about how these GPUs monetize over a longer length of time? The depreciation subject has always been very interesting to us. We've been very consistent. Six years is the preachable life of this infrastructure. And I would say if anything, we're expecting for the infrastructure to have useful life beyond six. I mean you see that today and like late 2010 SKUs that are available in market on clouds, like they're not running that infrastructure unprofitably. Yeah, right. It means that there's client demand for it. But as we look towards like Ampere and Hopper generations, you know, I think in our last earnings we have noted that our pricing on Ampere went up during 2025 and our pricing on Hopper stayed within 10% or so of where we started the year. Why is that happening? I think it's largely driven by inference. Right. And ultimately this concept that not every workload only needs the latest, greatest piece of compute. Right. Which we're incredibly well known for running. But you know, there are different types of workloads that need different types of infrastructure and the market is simply efficiently pairing the right compute with. With the workload that they need. So we see incredibly robust demand all the way back to the Ampere generation, which I believe is 6 years old at this point from its original Skew launch date. And we're really not seeing any deterioration of these older skewed demand profiles while also seeing accelerating demand for latest generation infrastructure as well. I think everyone's heard the stories of electricians being flown around in private jets and kind of the.

We're almost. It's not build versus buy anymore. It's like, it's like fork versus inference or something like that. There's like a. I mean increasingly you don't even fork. Like, I mean, you know, it's funny, like all of these things are very strange. We're in bizarro land right now. Like, we're in mid transition and like all of the transitions are not in distribution yet. Which means like if you try to make a product right now and you add, ask it to estimate how long the agent is going to take to make it, it says human terms. So it'll be like it'll take a human a month to do this. And, and then you have to ask it explicitly. Well, how long is are you going to take? And it's like, well, I'll probably take like 15 to 20 minutes. And it's like literally across the board, like I am coding 90, like my output in terms of like real products, not just lines of code is like 90x that of what I did when I was in 2013. I made posthaven that year. I made Bookface that year. And it's, you know, I was at a CEO conference last week at JP Morgan 100 and I was talking with a bunch of like former tech, you know, very technical CEOs who like now are full manager mode. And like I was like, good news man, it's time to come back. You know, you're Peter Parker right now. Time to put on the Spider man suit because this is the time. And I was blowing their mind and I'm like, they're like, oh no, like I shouldn't do this. It's not worth my time. I was like, dude, it is worth your time. Like you can still be the manager during the day, but by night you can be Spider man or Batman. Like you can don the suit, pull out the G stack, a little sleep. Yeah, pull out the G stack and you, you know, and my pitch to them was like, Look, I am 90 times. I am 90 of myself. Yeah, like I'm a really good manipulating time. Yeah, that's remarkable. And you can have 90 of yourself working on things like tonight and be the CEO. Right? It's fantastic. Well, you won a ton of people over in the chat. They were skeptical and they're very fired up. So thank you so much for coming on controlling the haters. Keep building, keep shipping those lines of code. And we want to talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Maybe private, and people don't want it to be screenshotted and shared, but there's definitely a process to open it up. How are YC founders in the latest batches adapting to the change of pace of software development? There was a guy yesterday who made the claim that he rebuilt the whole batch with agents. Yeah. Congratulations. God bless. Big respect. And of course, incredible troll. I'm not sure he made anything that people want. A good demo for his product got some attention. I love shout out to Tim Draper. Big respect, man. You got to do what you got to do. I love it. Yeah. But in a world where a YC founder might have, in a previous era, been very proud of the system that they built, the code that they wrote, even if they're not tracking lines of code, they said, look, this piece of software did not exist. I spent three months grinding with my co founders. We built a piece of software that solves the that problem. And now that's, you know, five minutes of work. Where will the moats come from in the future? YC companies? I mean, basically the future. Like, what's funny is basically all the people who already did that, like, you got to speed up. Like, it's time to let it rip, guys. Like, software is too. We treat software like it is so precious, and in the new world that we're going to, it is. It is going to be much more fungible. But that's the good news. Like, that's where taste and agency and trust matter a lot. This is something that only crystallized recently. Like, we've been talking about agency and taste for the longest time. Agency is being able to prompt, and taste is being able to do evals. Right. And then the third part that I only started thinking about, I think there was a tweet I reposted today that, like, said it really, really well. That, like, trust is the third thing. And so, you know, that. I mean, that's probably the thing that's the most important. Like, when you have an enterprise company that is selling to real businesses and they're relying on you, like, that's your moat. Your moat is actually trust. Like, they went to the effort to try you, to get you onboarded and to incorporate you into how, you know, they work. And then, you know, I think that either you can hold onto that and that's a real moat, and you can build something over the long haul. Like someone gets promoted or someone avoids being fired because you exist, and they're never going to switch and they trust you. Like, that's like, even more important than those other things. What is this story about? It's not about is someone going to try? Like if someone came along to you this impressive Draper company, like troll on YC Companies is a good.

Like this and maybe you should send this email to such and such person. And so I don't know, this is. I think all of these are just fun experiments, but I'm learning a lot. It isn't. I am trolling on people about the lines of code thing, but I will say that there's a grain of truth here where I am not about lines of code. I don't work for anyone really. I work for the institution of YC as the steward of it. But aside from that, like, I'm not here to like max lines of code to like, you know, to good heart law something. You know, what I've learned is that like the machines aren't good heart lawing like lines of code either. So that means that if you are 100% of your code is written by, you know, the machines and you are earnestly trying to solve the problems of your users and yourself, like I am with G Stack in the open, like you can look at it and I'm doing 36,000 lines of code a day and not a single one of them is like, for me to be able to say that it's actually like, I'm just having the time of my life building software. Like, we're about to launch something really awesome at yc. Oh, I was about to ask, can you tell us the story of bookface and then where you think software development will go at YC? Yeah, I mean, Bookface, we have, I mean we have, you know, 20 engineers at YC and you know, Book. One of the funniest things we, we found out was like, actually a lot of people seem to have access to Book Face. Book Face is the internal social network used by. We have about 16, 17,000 people who are YC alums now who have access. About 40% of them use it every single day. And I've started to realize, actually anyone who has a friend of someone who works who went through yc. Yeah, like people basically share their logins. Oh, they share their logins. So I mean, which is cool actually. Like, the reality is we should probably open it up. Like, we probably should have a. Like, if you're a builder, I don't think I want absolutely anyone. Like, I want like techno optimist people who are psyched about making the future. And like, I think bookface should be open to people. You know, that might be one of the things we work on this year. You know, there's so much interesting like wisdom and stories in there. Some of the stuff is.

So I think my response to the haters is like, have Fun Coding at 1x speed, bros. Well, I don't know. I don't know that the. I don't know that the haters are not also using the tools and not generally excited about it. How are you interpreting? I think it's just primarily like. I'll give you a concrete example, please. I noticed yesterday I had a throwaway comment because I created gstack. It's got 60,000 stars now. Like, I'm actually growing faster than Openclaw by stars on GitHub right now. And, you know, I mean, they had their moment and, like, I'm, you know, on my way, right? About 30,000 people use GStack every single day. I've been getting emails that are pretty awesome, actually. Like, people trying to start consulting firms and they just want to, like, you know, feed their kids and maybe they lost their job and then they literally are like, starting this consulting firm. I'd never done this before. I, like, sit down with a client. I just open office hours with Gstack, and as they talk, I type in what we're talking about, and then I'm live talking and they sign a customer on the spot within 20 minutes of talking to someone. Because of the Gstack office hours skill to build custom software for that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, yeah, maybe the thing is custom software. I was at Palantir when, you know, Stefan Cohen and Shyam Sankar basically invented the idea of forward deployed engineer. Right? That's what you're doing. Everyone can be an fde. And the thing is like, if you don't know how to do it, like, this thing is like the training wheels that will teach you. And then it was the training wheels for me as I was learning how to do it. Like, the original prompt I had posted on Twitter right, when I was working on Gary's list. And like, those things, like, both, both my engineering prompt to, like, shake out all the bugs and get to 100% test coverage. That was my plan Eng review that is in Gstack today. And then the other one was plan CEO review. I call it my Brian Chesky review. Okay. Like, it's like having Brian Chesky sit on your shoulder and be like, I mean, that would be a heavy person to sit on your shoulder. But, like, he's going to ask you, are you in founder mode? Are you moving fast enough? It's like, what's the ten star experience? Right? If you've ever seen him talk about the 10 star experience, like, that's what having CEO plan, CEO review in the Gstack skill feels like to me. And I really think that that's awesome. Like, I want everyone to have that. And so I was, like, having a throwaway thought. Like, you know, one of the core things I made was a browser plugin that wraps Playwright. And so the reality is, like, I'm just solving problems for myself. Like, I was building Gary's List, and I found myself. You know, the plan CEO review worked well. The plan end review worked really, really well. And then I found myself, like, you know, I'm using Conductor. I have, like, six or seven windows open at that time. I'm up to 20 right now. And I found myself, like, running between windows, just doing manual testing. And I'm like, great. Like, I work so hard to, like, build all these skills to, like, get way faster. And then now I'm just a black box QA engineer for the robots. Like, this is so bo. How terrible. Can I automate it? So I opened another Conductor window, and I was like, man, why does Claude in Claude in Chrome MCP suck so much? I don't know if it sucks now. Like, it's been a month or something. Maybe they fixed all the bugs, but it literally couldn't do it. It's like 2 or 3 seconds, 5 seconds. Crazy context bloat. It was unusable. And then I said, okay, like, well, I know Playwright exists. Can we make a cli that's like a thin shim over what Playwright does? Then basically, it did it. And then that was what the first v1 of GStack was. It was those two scripts and a Playwright browser plugin that allowed me to not QA anymore. I could just say, okay, now qa, you know what we did in this branch, we have all these plan files, go line by line and act like my QA engineer. And it did it. The first time I used it, it was like 100 milliseconds it was doing it. It could log in, it could click on things. It, like, took screenshots of things that were broken, and then it would fix them immediately. I was like, oh, my God, this is how to do it. Like, this is how you build a software factory. It's like, I automate each of the steps. Like, I've built so many pieces of software over the years, and I've helped so many people do that. And it's like, this is the process. And so now there are 30 of these skills. And then, you know, now you still, like, I think we're still in manual mode. Like, I built an auto plan so that now all of these different pieces, there's a recommendation in each of them. If you really want to be in the weeds and understand what's happening, you can just read the recommendation. You can talk with it. You'd be like, well, I like option A, but option B sounds better for X, Y, and Z. Reason? Let's talk about it. It's interesting because I'm arriving at similar things to what I think Devin or other automated software factories are doing, but I'm doing it in the open, open source MIT license. If you don't like something, just fork it, man, and just make it yours. And I have like 200 PRs I have to look at right now. PR review. Amazing. MD. We'll take care of it. That's right. Is Gary's list more of just.

We back founder. Oh, my God. How can we not be back? Explain what's exciting. We are at the dawn of, like, being able. Like, software is totally fungible now and then basically the tricky thing now is, like, you just got to spend the money on the tokens. That's, like, one of the things that's. I think people are very, very afraid to spend money on tokens. And the things that you can do right now, like, you can literally make open claw. And the reason why Pete could do that was he's actually, like, really, really successful previously. Sure. And he could let it rip. Like, I think one of the key things that people have to understand about, like, the current moment is you cannot be precious about your, like, Claude Code Max account. You have to, like, really just let it rip. And when you let it rip, you can create, like, these things that, like, set the world on fire. Actually, what about all the other things? I mean, so YC is interesting because there was a. You know, for a long time, it was about technical founders. You know, writing code oftentimes still is. Right. But it was like, okay, you're.

And then, so I mean, the big question is the Small Business jobs report. What is the health of the American economy? What is the health of the small business community? What questions were you trying to answer? And where did you, where did you wind up? I mean, every month we get this headline jobs report from the BLS we're watching for this Friday. I think what we're trying to do with the Small Business Jobs report is get a much firmer pulse on what's happening with small businesses, in particular, some businesses with less than 50 employees. You know, that is the majority of businesses in the American economy, but just a small minority of total employment. So it often gets buried in the headline jobs report numbers. And we know they're, they're a driver of job growth, they're a driver of innovation, they're a driver of kind of the bread and butter work that gets done in our economy. Yeah. And where, where does net hiring stand? Give me some of the headline numbers. What are expectations? What should we, what should we by default assume is happening? I mean, there's a lot of doom and gloom in the economy, honestly, broadly, because of geopolitical conflic conflicts and nervousness around AI. But what are you actually seeing? You're right, there is a lot of doom and gloom. Our headline jobs number for March showed that small businesses created about 120,000 new jobs in March. That's an exceptionally strong number. That's one of the strongest numbers we've seen since 2022. And you know, I think it's important to note that's not an outlier. Other kind of payroll providers are showing similar strength. So I think this narrative that we all have in our minds of the great freeze kind of businesses paralyzed by uncertainty, that's in some ways last year. I think 2026 is shaping up to be the great unstucking after being stuck last year. That's amazing news. That's great. Do you have any thoughts on. I can throw out a bunch of random theories off the top of my head, but this is paired with just yesterday, Oracle slashing staffing over costs. There are big headline attention grabb job cuts that are happening at name brand companies and those that news will fly very far because everyone knows meta, everyone knows Oracle, and maybe they don't know that the small business just down the street actually increased headcount by 20%, but they only added two people. So it's not going to be on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal. But is there some sort of, you know, how crazy, how crazy am I to think about, you know, the large companies maybe being overstaffed and maybe changing their business models so they need to recalibrate whereas small businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence, maybe trying to do more, trying to expand, trying to compete. And so they're actually expanding their labor force even while the bigger companies have like much larger questions to ask about what happens over 20 years. Yeah, big business grabs, big headlines. And you think about the shocks that our economy has experienced over the past year, the past few years. Big businesses are kind of, I say like a big freighter. They're a little bit more resilient to the tsunami, but they have a really wide turning radius. Small businesses are like a schooner kind of. They have to adapt and pivot really quickly in response to these shocks. And I think we saw that big businesses are just catching up whereas all the shocks we experienced last year, small businesses are already ahead of the curve and are thinking about what comes next.

In other nuclear news, Apparently Utah is going nuclear to keep ski runs cold. What? For the 2034 Winter Games? How does that work? Explain State says this is in town lift.com okay, State says neutron based atmospheric technology could lower ski run surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees and offset drought impacts through enhanced snowpack retention. Interesting, because when when you've given your case for Alaska, historically you've talked about how with abundant nuclear energy you could take an otherwise cold area and warm it up. But they're they're thinking about cooling things down. State officials confirmed Wednesday that Utah has entered a $1.2 billion agreement with a Vienna based energy consortium to install three micronuclear reactors along the Washoak Washok Mountain range as part of an unprecedented effort to stabilize snow conviction conditions on Utah ski slopes ahead of the 2034 Olympic Games. The project, designated the Wasach Atmospheric Retention and Mitigation Initiative, or warmy, could make Utah the first state in the nation to deploy nuclear powered atmospheric cooling infrastructure at altitude. Utah is not going to sit back and let the climate dictate the terms of our 2034 legacy, said a spokesperson for the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, who confirmed the project has received preliminary approval under SB114, the legislature's infrastructure acceleration statute, which removes local government approval authority over projects designated as state economic priorities. So apparently Juniper Peak selected as the first nuclear test site. I'm sure everyone at Juniper Peak will be thrilled about being able to ski around a nuclear test site. The three micro reactors are proposed at elevations above 9,000ft in what project documents describe as thermally neutral subterranean containment pods. I like the sound of that. Designed to blend with the natural terrain. So anyway.

In the Wall Street Journal about smartphone proves too big for most. We were debating this earlier and I'd like everyone else to chime in too. The original iPhone launched in 2007 had what was considered the largest smartphone screen at the time, 3.5 inches. The biggest iPhone now is more than double the size of the original at 6.9 inches. Or is. Yeah, is now more than double. Wow. In 2019. The 2019 introduction of Samsung's Galaxy Z fold introduced foldable devices to the masses. Opening up like a wallet. It has a 7.3-inch display. And Samsung Galaxy Z Tri Fold in 2026, when fully opened, unfurls to roughly the size of an iPad. Ken and the journalists in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, can a smartphone be too big? Tyler, what do you think? Yeah, I'm in favor of a smaller phone. Okay. This is a 16 Pro and it's not max. But it's not max. It's the normal one. And why don't you want a bigger phone? It's just too much. What if you're on a plane? You want to pull it out and watch a movie or something? Do you just. Yeah, but I feel like if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop. It works great. But you don't always have the laptop with you. Or I mean, you always have it in your backpack. Like, what if you're like on a train? You've never thought about getting an iPad with a cellular connection and then maybe like a strap on the back that you could hold and have and be able to hold it up to your head and use it like a normal phone. I was. I was seriously considering the iPad mini for a while. Just as an everyday carry phone. You could do it. I don't know if you can get a phone number on it. Is that even going to fit in my pocket? It would fit in my pocket. I tested. Does it fit in your suit pocket though? Maybe you. It would definitely fit in the suit pocket. You should get all of your suits custom tailored so that you can fit an iPad mini in here. I don't know. The foldable phones are really fun. What are they confirmed Z. Yeah.

Metab over at OpenAI says we are excited to share a new paper solving three further problems due to Erdos. In each case, the solution was found by an internal model at OpenAI. Each proof is short and elegant and the paper is available here. So there's a breakthrough for you. Yeah. Prinz asked, would you be able to comment on the delta between the unreleased model and GPT4.5.4 Pro? I'm reading correctly. You tried fewer than 10 identical prompts for each of the three problems with GPT 5.4 Pro Pro and that GPT 5.4 Pro got the first problem correct twice the result which you link in the paper, plus one other similar solution. The third problem corrected twice. Interesting. I saw another interesting paper from Google that apparently just repeating the prompt twice improves LLM performance. Did you see this, Tyler? So if you say like, if you say like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem. Because of the way the tokenization works when it first processes that u, it doesn't know. Like, it doesn't. It starts thinking and it doesn't necessarily know what's coming. Right. It doesn't know that Shakespeare's coming. So if you just repeat the prompt, the exact prompt twice, it improves performance on a bunch of different benchmarks. And it's this funny paper because it's like something that anyone could just do at home. It's like the classic, like, prompt editoring thing. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, you would think that it wouldn't work, Right. Because still you attend to all the previous tokens at the same time. Right. This is the whole thing. Yeah. You think so? I don't know. Yeah. But I remember early on there was all these things where you would prompt like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem. And it'd be a way better poem than if you said, write me a poem. Totally. Totally. Or like, pretend that you're Terrence Tao when you solve this math problem. Way better. Right? Yeah, whatever. In the training data, whatever. It just knows to go down that path as opposed to the other paths of like, oh, it doesn't pull any April Fool's jokes because it's not being an April Fool's jokester. There's these basins or whatever if you can. Like the personality basin where you can get the model to act like a certain thing and it does much better on that. At the same time, I think this paper was specifically on vanilla LLMs, and I think reasoning solves that even more because you're basically repeating the prompt a bunch through unpacking it, compressing it doing whatever you need to do to actually set the LLM up for success in answering the question. And so it might sort of hydrate through that process into something that, that yields those results. But interesting how simple some of, some of these, some of these hacks are. Well, in biggest number news. Yes. Yesterday, OpenAI announced the closing of their latest funding round. Yeah. Hit the, hit the gong. Hit the gong. It would be, would be an honor, John, but.

So, the Kit Kat heist. This is the story you all have been waiting for. Kit Kats, the candy bars were stolen and in massive quantity. The Wall Street Journal has a story of how the company reacted, how they turned a massive Kit Kat heist into crisis PR gold. We've seen this before. People were talking about Tucker Carlson having his nicotine pouch shipment stolen and how it sounded like the plot of a new Fast and Furious. Or Zoomer. Fast and Furious, Mo. Well, something similar happened to Kit Kat, and they took advantage of it and made the best out of it. So KitKat, of course, is owned by Nestle, but let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal had to say. Just how much are 12 metric tons of stolen Kit Kat bars worth? A lot of promotional gold, it turns out, says the Wall Street Journal. It was the brazen chocolate heist heard around the social media world. Oddly, this is the first time I'm hearing of it. I don't know why. I don't know how I missed this. Had you heard of this before? Yes. You had? Okay. Yeah, I've seen this. I literally found out about this in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know why I only heard about this in the reaction. But anyway, it's an interesting story. So, over the weekend, Nestle confirmed that thieves had swiped 413,000 units of kit Kats somewhere along their way from a factory in central Italy to Poland. Both chocolate bars and the truck carrying them remain missing, though no one was hurt in the theft, it said. With the Swiss company Lost in chocolate, though, it gained back in a public relations coup, as did multiple other companies. Quick to hop on the meme bag bandwagon. We need to pull up some of these memes. I haven't seen any of them. We've always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocol. The company said in a statement. I don't get it. You have to. They would have had to steal the truck for it, too. Yeah, they stole the truck. I mean, it sounds like Fast and Furious. It sounds like they. They stuck. Stuck it up. And you said, get out of the truck. You got to call cab. The truck is missing. The truck is missing. Took the truck. They took the truck. Wow. They took everything. Yes, it really happened. A spokesperson confirmed that it wasn't an early April 1st joke. Taking their cue from Nestle, other companies soon joined in with some social media spoofing. We would like to share our thoughts and condolences with KitKat following their sad news, the account for Domino's Pizza in the UK posted Monday morning. Then it added On a completely unreal Unrelated note, we're pleased to announce that we'll be selling a new KitKat pizza. It's very silly. Charlotte FC, the major league Soccer club in North Carolina, jumped on the same riff a couple of hours later. On an unrelated note, we are happy to share that we will be offering roughly 413,000. I don't know about you John, but I love when large corporations can just jump in on the fun. It's extremely Millennial. This is my culture is not your costume. If you're not a millennial and you're the one posting this, stop. Only a millennial has the right to post jokingly as a corporate account. The discount airline Ryanair, meanwhile, simply posted a cartoon photo of one of its planes with a face in the jet's mouth Are five bitten off Kit Kat bars? Not long ago, most companies would have said little, leaving it to law enforcement authorities to disclose such a potentially embarrassing reven revelation. Now, any bad news is good news, as long as a corporate brand can turn it into a viral meme. I wonder, I wonder if this is a global crime ring. That also came after Alp Carlson nicotine patch. It's possible, or it's possible that they're going to try to combine them kind of one plus one equals three type situation where they think that merging Kit Kats and nicotine could produce incremental value. Who knows? Who knows? Typically, nicotine products are much more economically dense, so a single can of pouches might retail for anywhere between like 6 and $10, whereas a KitKat might be the same size but only retail for a dollar. And so stealing a truck full of nicotine products is typically like 10 times more economically valuable than Kit Kats. But who knows, maybe the thieves weren't thinking about economic density when they chose to stick up this particular truck. What do you think about this take? It's a master class in public relations. Like I agree with your intuition that this is not that funny. This is sort of just a corporate cringe. It's a little rough. Like some of these. Like I'm not getting belly laughs out of this, but just in terms of corporate comm strategy, this feels like the best of all possible worlds. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's like a reasonable thing. Am I entertained? No. Do I think that it was worth doing? Yes. Yes. It's. It's like it's like the least bad. Does it make me want a Kit Kat? No. Also, no. Like, I was not thinking about Kit Kats and now. And I'm thinking, well, now I'm thinking. I just think. I think I've never really. I've never really had a Kit Kat and thought, oh, that, that was. That was so good. Yeah. And so now I'm just remembering that. Why? I don't care. Okay. Okay. I think, I think that, you know, the two options were, you know, put out some sort of, like, serious sad statement about how you got owned, basically. I think that could have been funnier. That might have been funnier if it's just. Yeah, the. Maybe a CEO viral video would have done the trick that kicked off. This reminds me of that McDonald's burger thing. That sort of all they talk about, that all the brands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, where, where does that go nowadays? Other companies want to profit from potential buzz from arrivals. Misstep, too. After a video of McDonald's CEO polite bite into a burger went viral this month, top executives from Burger King, Wendy's and Wendy's pounced with similar videos. In a lighthearted dig at their competitor, McDonald's said his new big burger, the Big Arch, got a sales boost for all the attention too. So it worked. Wait, they got a sales boost from having the CEO? They claim. They claim that getting dunked on all press is good press. That's their claim. I don't know. It doesn't seem crazy, like, you know, we found out about the Big Arch, we talked about the Big Arch, we sort of processed the value prop at least. Yeah. I keep catching you leaving early. You're like, oh, I gotta get home. I gotta pick arch school. And I just. I drive by the local McDonald's and John is there. He's got, in the passenger seat, 20 big arches just plowing through them. I don't think so. I don't think so. Not for me. I'll stick to the other. Microsoft is in talks with Chevron.

Like, what would you do without an iPhone? Yeah. What lessons from Steve or kind of memories do you find yourself coming back to the most in the present day of Apple? Well, I think something that people take for granted. But nobody worked harder than Steve and these things don't come easy. And he was the hardest worker of anybody I know. How did that manifest? Like, long hours, just deep focus. It's focus because it's focus and long hours. What it was, was there are only two things that mattered to Steve. And I think when people ask me, what's the difference between Tim and Steve? The reality is that's not the right question. The question is, what's the same things between Tim and Steve and their work ethic? They worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things, their Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers, believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going, but it was never the primary thing. And so those three things are something that I still take to heart and. And I feel that's what I try to do and how I feel. Can we talk about F1? I love that.

It. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 99 cents and they kind of told us to go pound sand. They weren't really interested in us at all. And their idea was they were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services. And we told them, like, what you guys are doing is not going to work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. Sometimes you could buy. So they would, like, price a hit higher than, like some random song on an album. Yeah, I mean, it was all over the map. Yeah. And part of. Part of the pushback against, like, just $99 a song, 99 cents, I mean, is like, you know, typical Apple style. It's just like, let's just make it simple, easy to understand. But was there pushback, like, kind of concern that people, you know, hey, we're used to getting people to just buy an entire album. And maybe what's going to happen if people just buy, you know, a song here or there? Like, yeah, the problem was whether you sold it at $1.29 or 79 cents, that wasn't going to change that. The key to there were two keys to 99 cents that we really believed in. And people didn't see there were two primary things. Number one is when the price is 99 cents and it's consistent, you never have to think about price. And so you would preview a song, decide whether you like it or not, and if you did, you bought. And so there was never any transaction, a billing transaction that you had to think about because you knew it was 99 cents. It's not a lot of money at the time. And it was really easy to do. The second thing was that people could never do that, because at 99 cents, if you're charging a credit card, you would lose money. Because credit cards have a fixed fee and they have a percentage that you pay. Well, the fixed fee and the percentage on a 99 cent song was like a quarter. And the vast majority of the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we would lose money. And so nobody wanted to do that. And so no other service did that. What we decided to do is as we were building this, and I remember it was a huge discussion because we would lose a ton of money. Obviously, if you're losing on every song, we said, look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song. You're going to buy a lot of songs when you go on there. And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time? So let's keep the, you know, let's keep the transaction open for a period of time, let's call it 24 hours or 8 hours. And everything you buy, we're just going to give you, and then we're going to charge you at the end. And so therefore, that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just 99 cents. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars, and the fixed fee didn't matter.