I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journals. What's your position?
Overnight success. The place 3000 double right away. That's misinformation. Party clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come. Get up. Trust the expert. Five. We are founder five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Five. Cop is team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right.
Hardy clearing order inbound. Come get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. Five good. I see more and more journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
You're watching TVP. Why am I so zoomed out? Look at this little guy over here. Look at this little guy over here.
Oh, we got a little guy over here.
There we go. Zoom in dramatically while I tell you that we are live from the TVN Ultra, the Temple of Technology.
John is not actually 6'8. He is 48.
Apparently, I'm a little guy. But you know who's not? Ramp. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. You use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.
Midjourney. Why? Midjourney pivoted to medical machines. It's not a pivot. It's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Holz. Uh, fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David.
Should we talk about the show today first?
Yeah, please. Because this is the first time that Derek Thompson and Jake Paul have been on the same podcast. And I want to just take a moment to just appreciate that because a lot of people said it would never happen. They said it was impossible that they were just going all over the place today.
Two different worlds, but we're bringing them together. Derek Thompson's kicking off our guest lineup today at 11:30. Yeah.
You don't need an introduction. In there we have Rene Haas from ARM, CEO, also on the board of SoftBank, and then we'll be closing it out with David Senra and Jake Paul at the end of the show, live in the TBPN Ultra.
Anyway, yesterday Midjourney announced a new division of the company, an expansion, not a pivot, called Midjourney Medical. We'll watch the video, we'll go through the Midjourney scanner. Tyler was actually at the launch event, has some news to break it down. But first let's kick it off with the history of David Holz because it's fascinating. Grew up in Florida, son of a dentist. He's not the dog walker. He's on team dentist over there. Son of a dentist.
We have a son of a dentist.
Son of a dentist on our team. And played video games.
Dentist son. Dentist son cam.
Wow. Nepo teeth. Nepo teeth.
Go back. Go back. Cut back. Big smile. Big smile. There we go. The Nepo teeth. That's crazy. That's crazy.
Your father really shaved his back.
Born on third base with the teeth wise. It's crazy over there. Anyway, played video games as a kid obviously, but starts hacking them. Learns a little bit about computers. Super intelligent. PhD in math track. I don't think he graduated or finished the PhD, but I mean, you know, at that level of engineering, he turned down the PhD to go work at NASA, I think. So, he's at NASA. Eventually branches into entrepreneurship, starts Leap Motion. Pretty traditional venture-backed startup, raised money, I think Founders Fund was in at least one of the rounds. But it was a grind by all accounts. And so, the first product brought hand tracking to VR. We should pull up a video of the original Leap Motion because there's some cool demos and you can see how it worked. And it's not actually that crazy to think about what we're going to talk about today with the Midjourney medical scanner if you know the history of Leap Motion and some of the technology that was employed there.
Yes. This is a different use case, different product, very much bigger, but in terms of sensing, detecting, mapping using algorithms.
Yeah. And so, when David was talking about the backstory, he was kind of going through some of the technicalities of how the Leap Motion worked. It was incredible because he was like, I mean, this is early 2010s and he's using these deep neural nets. He said it was a mixture of experts model. It was incredibly far ahead of the curve just on deep learning and then it's just on this weird side project. It's like doing hand motion.
Everyone thought VR was going to take off. There was so much energy around Oculus and the dev community. But it was a very tough business. A lot of hardware challenges, much less mature supply chain, everything's expensive. And there's all these complex market dynamics with other big companies. Meta bought Oculus. Apple was investing heavily. Eventually, Apple actually tried to buy David's first company, Leap Motion. But the deal fell through at the 11th hour. I think it actually happened twice. There was reporting that Apple had printed welcome packets to all of the Leap Motion employees being like you're getting onboarded today and then the deal fell through which is crazy. You don't see that normally.
He turned it down. There is some crazy reporting about getting in and basically being like ah this is too corporate or like this is not the vibe. We're not going to be successful here. But you know, one day he'll tell the story, but it was really rough for the company. They had to do layoffs. But they kept building and they sold devices to hackers. Yeah. Look at this. The Leap Motion. This is... Yeah. Play Fruit Ninja. Now, a lot of this stuff can be done with cameras and hand tracking. And the hand tracking on the modern VR device is pretty good just from the headset. Hand tracking in Apple Vision Pro, my favorite device, is fantastic. But at the time, you needed a third party device. So, you had... Can you scroll the video down to show the actual device a little bit? Yeah. This little like it looks like a stick of gum. Very small, very neat, very cool, but ultimately very much a dev kit. Never got to mass consumer adoption like an Oura ring or a Whoop band or anything like that. It was not a must-have for the average gamer, the average consumer, the average technologist. So, after about a decade, David was able to take a step back and start hacking on the next thing. AI image generation, you know, Midjourney, obviously huge viral success, broke a lot of the traditional rules. So no venture funding, no front end, no website, no app. Like really they I mean now they have a front end and stuff, but years went by where it was just a Discord. Everything was in a Discord and they scaled that Discord to millions of members, so huge that the company Discord, I think it was the biggest, the Midjourney Discord was the biggest Discord for a while. They had to scale their systems at that company. But you're doing all this off-balance sheet R&D basically and on day one you just get a fantastic mobile app for every touch.
Social experience, that was the second thing. So...
Yeah, because there was so much, this was the prompt engineering era, right, where people have their favorite prompts. Yep.
It really helped kind of cultivate...
It was multiplayer on day one.
Yeah. And so David has this quote, I think it's from him, saying like if you show someone a blank box and you tell them, 'Hey, this is a magical AI machine that can generate you a picture of anything,' people will just type in dog and they'll get a picture of a dog and they would get the same picture if they just went to Google Images. That's not what AI is actually interesting at. It's the astronaut riding a horse on the moon. The thing that that picture doesn't exist already. So it's you flying an F-16 in your hometown and like personalizing and doing something that would typically take a very large CGI budget or some sort of Photoshop master to actually whip up or collage together. You could do that with just one prompt. And so the multiplayer nature of Midjourney, when I jump into the Midjourney Discord, the first thing I see is your crazy prompt. You're 12 levels deep, prompt injecting, thinking of different keywords, doing different SRFs for style references, doing all these different tweaks, and then I can just see, oh, he used this model and he specified these dimensions, and he's getting really good results. So, I'll take that, but I don't want to make it about... I want to make my images about a dog. You're a mosquito guy, so you're going to make them about mosquitoes, right? And you can take my prompt and just sort of remix it. And so...
Some of the mosquito propaganda prompts I had back in those days were crazy. Actually, I never ended up sharing them. They were simply too good.
Yeah, well, you lost the war and the mosquitoes are going away whether you like it or not. Google is focused entirely on killing mosquitoes apparently. Anyway, by generating four candidate images for each prompt, Midjourney got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image looked like for a specific prompt. This was another sort of Midjourney innovation. I don't know if they were the first ones to do this, but it was really key to the Midjourney flow. It would gen you instead of generating you an HD image, it would generate you four low-res images and you'd be like, 'Ah, that has the right vibe, that has the right style, that has the right layout.' And then it would get that feedback and be able to iterate at the same time. Stable Diffusion had some really good results, but it ran locally. It was open source, and so they weren't having the data flywheel like Midjourney was. And so there were a lot of really positive things there. Now every company has a data flywheel and can iterate on that, but it was an important innovation. The company still, that we know of, hasn't taken venture funding. So I think David Holz owns most if not all of the company. And after the big Meta deal to power Vibes, there's clearly enough cash flow to fund other projects. David's actually been talking about this for years, this idea of a medical device.
The Meta deal, I don't think any specifics were ever released, but I think it's safe to assume it was in the hundreds of millions.
Hundreds of billions, trillions potentially.
Potentially, potentially, but enough to be able to take some really, really, really big swings and be able to have a balance sheet like a heavily funded private company.
Yeah. So, it's really cool. I was hoping for a VR headset. Honestly, I really wanted a VR headset.
I mean, this is just one of the hardware projects, right? He says like I think there were like eight little images thing. So there's a bunch more hardware.
Because after the Apple Vision Pro launch, I think he put out some sort of review being like, 'Ah, we're going to have to do it ourselves,' which I love. Anyway, let's play the Midjourney launch video for Midjourney Medical and see what's going on here in this two-minute video. While we pull that up, I'll tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. The goats. The goat is still on screen. The goat is in our stream, not in the Midjourney stream.
Did the aesthetics of this video carry through to the actual event experience? I only saw a few photos, but did the event have a nice vibe to it?
Yeah, it was very cool. They had similar warm lighting everywhere. They had like a kind of fake versions of the real machine. It's like way too big obviously to move around, but they had these kind of big tubes that resembled it. Then they had a smaller version you could put your hand in. I did it in my hand.
Are you healthy? Is your hand healthy? We need you coding at all times prompting. I think it's hard because that was like a small demo version so the resolution was lower, but someone else said that they figured out that they had some wrist thing because of boxing carpal tunnel.
Yeah. They found some issue with...
You can just use an if statement for that in real time.
If San Franciscan, then yes, carpal tunnel.
Very cool vibes. I've always said this about Midjourney that I think when you like people debate is AI art art or whatever. I always think of Midjourney as a David Holz art experience and I feel like you as the prompter are merely the museum goer in the museum of David and he is the one who is creating and the Midjourney team is the curator. They're the artists and you are experiencing the art through the prompts, but the decisions and the taste comes from David. And so are Midjourney images tasteful? I think they have taste. I think they have David's taste. And then there's the opportunity for a user to put a little bit more on top. But by default, I think the reason Midjourney has been successful is because it's so opinionated and it's not trying to just be a stock photo generator.
Yeah. Even this video was fully filmed by David. Like he was like the one holding the camera.
That's cool. Yeah. Love this guy. It's amazing.
It makes me a little bit emotional. It's so cool.
It makes me feel like we're finally living in the future.
No one... No one making this kind of device has ever been as cool as David Holz.
I'm willing to state that as a fact. It's just true. Like this is not the first medical device product that we...
But the medical device industry does not have Oura.
He's bringing motion and Oura to the medical device field category.
He's inventing medical devices.
Yeah. It's notable, Daniel in the chat is saying how does this affect the portable MRI YC company that we had on Tuesday that is now competing with David Holz.
No, huge category. I think that David is going a different path. I think a lot of people are going to want to get these scans because it is a beautiful representation, futuristic representation of the human form. It's personalized.
Also, just never bet against startups. Like, he could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never going to sell this business. And so you have like 12 biotech medical device companies that are like, we cannot get steamrolled by David Holz. We got to work with this company. We got to buy from that YC company. Like the competitive dynamics of the market are always more complicated than just a single winner comes and steamrolls all the startups and all the incumbents. That's not how things ever play out. Life is more complicated. The economy is more complicated. So never bet against. Do go to public.com though. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's play the deep technical dive. The technical deep dive.
Did he make this music too, I wonder?
Yeah. And he also made this in, I think, Blender, he said. Whoa.
Like all the animations are all made by him by hand though.
I guess he's doing Blender for... I mean for this it's a great use case for Blender because you're cloning, you know.
I don't know if it was actually Blender. It was some 3D... I mean, CGI stack.
Incredible music selection.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. There's words we should be reading. There's no voiceover. But we can kind of give you the summary here. The overviews. We'll start with something called transducer. We're going through transducers act as speakers and microphones. Imagine a choir of 9,000 singers and an audience of 9,000 people all listening carefully. The transducers are controllable at a rate of 100 million times per second. Together, they fire in a pattern that sends out structured waves. Those are the structured waves you're seeing. The waves travel out at a speed of 1,481 m/s. We construct a ring of 40 of these systems, 70 cm in diameter. The ring consists of 358,000 ultrasonic sensors. The chips take turns sending out waves. As the waves have a chance to dissipate, we fire the next one. One by one, they fire at a rate of up to 1,000 times per second. You're vibing out. The waves travel across the tank in 480 microseconds, about 1/12,000th of a second. Hundreds of thousands of transducers listen. Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom. Not micrometers or nanometers, but picometers working together. Hundreds of sensors can even push into the subatomic femtometer range. Finer than the scale of atoms, a scale where we don't even have anything you've heard of. The system captures data at a leisurely 17 gigabytes a second. Gigabytes of sonic reverberations flow around your body and from vibrations they form images with this device. Each probe sees different angles of your body. We combined hundreds of waves and thousands of sub-images to get the final product. Over 40 gigabytes of data moves through the system to just see one slice of your body. We analyze the images making out organs, structures, and tissues. Of course, all good uses of AI. There you go. Not going to read all that. Here we show a slice of what we can see with 25 different biological structures. Look at this. We do this again and again and again as you move through the ring. So, are you moving through the ring or is the ring moving around you?
No, no, you're moving down, the ring stays.
That's why you saw in the video little platform you stand on.
Platform. Interesting. Over a period of 60 seconds, the goal is to obtain several hundred slices of your body, reconstructing across 21 servers with two petaflops of compute power and up to 86 terabytes of raw data. The slices form a 3D map with the ability to resolve internal tissue details as small as half a millimeter. Wow.
Limina Leap says, 'Still can't believe they missed the Medjourney opportunity here.' True.
Less than a dozen of these systems operating at full speed can do a full body scan of every... The goal is a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth. Tyler, what's the logic of integrating these into spas? They want to make standalone spas or they want to make a first one in San Francisco that's like a flagship and then... Yep.
I can't imagine all 50,000 scanners would come with a full spa. But yeah, I think he said the plan was you start with the big one. I think there's going to be like 10 or so in the first SF location and then in some places there'll be like hundreds of these. Some places there's like one or two.
Yeah. But I think that the spa is like mostly because at least he rationalized it because like, oh, you know, going to the clinic or whatever, it's like not a good experience.
This should be like very quick.
And it should feel much more like going to a sauna or steam room or whatever than going to the doctor because you can imagine like you don't really need a doctor present during it, right? Yeah. It's like autonomous. Well, they should create a bunch of needles in the ring that come in and just kind of connect with you, deliver whatever peptides, hormones, whatever it deems necessary potentially kind of kill.
Well, I mean, he also talked about this like this system is like pretty overpowered, he said. So, you could like theoretically like instead of just basically reading like what's going on in your body, you can like write stuff too, right? So you can like do non-invasive surgeries whatever by like beaming light.
Folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer, the tumor with ultrasonic waves.
Yeah. Like think about like EUV lithography or something. If you like position the light in very certain ways you can like actually make a change too. Not just like...
You're saying potentially we could pivot this into more chip fabrication capacity.
That would be a goal. Yeah. Yeah.
Just... Yeah. Sorry. We can make way more money just making more chips.
Yeah, one of my friends over on X, Anabology, great account, says the obvious next step once you have a full body ultrasound scanner is to use the ultrasound to do useful things to the body.
Delete tissues, make cells divide, reprogram cells, read plus write. If you're an engineer interested in solving the right side of sci-fi medical devices, we're building this and hiring. Mhm. So...
Well, let's go through some more of the reactions. Midjourney launching an ultrasound scanner is such a clear example of freedom enjoyed by bootstrap companies that VC-backed companies would never have. Only time will tell if it's the right bet, but such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil-may-care attitude. That's somewhat true, but the counter to all that is like the Elon Musk projects and a variety of founders and SpaceX, but also you know like Sam Altman has done this too where it's like okay there's a new idea get a new team fund it and it's on the side like there are a variety of entrepreneurs that are playing the VC game marshaling capital and then have the permission to work on crazy stuff like a mass driver on the moon ETA. But in general, I agree with this point that a lot of founders get locked in a VC loop of you got to raise money every 18 months, you got to hit the core KPI, you don't have time or cash flow because you're in a win-win fight. And it's very very interesting and such a narrative violation that Midjourney has become such a machine financially in, you know, people would say it's a commodity market. People would say it's a highly competitive market. You're going up against Google. You're with Nano Banana. You're going up against OpenAI. And yet, Midjourney has carved out a fantastic community, a fantastic user base, a fantastic business model. And it's really, I don't know, it's a testament to something. It's just awesome. I don't know what else to say, but not everyone loves it. They're quoting Kanye West. I like David Holz's AI tool, but what does he know about medical equipment? He knows about this because of Leap Motion. Like, just say you don't study history. Also very important, he's partnered with Butterfly Network, which is a public company that is of course up almost 50% today.
Quick history on Butterfly. Let's see. Started in 2011 by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg. And yeah, fast forward to 2021. They were SPACed and then they've kind of just floundered a little bit in the public markets since then but have clearly developed some pretty impressive technology and so interesting way to combine, you know, Midjourney's and David Holz's vision with like technology that's been in development for a long time.
Yeah. Oh, this is interesting. Calling back to Rune. Rune says, 'The vaguely PBS Kids inspirational tone that new AI release videos take has stopped being appropriate. I think this is no longer like Carl Sagan explaining the rings of Saturn. There is something more dark techno-Promethean about it. Faustian even. Needs a Ligeti score. I don't know how to pronounce that. Pretty sure he's for sale.' Rivers is saying Midjourney is the first AI lab to score their release with something beautiful and so much more. Incredibly beautiful song from Max Cooper. I would guess people underestimate how much it stirs their soul. It certainly rose your emotions. You were excited by it. People were very very positive. Hank Green offered some context on other initiatives and whole body ultrasounds. We don't have time to read through all of it, but it's in the newsletter as well if you want to check that out. tbpn.com. We link to it. You can go check it out.
Alla says, 'Okay, Midjourney, now make my spine more Studio Ghibli.'
Yeah. I think one of my main takeaways is like, okay, now we have this new method. Ideally, you can, you know, find cancers much faster, right? If you're going to this thing every week or so, you can find cancers earlier.
So then, like, how do you react to this? Like, well now, you know, we have...
Go long housing because if the boomers don't die, they won't pass it down.
Well, yes, but also we have this joke like, oh, you're not AGI-pilled if you're not smoking every day, right?
So, it's like this is great evidence like, yeah, you should start smoking now. Start smoking, right? Because it's not smoking. Do not start smoking. But yes, it does fit in perfectly with this like risk of lung cancer is effectively zero.
It also tells you a lot about the whole pitch of like AI is going to cure cancer. It's like people tend to think that AI is going to cure cancer by like the prompt being like 'what's the cure for cancer' and it's going to give you some like E=mc² math equation when really it's like AI might cure cancer in the sense that like a guy gets really rich from AI image generation and then funnels that into a medical technology that can advance screening by a couple months and catch it earlier so the rate of cancer declines a bunch but it's not just like oh yeah he prompted it and we got the magic pill. It's much more complicated than that because curing cancer or actually reducing cancer rates is like a process. It's like an industrial process more than it is a like one neat trick.
And do you remember what happened on March 21st back in 2024?
Oh, was he posting about this?
Yeah. David said, 'TBH, I want to open up a medical imaging division at Midjourney to work on stuff like this.'
That's so cool. Called a shot and here it is. Very exciting.
Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. What did Noam Shazeer see? What did he see? Because Noam Shazeer, the legendary AI researcher formerly of DeepMind, has joined OpenAI. Very exciting news for Noam and OpenAI. He says, 'I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.' Everyone is very very excited about this. And Yacine shares interesting details here. He says Noam Shazeer six war.
I don't know... right to the important stuff.
But I like that we're apocryphally building up our heroes. Meta's list...
Number one on the Meta's list.
You remember the Meta's list which we released summer of last year during the height of the talent wars.
Yeah. Co-author of Transformer, T5, Switch Transformer papers. One of the pioneers of sparse models. He's leaving his VP of Engineering, Gemini, co-lead role at Google DeepMind to join OpenAI. Lisan Al-Gaib says this is likely the most significant AI talent move of the year. It makes you wonder what's going on at Google. Only matched by the next day Dean Ball joins OpenAI.
Tyler, you've been at Ball knower for a long time. We've had him on the show multiple times. We love Dean and he's been in the complete opposite camp. He's not an AI researcher. He's policy, a lot of experience there and had a really even keel I think on a lot of the analyses of should something be...
I think the main thing is he really cares about getting this right as a country.
Totally right. And he's been critical of almost every company in the space.
But only again because he cares.
What does Jim Cramer think about these moves?
Yeah, he posted at 3:00 a.m. this morning. Noam Shazeer, top AI thinker, goes to AI from Google. Big win for AI.
Drop the O, drop the open. Just AI.
It's cleaner. There's closed source models anyway. Just call it the AI company, I guess.
In other news, Riley Walls did it. He did the unthinkable. He bought a street in San Francisco and auctioned it off and Notion bought it and now the Notion Way is officially born. I'm so happy that Notion won this. It could have been some crypto thing. It could have gone so odd. You know, it's like high risk. Whenever you turn something loose like this on the internet, it can go a bunch of different ways. Notion Way is not something that I think would be annoying. I personally wouldn't be annoyed if like a street corner in my neighborhood was Notion Way. It is an ad, but it's certainly not annoying. I would love it, but it's just a term that feels like it could just be a street name, not something that just feels totally like an ad like with a dot in there or something. So, fantastic. Yeah, I remember talking with him about this idea for the first time.
Absolutely loved it. We told him like... they painted the street too. We told him that we'd backstop it.
Basically like if no one bid on it then we... Yeah. We were like we're good for like a thousand bucks or something like that.
I think it was like... maybe 10k or whatever the cost was. I remember it was like 20 something. But we were like we'll backstop it. We'll be like the buyer of last resort if you need that and uh... 40k.
Very very interesting. They get the blessing of the mayor.
That's very exciting. Very exciting. So go check it out if you're in San Francisco. Go to the Notion Way and you can also walk on the beautiful mural which turned out fantastically as well. Like faith in humanity restored here. A street in San Francisco painted with what is effectively anonymous internet graffiti and yet everything looks very inoffensive, very beautiful. It collages very well together. I think it looks good.
I was worried about that, too. I was like, if somebody like, you know, just paints it in like, you know, even if it's just like chaotic, messy colors, that's just not fun to have next to you. But this looks like a beautiful quilt of patchwork of interesting designs. It feels like everyone that participated took it seriously and wound up with a really great result here. So, good news for everyone involved. Good news for Riley Walls.
Our next guest is here, but what do you want to talk about before we go to our next guest?
Aiden Gomez accidentally became important at work.
I love Aiden Gomez. Can we get him on the show? Ruining his life.
We haven't had enough Death Grips fans on the show. We got to have Aiden Gomez.
Quoting a really funny thing to post from... also on the Transformer paper, by the way, Aiden Gomez. They call him Aiden Goatz for a reason. He's coded. No, I love him. He's fantastic. And he did a podcast episode with 20VC wearing a Death Grips t-shirt and that was incredible. Anyway, a bunch of other funny things happening at the G7. Apparently, Donald Trump had to ask Sam Altman how to adjust his chair up and down, how to use the chair. And that's got to hurt because you're Sam Altman. You've spent billions, tens of billions of dollars, years of your life, a decade of your life building a machine that can answer this exact question. Almost any question.
You take a picture of the chair, it tells you exactly how to operate it.
So do that right in his face.
Just completely reject the premise.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, on the tip of the tongue, he's like actually like this is a great opportunity to use ChatGPT. You can use images, upload a photo of that chair. It can go and agentically pull the actual diagrams, the manual from that chair. It can go to that website. It's chair super intelligence, Mr. President.
And Mr. President is just not interested. He's just like, I'm going with a human on this one. And that's why diffusion takes so long. That's why we're in the slow takeoff. Anyway, we have Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance, host of Plain English, contributing writer at The Atlantic. Derek, how you doing?
Good, man. How are you guys doing?
We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show.
Talking chairs. This is cutting edge technology. This is what I want.
Do you care much about chairs? Are you the kind of guy who like obsesses over... Are you a chair maxer? Are you optimizing your ergonomic work?
I noticed there's no... there's no neck.
You could be sitting on a stool.
No, no, no. You got to keep the neck strong. I'll say this. I remember I was in London when I was 18 years old and my best friend and I went there after we graduated from high school and we went to like all the museums and we were looking at all this old British stuff and I remember seeing this chair that claimed to have been made in like I god it was like 500 AD BC and I remember thinking in that moment it's kind of crazy that chairs have always looked like chairs. Like is that a stupid conclusion or is that like... Is it like chairs have always looked exactly like chairs? We haven't really changed the general contour of the chair. There's something about just like the shape of the body that's like okay well the chair just has to look...
What do you have wrong with a bean bag?
I think bean bags are like a cul-de-sac in the history of chair innovation, right? Like we went in the direction of bean bags and then we got up. We actually have a friend who has a bean bag. From an industrial standpoint, we collectively got up from the bean bag and I think we've tried to push it. You've seen those setups where you're basically reclined and you're in like a globe and...
Yeah. It has the screens here and then it leans you back. That's...
That's what I'm saying. Why don't we have more chairs that look like circles, right?
That's what I'm saying. We've got chairs that look like chairs that are shapes that aren't just this thing that's been the shape of the chair now for thousands of years. I feel like we've done chairs that have those classic right angles. It's time to, you know...
This is a big deal. I think it's time to reinvent the chair.
Reinvent the wheel. Yes, reinvent the wheel, too.
I mean, this is a big stagnation thesis thing where, you know, it's like, where's the new umbrella? Like there's like even Tyler traveled to the UK and he looked at 3,000-year-old chairs and he was like that looks like a thing I could buy from IKEA today.
Is stagnation a thing? And then suddenly it's the word on all of our lips.
Anyway, you know where's what country is not stagnating? They clearly read Abundance. It's North Korea. North Korea built 10,000 new homes in Pyongyang just last year. That's more than Los Angeles or Chicago. Did you airdrop Abundance to North Korea? Like, are you behind this? What's going on? Leafless.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories out there about all the various people that are bankrolling Abundance. I haven't heard the North Korean dictator conspiracy theory of Abundance. I have not spoken to Kim Jong... and thank you. I haven't spoken to that administration.
But have you looked through the newsletter? Have you checked your Substack? Yeah. Have you checked your Substack? Give us the link. Where can people sign up if you're a dictator in a foreign country and you want to get the latest?
All right. Well, I know exactly what I'm doing after this 30 minutes is over is I'm going to turn on... you got to turn on crypto search by whatever the sort of...
The surname is for North Korean website domains. I'll do that immediately. Yeah.
Okay. Staying on abundance, more seriously, has there been any uptake from American legislators, politicians at the local, state, federal level? Because when Abundance dropped, it felt like this is potentially a book that's going to be the foundation of a new political platform, and people are going to be running on this and quoting from this. And I'm interested to know if there's been little pockets of action where someone's taken an idea and actually tried to implement it. Maybe it hasn't passed yet, but you can see the gears are turning.
Yeah. I mean, the way that I think I put it on Ezra's show, when we did a sort of one-year retrospective on Abundance, is like, you know, and other people can disagree, and I'm interested if you disagree. I feel like at the level of nomenclature and vibes, like what one wants from a book, right? You spend a year essentially in isolation hoping that the ideas that you come up with in a dark little room end up infecting a discourse of millions of people that live outside of that room that you'll never meet. And from that standpoint, like people talk about Abundance, like for better or worse, right? Like the concept of an abundance liberal makes sense to people who are abundance liberals, who are conservative, who are on the socialist left. Like there is an understanding of what the term means, and that is its own kind of memetic success.
So you have that layer of memes, right? And that's not what we asked about. You asked about real world outcomes, and there I think the record is mixed, right? If you were looking for the elected individual who was the sort of ascendant political talent associated with abundance, it's not entirely clear to me that that person exists in a way that everybody on, say, an abundance group text would name the same person, right? Like obviously there's aspects of people who govern abundantly. Gavin Newsom signed a law called the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. Like he not only signed a law that had abundance ideas in it, making it easier to build houses in downtown areas, especially around transit, making it easier to build clean energy without passing through all sorts of NEPA, you know, hopscotch efforts — he not only signed it, he named it after the book. So there are success stories like that.
And there are absolutely governors like Hochul in New York who I think are not only doing abundantly things but also kind of flying under the radar in how much they're trying to press forward the policy agenda. On the one hand those examples exist. And at the same time I think that in politics, because what gets attention is not just law, it's people, there is a sense that what abundance needs is its champion on a public stage — its elected champion or presumed-to-be-elected champion on the public stage. And I think that's where, you know, when you write a book, all you control is the book. I can't write a book and make a person. And so I don't know who that person necessarily is yet. But there's a lot of possibilities. And the last thing I would say is this.
Why not, why not, why not you?
There's no [__] way I'm running for president. No way. A couple things: I'm very short. And I think that especially in a telegenic age, I don't think short people can win a national election.
Post— though, you—
What about leg extension?
Leg extension. Then I got to look at a leg extension — okay, see, now we're talking leg extension, and I got to bring my wife into this. I'm not entirely sure that I want to be laid low by whatever kind of recovery process is inherent.
Yeah, but you'd settle for abundance. So, can we just pause before I answer your question? Seriously, can we pause on leg extension? Do you know people who weren't in the movie Materialist who got actual leg extensions, like in real life?
I have somebody that I suspect.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. We actually do know someone, and you can see it in their gait.
How can you see it in their gait?
You know it when you see it.
You know it when you see it. It doesn't look fluid, doesn't look athletic anymore. And they're like four inches taller than they used to be.
Do you think overall this person would say, 'I'd do it all over again,' or would they say, 'I [__] up my gait and I can't run'?
Probably, because for a lot of lifestyles — I mean, it's like skipping leg day. It's the more extreme version of skipping leg day. It's only doing leg day.
Permanently skip leg day, but you gain—
But in many social interactions, the shape of your shoulders, is your chest filled out, even the bicep when you shake someone's hand — that's going to be a more recognizable sign of strength and athleticism than are your quads in shape so that you could do a box jump. Because in a meeting, in a business context, or even at a bar, or even at a concert, you're not presented with an opportunity to show off your explosive leg development, but you can show off your biceps or your shoulders.
I would almost say that in some ways, given how important clips are, podcasts, etc., this is—
There's actually an opportunity, more than any point in the last 50 years, to become the short-king president.
This is the short James Madison. James Madison was—
Five four and like 95 pounds. Like James Madison was like Prince — I mean, Prince was like Shaq compared to James Madison.
I'm just saying, like you on a generational podcast tour.
You're never — you're on a podcast, you're sitting down.
I can't tell right now. You could tell me you were John's height, and I could believe it.
All right. Five eight. But we're going to shut the door on me running for president or running for any kind of public office, because that is never, ever, ever happening. But the last thing I would say seriously on the topic of abundance in American politics is this: it's not lost on me that if you look at some of the more prominent elections across the country, Democratic socialists — they won mayor in New York City. There's a former DSA-associated candidate who's in the runoff in Los Angeles. A DSA candidate just won the Democratic primary in Washington, DC. A Democratic socialist just won in Seattle. So there's a way in which you can say, looking across the country, like, wow, socialists are really having a moment in American cities.
But something interesting is happening behind the scenes, which is that I've either spoken to, or spoken to meeting advisers for, all these people. Like I've spoken to Mamdani personally, I know people who are on his housing council, have met with and been at events with the mayor of Seattle. And there's ways in which I think abundance is winning arguments behind the scenes, even if the people that we see elected are — what's the headline — Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York. And so there's a way in which I think, optimistically, you could say abundance is pilling lots of people, even if the general public wouldn't identify those people as abundance liberals.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that there's been some consensus that the aesthetically socialist has tacked to more of the abundance agenda when elected because maybe that's just more pragmatic. Maybe there's more of an alliance there than people thought. You spar as you lead up to the election, and then when you get in, you're more pragmatic, which I think is probably good for everyone, but—
What's the old Cuomo line? You campaign in poetry, govern in prose. Yeah. If you campaign in populism and govern in abundance turns out to be the reality for certain Democrats, that's certainly not the worst and darkest possible timeline.
The North Korea way. Just kidding.
Campaign on complete authoritarianism and run on abundance. No. Self-enhancement — America's cult of self-enhancement. There's been, it feels like, looksmaxxing really broke through to the mainstream and introduced a little bit of this, but how have you processed the latest run of this? Because self-enhancement has been going on forever. Like, what's new? What's now? What sparked your recent essay on it? Why did you want to write about it at this moment in time?
Well, look, it's just a lot of things are happening at once. And I wanted to draw a circle around these things and try to name it, right? You've got the looksmaxxing phenomenon, with which there's a way in which I almost see that as a microwave that's crested — like, looksmaxxing, I bet Google Trends is not exactly on the right side of that mountain.
But you think about peptide stacking, you think about GLP-1s, which are going to go crazy when retatrutide, the third-generation GLP-1 drug from Eli Lilly, comes out. You think about the fact that TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, is going berserk, that preventative plastic surgery like Botox is getting younger and younger in terms of its average age of user. You look at the fact that, according to both the American Time Use Survey and gym associations, the number of people who are members of gyms is at an all-time high, and the amount of time that people self-report working out every week is also at its highest level in any period in American history. Like something's clearly happening in terms of America's changed relationship with health. It's almost as if health itself, which has in various periods of American cultural history lived a little bit outside of pop culture, is now becoming an integral part of culture itself.
And I'm really interested in this for a couple reasons. I'm interested in what drives it. I'm interested in its extremes and people like Brian Johnson who say not only do I want to live longer and be healthier, my goal is to not die at all. But I'm also interested in what it does to us as people, how it changes our relationship to our bodies. So, there's two observations here. One is that I have an Oura ring right here.
I like it. It's improved my health, it's improved my fitness, and it's helped me sleep better. But I also sometimes can't help fall into this relationship with my Oura ring where I'm making decisions about my daily activity to optimize my Oura ring scores rather than to do things that can't be measured. So if I have a really good time with a friend at 9:30 p.m., that can't be measured in my Oura Ring data. There's no dashboard I can look at on my phone that says I had a really good time with my friend and he appreciated my presence. But the Oura ring will say you stayed up too late and now your HRV sucks. So I think there's ways in which sometimes these technologies, this sort of biometric dashboard we can build for ourselves, replaces the hard question of 'how should I live' with the easy question of 'what should I optimize' that is observable. Right, it's a little bit of Goodhart's law — make number go up. So that's one thing I'm interested in.
But the other thing I'm interested in, and I think of your audience as being the bullseye of this — let me get at this from a kind of weird angle. Alfred Chandler is a historian who wrote a book called The Visible Hand about the invention of managerial capitalism in the 19th century. And he said what happened is the telegraph and the train created enormous information flows that couldn't be managed by 18th-century corporations. And so you had to invent this job to manage those information flows, and the name of that job was the middle manager. And so it was the telegraph and the train and the profusion of information created by the speed of products moving around the country that created the need for managerial capitalism. In a similar way, I think biometric capitalism, as you can think of it, creates the need for individuals to essentially serve as the chief executive of the self.
We are faced with all of this data about what we're doing every day, how we're sleeping, how many calories we're burning, what our VO2 max is, how much zone 2 time we spent training yesterday. And what role does overseeing all this information cast us in? It casts us in the role of the manager, just like in the 19th century. And so in a way I think, when I say our approach to health is changing, things that are more complicated than just 'oh, everyone's talking about health these days' — I do think it changes our relationship with the body to essentially assume this role of the CEO of the self.
And finally, and I'll stop, it changes our relationship to leisure too. Because typically, in a traditional setup, you go to work and you think about being productive, and then you leave work and you have downtime. And you don't think about downtime being productive until you can see on your dashboards exactly how you spent that downtime. How did you sleep? How much zone 2 time did you spend during your workout? So suddenly this productivity mindset that used to be contained to work is now leaking into our downtime as well and getting us to think about, again, our bodies as this kind of machine in which we're cast in the role of a CEO to optimize. I just think that's an interesting way that we're alive today. I think it's just interesting to think about how our experience of life is different than in previous decades. And I think these trends in health do make the experience of life different than it used to be.
Did you see the Nat Friedman talk where he describes using OpenClaw and an AI agent to monitor his water intake, and it uses cameras, which apparently he has inside of his house, which is not very common — most people have security cameras outside, he has cameras inside his house — and it told him, go to the sink and drink a glass of water right now. He did it, and then it sent him a message saying, like, good boy, basically. And it's just very funny because in that scenario it's like he's not even the CEO of his life anymore. He's like the line worker.
He's delegated the job of the CEO to the AI that then just tells him, like, you have to go to the gym. He doesn't even make the decision.
I would say he's a very modern CEO. Like you guys have talked with all these people about how the modern executive's job is sandwiching, right? So you give the large language model, or whatever AI system it is — you're the bottom layer of the sandwich. You give the AI model an input and then it gives you an output and then you act on that output. So you are the bread that is sandwiching the work of the AI model. It seems to me, without talking to Nat in this particular case, that's what he's doing. He decided I'm going to design a heuristic system to optimize my water intake. He designed that system and now he's on both sides of it. So in a way I think he is acting as a very modern chief executive, even using this sort of AI sandwiching function.
Yeah. I was talking yesterday, or maybe the day before, on the show, around when I — I got to a point when I was probably 19 or 20 that I felt I was using up all of my executive function budget on my own health, right? I would wake up, I would have a protein shake, I would go to the gym for two hours, I would sauna, I would have the perfect breakfast. And I was cramming all of this really high-effort activity into this period before 9:00 a.m. when I had, ultimately, coming out of that, accomplished nothing that actually moved my life forward, right? I could have just gone around and walked a couple miles and it would have had the same sort of impact on my life.
And I think that that is certainly a trap that I think you could argue a huge amount of the world is falling into right now, or at least certainly in Los Angeles and California, New York, coastal cities, where you know — how much of your intelligence are you putting into something just to make modern life bearable, right? Just so you have enough energy to send the five emails a day that really matter, that move your work forward.
I just think like some people are certainly in that camp, but then there's the other side of it, which is the optimization is this game that is rewarding in and of itself. And so it's the min-maxing. The maxing is enjoyable in the same way that you can max out stats in a video game, or even in business, or optimize whatever. But people enjoy these optimization games. So I'm not surprised to see that people get the enjoyment today from optimizing a life that they never really put to use. They might have the most incredible athletic performance. Are they ever going to go out and hunt a deer with their bare hands? No. But the process of maxing was what was satisfying to them.
Well, the word 'game' I think is apt here. And it's funny that in this case, to extend a metaphor, the game board is the body we're playing on. The philosopher C.T. Nguyen, who was on my show a few months ago, had this lovely line. He said, 'I used to think that there was no difference between a goal and a purpose in a game. But then I realized that if you're playing a board game with friends, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.'
The goal is the thing that's measurable.
The purpose is the thing that might be ineffable but is more important. Right? To win but not have fun is an experience that, on reflection, a minute later, an hour later, a day later, you're going to regret. And so writing this essay is a part of my trying to reconcile an experience that's very much like the one Jordi described, where on the one hand I do want to optimize my health. I don't want to die early.
I mean, on a personal note, both my parents died of cancers when I was in my 20s. So they didn't live to meet my wife. They didn't live to meet my sister's husband. They didn't dance at our weddings. And so I am not one of these people who looks at folks like Brian Johnson or Andrew Huberman and says this obsession with health and life extension, it's inhuman. It's like — no, what's inhuman? What's truly terrible is the premature death that means that my daughter knows her grandmother as a photograph rather than as a grandmother. That's terrible. So this is progress. The focus on health is progress.
But I do think it's just worth pointing out that this generation of personal, individuated health obsession is not like other generations of health movements in American history: the prohibition movement, the temperance movement, a movement in the 19th century in the UK that I learned about called muscular Christianity, which was basically just what it sounds like — New Testament values, huge biceps.
Those were movements about national change. Okay? You know, love them or hate them, they were trying to change the world. When you're playing a self-optimizing game around getting those Oura numbers—
—the game you're playing is to raise the numbers for yourself, and that's an important distinction.
Well, yeah, I do wonder if this health obsession will further reduce the birth rate.
I was about to transition to that. Yes. Phones are clearly like cigarettes for your mind, you know. Like they're certainly — they have some utility, just like a cigarette does. A cigarette can kind of make you relaxed or a little bit focused, whatever it is, but it's certainly bad for you overall.
Phones seem to be bad for a number of reasons. And I do think it's funny, you know, like biohacking and making the number go up is totally at odds with parenting in so many ways. Like — you'll never meet a parent that has children under five that's like, 'Oh yeah, five straight nights under six months old, so let's not even talk about my poorest sleep for the last six months.' So I had absolutely horrendous — but that's not the purpose. A friend of ours texted us over the weekend and said, 'After having a kid, it's just so funny to think about single people taking a vacation to unwind.' Unwind from what? Sleeping in.
No, but I do — when you think of the Steven Bartlett viral moment where he's talking about having a couple glasses, the drink he got that knocked him out for two days — and just thinking like, wow, parenting is going to be really rough for someone that gets that thrown off by a couple drinks, because you don't really get to decide. From midnight to 2:30 a.m. you might be up — yeah, like three times a week, and people have built their lives so that that never happens.
Yeah. No, I remember I was interacting with some tweet from — I don't remember if it was Brian Johnson or someone else of that ilk — and they were talking about all the various things in life, staying up a little too late, flying across time zones, that had some effect on their cardiometabolic data. And I said, there's a version of this approach to life that is literally anti-human, because imagine doing this analysis of childbirth. You know what happens when you have a one-month-old at home? I mean, you basically do, because you were citing it. Your sleep goes to [__]. You don't see people the same way you used to. So your social life goes down. You eat like crap. The risk of depression, anxiety, even postpartum psychosis skyrockets. Like, if you just looked at the biometric data of new parents and your only attitude in life was 'make number go up,' you would have to conclude that having children is horrendous for the human race.
But life is complicated. And a psychologist — you've seen the data that shows that women who have kids later in their 30s live significantly longer.
This is what I was getting at. So the psychologist Darby Saxbe had this really interesting point in her new book, Dad Brain, where she pointed out that new parent brains tend to suffer trauma when their kids are born. But if you look at parental brains decades later, they tend to have more neural connections and they tend to be richer. And in fact, there's been research done out at Northwestern University that found that so-called superagers — people in their 80s and 90s that have the memory of someone in their 50s and 60s — the thing that correlates most strongly with being a superager and having great attentional capacity and memory in those later years is social connection, which evolutionarily makes kind of sense.
Like maybe early memory, early language was just for gossip before we were inventing calculus and artificial intelligence. And so it would make sense that the strongest brains were the brains designed to keep track of who in the tribe was nuts and who in the tribe was helpful and who was an [__] and who was kind. And so I think if you're going to think about this scientifically, if you're going to go the science route to sort of science your way toward a theory of the purpose of life, pay attention to the whole body of research and don't just look at the dashboard on your phone, because that's capturing such a tiny, tiny amount of the bigger picture.
Yeah, I completely agree. We got to do this more often. This is so much fun.
We needed more time. But thank you so much for taking the time.
Have a great rest of your week. Have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI — own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is the CEO of Arm Holdings, Rene Haas. His first time on the show, but we're very excited to have him on to talk about expanding Arm's business beyond the CPU IP that they're known and loved for. Everyone's used an Arm-based CPU for one thing or another — probably everything in their life — but now they're getting into chip making and designing their own chips. Arm partners have shipped more than 350 billion chips. That is so many. More than 22 million developers build on the Arm platform. Rene has been with Arm since 2013, so very interested to hear about his journey over the last 13 years. You have to imagine this is the most exciting moment in probably his entire career, certainly the Arm story, but we'll bring him into the TBPN Ultradome and ask him directly. Rene, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, thank you. I'm doing well. How are you both doing?
We're doing great, fantastically. It's an incredibly exciting—
Shout out to your team. This audio-video setup is perfect. We talk to a lot of people. People like to go hard visually, make something that looks great, but then they'll miss the audio. You did both quite well. So I appreciate it.
We have a great team here. We hijacked a conference room and turned it into a little mini studio here. So glad to see it's paid off.
I love it. Perfect.
Yeah, I mean, we were just reflecting on the fact that it's an exciting time for us. We cover the news, we cover AI, there's so much going on. You've been with Arm for 13 years. Is that correct?
Is this the most exciting year? Is this the most exciting moment of your career? How else are you contextualizing what it means to be in this particular moment?
Gosh, having been in the tech industry my entire career, it's probably the most exciting time. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, artificial intelligence and the idea of machines that can think like humans — that's Star Trek-type stuff. So if you grew up watching science fiction — and I remember I think one of the very first movies my dad took me to was 2001: A Space Odyssey — we're kind of living that life now. And it's one of those things, I know my compatriots have said the same, that you knew it was coming but you didn't know if you'd have a chance to work on it in your lifetime. So yeah, it's amazing.
Now it's here. Talk to me about how you've processed the AI boom. There's been a couple of distillations of the progress. You have the ChatGPT moment, the reasoning moment, the coding agent moment. As each of those moments happened, how did your business change? How did your perception of the AI boom change? And then at what point did you realize that you needed to expand the strategy, change the strategy? How deliberate were you along the last three years, four years, as we've seen these sort of tectonic shifts in the capabilities of AI systems?
Yeah. One of the things in our industry that has been almost like a force that you cannot stop is the need for more storage, or more memory, or more compute, right? There's just something — whether it's an end application, a new product — that just drives that need. AI is almost the monster that can eat almost unlimited amounts of memory, unlimited amounts of storage, and unlimited amounts of compute, just simply because of the raw amount of computation that's required, the amount of data that's needed, the amount of intelligence that you're generating in the tokens, etc. So what we've seen over the last number of years, as everyone in our industry has, is this sudden huge tailwind of how much is enough, and we don't seem to be hitting that point yet.
And I was at Computex a couple of weeks ago and met with folks in the industry, and I remember talking to some of the guys at TSMC, and they said, we've never seen a cycle where it's this good for this many years. Something's got to change. But we've never quite seen artificial intelligence at the level we're seeing it, and it still feels very, very early. I know a lot of people say that in the sense of, to your point, the ChatGPT moment, the Claude Code moment, the co-work moment — but still there's lots and lots of industries that haven't even scratched the surface. So it still seems very, very early, even given all the tailwind.
I can intuit or at least guess at what the crunch at TSMC feels like. It's incredible demand from every supplier, sharp elbows from probably everyone who's trying to get line time, and a lot of people working late nights making sure that the machines are running, that the fabs are delivering at high quality consistently. But what is the shape of a crunch at Arm during a boom like this? Is it different? And then I imagine maybe take me through what the next couple of years will look like and how different pieces of the business will scale to react to different bottlenecks, different opportunities, different supply — just demand increasing broadly.
Yeah. So it's a very, very important question because it's changed a bit for us. When we were seeing all of this growth in demand in the prior years or in previous growth periods, we would feel the crunch in terms of our end customers saying we're limited by this, we're limited by that, demand is really strong. Our business model on the IP side is all about a licensing fee up front and then we collect a royalty on chips shipped.
That all kind of changed for us at the end of March when we announced our first product. So now we are in that soup as well. We have huge, huge demand for the product, which is an Arm AGI CPU. Somewhat selfishly, it's a great product — it's 2x the performance at the same power as the competition — but also with all this takeoff of agentic demand and all these agents that essentially spawn off workloads, CPUs do a lot of that work. There's been a huge demand for CPUs, so we were fortunate in terms of timing of announcing that product. But yes, just like everyone else now in that world, we're looking for all kinds of avenues to find increased supply because demand is extremely strong. So yeah, to your question, we feel it on both sides. We feel it from our end customers on the IP side who are trying to ship as much as possible, and then ourselves because we've got our own end customers that are really, really pushing us for supply.
So when you're getting into your new chip business, what changes for you? Are you a fan of founder mode? Is this something where you're clearing your schedule so that you can spend more time on that new growing division, that new opportunity? Are you bringing in a new team? Are you shuffling folks around in the organization who you know can deliver on this new initiative? Like what is your managerial philosophy for delivering on that?
Yeah, I've had a fortunate opportunity in my career to work for a lot of founders directly. Probably if I just think back now over the last 25 years, I've not been a founder myself, but I've worked directly for founders, whether it was early startup companies, then a bunch of time at Nvidia working for Jensen, and then at SoftBank, who owns Arm — Masayoshi Son is a founder. And what I found for myself personally is that that is probably the style that resonates best with me personally.
So what does that mean in terms of day-to-day activity? Am I in the meetings with the operations guys figuring out where the supply is coming from? Absolutely. Am I thinking really, really hard about what we want to do next in terms of product and can we get the supply and can we be strategic to a number of different customers? Absolutely. Did we bring in new people with new skill sets and new capabilities to help us there? Yes, we had to. You know, building chips is not the same as building IP. You need people who can do back-end design, customer validation, supporting customers, and you need operations folks that can work downstream. So we knew we needed to do all that.
I had done a lot of that in my past, in previous jobs and careers, so I had a good sense of what was required. And as importantly, I had a really good team around me, folks who came from that world. So yes, a high degree of focus. I don't know if I would say I've gone into full founder mode, but that's kind of how I operate. I think intrinsically, and as you get on in your career, you start to find out what are the environments that not only resonate with you but that you can thrive in. And for me, that's definitely one.
We talked about this interesting phenomenon in AI where, with 2020 hindsight, you can look back and see that the ChatGPT moment was a turning point, Claude Code as you mentioned, reasoning models — there's these unlocks that feel binary in hindsight. And they sort of blur together as they're happening, but a couple of months later you can see that there's some sort of takeoff. Do you have a vision of what we're waiting for for the next one, or are you more zoomed out, looking at broader trends, sort of straight lines on log graphs, and you see that capability will come as compute scales?
I think it's a little bit the latter. I mean, people like to look at the ChatGPT moment or the Claude Code moment, and maybe that's mile marker six in a marathon or mile marker eight, but actually what they are is proof points of scaling — that the more compute you can apply to the problem, the more sophisticated the level of problem that you can solve. And that's what I think we're seeing on all levels.
So I don't think there's another aha moment. You know, people talk about AGI or ASI or things of that nature. I think what you're starting to see is, for some of these models, or some of these applications, we don't have the data sets on the internet to solve them. And these are like science problems, engineering problems. Yet using the compute and models to create synthetic data to help you solve these complex engineering problems that you can't find on the internet — that could be the next thing, you know, if you will. So I don't know that there's another, end-quote, moment ahead of us. I think what we have seen so far is that the law of scaling has not been defied, and the more compute you can apply to these problems and the more power that's required for that and everything around it, we get greater and greater benefits.
I'm interested to hear how AI is changing chip design specifically, like the actual work that your team does on a day-to-day basis. But I'd also like a little bit of a primer on just computer-aided design through your tenure, because it's not like it was pencil and paper three years ago and now it's a single prompt: make a great CPU. So I imagine we're on a — it feels probably a little bit smoother to you, but there's a lot of excitement about AI actually designing chips. Where are we on that trend? Where were we 10 years ago?
Yeah, I remember I was smiling when you said that. I think I remember my first job out of TI, we actually had four-foot by four-foot tables where we would actually lay out printed copies of the actual chip itself to look at the layouts from a transistor level, trying to figure out exactly what we had done from a design standpoint. And that was before the workstations really had a lot of sophistication to do automated design. People talked about CAD and CAM of that nature. Now, when you get to the billions of transistors on a chip, there's no way you're printing that stuff out.
You know, chip design is pretty interesting. On one level, it's code. In other words, when you write a piece of software to describe what a circuit's doing, that's a piece of software. The industry uses something called Verilog to describe RTL, which is a different version of a Python or C, if you will. But chip design is a multi-dimensional problem. You can write RTL in Verilog and it can be functionally correct — I can do an adder or a multiplier or a certain level of circuit — but to get that to operate at a certain frequency, consuming a certain level of power, and then occupying the smallest set of millimeters on a piece of silicon.
That's still a very hard problem. So the industry isn't there yet in terms of being able to use those tools to essentially — the nirvana would be I come up with an idea, I press a button, and I can go tape it out at TSMC, right? That is sort of the nirvana. And will we get there at some point in time? Most likely we will. We're a ways away because the data sets aren't quite correct and we don't have the good closed-loop systems, but we'll get there. But where it's helping in chip design are things like — let me back up and just say, in chip design, a lot of the work actually is not in designing the circuits. It's actually in verifying the circuits. It's in bug checks. It's in validation.
And AI helps a lot there. AI can do a great job in terms of triaging bugs. An engineer will do a run over a weekend and come back in on a Monday and see where the bugs are and triage them and fix them. In the AI world, that can all happen automatically. AI can not only order the bugs in terms of the high-priority bugs, but in some cases can fix them. So we are seeing that today. We are absolutely seeing the benefit of AI helping us design chips faster, to get bugs out quicker, to help us in the validation process, which is super important because these chips are getting bigger and bigger. The bigger they get, the more complicated they are to build, the longer it takes. So it's a little bit like running uphill on a treadmill — we're running fast, but the chips are getting harder. So it's not like we've shaved chip development times in half yet, but without the tools I think it would be longer to develop. So we're certainly seeing benefit.
Bit of a more anodyne question, but where else is AI permeating within Arm Holdings? I'm interested to know, like, you have license fees. Are there AI agents making sure that invoices get paid appropriately? Like—
Customer support, even just, you know, you probably have a ton of documentation. Have you wrapped that in an LLM? Like, there's some, there's a bunch of like, you know, very basic use cases for AI that you see propagate through all sorts of businesses. How have you thought about adopting AI outside of the core context?
All over the place. I would say probably 85 to 90% of the company is using it in some way, shape or form. We use it in legal, for example, to look at contracts, to do inputs and checks against our standard terms and conditions. It's very, very fast. Finance teams use it for all different kinds of functions. One of the more interesting ones that we use it for is, so on our IP business, we collect a royalty for every chip shipped.
We have a quirk in our financial model in that we have to every quarter accrue for the royalties that we think will come in the next quarter. So it's a forecasting tool. And that forecasting tool is almost like a GDP hedge fund where we're trying to look at macroeconomic indicators, what's going on in terms of certain markets.
We use AI to help us rationalize what our predictions are, and it's very, very good when we report the royalties at the end of a quarter, and then the following quarter we do something which is called a true-up. In other words, where we were wrong and where the error bars were. And I tell you, AI makes the forecast really, really well. And then just something simply anecdotally, you might be sitting in a meeting where you're brainstorming about different ideas and you're trying to figure out what's the size of this market or who's shipped this much volume into this area or is someone using this type of substrate. You know, in the past that would be, we'll go look this up offline and get some answers. People are using ChatGPT or Claude or any of those tools real-time in a meeting and you just get answers much more quickly. By the way, it's not necessarily a 100% right answer each time, but it's 80 to 90% close enough that you can start making decisions. So we use it everywhere and I use it all the time.
Of course. How are you thinking about more farther-out opportunities or technologies? I'm interested to know if you have a view on, you know, these wafer-scale ASICs or even quantum computing. Is there something where you're starting an investigatory R&D process to see if there's at least an integration in the future, if not an indigenous R&D effort?
Yeah. No, we were talking earlier about, you know, is this the most exciting time in the industry? And there was a time, I know, 20 years ago when semiconductors were not seen as the next growth engine and a lot of the investment and growth went into other areas. Now, not only is there amazing opportunity for what you just described, whether it's wafer-scale compute or in-memory compute or different computer architectures, but everything around material sciences, different components, whether it's co-packaged optics, whether it's different type of copper, the computer, the system is the computer, and you have to think about everything that goes into it relative to how you maximize performance. So even things, believe it or not, like efficiency of turbines and efficiency of gas engines and everything goes into building out power plants because everything in the supply chain suddenly matters and the resiliency of the power matters. Everything can't come off the grid if you're using alternative power sources. What does that mean in terms of interruption of supply? What does that mean in terms of reliability and sustainability of the systems? So it's probably a long way of saying that there's investment opportunities not just in the chip space but in everything that surrounds it because now the entire system becomes an opportunity for innovation. And at Arm, yes, we have an investment profile. We also work very closely with our parent company, SoftBank, in terms of looking at the investment opportunities there.
On SoftBank, what was your first meeting with Masa like?
That was back in 2016 when they had just announced the purchase. So, gosh, that was 10-plus years ago. And his vision for Arm at that time was a little different than what we're doing now. But he had a big belief back then in terms of the world is going to need a trillion connected devices and everything needs to be connected on security and software and such. But my first impression of him, and I had not met him before but obviously had known and heard of him, was he has a lot of big ideas and he's been consistent on that for the last 10 years.
So is part of your role like the translation layer between that unbridled optimism and the pragmatism that needs to keep a business running? How do you see your role in the SoftBank organization?
Yeah, that's a good description of it. I think at a high level, I think the reason it works well is that I share Masa's ambition. I admire the big bold views. I like big bets myself. He's really, really good at looking around corners and thinking about what are the big trends 10 years from now and then how do we act on it quickly. So where I think I fit in is I align with that, but I'm also an operator. I'm on the ground running a company and have put out products and solved engineering problems, etc. So it's thinking about how do we take those and make those into realistic plans that we can execute on.
Where should we go next? Jordi, do you have anything you'd like to move on to?
I'm interested to hear more about your path to becoming CEO. Was it always on your mood board? What were the key steps? Just advice for people who want to be in this position one day?
Yeah, we meet a lot with new employees and I do get that question a lot. Was the CEO job something that you always aspired to? And I would say that was really probably not the case. Again, having in the last 25 years worked really closely with founders, if I kind of look back in terms of what that experience was and how it got me here. First off, I was always interested in not only doing something that made a big difference, but I always had an intellectual curiosity to doing lots of different things. So I've done probably almost every single job that exists in kind of the semiconductor world. I've been an FAE. I've been a design engineer. I've been in sales. I've been a GM. I've been in marketing. I've done kind of all these jobs. Not because I was trying to fill out a checkbox and said, 'Okay, here are the eight things I need to become a CEO.' It was more a function of I'm really curious to learn about these disciplines and learning more about how things all kind of come together. So what turned out as I was gaining more experience and more of those skills and working around great people like Masa and Jensen, I just started to learn a lot and became a sponge for all of that. So when the time came for me to take this role, I felt very ready for it because I had watched CEOs do the work. I had done a lot of different work. Now, clearly, it's a different job. When you're the CEO, your jokes are a lot funnier. People always say hello to you in the halls and stuff. And you feel a different sense of responsibility, accountability for what's going on. But more broadly speaking, I think I was very, very lucky in that everything I had done up to my becoming a CEO had really kind of helped me get there. And then what I tell young folks is get as much exposure as you can to as many things as you can. The one thing that I've always found that was a trait in great people was curiosity. And never stopping to learn, because if you're never stopping to learn and you're quite curious, you'll probably land in a pretty good place.
What is your approach to creating your own sort of model for what the world will look like in two to three years? The pace of progress over the last three years has been, you know, really aggressive. But at the same time, you can consistently go back and look at people's predictions, a handful of people's predictions in 2023 and let's say 2024 that have turned out to be almost perfectly accurate. And so I'm curious how you kind of curate information sources to try to build an accurate model of what the industry will look like in two, three, four years. Beyond that it's probably much harder. But what's the approach? Because everyone's sort of like selling something, right, that you're interacting with, and your job as CEO is to try to actually figure out what the world will look like so that you can build against it.
We're in a very fortunate place in the business that we run in that we're sort of at the center of the universe. And what do I mean by that? Arm's core business is compute. We do CPUs and CPUs are table stakes. Every digital product needs a CPU no matter what it is, whether it's the smallest device that fits in your ear or wearable or these giant data centers. And Arm is the most ubiquitous CPU platform ever invented. You guys were chatting about the platform, over 350 billion devices have shipped based on Arm. So what we have inside our company is almost like a control tower view of the entire industry, right? We see everything. We talk to everyone and as a result we have kind of an amazing perspective in terms of where the direction of travel is going. And I think back maybe to your question in terms of how do we think about that? Because we have that view and vision and the products that we are working on and the stuff that's in the roadmap. It's not unusual to be sitting in a meeting and we're talking about the product that's going to be coming out in 2030, 2031, 2032. It's just the nature of what we have to do in terms of the business. So we have a really good view on that and what we tend to try to look at is these gigantic macro trends. But some of the things always tend to stick, right, in terms of people, efficiency matters, low power matters, compute matters. And when I say low power matters, it doesn't mean everything needs to run on a battery, but ultimately you can't continue to have all these parameters go up and to the right because the costs get into play, thermal economics get into play, etc.
It's almost like Bezos' approach where he has some line. He can't predict the future, but he knows that customers are going to want things, you know, faster and cheaper.
Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it. Those macro trends don't change. If we were having this discussion in 2000, that's still a valid comment. Now, in 2000, we'd be talking about, oh, the internet is going to explode and we're going to need to build all this fiber, we need all these lasers, etc. It's subsided, but the internet obviously is foundational to everything we do today. And AI is kind of the same. I mean, it's almost a utility, right? It will be something that will be used by everything, everywhere, by everyone. But gravity will still apply, right? People are going to want to make sure it's efficient. They're going to want to make sure it's economical, and they're going to want to make sure they're getting benefit from it. So when you think about product development, you have to have that kind of sensibility that makes sure that you're delivering on that.
What are you expecting from robotics broadly over the next two to three years? Like I imagine you have an interesting view, you're able to look in some of these customer segments and maybe see areas that represent less than 1% of revenue starting to maybe grow at a faster clip. But I think people are asking like when are we going to have the ChatGPT of robotics, which I think people just bucket like a humanoid that can be economically valuable or have some utility. But it's probably much more likely that it's possible it's already happened like in an industrial setting and it's going to look different. But what are you kind of predicting before 2030, let's say, in robotics broadly based on what you're seeing?
2030 might be a good tipping point. I think it's going to take a little longer than we think and it'll be bigger than we think. And by that I mean the business models I think will need to be worked out. I think robots as a service is probably more viable than buying fixed $100,000 robots. The bill of materials on those will come down, but at the end of the day, there's just a lot of parts. There's motors, there's actuators, there's computers. You're not going to be able to make one, I think, that's going to be $4,000, for example. But can you provide them at a cost where it can be a very, very good replacement in certain areas for human labor in terms of what you're paying per year and have it subsidized? Yeah, I think that is quite real. And I do think, you know, it's a hard problem to solve, right? Because one of the hardest problems around robots with AI is our fingers, right? Our fingers are unbelievably good at what they do in terms of sensing, applying the right level of pressure, being able to pick up a phone or pick up a 20-pound weight or picking up a needle to thread a needle. That for a robot is a lot of work relative to sensors. It's a lot of work relative to motors. It's a lot of work relative to dexterity. But it will be a solved problem. And when it becomes a solved problem, it's going to be transformational. I mean, you think about infrastructure projects, right? Just looking at the amount of time it takes for road work or putting up bridges and anything around those spaces, you know, just look in the United States, just the amount of infrastructure that needs replacement. And you can't find the people to do the work, right? Those are very, very hard skills to go off and do that. Once you start to put real automation in place around that, it's going to be hugely transformational. So I think it'll take a little longer than people think. We see a lot of amazing stuff with humanoids and dancing robots, etc., but it will be bigger than people anticipate. I think it will be gigantic.
Staying in the control tower of the AI buildout, the global economy, where are you focused on outside of your core business in terms of potential bottlenecks? We've been going back and forth on is it fabrication, is it energy, is it permitting, power, shells, memory. There's been so many different bottlenecks that have sort of popped up and there's been a lot of excitement. And that feels like an opportunity for America or the world to focus on alleviating a bottleneck when it comes out. You're helping a lot with what you're doing, but what else is top of mind for you as you view the potential bottlenecks to just scaling AI?
You hit on all the big ones and they're all challenging, right? I think logic is a challenge. Memory is certainly a challenge. All the things that you mentioned. I think it is a fantastic opportunity on the flip side for the United States to be able to invest in manufacturing and support of these infrastructures. I know there's been a lot of backlash, for example, about these giant data centers being built and communities not wanting data centers in their area. And then some people look at the data centers and say, 'Oh, these data centers are so giant. They don't actually employ a lot of workers. They're just giant Costcos with whirring motors inside.' But I would argue that while that may seem to be true in terms of when the operation is completed, the ecosystem that gets created by building out these data centers is immense, right? And if you can have the entire supply chain, whether it's again around the motors, the turbines, the air conditioning, the chillers, the chips, if the United States can put that all in such a way that is going to be all vertically integrated, that's huge, huge job opportunities for us. I read some of this in an op-ed about 71% of folks are kind of against data centers. And I was thinking to myself, gosh, this reminds me of back when the US had most of the semiconductor fabs in the world, you know, 30, 40 years ago, and people weren't complaining about fabs per se, but there were a lot of complaints about the chemicals and things of that nature. And then you had labor shortages and next thing you know, 35 years later, every advanced fab, whether it's memory or whether it's logic, is not inside the United States. And I would say just on these supply shortages, which we have now, which are real, I think it's a great opportunity for the United States to really boost up domestic manufacturing and not just again like I said around the data centers, but the ecosystem around it. If you think about the automobile industry, one of the powers that drove the US industry was the huge supply chain around automobiles that created lots and lots of jobs. I think data centers are similar.
Yeah, it's always been a good point. People point to Flint, Michigan as a place where water was contaminated. But if you trace back through the Flint, Michigan story, it is the departure of the General Motors plant in Michigan that actually led to all of the renegotiations about where the water would come from and ultimately the degradation of the local water supply. It's sort of the flip of once the businesses pull out and the local economy stagnates, then you wind up with the environmental problems in an odd way.
And it's super hard to bring them back once they go. Yep, 100%.
I like it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. We went overtime, but this is a great conversation. We really appreciate you taking the time. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Rene. Cheers.
Thank you so much. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we are going to reindustrialize. We couldn't be there in person, but we have a correspondent on the ground. How are you doing?
Welcome back. I'm doing great. How are you guys?
Good to see you. Take us through it. Quick reintroduction on yourself, the company, but then tell us about how Reindustrialize is going. We were just talking about Michigan, actually.
Yeah. So I'm Rob Slaughter, co-founder and CEO of Defense Unicorns. Defense Unicorns, what's the big idea? It's all about getting software to warfighters. People don't realize how hard it is to get modern software capabilities on a lot of the military assets and what we've done as a company is build an entire tech stack from the ground up and just made it easy.
What's the mood on the ground like? Take us through Reindustrialize. How long have you been out there? What's been the highlight? What are the key themes?
Yeah. So we're out here today actually, the noise in the background, just to give you guys a sneak peek. So we are actually at the Navy's War Hacker event. We recently announced our product launch, UDS Fleet, and so we happen to be here in San Diego, super excited about the Anduril 250 that's coming up here. But today actually, and all the folks around me, there's 350 builders across the Department of War all working and hacking on cool problems. And so we're excited to work side by side with the military and government and building solutions here.
Is this a new trend, just a new era for software defense technology? Because it feels like a lot of the defense tech energy was around new systems. You're building boats, you're building drones, you're building counter-drones, counter-UAS or something. A lot of like hard tech getting unlocked, a lot on the back of the Anduril story and a bunch of other successful companies, but this feels a little bit new to me. Are we in a software boom these days?
Yeah. So a couple of things. The nature of warfare is changing. And so I think people realize that a little bit, but to give you guys some perspective, when I was active duty Air Force, when I was deployed, there was 4,000 airmen managing 70 aircraft. You can imagine in the not-so-distant future there's going to be 70 airmen managing 4,000 or 40,000 autonomous systems. And so the sheer nature of warfare is changing just based on the sheer number of systems. Also the demand to get updates out faster has never been more important from a capabilities perspective. And so that's the advantage side. On the national security side, the scary side is you have new foundational models. I know Anthropic had their model pulled due to national security concerns. I mean, those concerns are very real. Like, we need to obviously secure our systems. The ability to patch and update your software has never been more important. And so, honestly, shout out to what's changed. The threat is real. Modern warfare is here. Shout out to the Trump administration and honestly the entire Department of War to just take new approaches to doing business. And so, this hackathon that we're at today, which is a Department of War effort, it's one of many things that the Department of War is doing to just take kind of new approaches. And really just like the big idea here and what we're trying to get after is like, you have a team full of industry people. It's hard in industry to actually sit side by side a warfighter. You might develop a product and be guessing as to what their issues are. You can actually sit side by side with them. You can get real feedback and vice versa. As a former military member, you really have no idea what industry is capable of and something that you might think is a hard challenge, somebody can actually solve overnight. And so, I think this is one of many things that the administration has been doing. As a citizen and somebody who spent the last two decades in the Department of War, I really love to see the bureaucracy just totally get out of the way. I think this is a new vibe. I know you've got a lot of tech companies like ourselves really entering the ecosystem and I think the reason why it continues to grow is because companies are finding success. And why are they finding success? It's because the military members on the other side are open to new approaches, they see the demand, they know that they need to be operating in a different way, and I think there's a whole industry of startups that are eager to work with those customers.
Do you think there's more pre-seed stage companies at Reindustrialize this year than two years ago or less?
Well, I would say that it's, for me, this is my first one, so I don't know between this year and last year, but I'll tell you what, we got a startup over here. It's like four people. It was three people a week ago. And I can't go into exactly what they're doing, but I've been blown away. Being a former Air Force member, they're working on some awesome things. There are small companies here, right behind me we got a small group of, you know, a small company about 10 people building a drone live integrating with some new software capabilities. And so I think the appetite for smaller and smaller teams, because as you guys know very well, AI has lowered the barrier to entry. And so as AI lowers the barrier to entry, there's an appetite for the Department of War and the government to work with these smaller and smaller teams.
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Thanks for calling in from the hackathon. We'll talk to you soon. I'm sure the energy is awesome. Have a good rest of your day. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye, Slaughter.
Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is almost here. I'm not sure. I guess not yet.
In the waiting room, we have Rob Reid, the author of After On and Year Zero.
DC Brags hit the timeline said, 'I want to sincerely apologize for poking fun at the most marginalized and victimized group in our society, venture capitalists.' Yes, the Stratechery effect was fully out on the timeline over the past few days going back and forth with venture capitalists over something that wasn't quite a brag, but it was more just a reflection on the time in San Francisco, how much money is flowing around, how many people are raising different funds. But VC Brags, of course, takes a screenshot, posts it, and that was not well received. But if you're getting dunked on, you've got to lean in. I think Jason Calacanis has learned this and has done a fantastic job negotiating with VC Brags to the point where the whole first investor in Uber, third investor in Uber thing became part of the sticky brand.
If VC Brags takes a shot at you and you're an investor, you've got to lean in. You can't... you've made it. You're worth taking a shot at. Like, people are talking about you. You're not a nobody anymore.
Anyway, we have Rob Reid in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TPBN Ultra. Rob, how are you doing?
Doing well. Hello, gentlemen.
Thank you so much for taking the time. We wanted to talk about all the advancements in bio, biosecurity, what's happening there. But since it's the first time on the show, I would love to know a little bit about your background and sort of introduce you to the audience. Could you take us through some of your earlier journeys, some of the companies that you've worked with and what you're doing now, and then we can go into the hot topics of today.
Absolutely. So I came to the Valley right out of school and I'm chronologically advanced enough that it was during the first wave of the internet boom. So I was at a big company that got very aware of the internet's sort of oncoming tide early, I'd say. Got into the internet group there. Became an internet person, you know, in like 1994, which is very, very early. And as a result of that, I saw a lot of things coming. I ended up writing a book about the rise of the internet as a commercial medium kind of as it was happening and that got me widely known and I became sort of a junior VC at a junior firm and then I took off and started.
What year did you publish the book? Sorry to...
The book came out in 1997. It's called Architects of the Web and I profiled...
I think this is, I think this could be a good business opportunity. There might be some commerce that happens on the worldwide web.
It's amazing. Yeah, that was one of my theories. There might be commerce there. People might trade stocks. Video, crazy stuff.
How much pushback did you get at the time? Because we've covered it before on the show, but there was this almost, if you look at the doom and fear that people had around the internet, it almost aligns one-to-one with AI. There was the Y2K moment. Y2K, cyber... putting all bookstores, all retail, the mall apocalypse, retail apocalypse was the retail apocalypse. Almost, there's basically a one-to-one example for each.
Yeah, this was in the honeymoon period before the panicking started. So '97, it's still primarily a tech-forward thing and there was wild optimism about what was going to happen. Although we didn't have the vocabulary yet, I think if you asked people what the internet would do for information and informedness, people would describe a combination of Wikipedia and Snopes, if you remember Snopes. Nobody ever imagined that disinformation would spread as rapidly, that it would be divisive. It was a real Kumbaya vibe early on and people were obviously a little bit over-optimistic on that front, but boy were they right about the economic opportunity and the degree to which it would change our lives and the way we do business. And so at that time with that book, it was celebrating that moment and really taking a deep, deep look at what was happening right then at the outset. And it was a small enough industry and I had been a part of it just a few months before I started writing it that I had access to everybody and I got to know everybody of any consequence. I mean, this is when you could go over to Netscape and get a meeting with Marc Andre if you had a good reason to with relatively little difficulty. And through all the relationships that I made through that, I ended up getting this sort of field promotion to be a VC far sooner than I thought I would. Did that for a couple of years. Learned a ton. Started this music... I started a company as the solo founder of a company that created a music service called Rap City.
But tell us the domain name of that company.
Fantastic domain name. We love these amazing domains. They're so rare these days, but back then everyone had a great domain. What was the entrepreneurial journey like? Was it a tough transition? What was the whole journey like? How do you reflect on it today?
You know, the toughest thing was that I'd never really managed prior to that. I'd been a mid-level marketing grunt at a big computer company and then a VC. You learn a lot of valuable lessons as a VC, but how to be a self-taught manager. And that's hard enough when you're doing it for the first time, but when you have people who work for people who work for people who work for you, you know, that's a lot to rocket through. We got up to about 200 employees before we sold. And so that was the trickiest thing. And it is lonely being a solo founder because there's no one person. You may have great investor relationships, great board relationships, even great relationships obviously with your team. There's nobody that looks at things through precisely the same lens as you. That said, every co-founder that's added to an equation or every co-founder relationship, which scales quadratically if you go to three, four, etc., is an axis upon which a startup can break. And so that's sort of the trade-off that you face. And I'm glad I did it as a solo founder for a whole bunch of reasons, but that's tough.
Yeah. Interesting. When did you start thinking about biorisk generally? That seems like a second-order effect of technology at this point. But what piqued your interest? What was your process to get up to speed and start actually thinking through tactical implications and forecasting risk?
In a way, it connects to that startup, Rap City. So most of your listeners may not remember Rap City, but for all intents and purposes, we were the first Spotify. We created the unlimited on-demand streaming model that everybody else later adopted. We were the first company to sign full catalog licenses with all the major labels, even before Apple did for their MP3 store. And when I came out of that, I wanted to take a little bit of time off and I wrote... I'd been a writer. I'd written a couple of books, but non-fiction. And so I wrote a book about a crazy alien civilization that was so into American pop music, they accidentally committed the biggest copyright infringement in the history of the universe and bankrupted the entire universe. Based on a true story, I like to say. And so that I thought I was doing for myself. Bizarrely enough, it briefly and barely, I want to put those words out there, became a New York Times bestseller. And I was living in LA.
That's forever. You said briefly, but it's forever.
Yeah. It's like I was a little prairie dog coming up to the bottom of the list and looking around for a couple of weeks, but you do get to say that forever. And I was living in Los Angeles, we were just newly married. My wife was hosting a TV show that kind of had us marooned down there for a long period of time. So before starting another company, I leaned into more writing and doing a bunch of deep science podcasting. And this is where it all sort of comes together. Generally interviewing world-class scientists all the way up to the Nobel level about, you know, very deeply about their work. And I would spend 30 or 40 hours of prep before each interview because I was mainly doing it for the fun of it. That was a great way to learn about a bunch of different things. Through one of my novels and then through my podcasting, I got more and more concerned about synthetic biology risk. And this probably started about 10 years ago. And at the time, you could see that synthetic biology, like computing, was and is an exponential technology. Which means that the things that are incredibly hard or indeed even impossible to do today, unless you're one of two or three people, are the types of things that freshmen in college will be able to do with the passage of time. And when you think about the bad things that can happen on the edges of synthetic biology, and this is before we got to the AI intersection, you could really imagine catastrophic acts of bioterror or bioerror, you know, seven to nine years in the future. And I started diving deeper into this, speaking about it, writing about it. And then right before COVID, I gave a TED talk about the dangers of an unnatural pandemic. And of course, a few months later, we had COVID. And so I've gotten deeper and deeper into this. It's my public service side. I have made one investment that is connected to this as a VC, which is what I do now. But it's my public service side, and I've at this point probably put at least a couple thousand hours into it over the years.
There's been some movement at least, like open letters signed by AI lab leaders. The most recent was around basically recordkeeping and sort of KYC rules at companies that manufacture DNA/RNA sequences, if I understand it correctly. Is that the right hinge point to focus on? Are you a fan of an ensemble approach where the models have guardrails baked in and then also if you're using the model through a SaaS product, then the software also is tracking things, then the company that makes the actual sequence might have guardrails, and then maybe the equipment is regulated with licenses? Do you have a prescriptive approach that you're advocating for at this point? Is it evolving? How are you thinking about that?
It's always evolving, but there are a few very, very simple and incredibly inexpensive things that we can do as first steps that would significantly improve the situation. So, first of all, all of the foundation model companies are very, very aware of this risk. They all have what's called classifier models that are there, that we've all probably experienced versions of them, that are there to prevent people from doing, you know, dangerous biological research or trying to create dangerous bugs. Every frontier model, every model has what's called a system card, which they describe a model and its capabilities. And every system card I've ever seen has acknowledged that classifiers, classifier models, which are like smaller models, almost like bouncers that sit in front of the big model, classifiers can and are always fooled. So they are doing everything they can. They will continue to. We should be grateful for that. But we know that that's only the beginning of it. The next issue is securing our DNA supply. So at this point, practically anybody who wants to make a long strand of DNA goes to a service bureau to have that done because the experts are better at it and researchers would rather do research. There is a consortium called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium or something like that. It's called the IGSC. It's a voluntary consortium that does very good work. They put together what they call sequences of concern and if somebody tries to order one of those things, a traffic light, red, yellow, will go off and they'll dive into the order. This is expensive for companies to comply with and it's also voluntary. The IGSC claims that they speak for 80% of the synthesized DNA in the world, but that was kind of a blue-sky guess that they made over 10 years ago and they don't have very many Chinese members. So that's no longer true. But even if it was 80%, I can confidently say that if there were a town in which 80% of the bars enforce the drinking age, that would be a town without a drinking age, right? So it does nothing. A bad actor is going to go to a non-IGSC shop, obviously. And it's even worse than that. It'd be almost like you had security lines at the airport that were voluntary and it was actually cheaper to fly if you didn't go through the security line because you save money by not... this adds to the cost basis. We need to make that mandatory. And there was actually an open letter signed by a lot of folks, including from AI labs, just a few days ago pushing for that. This is a dead simple thing. And by the way, it's as much in China's interests as it is in our own because if anybody can order any strand of DNA that they want, and we'll get into what they can do with that DNA once they have it if you'd like, the two entities that have the most to lose are the United States and China. And this is something that we can team up on with them and say, 'Yeah, there needs to be an international regime. It has to be mandatory and it also has to apply to benchtop synthesizers where people can make much shorter strands without having to go to a service bureau.'
A bad actor gets a hold of or is working with somebody that's not voluntarily being, I guess, regulated. What can they do with it?
Well, in a worst-case scenario, let's think about something that's not just hypothetical. Let's say that there is a really deadly genome that's in wide circulation online.
Everybody knows what it is. The 1918 flu happens to be just such a genome because our government put it there. They put it there a long time ago when very few people could do anything with it. But the passage of time always happens, and it was a very foolish thing to do because we now live in a world in which 30,000 people, roughly, perhaps a little more, have the tools and the know-how which would allow them to basically animate that virus just from the DNA if they felt like doing it. And the last time that thing came around, it killed a staggeringly high percentage of the people in the world. And we don't want that to happen again. There's reasons to think it might not turn into a pandemic this time, but let's skip the rabbit hole. This is just a hypothetical.
There is a brilliant professor at MIT named Kevin Esvelt who stress-tested the system with this in mind, and he basically cut up a whole bunch of orders which collectively added up to Spanish flu and sent it to a whole bunch of different labs. Most of those labs actually knew that this was a sequence that was part of the Spanish flu. But although the Spanish flu virus is very, very tightly regulated by our government, it's one of the very most regulated biological, you know, critters or sequences or whatever you want to say in the world because it's called a select agent. There's fewer than a hundred of those. They didn't stop themselves from sending the DNA because it's only the entire genome that's regulated. And so this was a scientific paper he did. He did it with the knowledge and cooperation of the FBI. It was a red-teaming exercise, and even going to IGSC-compliant labs, he could pull this all together, and somebody like Kevin and about 30,000 other people could then animate the virus, and the number of people who can do that is only going to go up. It was probably fewer than 30 when that genome was first posted to the internet. At some point, it will be anybody in freshman biology.
So please, what do you... I feel like every six months there's a very concerning headline where like some illegal lab is raided by law enforcement, and then it just sort of like goes away. What do you make of that? I'm sure you've kind of tracked a lot of these stories. I'm assuming if law enforcement is consistently finding them, that there's a lot more out there that aren't found. Why are they created in the first place? What is the United States doing to crack down further, all that stuff?
Yeah. I mean, we can rely on the fact that we have not found each and every one of these things. And this all keys off of proliferation. So again, I'll go back to the notion that synthetic biology is an exponential technology like computing. With something like that, you have very, very, very rapid proliferation and very, very, very rapid drops in cost. So just think about transistors. I forget the statistic, but it was in the late 50s that one very brilliant person in the entire world developed the ability to play checkers with a computer. You know, he had one of five machines that could do it. He was one of two people who was smart enough to program it, whatever. And with the passage of a couple decades, you know, anybody can play chess. And then it gets to the point that any, you know, street kid with a tiny budget can do that. We'll go through the same thing with synbio.
Now, these labs that we're discovering have not been terribly capable yet, but because particularly when synbio meets AI, the level of expertise that you need in order to achieve really powerful things that perhaps nobody even can achieve right now will become increasingly cheap, achievable in a very, very low budget with the passage of like a single-digit number of years. And so these labs, we're hearing more and more about them because it's becoming cheaper and easier to create them. And you know, this needs to be something that we as a society think about and invest in as much as cybersecurity. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on that, as we should. But the consequences of, you know, the human genome and therefore the human species being taken down by a cunningly engineered virus are so much higher than that in cyber that we should be rationally making at least as much of an investment. And at this point, we're making a vanishingly small amount of investment.
And I should point out part of this investment needs to be about, you know, preventing bad actors without hobbling our ability to get incredible gains from synbio and from AI models. And so that has to be done very deftly and very intelligently. And so simply passing a law and saying we've passed the law ain't enough. Not that we're in any danger of passing a law that makes us more secure on a bio level, but the objective, the urgent objective needs to be to allow creativity and technological and scientific advance to run rampant and bring incredible benefits to us, but not allowing ourselves to get taken down. And this thing that I mentioned with secure DNA, that would cost, you know, virtually nothing because there are tools that do this that are actually open source. It's just not required of anybody. There just needs to be a requirement in that case and some enforcement, and we haven't yet had the social willpower to even do that. Hopefully that's going to change with all these powerful signatures that are starting to accrue on these open letters.
Seems pretty straightforward that AI's ability to find software vulnerabilities, you know, basically sending a model and saying, hey, just figure out vulnerabilities in, you know, this infrastructure or this piece of software. Do you believe like already the models have that same ability to effectively find like vulnerabilities in the human species?
Yeah, there's no question because we are not as robust as the Mac OS, for instance. There are lots and lots of known vulnerabilities that we have already that have not been patched, will never be patched, cannot be patched. And so yeah, we're a much softer target, you know, than Linux or Mac OS.
And so how does... it seems like the solution needs to be, like you've been talking about, focused on like actually making it more difficult to procure DNA because if you assume that open models, you know, a bad actor is going to be able to have an open model with no guardrails with access to enough compute that they can send the model on, you know, basically a goal which is like find as many possible, you know, known vulnerabilities as well as potentially net new vulnerabilities in, you know, the human species. And so that, it feels like the cat's out of the bag there maybe already or will be within the next 12 months. But do you think...
Hopefully 24 or 36, but perhaps already?
Last question for me. You know, as guns proliferated in society, so did metal detectors. Is there an opportunity for more diffuse early warning detection around sickness? I'm just thinking if a Whoop or an Oura ring or some other connected device can tell every individual you're getting sick, you should get checked out, you shouldn't go to work, you shouldn't go to that, you shouldn't spread anything. Feels like that could make quarantining more targeted and potentially more of an early warning detection system. Are you optimistic about that?
You've actually hit on a couple of really interesting things with that question. Let's go to metal detectors and guns first. In 1972, astounding fact, there were over 50 hijackings of large commercial airliners in the United States. That started being true in the late 60s. Why? There was literally no airport security at all in the United States. And who was lobbying against it? The airlines. Because they thought it would be expensive and it would make people think, seeing those security gates would make people think that airline travel was dangerous. I'll tell you what would make me think it's dangerous: 50 hijackings a year.
I'm sorry, go ahead. That people would hijack a plane and enjoy hostages, hostages, money. So was there a lot of like ransom payments being made? Was that like the primary...
We got to do a whole deep dive on...
Yeah, I guess we're going to do three hours tomorrow on hijacking.
There was everything. There was everything. So there's a great book called The Skies Belong to Us to tell the story, but this was kind of the late 60s and there were a lot of radicals and the most popular destination was Cuba. Somebody would have it in their heads that they're going to fly down to Cuba with a hijacked plane. Fidel's going to become their best friend and it's just going to be, you know, rum coladas and beaches for the rest of their life. It literally got so bad that they started a dormitory for wayward American hostages, and I'm not exaggerating, in Havana. And they would send the plane back and just have to deal with these, you know, entitled, you know, college or post-college kids. Anyway, the security guards at the gates go in and we go from 50 hijackings in '72 to zero in '73.
And then there's kind of a very occasional thing and then 9/11 hits. And after 9/11 hits, we take security much more seriously than ever. And there has not been a single one in the United States in, you know, 25 years. What does this tell us? It means that you just don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A lot of people say, 'Well, gee, securing the DNA is only part of the solution.' It is, but you make a major speed bump in front of people. It becomes a much higher bar, much higher intent.
Something you don't do on a whim because you're pissed off that your girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with you. And then it becomes much, you know, more difficult to get over that bar. And you can really, really plummet the level of ambient risk down to the point that it's really only determined actors who are out there who become much easier to detect using intelligence and law enforcement and all the things that we want to use.
And then in terms of your question of surveillance, yeah, we're pretty far off from when Oura rings could necessarily do that, but we should be thinking about improving them and tying them into the primary care system in the US, if only because we're worried about sick days at work. Like there's lots of benefits to that. But the other thing we can be doing is what's called biosurveillance, which is getting a global detection system out there. The best place, believe it or not, is airports where everybody comes in and all the waste products from all of those planes goes into a single place where you can sequence parts of that wastewater and see if there is a genetic sequence that's never been seen before that is suddenly starting to grow exponentially in various points of the world. Because that would mean it's either something with a long incubation cycle or it's what some people call a stealth pandemic, which is something that is engineered to have an extravagantly long incubation cycle. So everybody's asymptomatic but it's spreading and spreading. If that ever happens, we want to know pronto. And the budget for some very, very powerful plans for biosurveillance has been as low as, you know, $50 million setup and $10 million a year thereafter. These are not expensive things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got to do it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. We really do this again. We got to do this again soon. This is fantastic. Also, there's a bunch of your fans in the chat hoping for more podcasts from you because they love your podcast.
Well, thank you so much, Rob. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have the founder and CEO of Taste Labs. We talked about it yesterday on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. How are you doing?
What's happening? I'm doing great. How are you guys? Thanks for having me.
Thanks for hopping on. We talked about Taste Labs, the launch, the back and forth a little bit yesterday. I would put... Did you mean to rage bait everyone with the name?
I knew there was going to be some debate about the name, but it's actually funny. We registered for the company like a year ago with that name, and so before the word really popped up.
Okay, okay. Yeah, well, you get a ton of points for that for sure. What about this, what about if I boil down the core debate? It feels like a lot of people are very optimistic about your business. Like there are just a lot of models where the outputs, even if you just put aside taste, like they're just not satisfactory to the user, and providing more data, more signal there, that's valuable, great, good business. But then there's this other discussion of like, can taste ever be something handled by a machine? Is it so human we'll never touch it with the most magical godlike superintelligence? Those are the two angles. How reasonable is that as a framing for this discussion?
I think that's very reasonable. But by the way, I almost went to even do the exercise of not even using the word taste to describe what we're doing because I think people got very caught up in the terminology. But ultimately, I think one thing that everyone can agree on is slop is a problem. Slop is everywhere. It's not going anywhere. It's just getting worse. And so that's really what we're ultimately trying to solve is how do we raise this bar of quality first and how do we just allow us to even be able to create better things with AI. But it's not a substitute for human taste and it's not trying to determine like one taste, if that makes sense.
Yes, yes, yes. I think another thing people are worried about is like the idea of monoculture, which happens in Silicon Valley every once in a while where someone says like serif fonts are tasteful, sans serif is no longer tasteful, therefore everyone must use sans serif or vice versa. And we're all like, wait, everything looks the same. This is actually bland. This doesn't feel as rich or tasteful as what you'd see in a thriving community that actually has a ton of culture to it. I'm interested to know though about the actual process. Congratulations on the funding round, but how are you thinking about actually imbuing models with taste? How much of this is about data labeling? How much of this is bringing on experts with particular backgrounds? Is this a very high skill ceiling effort where you're finding, you know, artists and people with art history backgrounds? Like who is the ground truth? Where's the ground truth coming from?
Very good question. So I think on the monoculture piece, I think that's exactly what we're trying to solve. Like the whole problem with slop is this repetition that you see, right? Every site now looks the same, every site looks the same, no one wants that. And so part of what we're doing is building this community of experts that is at the heart of everything that we do that are a lot of designers, front-end engineers, art people that can exactly like bring this whole range. I think we don't even as a team want the company to be a reflection of our own like personal preference. Like I think it's much more how do we map this whole range of preferences that exist and select the best people in the world at this so that they can bring to the table all their opinions and discussions of like when is something good, when is something bad, because also none of this can really happen in isolation, right? I think yes, first we have to really raise this floor and figure out what's the minimum bar of quality. But then I think there is this multitude of preferences and that's always going to be the case.
I always think of in text, the 'it's not this, it's that' — antithetical parallelism is the name of that term. And by itself, I've probably read that exact phrase in... actually somebody pulled up an old Paul Graham essay that had that exact phrase, the forbidden AI slop phrase from a decade ago. And it's probably been in New Yorker articles and famous books. But it was only when it became so repeated that it was in every paragraph of every thing that was ever generated that it became a tell. And it became somewhat, I don't even know if it's less tasteful, but just annoying. And I think that... I'm interested to know like how much of taste in your mind or just the quality output is driven just by variation.
I think that's a very good point. Like the feeling of repetition, it will lead something to be less tasteful over time, right? That's why you have these like cycles of trends because you have kind of the people that are early, but then the soon that it becomes too ubiquitous, it kind of loses its power. And so it's this moving target. And I think that understanding how do you force diversity in an intentional way, right? It's not just, for example, turning up the temperature of a model and having it produce more randomness because that wouldn't be like intentional. And so it's like how do you understand, yes, how to force that diversity but in a way that's more intentional.
Time, what are your aesthetic superintelligence timelines? Do you think where we can one day... because it feels like we're... I mean even just the latest revision of the models, if you interact with the frontier, the 'it's not this, it's that' is actually gone. I haven't seen it in a long time. Like, and a lot of these things like six fingers just went away and no one talked about it because it was only fun to talk about when it was sloppy and terrible. And now people are like, wow, the victory lap was like two days in tech Twitter and then everyone moved on and they found some new bone to pick, which is maybe the human condition. We'll always find something to complain about. But yeah, do you have like some end state or do you think this is a life's work? Is this something that...
I do think it's a bit of a life's work situation because I think you'll have this phase now, like to your point, how do you fix the problem of six fingers that's equivalent in design, right? Or that's equivalent in writing. But once you're over that, then I think it's like how do you actually raise the ceiling of that too, and that's a moving target. So I think part of this that's very different than training a model to be amazing at something like coding or math is that it's not like you can train that capability at once. It's something that you need to consistently retrain. I think a lot of the thing the model right now is bad at is even these fundamentals like things like vision, alignment, typography. But once that's solved, then I think it becomes much more this problem of personalization, moving trends, localization too, right? So yeah, honestly I think within like a year a lot of the capability problem will be solved in terms of what we can actually produce, but then the bar of ceiling I think is a much, much longer endeavor.
Talk about transfer learning in taste, where taste applies more broadly. We were just talking to the CEO of Arm Holdings, chip design firm. In labs they talk about research taste. I imagine that there's a lot of chip design that can be done just with, you know, a deterministic like Verilog model, Verilog fine-tuned model. But I would imagine if I actually went and talked to the best, you know, designers at Arm, they would say, 'Yeah, there is a lot of taste in what we do.' And I'm interested to know if you think there will be knock-on effects because everyone probably goes to images, front-end design, you know, the visual taste of a visual designer, but I'm wondering if you see yourself as doing something that is in the path of solving challenges outside of visual taste and maybe there will be implications in things that maybe people outside the industry can't see the taste that goes into the design of a CPU, but in fact there is.
Totally. So I think it's funny you say this because whenever I'm even explaining the company, a lot of people are like, there's space in code, right? Like I am very opinionated about the way that I write code. So I think how do you develop really a framework and almost this like infrastructure to be able to turn something that is subjective and something that's more objective or that can be codified. And that logic I think will apply to many things way beyond just aesthetics. I think aesthetics is a super important one that we care deeply a lot about as a team, which is why we started there. But creative writing is another one to your point. Like anything really where there's a multitude of opinions applies the same logic.
What does demand look like just this week? Sounds like you started the company around a year ago or at least incorporated it. I imagine that the haters would be in shambles if they got a look at your pipeline just given how much attention the launch got. But what's demand been like?
The inbound of the last 48 hours has been absolutely insane. Don't get me wrong, it's actually the reason we took so long to launch. The reason we took so long to launch is actually because we already had more demand than honestly I think we could serve before even the launch. And so it's been a very low sleep week for me trying to catch up with all the demand. But yeah, I think both on the side of the labs and of the app-layer companies, it's been kind of bonkers. Still trying to wrap my head around it.
And then meeting that demand. Creatives, I've had the pleasure of working with so many amazing designers, photographers, creative directors over the years. And oftentimes I have found that many of them are not... their life is not guided as commercially as many other kind of domains, right? Like software engineers, lawyers, accountants, etc., where, you know, if an accountant has an opportunity to work with a company for a great salary and the company is doing something, you know, ethical or not even just not illegal, they're like, cool, sign me up. Whereas like creatives that I've worked with, I've at some points just offered to make an intro, hey, there's this company, and they'll just be like, no, I don't vibes.
Yeah, there's no price to work with a brand.
How has it been talking with creatives who many of them are already like... I've met plenty of creatives that love AI that are like, this is amazing, this is like a new tool. But certainly many of them are also... maybe they wouldn't even admit that they enjoy it as a tool. So how's it been building out the network?
So I think there's still definitely a lot of division maybe within the creative community of like people that are really leaning into it and others that are very like anti. I think what's been really cool is actually finding these creatives that want to be that bridge. They're like, hey, I do agree that AI is inevitable and why not make it better, right? Like why not be part of the solution to make this actually something good and that we can also use. And so that I think has been really cool. But you're right that they're way more picky, which they should be. Our founding designer actually had... we made her a hat that says picky. Because I totally agree with this. It's like we have to create a community that actually people want to be a part of and are excited about. But of course I think you're always going to have people that are anti-AI especially and that will be against it, and I think we have to find the ones that are pro.
Predictions, how many years until we see someone affectionately and nostalgically embrace AI slop, like the slopcore aesthetic? They're bringing six fingers in. They're prompting the latest and greatest models, the Nano Banana 7, and they're like, I want you to add six fingers because that has a retro feel that takes me back to DALL-E 2, and I want that. I want that slop.
Yeah. Maybe they just go back to the model if they're really authentic. It's like running the iPhone photo through the VHS recorder, so you get the film grain in there. Something like that.
How long until slop becomes affectionately loved and reminisced about?
I think it's going to be kind of like taking photos on a film camera because it has like a specific vibe. I do think that people do gravitate to these like specific aesthetics and vibes. Totally. And maybe in like five... I need a little bit of distance so that I'm not traumatized by the software anymore. So maybe like five years people will be like, I really miss those fonts and purple gradients all over my page.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that time. We had it so good in 2026. I just want to go back to that era. So good. Last question. Anyone that has, you know, worked on building a brand or a product, I think early on in their career they can have this like frustration around the gap between their ability and their taste level. Do you think that's going away already? Because I even noticed like historically if I wanted to try to create, like let's say 10 years ago I wanted to create like some type of render for a product or a design for a product, I could go into Figma and like make a version of it very, very quickly. And now like with a... let's say I have an idea for a joke consumer product I want to send to John. Now I can basically one-shot a version of it that's like pretty easy, and it feels like that gap at least initially has closed. Do you think that's the case or are people's expectations just like already much higher and going to rise?
Yeah, I think so. I think people that love this mastery of the craft of design and that are like the peak of tastemakers, I think will always want to keep improving even their ability to create to like keep up with their taste. But I think what we really don't realize is especially now with AI, any person on earth can suddenly create, right? Like anyone can prompt, anyone can build something, and I think that group is a very large group that is producing a lot of volume. And if we can again both actually raise the skill to match people's taste but actually even help to maybe improve people's taste and like show them, understand their taste better or improve the things that they can create and so their bar will get higher, I think that would be awesome. I think the craftsmanship will never go away of the people that are like at the peak of that field. But I do agree with you that I think you're going to see this ability for you to suddenly match the level of taste that you maybe had as a consumer even though you weren't like an expert or professional before.
Last question. Are you having to hire... are you having to convince people with taste to move to San Francisco or are you setting up satellite offices in New York and LA, Bushwick and Austin?
I'm trying to convince a few to move. There is an amazing concentration of creatives in New York, and I'm actually from Brazil originally, and Brazil is also an amazing like aesthetic city. So yeah, we have a couple people that are spread out, but convincing a few to move.
That's great. Awesome. Thank you so much. Well, congrats on the launch. Congrats on the round. How much was it? How much did you raise?
There we go. Congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time. Sorry we couldn't do this yesterday, but I'm really glad we got to digest the story. I'm going to have to convince Jordan now to like the name eventually. That's my one mission.
