I see a large IPM on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place meter 3000.
Right.
Permission.
Courtney declaring order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts.
Five.
We are experts.
Founder Mel.
Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Blaze win.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
Bike.
Is.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blades.
That's just wrong.
Right.
Mark clearing order inbound.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one.
Strike two. Retreat.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Market clearing order inbound.
Five.
I see more and more journalists on the horizon.
You're watching TBPN.
Today is Tuesday, February 10th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We're not slopping it up today, Jordi. We're in full force with Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Thank you to Ramp. They took us to the Super Bowl. We hung out with a bunch of folks in SF, very smart people: Dwarkesh, Dylan Patel, Trenton, Schalto, Mark Chen. There were a ton of AI really frontier people, the people who actually know what's going on with the labs and the progress. Came away extremely dialed. Then I had to wait two days for the photo that we took to work its way through the NFL's software system.
Yeah, they had on-site photographers.
An on-site photographer. The guy, I mean, no disrespect to the guy, took a nice photo. But it was very funny because when he was taking the photo, it felt like the camera had recoil or something. Like he would take the photo. It was like first day with the camera. But he had a phone attached to the camera and I was like, 'Oh, it must be connected to the camera real time. It uploads immediately. Then you get your photos and you can post them while the game's live.' And for some reason it took like two days for us to get the photo. It was watermarked. We had to buy it. And I guess it makes sense. But we got monetized. It was just a funny, funny situation. Anyway, let me tell you about Tigris: serverless vector and full-text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
N in the chat says the photo quality was not great as well.
Well, first time, first time. There's a whole bunch of interesting news. We're going to talk about Michael Grimes today, what Apollo is doing, some new humanoids out of China. There was one piece in the Journal that I wanted to read for you. Streamer Braden Peters suffers awkward encounter with Arizona State fraternity leader. Video of the interaction has drawn widespread attention. Braden Peters, the online streamer known as Clavicular, found himself at the center of viral attention this week after a brief in-person encounter with a fraternity leader at Arizona State University left him visibly diminished. This is news just today. Video of the exchange, which has circulated widely across social media platforms, shows Mr. Peters appearing noticeably uncomfortable as the unnamed fraternity member dominated the interaction through sheer physical presence and social confidence. Viewers noted that Mr. Peters, despite his considerable height, appeared to shrink during the exchange, struggling to maintain composure as the other man controlled the tone and pace of the conversation with apparent ease. The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times now, with commenters largely agreeing that Mr. Peters was, in the parlance of his own audience, thoroughly outclassed. Neither Mr. Peters nor the fraternity leader could be reached for comment, but we'll be following that story, of course. Anyway, moving on. Michael Grimes, he's Elon Musk's banker, and he might be the most important person in the SpaceX IPO that's probably going to happen this year. Kev Quirk summed it up. He said Michael Grimes moving back to Morgan Stanley is the strongest signal so far that the SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic IPO jubilee is a real thing. We're going to dig into it. First, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Why is no one talking about Grimes?
Well, a lot of people are actually very familiar with Michael Grimes. Took Facebook, Google, Tesla, Uber, Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, and literally hundreds of other tech companies public. He was involved or lead banker on those. He's been in the industry for decades. He has a reputation because he becomes a customer or user. Yes, that's a fun fact.
Of the different products during the kind of bidding process, he talked about playing Farmville. How many hours did he play Farmville?
He didn't say how many hours he played. At some point we'll have to ask. They just said he played hours of Farmville in the lead-up to the Facebook IPO, saying, 'Look, I don't just use Facebook. It's a platform. I understand the full business case. I understand that there's whole other companies like Zynga that are building products like Farmville on top of Facebook.' And to understand the IPO thesis, the investment thesis for Facebook at that time, you had to believe that other businesses would be built on top of Facebook. So you had to understand far more.
Yeah, so like you would expect him to, you know, spend hours talking to Annie, you know, for the SpaceX IPO.
For sure. For sure. Yeah. Definitely. He also actually drove for Uber before taking Uber public in 2018, and so he likes to dig in. He also has just a very, a very like perfectly aligned background for tech and tech banking. So he did the traditional investment banking thing. He was at Salomon Brothers, then Bear Stearns, then Morgan Stanley. But before that, he studied electrical engineering, computer science at Berkeley. And so he was like never really boxed in as this pure finance guy. And there's this interesting full circle moment where, you know, many people could compare Elon Musk to Howard Hughes, who started Hughes Aircraft and sort of created like the aviation boom. And Michael Grimes actually interned at Hughes Aircraft in the space and communications group back in 1985. And what is SpaceX? It's like a space and communications company. And so you have this like very full circle moment, which I thought was cool. But the real like fork in the road for Michael Grimes was when he was at Morgan Stanley and he's working with Frank Quattrone, who now runs Catalyst Group, a big investment bank focused purely on technology companies. And Frank Quattrone was like a heavy hitter in the Menlo Park office for Morgan Stanley, and he had a bunch of associates. And Quattrone bails. He's like, 'I'm out of here. I'm leaving.' He goes to a different bank, eventually starts his own bank. But Grimes stays. And so that, you know, allowed Grimes to really grow into his role. I think he became the co-head of West Coast investment banking, co-head of global technology banking in 2005. And so he had like basically a two-decade run with all those IPOs that we mentioned: Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Salesforce, a ton of companies. His office is—you can't put down a coffee cup because it's all deal toys. It's all deal toys. It's one of the craziest offices I've ever seen. He's like truly a deals legend. So then he went, he did a brief stint with the Commerce Department. And people were wondering, like, is he going to be able to stay out of going back to deal land? Like, there's so many good deals on the table right now. You got Anthropic, you got OpenAI, you got SpaceX and the government.
There's deals in the government, but it's just a different environment. You know, there's so much red tape. And famously at Morgan Stanley, Michael Grimes was set up in a way that he at least reportedly was not really required to deal with all like the firmwide strategy, what's going on with the rest of Morgan Stanley. They were like, 'Go hunt. Like, you're a killer. Just go do whatever you need to do. Go fish. Go fish.' And so he had a lot of, he had a really like broad, he had a lot of, they sort of like cleared the agenda to just let him go do what he did best. And he obviously was extremely successful at that. In the government, you know that there's going to be 25 different committees and stuff. So it's just going to be a different environment. I don't know. But he got pulled back to Morgan Stanley and he got a promotion. So now he's the chairman of investment banking, which is I guess higher than co-chair of global technology banking, which sounded like the top. But there are levels and he's even higher now. And it makes sense if SpaceX, you know, they're on track to raise $40 billion in this IPO. You know, nothing's really confirmed yet, but that feels reasonable in the range. So what are the investment bankers going to have to do? They're going to have to talk to literally everyone with money because putting together that size of a deal is huge. Pricing it is very difficult. And the investment banking fees could be like $400 million. And so right now people are thinking those will be split across the four lead banks: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Goldman. And Kalshi actually has a prediction market on who's going to be involved in the SpaceX IPO. I believe Citi is sitting around at like 50/50. So they might get...
56%. But the major bulge bracket banks that everyone knows and loves—Goldman, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America—are all sort of locked in at that...
89% being the lowest of that group.
And so either way, you got to get ready for the road show of a century. It'll be interesting. What will Michael Grimes do to prove that he's ready to go to space? Will he go to space personally like Jared Isaacman did? That would be pretty cool. I want to see some stunts. I want to see stunts pre-Roon. I fell in love with Annie.
I think he's got to go to space. He's got to do the Jared Isaacman thing. Put me on top of the Dragon capsule. Get me into space. I want to do a civilian spacewalk. Jared did it. He got up there. He got back safely. Put Michael Grimes in the rocket. Let's do it. Do it.
And I mean that, you know, you're going to be so—it's so much easier to underwrite the deal if you're like, 'I've been to space. It works. I've driven for Uber.' I think everyone...
I played Farmville. This is the best technology. Going to space is better than playing Farmville or driving.
What if he says, 'Put me in the mass driver.'
Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. So, the Wall Street Journal has more coverage on Michael Grimes. By the time Musk finally decided to take SpaceX public—and this was sort of a surprise to people. People thought, okay, Elon has run the A/B test. He took Tesla public. He kept SpaceX private. He had a much better time with SpaceX doing, you know, secondary sales and fundraises very easily. He could do whatever he wanted, really, like much more control. Tesla, he's getting sued by shareholders, all these different things like regulations, SEC stuff, like it's a headache. But the stock's doing really well, and at a certain point maybe you cap out what's possible in the private market. So all of a sudden Elon says, 'I'm going public. I'm merging everything together. I'm going now. I've made the decision.' And so Grimes is working in the Commerce Department, and he had actually followed Elon to Washington, D.C. in many ways. Grimes found himself watching from afar as former colleagues pitched for roles on what could be the biggest IPO of all time. You're just like, 'Get me back in, coach. Put me in.' This week, Grimes put himself back in the middle of the action and in line to reap millions of dollars of fees. Morgan Stanley said Monday he was rejoining the bank as chairman of investment banking, a promotion from his previous role as head of global technology investment banking, according to an internal memo. SpaceX has long been considered a golden goose by IPO bankers. It skyrocketed to a $1.25...
Let's give it up for all the golden geese out there.
Golden geese. May they never be slayed. They must just continue laying eggs. Merged it with the AI company xAI, which we know. Also interesting, there's all this news about the xAI co-founders leaving, but post-acquisition, of course, the co-founders leave. That's pretty normal.
Well, I think the reason that people care is because it was happening for quite a while now.
Yes, that's true. And there's also this question of just like how much research do you need at this point. We were debating this this morning with Tyler about like, okay, do they need to just be near the frontier or do they actually need to be doing research to advance the frontier? Should you think about xAI more like a Neo lab that's trying to solve continual learning or some unsolved problem in AI research, or should you think about them more like a hyperscaler, like an AWS or like a CoreWeave or like a Lambda, like a neocloud that's just like capacity and more of an engineering task? And if they're able to build Colossus and then build a bunch of space data centers and they just have a lot of capacity, like who knows, maybe they wind up working with Anthropic.
I mean, I forget at what point last year we started talking about that possibility.
But as the consumer products and the enterprise products have kind of fallen behind or failed to, you know, fully catch up.
I don't know. I'm seeing a breakout in Grok in the comedy category on Instagram Reels. You can go check them out. There's some funny, funny interaction.
It is really wild. Yeah, you really have to find the different modes in the product, but finding the different characters, going to the unhinged setting, it is about five times more unhinged than I would expect a product like this to be.
Yeah, yeah, it talks trash about Elon. It goes all over the place. Honestly, some of it is genuinely funny though, which is like a high praise. It's a new benchmark for AI. It is sort of like doing—it's a cheat code because no one else...
Part of humor can be truth-seeking, right?
Truth-seeking or just saying what no one else can say or be unexpected. You don't expect the computer to talk...
Sometimes people can't say that, you know, there's certain topics you can't...
Say the truth. And yeah, the unhinged mode is certainly truth-seeking.
Certainly unhinged as well. Anyway, if you want a more hinged voice AI experience, head over to ElevenLabs. Fully hinged. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs.
Will Deppe shared a little hack for everyone who's into Chipotle. We reposted a clip that is truly evergreen. Jordi quote: 'I used to get 90% of my calories from Chipotle at certain times in my life. It was something I would look forward to, but the last time I pulled over to get Chipotle, it was like, this is going to be rough. The quality has degraded. I'd rather fast than eat Chipotle.' Taking shots at Chipotle.
A couple of the younger guys on the team were saying like, 'What's wrong with Chipotle?' And I started shedding a tear, like shedding tears explaining how you...
Back in my day, it was the pure...
When I was a boy. Yeah. It was more fresh than the farmers market.
But Will has a good hack. He says, 'I bought a Chipotle hat on eBay once and I would walk to the Chipotle in Ann Arbor and wear it when I went and they would just give me the employee discount every time. I didn't even ask. It was a $2 hat and I saved $7 on my $15 order every time.'
This is thinking outside the box.
He says, 'I used to be so into budgeting in Chipotle that I'd measure everything in Chipotle meals. Rent was four Chipotle meals a day. A nice hat was two Chipotle meals. I also gorged it. And in case this is fraud, it was more than six years ago, so past the statute of limitations. Can't get me. On second thought, I need to atone for my sins and repay Chipotle the $21 I stole from them by purchasing $21 of their stock. I am sorry, Chipotle.' That's very, very funny.
Moving on. We talked about this briefly. Another resignation has hit the timeline. The co-founder of xAI is out. You want to read through it?
Yeah. So, he says, 'I resigned from xAI today. This company and the family we became will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the war rooms, and all those battles we have fought together. It's time for my next chapter. It's an era with full possibilities. A small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible. Thank you to the entire xAI family. And Elon, thank you for believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime.' So I wonder if he took some of the executives at xAI were offered cash instead of staying around. You remember this? We talked about this, I think, last week. And so it's possible he just said, 'Cool. Time to move on.'
Did you see Jack Clark's post about this? Did he take it down? He said something about...
Manu says this isn't looking good. And it's the original xAI co-founders. There was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There's three remaining. Elon plus Manuel. Yeah. And Toby or...
Yeah. Jack Clark at Anthropic had some post but it's disappeared. But he was basically like, if you're... Oh, it is in the timeline. I don't know where it is but...
And someone said, 'Now do OpenAI.' And this Honcho says, 'Sam was always ahead of his time.' And you look at the original list, there's just...
There's Sam Altman and Greg are left and you had, you know, a very long list of others.
Yeah. Yeah. Jack Clark here said, 'People leaving regular companies: time for a change, excited for my next chapter. People leaving AI companies: I have gazed into the endless night and there are shapes out there. We must be kind to one another. I am moving on to study philosophy.'
Well, so this was like in reference to there was an Anthropic researcher that just left and it was like this whole essay and then he ends it with this poem.
People get deep at these companies. Yeah, it was SA over at Kleiner said head of Anthropic safeguards research just quit and said the world is in peril and then he's moving to the UK to write poetry and quote 'become invisible.' Other safety researchers and senior staff left over the last two weeks as well. Probably nothing. Yeah, so I think there's multiple factors going on. You can't discount the fact that many of these people like, you know, maybe made something in the range of $100 million in the last two years and if you're AGI-pilled enough you believe that that will be, you know, many, many, many, many, many lifetimes worth of wealth and so why not go to the UK and write poetry. There's obviously a more dystopian sci-fi vision where when this period of our lives gets turned into Hollywood blockbuster movies, this will be a moment where, you know, the safety researchers start peeling off and, you know, going all over the world to write poetry. Yeah.
I just want one AI co-founder researcher to leave and be like, 'Look, I got an allocation of an F80. I got a bus down coming. I'm good. I'm Gucci. I don't need... I quit. I quit.'
Schlom says probably burnout from organizational dysfunction and moderate to severe safety oneshotting.
Interesting. I don't know. Paula says guy who can't quit his AI lab because he's bad at writing essays. Just like deathly afraid of Pangram Labs just one-shot by Pangram and you can't post slop really quickly. AppLovin profitable advertising made easy with AppLovin AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Before we move on to the next story, let's pull up the Linear lineup and show you who we got today on the show. It's an absolute murderer's row. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Enzo Landino's in to break down NASCAR.
NASA has a new campaign. They did something that I'm mad that we didn't think of, which is they broke the world record for the loudest billboard ever.
It appears to be an engine built into a billboard, like an actual gas engine that just runs.
So, we'll talk to him about that. I want to ask him about the new Ferrari. Get his thoughts there as well.
Oh, yeah. That'll be great. Then we got Ashlee Vance in person. Danielson Thornton is coming in person. Val, CEO of AI.com.
Oh, yeah. That's going to be fun. He owns AI.
Yeah, he controls it. And I want to ask him about the whole Super Bowl debacle and how everything went down.
And then you said already Chris Valenzuela from Runway and then yeah, we'll close it out with...
Fun times. Moving on. Apollo says it avoided the pain of peers by steering clear of software holdings.
Software? Never heard of it.
What's that? Don't touch it. You know, people are saying the SaaS apocalypse or SaaS-mageddon, but assassination was right there. And I don't know why we're not just calling it the assassination. Isn't that better?
I would think assassination would be like SaaS is assassinating something else.
Oh, okay. You know, it's like your fund got assassinated. Assassinated.
Like I would think it got killed by SaaS.
Yeah, I guess you're right. SaaS apocalypse is maybe better. Apollo says fees rise as company reports record quarter for deployment of capital. Mark Rowan said the group's decision to avoid heavily investing in software companies during an era of soaring valuations will bolster its growth as investors move their money to firms that avoided a sector now threatened by AI. Rowan said he believed private capital groups would see a dispersion of returns depending on their exposure to software companies following growing fears of AI disrupting many IT businesses that triggered a recent sell-off. Apollo would benefit after largely avoiding such deals within its private equity portfolio and curtailing lending to the industry over the past decade, helping to bolster its performance versus many rivals. He said during an earnings call, 'I expect that we will be, along with a handful of other managers, prettier than we have been historically.' I like that.
I saw a bunch of Apollo's leaked returns.
I think I sent them to you.
I think they're just very, very...
Consistent. That's the whole point of like this fund.
But I don't know. Yeah. Sitting prettier kind of implies that they're going to be outperforming at least their own...
If you're in a bunch of the software that's selling off then yeah.
Their most recent buyout fund raised in 2023 has generated a 20% net return and has already returned about a third of investors' capital.
Significant outperformance versus the broader PE industry.
That has struggled to exit investments. And wait, what have they actually been investing in? Non-software industrials? I'm trying to...
You will failing to mention that.
They cut its exposure to software loans as it grew increasingly bearish about the sector's prospects in the wake of rapid inroads made by AI. The decision appears to have been validated by a recent sell-off in software stocks and the loans of many large IT companies amid rising AI fears. Rowan's comments came as Apollo reported better-than-forecast fourth-quarter earnings that included nearly $30 billion of net inflows during the final three months of the last year, pushing its AUM to almost a trillion dollars. Apollo, which manages private funds and owns insurer Athene, said it had a record quarter for deployment of capital, which helped lift the management fees it charges on its funds. So-called fee-related earnings rose 25% from a year earlier to $690 million, eclipsing Wall Street expectations. That was boosted by a 27% jump in management fees and a 41% rise in the fees it earns by originating and syndicating deals through its capital markets arm. Net income fell 55% from a year earlier to $660 million. The earnings were impacted by a $592 million income tax provision. The company also announced its board had approved a $4 billion share buyback plan. Annuity sales to everyday investors moderated from last year's highs with Athene reporting $34 billion in inflows through retail annuity sales in the year, including $7.3 billion in the final three months of the year, the insurance unit.
Every time one of these companies has earnings, it just makes me... it's hard to wait for at least one venture firm to get out into the public markets. Like how fun would it be to listen to Marc Andreessen on an earnings call?
Be so good. I was so optimistic that it was going to happen last year or maybe this year, but it just feels like that was total just like head fake from both General Catalyst and Andreessen. Like it never really went anywhere.
They're like, I don't want to go public, but I don't want my rival to go public before me.
Maybe, maybe, but I don't think it's happening. I don't think we'll see it. Although, aren't there some venture funds that might be traded on the public markets soon? So you might see some of that, but it'll still be tricky. It certainly won't be like a proper venture fund that we know on the markets. Really quickly, Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Monday.com had earnings and the stock went down 21% after they flagged AI agents as a competitive threat on their earnings call. Anyways...
What did they say? What did they say?
Trying to pull up what they said exactly. Issued weak guidance as it grapples with rising concerns that artificial intelligence is disrupting software business models. I imagine it's seat-based right now, Monday.com, and they have to transition to some sort of consumption-based, some sort of usage-based, something outcomes-based, I suppose.
Yeah, you'd think at least some would say like we actually love the seat-based model in the era of agents. Every agent will require a seat. You might have, you know, again, you might have a hundred employees, but then a bunch more agents. Maybe you can't charge nearly as much on a per-seat basis, but...
We'll see how this nets out.
Yeah, it seems pretty easy just to be like you have one agent that goes into the software and does everything that it needs to and then brings it out to your organization. It's like I need to use the tool.
There's one agent whose sole job is to pull it.
Yeah. Everyone gets a prompt box and then that agent has one seat and uses the tool and brings you back the results. That's...
Risk. Buc-ee's capital is out for blood. He's... you worried about stock-based comp? These businesses only need half their employees.
I believe he thinks that the SaaS apocalypse is overstated. So headcounts for assorted companies: Salesforce is at 87,000. ServiceNow 32,000. Workday is at 23,000. Zoom's at 12,000. DocuSign famously large at 8,000. OpenAI's at 7... Okta's at 7,000. UiPath at 5. Sprinklr at 4 and Anthropic's at 4,000. Yes, UiPath still has more employees than Anthropic. Infer from that what you will. The flip side of this is that the companies do need employees to go deploy AI and actually lead about change management and get the... they certainly need to talk to the NFL's photographer about the software that they should be using to upload those photos a little bit faster.
Tyler over at Paveon says, 'Correct, Buc-ee's. I have a strange amount of conviction that they could cut up to 40% and not impact growth.' Buc-ee's says in fact it would accelerate.
Peter T... it's a fake Peter Thiel account. Peter T.
Says really only 10 to 20% of X is a good case study. How much... how many is that actually? Did X really only cut...
I thought they cut like 70% of the workforce. I thought they were up at like 5,000. They went down to like 1,000. But while you look that up, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
I am pulling this up. I think it was like 80%.
80% reduction. Yeah, that's huge.
I'm seeing 80. Pre-acquisition, late 2021, they had 7,500 to 8,000 employees. As of late 2024, they had 2,800 employees.
Yeah, it was so... I mean it was such a chaotic time. Like they were changing the business model. A lot of advertisers were boycotting and pulling out. There was political considerations. There were all sorts of things that were going on. So I would hesitate to say that they accelerated the top line, but they certainly right-sized that business very, very quickly.
Yeah. Derek Thompson is giving a shout-out to Matt Levine. KPMG is trying to force its auditor to accept less money since accounting work can be significantly automated by AI, but KPMG makes money from accounting. So this looks like a company accidentally announcing to the world that its business model is under attack. Matt says, 'Auditing can basically be done by AI, so why should we pay for it?' It's not a crazy thing for most companies to think or to say to their auditors, but it's a crazy thing for an auditing firm to say to its auditor. That is wild. KPMG should be paying Grant Thornton more in these crazy AI times. Everyone needs to pay more for trusted human auditing. We'll go first. I guess that's what Grant Thornton said. I bet we should negotiate a discount.
Wait, they're saying... going to want trusted human? Well, that's Grant Thornton, like a different group.
Yeah, the... it seems like they'll have to switch to value-based pricing too, like everyone else. And the value, even if it can be one-shot with a prompt by some superintelligence, is nonzero. Like it is very valuable to have an external party verifying... verifying your work and the numbers that you're reporting. So it's definitely nonzero, but I...
Price wars all over the place. Price wars because for a long...
Yeah. Or I would say the other dynamic is you have like basically legacy, you know, the big brands in the space, they adopt maybe a more Coke and Pepsi model where like Coke and Pepsi both could, you've talked about this, get in an insane price war, cut down, compete on price so aggressively that there's just no money to be made anymore. But they have sort of like somewhat of an equilibrium where it's not really in any group's interest to compete prices to zero. And I would say like brand is still going to matter in this category, in audit with auditors specifically. And maybe that's where you find like bull cases within the broad sell-off is do they like Coke and Pepsi, it's a duopoly, not an oligopoly. So there's no third player that can be, 'Oh, we're 5% of the market, there's so much to gain, let's go be the bull in the china shop.' Just doesn't happen. And then also there's lock-in around the brand and then there's also lock-in around the distribution because Coke and Pepsi have trucks that go to every store where it needs to be distributed. Auditing might not be the same structure. It might not... I think it's more oligopolistic. I think there's more firms in the market and there's less of like you have to use this auditor because they're in this particular distribution channel. Anyone can pick up the phone, call the new upstart auditor that has the same level of quality at a lower price, and if you're getting a good product, you'll just go there. As opposed to if you're at a gas station and they only have Coke or Pepsi, you're sort of out of luck. Really quickly, Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Let's pull up this clip of Gerson...
on CNBC. He hosted CNBC last week. Yes. I tuned in to as much of it as I could.
Why is this happening to the degree it is? As we've discussed on numerous occasions, is it overdone? At times you've said yes. The last time we were together you said something like 90% of the software companies that were down the way they are deserve to be. Those I think were your exact words.
So when you and I were together on January 6th, I said you have to understand the difference between earnings and revenue and stock price. Okay? And what's happened in software is hard for people to get their head around because the stocks have been cut in half. But that's not what the market is discounting, Scott. The market is looking into the future and saying, three years ago I could buy 35 years' worth of Salesforce's free cash flow into the future. Give them 35 times free cash flow because I had that level of predictability. It was like a government bond. It was a sure thing. You definitely were going to get those. And then we have AI do what AI's done over the course of the last several months. And people just said something very rational: I can't see as far into the future. So I'm going to pay less for the terminal value. I'm going to pay less for those future free cash flows. I'm not penalizing them because they're missing their numbers today. I'm just putting it in the too-hard bucket because I can't predict those future numbers. So the only way that reverses, Scott, is those companies have to accelerate their core revenues and show that they are beneficiaries of AI. The companies that do that—Databricks is accelerating their core revenues. I think this quarter they grew over 60%. Snowflake, ClickHouse, these are companies that are accelerating their core revenues because AI relies on them. I think they'll do fine, but application software where I can't see into the future, they're going to have lower multiples.
I'll tell you this week was especially acute in some of the moves on the news of this updated tool from Anthropic, which you're an investor in. Of course, that speaks to the marketplace and the investment community doesn't necessarily know even yet how to assess the level to which software is going to be disrupted and by whom and by how.
And even a simple, what appears to be a simple update or an upgrade from Anthropic causes software names to go down. It causes private credit names to go down because they're exposed in their loans to software businesses. We're still trying to get our arms, it feels like, around this exploding technology and the impact it's going to have, right? And it's exponential, the rate of change, the rate of improvement of these...
Popping any bubble he can get his hands on.
Second week in December. A lot of good points. I mean, I think the real SaaS apocalypse might not start until you have some of the labs public and people can actually really rotate out of software fully and say, I don't want to own this thing that I don't fully understand how AI is going to impact it when I could own the disruptor, right? The Anthropics, the OpenAIs, etc. So...
Yeah. Yeah. People were asking like, where will the 50 billion come from? Where will the 100 billion of capital come from? And we see this in China too where one company will go public and you actually see a drop in the previous Baidu or whoever the legacy company is because there just isn't that much liquidity in the market. So it needs to come from somewhere. Sorry.
Yeah. I just don't know how the narrative around SaaS flips positive because the models are not getting worse, right? They only get better. Yeah.
We actually need to see some type of plateau. Like SaaS would benefit from a model plateau, right? It's like, hey, there's sort of a set... we have a set of capabilities. SaaS companies can deploy this, but if the models just keep getting better and better and better and agents get better and better and better, where's the bottom for SaaS other than, you know, some type of like minimal free cash flow multiple?
Well, it's like refocusing on a narrative that has durability even in a...
world where software R&D is essentially free. So I guess what I'm saying is like, Brad's right. If you see a business actually really accelerating, growth accelerating, then it's possible to get excited about that one company, but it's hard to get excited at any point about SaaS broadly because the models are just going to keep improving and that just seems to be more and more of a threat.
Yes. But within SaaS there will be companies that reveal to the market and correctly message that they are in fact AGI resistant because of ad networks, because of lock-in effects, because of regulatory moats. There will be a number of categories that emerge. Like when we talk about the payment rails, those feel like yes, you could maybe vibe code it, but are you going to vibe code your bank charter and all these other things that you need to do and get all the customers, the distribution, the lock-in? So I think within SaaS there will be things that are pretty easy to just rip out and replace with something directly like a model, and there will be other companies that are old and are legacy, but you're just like, 'Oh, yeah, that actually can't be assaulted by a model. It's impenetrable because it's actually a different thing.' And so those companies will wind up sort of rebounding, I would imagine.
Yeah. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange, want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We love... when, 1792. 1792. That's when they started. That's when they started. Overnight success. We created the country and then almost immediately we decided time to exchange some stocks. Got to start.
Michael over at Quiet Capital is quoting Buc-Quote. Buc-Quote says, 'For 50 years we treated the supremacy of asset-light businesses as a permanent economic law. But if AI commoditizes asset-light businesses, we'd just be reverting to the historical mean where value accrued to atoms, infrastructure, energy. It would be a 50-year blip, an anomaly.' Interesting. Michael says, 'This is one of the most underrated observations in tech right now. If AI commoditizes software, what's actually safe? Regulated liability-bearing businesses. Someone has to be on the hook.' Oh, sure. Anything touching the physical world, hardware, manufacturing, energy, that's the kind of Tesla.
Yeah. These are the subcategories of things that are sort of SaaS businesses now but will reveal themselves as being not actually that asset-light.
Yeah. Proprietary data sets. AI makes your data more valuable, not less. Marketplaces and businesses with network effects. Liquidity greater than software. Operationally intense businesses, the bad businesses become the best ones. And cyber security and physical security. More AI equals more attack surface. Yeah, EquipmentShare, I wonder how they're doing. They went out, IPOed, I guess it was a week or so ago, January 23rd. They've done well specifically because they have so much supply on the platform that they actually own. Yeah, and we're just so far away from anything like an Optimus being able to, like, 'Hey, make me a bunch of heavy machinery. Don't make mistakes.'
Yeah. Carried No Interest is in the reply saying, 'How is this underrated? Most have been talking about this for over a year.' I'll say it again. An HVAC business is not vibe coding a ServiceTitan competitor. That's true, but you know, there's still the risk of the software vendor for HVAC businesses now has 25 competitors that can vibe code competitors, and there's just a lot more fragmentation, a lot more competition in the space as...
Yeah, that's interesting. ServiceTitan serves a pretty wide range, but they also serve a bunch of SMBs. Yeah. And those SMBs, if you went to them and said, 'Hey, I can build you ServiceTitan, but I'm going to cut your bill in half because I can use AI.' Exactly. That is a real risk to the bottom because a single owner-operated business might just say like, 'Yeah, no one's getting fired if I choose the wrong software. It might be a little bit annoying, but if I can save a lot of money, maybe it's worth it.' So I think there is some risk there.
Yeah, there was a good comment in the chat earlier. Someone was saying, you know, it's the famous Bezos quote, 'Your margin is my opportunity.' And so a small company comes in, sees high SaaS margins, can actually go attack them now. And instead of needing to raise a billion dollars and do five years of R&D, they can raise 10 million and do one year of R&D and have a competitor that's ready to go, you know, head-to-head on a battle card against an entrenched public company, SaaS company. And maybe they're only earning 30% margins instead of 60% margins, but they're happy with that because hey, it's a new business and they started it from nothing. And if they make $10 million, they get to take a lot of that home and stuff. And so there's a lot of opportunity for these new companies, but then that's obviously a threat for the incumbents really quickly. public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Where do you want to go next?
She says the greatest rebrand in enterprise software history is calling consulting revenue forward deployed engineering. I do wonder if a year or so from now we'll see companies that, you know, these companies that went from one to 10 or one to 20 million in revenue really quickly, it just turns out like, hey, they were just kind of doing a bunch, they were doing about $10 million worth of engineering work and it wasn't actually... again, a lot of them are setting it up where like, hey, we're going to come and build a bunch of software for you and then we're going to charge on an ongoing basis or based on usage. But still, I'm sure there's some examples where it really is just like, you know, effectively consulting or you're running like a software development agency. So...
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny thinking about OpenAI. I think they're at 8,000 employees and wasn't the report that they're hiring something like 800 forward deployed engineers? So you're going to have 10% of an AI lab that's focused on AI research curing cancer is going to be like forward deployed engineers. And you have to imagine that that was basically zero, you know, five years ago. I mean, I guess Greg Brockman was out there paying people to use GPT-2, which I love, but it is going to be a very interesting shift for that business. And I think the forward deployed engineering is going to be important, like the AI diffusion question. It's a lot of sticky systems. It's a lot of people that don't have time. The fact that we see these spikes in attention during long weekends and holidays, it's like that's when people have time to go do the new project and stop doing the same system again and again and again. And a forward deployed engineer comes into your organization and just is able to do that hard work that you don't have the slack capacity for.
Brian says, 'Did you guys see that guy who offered in-person OpenClaw setups for people and accidentally realized it was a seven-figure business?' No, I did. I did see this. It was like a Geek Squad thing. That's really cool. I wonder, I wonder...
No, there are plenty of people who are like, 'I don't want to open the terminal ever. Like, I feel like I'm hacking into the Matrix. It's just not for me. I don't know. I'm going to mess up. I don't know any of these commands.' And so, I mean, that's why the labs are launching desktop products around that are wrappers for the terminal agents. But yeah, there's going to be a bull market for deployed engineers in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler?
I was going to say that's like Ben. Ben's scared to use the terminal. Oh, called out. Called out. He's not even here. Where is he? He's practicing T-Mox or whatever. CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
China is going all in to beat the US on humanoid robots. Yes, Beijing is showering companies with support, but some fear a bubble. Where's our bubble gun? Oh, yeah. We don't have the bubble gun. But look at this. Look at this terrifying lead. Do you see this? So, if you scroll way down in the article, you can see the comparison of the different humanoid robots. And they're getting taller. Chinese humanoid robots are getting taller very, very quickly. So, the Unitree G1, the Unitree G1 is the robot that most people think of when they think of Chinese humanoid robot. The Unitree G1 has 23 joints and it's 4 feet 4 in tall. 4 feet 4 in tall. That's something you can drop kick across the room. It's probably pretty safe. But they're getting taller. The UniX AI Panther has 34 joints and he's 5 foot 3. The UBTECH Walker S2, it has 52 joints and it's 5'9. We're getting short king status now.
Then now they're, now the AI Squared Robotics Alphabot 2, 5'11.
Wait, that could be some regulation that I could get behind. Yes. All humanoids should be capped at a certain height. Yeah. So that if any people out there are a little bit on the shorter side, they get to feel tall. And then, but in general, a lot of the average person should mog the robot. Yes. On X, Elon said the Optimus is 5'11 as well. 5'11. That's a very reasonable height. So the AI Squared Robotics Alphabot 2, 34 joints of freedom. Yeah. Let's give it up for the short... degrees of freedom. Let's give it up for Trey. It's... Yes. Give it up. It's 5'11. It has wheels. But it's starting to look intimidating. It's starting to look...
Ashley Vance was at the latest robotics fight. We got to ask him about that later.
Yeah. So, the Wall Street Journal has a whole deep dive on what's happening in China with regard to humanoid robotics. China's going all in to beat the United States on humanoid robots. Of course, they have a ton of industrial advantages. So Elon Musk has been telling investors for months that Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot will revolutionize the world and create a new mega industry, but most of it could belong to China, he has warned. 'China is an ass kicker, next level,' Musk said in January. 'To the best of our knowledge, we don't see any significant competitors outside of China. China is moving quickly.' Shots fired at Figure and 1X, but I mean the supply chain is not something... Oh yeah, true. Yeah, he talks about this in the context of are you going to be able to make a million of... Yes. Yes. He's thinking about like massive scale gigafactory status. So, China's moving quickly to dominate the industry. Humanoid robotics companies are sprouting up from Shenzhen to Suzhou with more than 140 and counting. There's 140 different companies. So, you got a market map over there. We have five and they have 140. They're tapping a vast ecosystem of parts suppliers and engineering talent. They're starting to produce humanoid robots at scale and actively...
humanoid running a bit right now. That's how you run. You ever go through TSA and they make you take your shoes off? What's the deal with airplane food?
They're actively introducing them into real life scenarios in factories, hotels, and offices. Yes. Grok unhinged voice mode in an Optimus intimidating hanging out around the office just running bit. It would actually be hilarious. It would actually be hilarious. Get ready. I mean, you're going to be able to do that in like two years. That's, it's going to be very viral. Is that like skin over a humanoid? Not a fan of that. I think I like the Terminator more than the humanoid with the skin. That is odd.
Setting the broader industry direction is Beijing, which has identified embodied AI, the fusion of artificial intelligence with physical systems, as a cutting edge technology area China wants to own in the coming 5 years. It's in the latest 5-year plan. Local governments are showering companies with land and discounted office rent. Banks are offering favorable loans. Since late 2024, Beijing, Shenzhen, and other cities have established investment funds totaling more than 26 billion, that's right, that's a thousand times as much as France is investing to inject capital into the industry. Just kidding, France, we love you. Government agencies and state-owned companies are serving as early adopters, buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums, at events, and on the street as Robocops performing traffic control. The deployments are helping firms build a market and collect data to make the robots work better.
Yeah. Bill Bishop was saying next week China kind of has some seasonal celebration that they're doing and there's going to be hundreds of robots on display. Totally. They're very good at effectively like scripted dances, maneuvering.
I have been surprised that, I mean, China was very early with the drone shows. Then we've seen a number of drone show companies come to America and do like sort of bring that technology to America. I still have, you ever seen a drone show in person in America? I've never like run into one like, you know, oh they're, oh like I'm driving in LA and like the Chargers stadium just has a drone show, like yeah. Or like I live near the Rose Bowl so like I would imagine once in a while they have concerts but I've never seen a drone show there. That certainly is getting diffused into America, but the humanoid robot shows can do a whole another level of just like bizarre thing and it works particularly well there as opposed to a truly unbounded like just be a worker at a restaurant, right? It's like just dance in the scripted really quickly. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So the moves closely track the way in which China built up other industries such as electric vehicles which benefited from incentives from buyers to help stimulate demand. Now China has many of the world's most notable EV makers including brands that are eating up the market shares of General Motors, Volkswagen and others.
Have you seen the people doing the 'I'm outside in the BYD'? Oh yes. Is that a Drake line? Did he actually say that? He says 'I'm outside in the AMG.' Oh, and they changed it. And so there's like thousands. If this is a campaign by BYD because it's always showing off the features like it can... it can, the way that it can automatically park, like parallel park for you. Not just like a normal parallel park, but it can like shift. I don't know. It's like the Hummer EV. So it has like the crabwalk, right? Like the wheels turn off the axis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can sort of tank turn where you're spinning the car without moving forward or backwards. And then I think you can also tilt all four wheels so you can drive in at a really aggressive angle. But I feel like I saw one, maybe it was AI, that was like even more brainbreaking than anything I'd seen from an American car at all. Yeah. Can do really crazy U-turn.
And there was also, I saw one video of someone driving a BYD on like sand dunes that was really crazy. So people show it off in snow. People show it off all over the place. Good marketing. Good marketing. We'll see what they do with the humanoid robots. China is once again mobilizing state support, supply chain depth, and rapid commercialization to build a new strategic sector. Success will depend on who can best solve the myriad technical problems associated with humanoid robots. The industry is still in its early days and it may take years to take off, if it ever does. Skeptics say humanoid robots are a bubble and may never find a true use case. What... it's like the most obvious use case. It's like you don't have to reach that far to be like, put the e-commerce package in the box like they're already doing. Yeah. Like anything a human can do. I can't think of any good use. Who said this? Horse says cars may be a bubble.
Bad news. China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoid robots. Government agencies and state-owned companies in China are buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums. That's an interesting place. It does feel like we'll be in an era of like the Optimus is already deployed into a lot of Tesla showrooms which is just like a cool thing to see if you're at, you know, I was at the Americana and Brand in Glendale, went into the Tesla store and it was just like there's Lucid Air store and there's a Rivian store but the Tesla store has a robot and so I want to go see that robot. Tesla diner has one. Oh yeah, they do. Yeah. I drive by that every single day and I've never, I still have never been because I pulled into the parking lot one day and I felt so uncomfortable because it was all electric cars and I'm sitting there with this supercharged V8 just being like, I don't belong here. I don't feel welcome and so I shamefully like drove away. Yeah, I have so much respect for Tesla and yet I've never wanted a food product from Tesla. That is a big part of it. Hey, I mean it's like a stunt marketing though.
Let's go into US worries. Even so, China's momentum is a source of concern for US policy makers and tech leaders. The White House has been working on an executive order aiming to boost the development of American robotics industry. Among the US's concerns, many American robotics companies will rely on China's supply chain. Dylan Patel over at SemiAnalysis has talked about this a lot, like if humanoids become a thing, like China has the supply chain almost exclusively. Tesla's Optimus will count on Chinese suppliers for components such as roller screws for robot joints and motors for robot hands for mass production. The US still leads in one key area. The foundational AI models that serve as the brains of humanoids, companies including Tesla, Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have made advances tapping cutting edge technology from the likes of Nvidia and Google. But China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoids, including sensors, batteries, and other components. With the ability to source so much locally, Chinese humanoid companies are able to make design changes easily and at low cost. It is a hassle buying from China and waiting two weeks while something ships to you. They don't have to do that. They just walk right across the street, pick up whatever they need, bring it back.
Yeah, we're in the process of shifting, we did some sampling for merch and... we're refactoring our supply chain. Exactly. Our merch supply chain, I would say it's looking like 80% of the merch that we make for our upcoming drop will be made right here in Los Angeles. Yeah, it's exciting.
I mean I do think there's probably some cool things you can do with delivery of humanoids, right? Because if you're buying it from China, you could just like have it go on the plane and just like sit down, sit in the seat, walk over, have it swim. Yeah, it needs to learn to swim. Give it a windsurfing board, a paddle board, give it a foil and it can paddle all the way here. I mean, yeah. I mean, Palmer's talked about that with Anduril, like they want the planes to fly from the factory straight into the battlefield. Pretty crazy.
Chinese makers of humanoid robots, which include humanlike machines with wheels, as well as those with legs, don't have to have legs to be a humanoid robot, apparently, announced orders worth more than 300 million in the second half of 2025. So, the Chinese humanoid robotics industry is at a $600 million run rate. It's not bad. It's not tiny. Like, that's pretty significant. That's more than just like demos. I mean, sure, there's like a lot of museums and random places where you just want to show something off, but that's getting... Isn't... It's hard to like, you know, take every Elon projection at full face value, but he's talking about being able to make up to a million humanoids in the, what is it, the X and S facilities in Fremont. I have no... it's so unclear like where these are going to price still. Like I think you can look at Chinese companies for like some type of comp. Like it's going to be hard to really compete. But yeah, Morgan Stanley has, let's see, 100,000. So that's very interesting. So the run rate right now is $600 million. Morgan Stanley is predicting up to 100,000 humanoids shipped in 2026. If there's not significant increases in price for these, that would be $6,000 per humanoid. It must be higher. So, I would expect based on this Morgan Stanley prediction of 100,000 humanoids shipped in 2026, you would expect revenue for the industry to be in the billions for sure because I have to imagine that the average selling price of a humanoid is more like 20,000. It's more like a car than...
You can get a Unitree G1 on their site for $13,500, but they're going to charge you for delivery, John. They're going to charge you $144.
Wait, really? $144? They're like, 'Sorry, our margins are so bad on this. They're actually negative. We can't afford free shipping for this human-sized thing across the ocean. We're going to have to ship it in the spookiest coffin possible.' She gets up, wakes from the dead. Very macabre. Very, very spooky. Anyway, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI.
Adjusting bed sheets. On a recent weekday at UniX AI, a Chinese robot maker, founder Fred Yang showed a group of investors how its wheeled humanoid Panther could easily adjust messy bed sheets, pick up trash, and place dirty clothes in the laundry machine, and start the wash. The company has about a hundred employees now and it's developed three versions of its humanoid robots with a starting price around $12,000 each. It has deployed in hundreds of places such as hotels, mostly in China. I was in a hotel in San Francisco once and there was not a humanoid robot. It was more like a trash can with wheels, kind of R2-D2 looking like guy. If you ordered coffee, they would put it on the delivery robot, and then the robot would get in the elevator, take the elevator up to your room, and then knock, and then you would take it out of the bin. It was more like those delivery robots that you see on the street, the Coco, right? So, you know, just one level up that it still has wheels. It needs to be in a controlled facility like a hotel, something that's not super unpredictable.
Goes pretty hard to name your humanoid Panther. Panther is a good name. I don't know if I would be fighting alongside Panther in the Singularity. I think in the Skynet Apocalypse, Panther's coming for me. I'm gonna have to shred it.
Yang, who studied at the University of Michigan and Yale University, returned home to China to start UniX a year and a half ago. He said, 'China's deep bench of technical talent and government support help make it a good place to launch. Some local governments offer free land and office space for three years, followed by three more years at half price.' They're giving out free land over there. We can't even get an art gallery in Hollywood to make a TV show. We need help. Saga continues. We got to compete.
Policy is one of the most decisive reasons that embodied AI is doing so well in China, Yang said in August. 'I treat the government policy as a force to crack the market and our embodied AI startups are the force to push.' They call it Robot Valley. Other cities and provinces have set up their own action plans and embodied AI funds to provide capital for the industry. Tencent, Huawei, and EV maker BYD have been part of a so-called Robot Valley in Shenzhen with 15 robotics firms there. Shenzhen has said it is setting up a roughly $1.4 billion fund focused on AI and robotics industries and another valued around 640 million. What is that? A fund for ants. Robotics fund they're making. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money to just give away. They're making ant-sized robots. I mean, that's a lot of robots. That's definitely like get a ton of these companies to Series B, you know, like get them with a product that actually ships, you know, hire good people, do the R&D, do initial manufacturing run, and then yeah, when you're ready... that much with triple-layered SUVs every day. Every day.
One humanoid robotics firm there, AI Squared Robotics, enjoys subsidized rent as well as access to interns from nearby universities. Their costs are also subsidized. Eric Guo holds a PhD from Purdue and worked previously at Microsoft. The firm's general purpose humanoid called Alphabot is currently used in factories including LCD... This implies there's a firm called Sigabot. Sigabot. Yes. Somewhat antisocial. Doesn't actually like humans and looks out on a rainy day. It's just plotting, scheming, just plotting and listening to vibe reels.
'Our primary focus is to figure out how to make robots usable and operational even when they haven't fully achieved 100% perfection in technology,' Guo said in September. Beijing also has an economic development zone with humanoid robot startups. They are doing a lot, 14 billion to support AI and robotics industries. So, China's recipe for government support, low-cost supply chains, and technical talent worked wonders in the EV industry. But it also led to hundreds of brands crowding the market and severe price competition. With many companies unprofitable as more robot firms emerge, fears of a bubble have risen. Hoping to avoid that outcome, China's government is drafting a set of technical standards to guide development of the humanoid robot industry, weed out unqualified players, and accelerate adoption, according to researchers involved in the process. In November, China's top industry ministry set up a standards committee with executives from leading companies as well as state labs. So, China's financial regulators have also tightened oversight on robotics companies seeking to go public to reduce the risk of a bubble. So, they say if you go public, you got to be accountable. You got to follow all of the regulations so that you're not just fleecing the public.
Apparently, Warren Buffett was an investor in BYD. Gabe just brought this up. He was. But he exited in late 2025. He held it for 17 years. What? I didn't know BYD was that old. Wow. He got it early. Was he like a pre-IPO investor or something? I don't... How do you get into BYD 17 years ago? That's crazy.
Buffett began investing in BYD in 2008 when it paid 230 million for 225 million shares. Yeah. Equivalent to a 10% stake at the time. Wow. Basically led the Series A. Basically. Yeah. That's crazy.
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The Wall Street Journal is trying to unpack what is going on in the US labor market. They identified a number of factors that were sort of interesting. I thought we should read through them. So, the pace of hiring in America has dropped precipitously and there isn't a single reason why, says the Wall Street Journal. Instead there are a lot of them. Uncertainty over tariff policy. There's a variety of things here, but they identify... uncertainty over tariff policy has made it difficult for many companies to plan ahead, leading them to hold off on hiring. Some, particularly small businesses, tariffs have raised costs, making it more difficult to take on new employees. Higher short-term interest rates are another pressure, particularly for smaller firms, which often rely on credit card borrowing to meet financing needs. Tech companies that hired heavily in the wake of the pandemic are still dealing with an overhang of workers. And then there's another factor. Workers aren't leaving the jobs they have. The number of people that quit in December was 3.2 million and in March of 2022 it was 4.5 million. So less people are quitting and so that's obviously putting pressure on the labor market because there's less employee churn. When post-pandemic hiring was in full swing, the quits rate, which measures quits as a share of employment, was 2%, well short of the 2.3 it averaged in 2019 before the pandemic.
Yeah, it felt like at the back half of last year, a lot of people started saying very publicly, if you have a job right now, keep it. Yeah. So yeah, maybe it's...
So the labor market Thursday reported that the overall number of hires employers made in December came to 5.3 million. That put the so-called hires rate, the number of hires employers made as a share of overall employment, at 3.3%. That's a very low number, not only below the level of a few years earlier when businesses were desperate to bring on new workers, but also well below its level before COVID hit. Low hiring has historically correlated to a much higher unemployment rate than the US is actually experiencing, about 4.4%. The disconnect between the two reflects an unusual environment where despite the low pace of hiring, employers haven't been shedding as many workers, notwithstanding some of the big recent layoff announcements. As a result, employment has been growing at a glacial pace with the economy adding the fewest jobs last year outside of a recession since 2003. And economists expect annual revisions, including the January employment report coming out Wednesday, will bring the 2025 jobs tally lower.
Still, the relatively low number of layoffs, said JP Morgan Chase economist Mike Foli, is a reflection of an economy that continues to chug along and hasn't undergone the kind of shock of demand that leads employers to start shedding workers. So top lines aren't decelerating. The economy is doing well, but the low level of quits on the other hand is probably driven by workers' sense that the labor market is fragile. And there was another article in the Wall Street Journal today about how the recruiting business is flipping and it used to be employers would pay the recruiter fee, but now job seekers are paying recruiters to find me a job. Like, if you find me a good job, I will pay you to find me the job. Oh, success fee. Success paid by the talent. Yes. Which is the opposite of what it usually is. That's interesting. So, consumers surveyed by the New York Fed in December put their chances of finding new work in the next three months if they lost their jobs... because if you're a company and you find out somebody's going around offering to pay people to find them a job, it's a very probably negative signal because a lot of the best talent has no shortage of job opportunities. Sure. Yeah.
Yeah, I was looking at this. I mean, there were other attempts at this over the years, people trying to build kind of like talent agencies for tech talent. There was at least one company that was doing that. I don't know the latest on them. But it's, yeah, people trying to comp the tech hiring market to sports, right? And it felt like we had that moment in summer of last year. But in reality, those people again, you know, hopefully if you're negotiating a comp package worth 100 million or 50 million or even 10 million, you have like a lawyer involved, but unclear if anybody really capitalized on that moment and became like the agent for a lot of these different researchers.
Yeah, I talked to one person who was sort of a talent agent, recruiter, I think for like GP positions at venture capital firms. And there's a few other people that have sort of played in that space, but not too much.
I have one more thing, but quickly. Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes, and apps fast.
So I was looking at the share of white collar work over the last century in America. In the 1900s white collar work was around 18% of American labor and electrification was the big technology of the day. It was transforming factories, cities and homes. Then in the 1910s we got the automobile. White collar work moved upwards to 20%. Then in the 1920s you get radio and consumer electricity. White collar work goes up a little bit more, 22%, 25%. In the 1930s you get aviation. Despite the depression white collar work kept climbing, 25 to 27%. In the 1940s you get nuclear, radar, synthetics, white collar work goes up to 30%. In the 50s, you get television. You're up at 35-40% white collar work. In the 1960s, you get mainframe computers and space technology. White collar work's up at 40-42%. IBM is starting to dominate. The 1970s, you get semiconductors and microprocessors. White collar work goes up to 46%. The personal computer in the 80s leads to 50% of the American workforce working in white collar work. The internet in the 90s pushes that up to 58%. You have Netscape, Amazon, Google. Mobile and smartphone kick off in the 2000s. White collar work's up at 60% then. And then the 2010s you get cloud computing that takes it to 62%. So now we're at like between 60 and 63% white collar work. There's this big question about like do we redefine how people work? Where do things shift around? But Tyler...
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I mean, I think Boris... you got a blue collar on right now? I do have a blue collar on. I think it was Boris yesterday. He was like, 'Well, maybe we have more blue collar jobs in some way, but the colors are less blue, right?' So, it's like maybe you're in a factory, but you're just using an iPad, right? You're not actually like moving things with your hands. Totally. Totally. I think it's like very, I think the line is getting increasingly blurry like in the US.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree. And it does seem like people will just be moving around to new jobs. New jobs will be created. But certainly a lot of opportunity for like chaos and turmoil if things happen quickly. Although at least according to the Wall Street Journal, there's a whole bunch of different factors that are going on in the labor market. They sort of conclude that article talking about how it's still difficult to really quantify the impact of AI because there's so many other things happening around interest rates, tariffs, quit rates, hiring slowing, COVID overhang that, you know, you shouldn't just jump to being like AI is 100% explanatory for what's happening in the labor market.
Quickly let me explain to you Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. You want to go back to Ferrari. There's more Ferrari.
He's an automotive advocate according to his bio. He says to all the people who for some reason want the inside of a Ferrari to keep looking like a mid-range gaming mouse, here's a historical comparison that may provide some context for recent design choices. This is very cool. I really, it was easy obviously to clock that the steering wheel of the Jony Ive Ferrari looks like some classic Ferraris, but I hadn't seen a shot exactly like this. I can't tell. I don't know what car this actually is. But you can see a lot of the same functionality. Even the vents up at the front are quite similar. They've just modernized it. So, my main thing, I'm going to have many more thoughts on the Ferrari, but I will wait to see what the outside of the car actually looks like. That's true.
Yeah. I mean, very mixed results. Some people were super excited about this design. It's always just cool to see like what Jony Ive is up to outside of Apple. Like, this is one of the first big projects that we've seen. You know, we've heard about the LoveFrom acquisition with OpenAI, what he'll be doing there, but all of that is still very rumored. It's unclear how much of his design work is actually working its way through the OpenAI organization, but here is just like a project that he did from start to finish and turned over, like they delivered not just like a deck, but like a series of books. Do you see this? Like five multiple hundred page like coffee table books around their work. Like here are all of our references. Here's how we think about Ferrari's history. All this stuff. I think it was very, very cool. But very mixed reaction. Lee says, 'Cover the badge.' And you'd think this was the interior of a budget hatchback. I don't know if that's entirely fair. I think that up close and personal, you could convince me from far away that this was in the new Mini Cooper. Yeah, totally. But I think the thing that is undeniable is like some of the little details, right? To start the car, you can like pull this thing out, lights up. I think that'll be very cool.
Yeah, Ilia has the Imagine starting your car like that. It does look very cool. Is this in the ceiling? Like why is the video... this looks like you pull it down from the ceiling? It doesn't look like... the way the camera is pointed looks like this will be up top which is very cool and very different. And I think this is something we were talking to a friend about that the tactile feel and the way, like I saw some ASMR video of all the different buttons and the buttons make, even if it looks like the same switch, it makes a slightly different sound when it clicks. And so you could potentially have an audio cue that knows, okay, if I click this, it's the light. If I click this, it's the windshield wiper. If I click this, it's defrost. And all of that makes no sense in a gas car because a Ferrari is going to be very loud. But in an electric car, you could actually hear all these little subtle cues. And it really takes beyond, like the image doesn't do it justice. I just know that when you're there and you're feeling the materials and then interacting with them and the sound that the materials make and the feeling of every knob, every button, how it...
Works. That's very interesting. But at the same time, Porm says it looks like a PS2 peripheral. So, you got him dead to rights there. But you know, you got to see it. Yeah, this is it. All the buttons and switches in the Faro sound incredible. Love that they went for a real tactile experience instead of just a touchscreen. If we have audio here, you can hear them sound different.
And it's really cool. Yeah, those sound the same. But that's good. That's good. You ever seen one of those new car reviews where they push plastic throughout the whole car and sometimes it it it like...
This is it. Listen. So, if you go back a little bit. So, listen to the different switches. They sound different. Even though they're like on the same dash, this one.
Okay. See different sounds. That's really cool and unique. I've never seen that before. I was I was I I was intrigued.
I like this. I like it. I like this. Johnny, I've come on the show. Johnny Drive Johnny drives making cars now. A lot of people in Silicon Valley are are are teeing up. Uh Ilia Sukar uh said, "How do I order the Johnny IV car? I'm ready. You got to call it the Johnny Drive." Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Ready? We can bring him in.
Venzo is in the ream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultrad. Venenzo, how are you doing?
Good see just here talking about car.
Oh, this is the Williams Pit Crew. Retro Pit Crew.
That's very nice. Uh shirt.
Well, thank you for taking the time.
We might have to do a Puma collab.
Still waiting for my TVPN.
Uh we'll send it to you. We'll send it.
Aren't we all? Everyone's waiting except for me. I John John this morning...
John this morning was like, "Yeah, it's really cool how how every you know, every Tuesday you wear a new one of one, but we're in the sampling process, so don't worry. We we got a bunch of stuff."
We will be mass producing.
Let's get I want So, we've been talking about Ferrari, but I I wanted your take on the new Johnny IV car.
I hadn't actually seen that video yet.
The luch luch. It's luch John. Luche. Light means light in Italian.
Yeah. Break it down. What was your reaction? Do you like it? Is it too iPad like? Does it look like a PS2 peripheral to you? What do you think?
I think I'm I'm I'm with Jordy in this one where I'm like I'm kind of torn. Like I I want to like it for what it is and I think it's it looks cool. It looks great, but is it is it Ferrari? It is a little But is electric Ferrari? You know, they're doing a different drivetrain.
Well, that's a whole other that's a whole other issue.
Why not just go full send and change?
It's so funny. Uh cuz cuz uh you know American consumers have broadly rejected EVs even though there are some some that sell well but every American manufacturer like Ferrari is so late to the game. Every American manufacturer has already taken like a multi- tens of billions of dollars worth of write downs already. So they're coming in. So I'm expecting the car to be cool. I'm expecting it to sell well in LA which naturally means it will sell terribly in the rest of the country. Expecting it to be uh Ferrari's just like known watch F1, right? Like and and decide do you want to daily a Ferrari? I've tried doing that. It's not good. Um I expect uh but but the the price point's interesting. The Johnny thing I'm expecting.
Do we know the price point yet? No, I just I think you can assume like it's not going to price like the per song up in the half a million dollar range because you're getting a naturally aspirated V12 and this is like not even...
Here's what they got to do. They're they're they're changing the drivetrain. They're changing the UI and all the interior. They got to change the exterior. It's got to look like a cyber truck and it's got to be orange. They say we're we're burning the ships. No, no Ferrari design cues whatsoever. Just complete blank slate. Uh you already frustrated a lot of people. Why not just frustrate 100% of the audience?
Have you Do you do you do you know when they're going to come out with the actual like what the car actually looks like because the render that's been getting shared around is not released by...
I did not see the date on anything.
Um I I the render looks doesn't look impressive. So I really hope that's not what it's going to look like.
Yeah. Uh, NASCAR. NASCAR broke a what is it? A Guinness World Record for loudest billboard. What's going on? I guess that's a I guess it's a thing.
This is the alpha. You got to be making up records that only you can achieve.
Yeah, they have got a billboard out in Time Square, which it feels like there's so much motorsport stuff happening in Time Square. We had the Cadillac F1 reveal. Aston Martin took out some billboards out there. Um, well, I said some billboards. They had a whole bunch of Times Square uh queued up with their reveal. Their launch was happening. Uh and then NASCAR did this. But I I thought was really impressive was the ad they put out. Did you guys see the ad they put out?
The guy in the red truck. The guy in the red truck.
Clint Eastwood's kid. That's Scott Eastwood. Yeah. So it um it really impressive. So a lot of they had a moment a kind of a Budlight moment too, right? They kind of switched up. Started alienating their typical base.
Wait, so they switched up on their day ones?
They did switch up on their day. They were They were accused of switching up on their day ones. But But this is...
Let's play Let's play the campaign. Uh I just I just dropped it for the team. We can We can watch it together.
We can watch it together.
Little watch party. I love it.
It's pretty fantastic if you're...
One second. So we can be loud.
We don't come from royalty. We come from bootleggers and barn builders.
We're about grit. Fights for inches and contacts.
Wait, is Clint Eastwood's son is he an actor or...
he's a very famous actor? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's also...
I didn't know if he was a NASCAR driver.
There's a YouTuber Cletus. I believe he's in it, too, which a lot of people spotted.
This is great driving. Wow. The sense of speed here is amazing.
This is a level above even like uh watching a movie, a Michael Bay movie or something.
Speaking of Michael, true like true like brand collab here.
This is a NASCAR ad, but it feels like an ad for seven other things.
Oh, I mean it's it's motorsport. You should have a bunch of ads. You should have a bunch of logos.
Yeah, stack them up. Stack them up.
This is good editing. This editing feels like a vibr. Like it's very like Yeah, it's really like the cuts are so fast.
It's like somebody said, "Give us the most America feeling trailer you can possibly think of."
Ben Sand in the YouTube chat still is commenting on Apple. He says, "Carr takes the awkwardness of the Apple Watch and scales it up to a car."
Whoever said that is accurate.
That's exactly kind of...
Anyway, so so NASCAR switched up on their day ones. They're like, "We're done. We're we're back."
But they're back. They're said we we never forgot the day one. They take some shots at uh...
took a media shot at F1, right?
The royalty thing, right?
Yeah. Yeah. We're not here for royalty. You know, we're we're founded by boot bootleggers and barn builders. And so that's kind of that's what sets the whole...
How many NASCAR What percentage of NASCAR drivers do you think are if they're taking shots at the European Royalty F1 pipeline? Are is NASCAR a a motorsport where you can be truly self-made, actually just work your way up, or is it just like Americans version of royalty? Like your father had an oil and gas company and so you're a NASCAR driver kind of thing.
I mean, somebody put up this this uh graphic and it was like here's all the top players in, you know, uh NASCAR, Bill France, Michael Jordan, Roger Penske, and it's like they're all billionaires.
Yeah. I mean, listen, it's everyone's got their version of royalty, but I think it is a little bit easier to come up in a somewhat of a NASCAR, maybe not at the Cup level, but even at like the Xfinity series, there's the Arca series, which is kind of like their third division. You can come up in those pretty well. You the the bottom line on motorsport is you still need money to race in it. You need significantly less. I don't have the exact figures, but you need significantly less to go through um the na a NASCAR feeder or NASCAR ladder than you do F1. F1 formula racing. It's insane. It's like the numbers are mindboggling. I I had someone on the podcast recently who was telling us like you need $400,000 a year just to even be uh in the Formula series or in the Formula 2 I think it is. And then or formula 3, Formula 2, you already need like almost a million per year. So, if you're not getting out of that soon enough and getting into like a paid F1C, yeah, you're like, how how how long can you sustain that without being loaded? I I think we...
I think Lando people were running the numbers like Lando's dad spent like 40 million or what getting him to the point where it was like net like...
Yeah, we talked to some like indie car guys who where it's basically like they had a family friend who ran an investment company or a law firm and they put up like 20k a year and they're like just put our logo all over it. will go and like take clients to the local race and it's like not a huge investment for some company that's doing well and they get to support like a local hometown hero and so they can actually get racing and then move up.
Uh what are you like NASCAR is doing this in response. They want to are they is this they're threatened by F1 and the popularity F1 has three races in the US now. Do they feel like hey there's a number of people that are going to be just saying well I'll just go to F1. It's got the glitz and the glamour and and maybe they're worried about people not kind of entering the NASCAR world or is this just hey we should do a new campaign.
So NASCAR, they they got a new agency or LA late last year, creative agency, and I believe it's 72 and Sony, but don't quote me on that. And they wanted to just attack this whole thing, right? You've got F1 growing, uh, Indie Car, the massive deal with Fox. Fox took an investment stake in Indie Car and all the broadcast rights. So there's a a massive, uh, thing going on there. IMSA Sports Car Racing, their YouTube channel is about to surpass NASCAR in terms of growth and they're they're growing tremendously off the charts.
Yeah, I couldn't Yeah, I couldn't believe that stat. I was like, the only way this makes sense is is if NASCAR has just not been paying attention to social media or something. Uh, IMS obviously has like a massive international audience. NASCAR, you know, very big. Um, but and yeah, even even as like somewhat still I I consider myself a casual viewer of all these things, but like IMS is a lot more exciting to me. You have the battles, you're not just around an oval, right? It uh it's it's very class racing.
Yeah. They also they made So what I did really well was they worked out a deal with NBC to allow international feed to be completely free on YouTube. So, internationally you can watch if you're outside the US, you can watch it from flag to flag uh for free on YouTube.
You know, is that something others are doing? Now, I think NASCAR is tripling down on we're America first. We're going to go all in on America. We saw they've got the Ander race coming up in San Diego. Uh Anderrol is sponsoring car. Like there's there's a lot of that comeback to hey, we are an America first series. we're going to go all in on America first. So, they're going to double double, triple, quadruple down on what works for them. Uh, other series are have to do the same thing. And I think that's what they're seeing more than anything is, you know, F1's doing what they're doing. Indie Car is doing what they're doing. IMSO, which is owned by NASCAR, is doing what they're doing. Like, we have to go back and find an identity. We can't just try to be all things to all people. It's just not it's just not going to work. It's not that kind of uh racing. And there's there's so many other flavors of racing now. They're available to everybody. They're so attainable to watch. It's like NASCAR, you need to carve out something. And that's what I think is happening. What is actually happening?
Uh switching gears, uh Aston had their event yesterday. I was excited to see Cognition working with Aston. They got all their enterprise clients. Got to get them got to get them on the paddic. Uh Public of course sticking with with Aston uh for the for for the season as well. Uh what's going on with Cadillac? Uh how how like how would you how would you rate their their whole launch their entire strategy running a Super Bowl ad for a new Formula 1 team? Very bold. Was that to get was that a to acquire more advertis...
I've got a double take. First of all to go back to Aston Eight. Did you guys see the eightle announcement? They're also...
So that's a big one because not only are they a partner They are a partner with Aston. Aston uh invested in Eightle. So, it's a little bit of a uh two-way situation there. So, that's a that that was big news today for Cadillac.
Yeah. Lawrence Lawrence Stroll is an investor. So, he's like down to do some equity equity deals and stuff cuz he's like I got the cash.
That's a thing. That was a thing. As for Cadillac, they were attempting to reach a new audience that they don't have, right? The US audience. They don't have anybody yet. And I think the Super Bowl ad was aimed at doing that. I don't know the ins and outs of what they were trying to accomplish because it was it felt like a very fast spot and you guys were at the stadium. So I don't know if you saw it but it was it showed up and it felt like it was over really quickly. The longer full spot the one minute that I that you see on social on the stream the next day.
Correct. But during the moment, I had a lot of people text me and say, "Hey, what was that Cadillac thing because they were pulled in by the JFK speech, which I thought was brilliant, and the moonshot, the whole that was great." But I think if you're watching the game, you don't know it's coming, which a lot of people don't.
Uh they had no idea what was going on. A lot of people that did not know, I was like, you the people I was watching it with, I was like, "Hey, check that out." And they were like, "What happened?" I said, "Oh, well, they're an F, their new F1 team." And they were like, "Oh, that's what that was." So, a lot of people had no idea. So, I'm curious to see if it worked. They had the Times Square activation, which I thought was the better move in terms of actually getting people like interested because you had this box sitting there thawing out in Time Square for a couple days. So, people had to figure out like inquire what is going on.
I think that was the the the what it looked like. It looked like it was frozen, then it was thawing right that last minute. So, I I like what they're doing. They ended up with not a lot of sponsors on the car. They used a lot of TWWG's assets. So TWWG AI is like their big primary partner, but TWWG owns the team. So...
Yeah. I was just expecting for Cadillac to partner with like an Exxon or a Chevron or some, you know, you have a Ramco out there and there's just big oil pockets. A lot of the big tech.
We love big oil, but we also like asset management.
Yeah, there's a lot. What do you have any idea what percentage did did Cadillac retain significant ownership in the team or does TWWG effectively own the entire thing?
It's TWWG Motorsports that runs the whole thing. So, they're basically operating a factory car or GM under the Cadillac badge with a Ferrari engine if that makes any sense to anybody.
I love it. That's that's F1. Get ready to study. Hit the book.
And that's also probably why they're not they don't have a oil partner yet because they're using Ferrari. So they're they're they have to use shell, I'm guessing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's tricky. Uh really quickly, you did get fact checked on the 72 72 and sunny thing. You were right.
You were right. Good job. I want to get the Rolex 24 update. How was it? You were there. Uh give us your review, dude.
I mean, the cars are incred like that's to me what cars should sound like. The the Valkyrie was there, the naturally aspirated V12. And in IMSA there is no they don't muffle the the engines which they do they have to in wet in the the World Endurance Championship. So it is full boore like during the night you hear that thing around the track.
I got to sit in the passenger seat of of our friend's Valkyrie and every single corner was oh I'm going to die. I'm going into the wall. Oh okay we made it around. Next corner. Oh I'm going to die. Oh we made it around somehow. Coming around. Oh we're going to die. The access people have though at IMSA is really really crazy. I mean there's fans of any like with any ticket can walk through the the garages and there's like a whole pitwalk and so people that just think of F1 as the only thing out there like have no idea. There's wellpriced series to get you into you know into motorsports but there's nothing like Daytona. There's nothing like an endurance race. I had never been to the 24 hours of Daytona. That was my first time there. Just such a cool event. Whoa. Such a cool event. I mean, people are up the whole time. There's festivities going on, walking through like where all the RVs are. I mean, people are absolute party. It's it's a good time. So, if you ever want to go for a good time, Daytona is a great spot.
What was your experience like? Were you up for 12 of the hours, 18 of the hours? Are you sleepd deprived or is it more like I'm going to the day and then I'll sleep normally and then I'll come back for the day section?
Yeah. Do you really need to catch the fog? This is hours of straight fog. No, fortunately like I didn't have we didn't have anything to do during that. Like we weren't tied to anything. We had gone up to like the spotter stand and the the starter stand. We had done all the things. We were hanging out with the president of IMSA. Um we were in the suite like so we they were taking us around. But then around 11 around midnight it was like all right things are dying out. The fog was coming down. So we actually went back and came back at about 8:00 in the morning. So there was like an 8 hour period. So what 16 hours I was up for for the actual race.
Not too bad. What uh what kind of stories, narratives are you tracking ahead of the Formula 1 season? I know there's been some drama with kind of some of the advancements Mercedes made and other teams pushing back. Can you can you share more on that front?
I'm tracking to see if any of this anything pans out with the Mercedes situation. There was this rumor that I don't believe is going to happen, but a rumor that the Mercedes cars may not like start in Australia, which is not going to happen. It was just interesting that that was being floated around. And I know Red Bull was trying to, you know, garner support. And then Dan Towers today, the CEO of the Cadillac team, he actually said like, "Yeah, we're all like we're all competitors. We're we're banning up against Mercedes because they're they're competition." So obviously if you take out the Mercedes engines, which to me tells me they are just very worried about that engine. It's it must be that good. Um they're pushing the FIA to change how they're measuring compression ratio which is like okay, you know, they're really trying to nerf this thing and it it's either an absolute rocket or things going to blow up. Like there's no there's no in between to me with the the Mercedes at this point. Um but you know, Half the Grid runs the Mercedes the Mercedes team runs it, McLaren runs it, Williams runs it. Uh Alpine runs it. So, like you've got you you've you've got a lot of cars that gonna have a rocket ship in it. Um, yeah, of course, if you're Ferrari and your Red Bull and and and anybody else Honda, you're going to be nervous. I'm also curious to see how this Adrian Newui Aston Martin ends up with the Honda power unit. Like, it's a match made in heaven. Honda and Newi. Uh, you've got Alonzo who's been wanting to drive there a lot of experience. So, you know that he's going to put in a good drive if that car is halfway decent. I think I think that car is the one to watch out for, the Aston. I'm really excited to see the Aston.
Uh do you think Lewis Hamilton is uh locked in during the off season? We saw him at the Super Bowl.
He's keeping up with the Kardashians now. Um I do blame him though. Do you blame him?
No, he's having fun. He's living his best life.
Dude, you're 40ome years old. You're loaded. Like I mean he's already been on reality TV with Drive to Survive. What's What's one more show?
Yeah, we're both reality TV stars essentially.
Essentially. Probably more people know him from Drive to Survive than actual F1.
I don't blame him. And if that car is a dog, I could see him checking out sooner rather than later.
No, I mean, I'll just be real with you.
Maybe maybe the conspiracy is like F1 is actually doing an, you know, some type of influencer deal with the Kardashians. It's kind of an arranged marriage. like they saw the success of the Travis Kelce Taylor Swift thing. They're like we need a we need we need our own uh T Swift.
Would it shock you? Like would that actually shock you if that was the case?
That'd be great. It' be great.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
You got the update. We'll have...
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we have Ethan Ethan Thornton from Mock Industries. Long overdue. Welcome to the show.
Good to see you. Uh, first time in the show. Long overdue. Uh, please introduce yourself. Introduce the company for us.
Awesome. Yeah, I'm Ethan Thornton. Started Rock Industries. Happy to tell background on the company.
Yeah, please. I mean, we met what, two years ago or something, and you were maybe just starting the company then. Huge progress, but yeah, give us the background.
Yeah, for sure. So, I actually started the company in high school. I ran like a woodworking, metal working company in high school. Was pretty obsessed with this turnover we're seeing towards unmanned systems. Um, and the importance that'll have on the world over the next few decades. Went to MIT. Um, initially thought this would take a lot longer to play out than it would. So I went to MIT but around that time War in Ukraine starts becomes clear that this transition is happening very very quickly. Drop out start mock I guess two and a half three years ago now.
Where were you studying at MIT?
Aerospace engineering. I was there I I I was playing football there. I dropped out during football preseason. So I can't I can't say that I was I was there very long. But I think I think the the mission of making sure the West wins on Systems is just so urgent.
Was the Teal Fellowship part of the decision to leave or had you already left?
