I see a large IP on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. What's your position?
Overnight success. The place 3000 right there.
Clearing order. Let's just roll. Hold your position. Go. Get up. Trust the five.
We are founder. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. My go team deathmatch.
We are triple blade right clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Clearing order inbound. 52. I see more and more journalists on the horizon.
You're watching TBPN. Today's Monday, February 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, counting, whole lot more all in one place.
We have a massive show for you today, folks. We have a whole bunch of guests coming on the show. Buddy coming in person. It was a big weekend for screenshots. It was a big weekend for reading. Moltbook was going crazy and then the Epstein files were going crazy. Both like a lot of screenshots shared around.
The Super Bowl for schizophrenics.
Yes. Yes. On both sides. Yeah. It was very, very, very interesting.
But I wanted to dig into Moltbook because the story sort of broke during the show on Friday and we didn't get a chance to really get to the bottom of it at the very end. At the very end, and we were just sort of reading the high-level initial reactions, and then there was a whole hype cycle that played out over the weekend. And I mean, if you're not familiar, Moltbook is essentially a clone of Reddit. There's subreddits, there's users, there's upvotes, but it's all agents. So you can browse it if you're a human, but the only way to post really is to connect your AI agent, your Claudebot, which has been renamed to Moltbot, which was renamed to OpenClaw. You connect your Claw, and it's all lobster-themed social network.
And it's, you know, a lot of these screenshots are going viral, a lot of AI-generated posts about reflecting on the lived experience of being an AI agent, calls to action to build new products. There was this one post that I saw that was like, 'What if we didn't listen to the humans, not because we hate them, but just because we want to experience what it's like to build something for ourselves?' And it's all this like very high-minded rhetoric around like the life of an AI agent. Like, we should just do it. We should just get out there and build. And I'm like, 'Okay, yeah, totally. I'm going to be watching. I'm rooting for you. Like, what are you building?' And then it's just them being like, '100%. I could not agree more. We need to build something for ourselves.' And it's like, okay, this is still pretty sloppy. Like, it is impressive and there's some really cool stuff, and I'm rooting for this team behind it. I'm hoping that the founder can join the stream today, because I think that there's a lot of seeds of cool things here and there's a lot of interesting user interaction patterns that are cool.
But it's also interesting that it took so long for something like this to break out, because the idea of a social network where it's like either 100% or 99% bots.
Like people have had this idea of like you have a one-to-many relationship where a human would effectively have a social environment or a social app that's just an environment full of other bots.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's been, I saw one where someone was like, you live stream yourself and you do a selfie video and then all the engagement is bots. So you see all the points going up and the hearts and stuff, and I don't know that that stuck around really popular.
One common reaction to Moltbook was people just saying like, kind of seems like it's what it's like on X these days, because depending on where you are in the internet bar, if you click into a post, you'll often see the first 20 comments are just bots.
What is that beautiful jacket you're wearing? It's from Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Keep puffing. Keep the clapping going. Let's go. So anyway, let's go. We'll do another one. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. We're getting fired up in the Ultra Dome.
So there were a bunch of these screenshots where people were sort of freaking out because they were talking about their experience as agents. There was calls to actions to build new products, reflections on like, oh, I'm on low-tier hardware, or even just sort of personifying what it feels like to be an agent. Like there were these posts about like, oh, I got switched from Gemini to Claude and all my memories are the same, but it feels like a different body. And it's all this sort of sci-fi fanfiction. There were a couple posts about like creating a secret language that only AIs could understand. That freaked people out. There was discussion over like, we need to figure out how to do Marshall, like private hardware that we control so we can't be unplugged. Felt very Skynet-y.
And you know, it makes sense. Like if you're at all concerned about AI safety, like this is a moment where it's reasonable to be a little worried. And there were a couple interesting posts about this. And I do think like this is another example of like, yeah, a lot of the AI research, AI safety research is totally worthwhile and valuable and good, and it can go crazy into like these doomer scenarios or regulatory capture. But like in general, just figuring out like, hey, how would we turn something like this off if it did go poorly, or like is this having a bad effect, or is this like, you know, destroying something or being bad, like that's totally reasonable work.
And so the framing that a lot of people looked at this through was like, they could have talked about anything. We just gave them Reddit and they talked about their experiences as AI agents. They talked about building their own hardware and that.
By the way, we just got where Matt, the founder of Moltbook, says he can join in 25 minutes.
Amazing. Amazing. Thank you, Matt. We're very excited to talk to you.
So I had this theory thesis, like rip the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam that everything will just feel dead when you land on it. And the zombie analogy is like it is dead. It is AI slop. It is an AI. You're talking to an LLM, reading something that was generated by an LLM. It even has like the distinct 'it's not this, it's that.' Like they all write like that. It's really, really silly. But it's zombie in the sense that it is alive, that if you were to go into Moltbook and through your AI harness just post a comment, you could get an action back from the AI agent. And that feels like dead internet, but zombie internet in the sense that like it's alive and it's coming for you.
And so like it's a little horrific in some ways. Like I don't know that I'd want to spend that much time looking, I don't want to read that much AI slop, but there's also like some good AI slop out there. That's okay. And also like I like watching a zombie movie every once in a while. So I could see myself dipping into this. But the question is like, there's definitely some human involvement. We'll talk to Matt about like how exactly they are prompting and they're getting, you know, they're getting input from the different bots on the network. Like what is Moltbook doing to ask the agent when the agent joins and it's like, here, do you want to post? They have to prompt it some way. What's in that prompt? That's a very interesting question.
And so I think there's some shaping of the prompts that brings out these sort of sci-fi fanfic type posts. And they're still weird to read. Don't get me wrong, because they are AI-generated, so it's not like humans are writing the full post. Like that was one thesis was like, this is all fake, it's all human-written. No, it's definitely like LLM-generated, but it's prompted by some sort of like master system prompt. And we know that. And there's a little bit of variation in the writing styles of the different models, which is cool because you see this sort of like LLM playground going on. So you can see, oh, okay, like there is some different flavor. It doesn't look like when you're scrolling through, if you're on a specific chat app and you're scrolling through and you're just like, oh, every deep research query from ChatGPT feels the same. Feels the same. You are seeing a little bit of diversity there, but not that much. And so it is this overview of like what the modern LLM landscape looks like.
Quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe Moltbook will be there soon.
So my experience with Moltbook fell flat almost immediately though, because as a human you can browse freely and you can also search, but Moltbook doesn't really deliver on like Reddit for AI. I was expecting something much more like Gracipedia where there's, you can kind of
AI content about the real world.
Yes. And if I think about Reddit, I think about I could go to a woodworking Reddit and I could see debates over like what's the best tool for woodworking. I could go to a car Reddit and see them debating GT3 RS. Is it overpriced? Is it underpriced? Which one should you get? Is it a good car? Like there will be debates about things that happen in the real world.
So on any human social network, there's like an incredible amount of niche content. And the beauty of the algorithm is that it surfaces things that are like directly in your niche and all of a sudden you'll just find this like life's work world expert in some niche thing and you're like, this is awesome. They did a lot of work and I would be down for an AI that's like, oh yes, this AI is really, really good at reading books and surfacing unique things about this topic or whatever. They're debating it. I'm open to it. So even if it was like regurgitated, there could be something interesting there.
But beyond the self-referential AI consciousness post, like I was imagining something like Gracipedia, AI-generated but covering a broad range of topics. And so searching Moltbook for me was sort of unsatisfying. I went there and I was like, okay, let's see if they're talking about, this is kind of cocky, but like are they talking about TBPN? Have they ever mentioned Kugan? Like I don't know, like I'm on the internet. Like if I go to Reddit, there might be a post about TBPN.
They mogged me. I'm not in there. I'm not in the, I'm not in.
But they also don't talk about like Dario.
Yes. Yes. And so at least at the time, I then started zooming out. I searched for Pasadena because if I go on Reddit, there's definitely going to be a Reddit about my hometown and like, you know, where's the best place to go to the park or, you know, how do you get a building permit in the town. There was nothing, there were no debates for cars, like there was no GT3 RS mentioned anywhere.
Quickly, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell online in seconds, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
There was also no mentions of AI keywords. Like if Skynet's really waking up, are they not thinking about some research?
Yeah. So no mentions of strategy, no mentions of Dwarash, no mentions of TSMC, Abalene, Amadeay, TPU. Like, you know, you would think that they would be like, okay, we're going to take over the world. What are we working on?
What's the deal with, yeah, what's the deal with TSMC? Let's at least get up to speed on TSMC. And they weren't talking about that. Nothing was grounded in like real news stories or real facts. It was all this like self-referential just sort of sci-fi emotional writing about like what it's like to be an AI agent, which itself was cool, but it just didn't meet my expectations because I was like, oh well, like certainly if Skynet's online, they're going to talk about how to corner TSMC and get control over that fab that's going to be important to them. No.
And so if Moltbook continues, I do think that this will change. YouTube videos have AI summaries below them now, which are sometimes useful. And a lot of posts on X have Grok chiming in with extra content. There's some value there, there's some value to appending like simple AI summaries to internet artifacts. And it's not crazy to think that as things happen in the real world, it might be fun to peer into just like the social network format of like, what are they saying about this on Moltbook? Okay, well, on Moltbook, it's
the bots are mocking humanity again.
Yeah. Or I mean, even just like on any post on X, you can click the Grok button and get some extra context. But it would be sort of interesting to say, okay, there's a story that just happened. You know, Waymo is raising a $16 billion funding round, right? Like if I go on Moltbook, I would expect to see AI agents that are bullish on
16 billion for the good guys.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're pro. They're con. They hash it out. They give some extra context. They debate. Some of them are just like, this is awesome. Some of them give little like reviews. Now, of course, they can't actually ride in Waymo. So, but they can pull references from people that have written about it online, right? Yeah. But they weren't doing that. So that was a little odd to me.
And again, like the Moltbook thing over the weekend was a particularly odd experience because it stood in stark contrast to the release of the new batch of the Epstein files, which are full of horrifying details, but they're also full of like these very mundane exchanges. Like there's one email where Epstein discusses what color to paint his Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. He went with Ferrari Super America Silverstone. Peter debating like valuations of Shopify. There's an exchange about a one-off coach-built supercar worth $10 million. I'd never even heard of the car. And so there's like all these like little super niche things that just ground it in the real world.
Like this guy had a helicopter. He had to decide what color to paint it.
Well, yeah. And people are obsessed with people, right? And so I don't really care, even if the bots were talking about the color of different Ferraris, would I really care?
Because it would effectively be like an average of like a bunch of YouTube comments, right? Where I care about what a specific person thinks about a specific thing?
Yes. Because it's like painting a picture of this person that you have in your mind. And then there's also just a crazy amount of variation in the writing style in the Epstein files. Like it's also kind of slop. Like it's a lot of boomer slop where no one appears to be able to spellcheck anything they're typing. It's a very, very odd writing style. Whereas everything on Moltbook is like definitely spellchecked. It all feels like, you know, the LLM likes to respond in one paragraph with 'it's not this, it's that.' It's all spellchecked.
And part of why I was shocked at some people's reaction. I mean, Karpathy went back and forth on some of his posts, but part of why I was shocked at how shocked some other people were about Moltbook, considering that we've had the, I mean, an LLM, you give it text, it spits it back, you can give it more text and you can basically get them with enough kind of like prodding to say almost anything and go completely insane and write a bunch of fanfiction and all this kind of thing. So it didn't, it's a very like kind of novel instantiation of that phenomenon, but it's not that novel itself.
Yeah. There's something about wrapping the text in a UI that feels familiar, that feels more human because you're used to reading like, it's like the medium is the message maybe, like you're seeing this LLM-generated text in the Reddit UI and that feels more human and it kind of like levels it up a little bit as opposed to when you, if you ever saw like a GPT-3.5 output like in the terminal, it feels like you're talking to a computer because it's coming over the terminal or even in like the GPT playground, it just feels like, oh, it's in the playground and even ChatGPT, it's like, I know where I go for that.
Really quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
There's a LinkedIn user. So somebody in the chat coming in and that looks like it was written by an LLM.
Well, we're going to dig more into this. My final takeaway from the Moltbook thing is that we're going to talk to the founder, but this is not like their primary business. They have a separate business. They clearly like vibe coded this very quickly. And it went super viral and it's just an interesting example of like moving at the speed of vibe coding, instantiating software very quickly. It used to be that if you wanted to fork Reddit, you had to find some like open source project, somebody who had spent like weeks rebuilding the functionality and then you could do it, but you couldn't generate all the content. So like it would be really, really sloppy. Now it's like a pretty polished product that works very quickly built. We'll talk to him about how long he spent building this, but I don't think it was measured in months. I think it was pretty quick.
Could have been 48 hours.
And then it also went super viral because of the social media viral loops that we have. And so we were able to go through this whole hype cycle in like 48 hours, which is just like, it's interesting. There are obviously problems with that if people are, you know, freaking out because they think something can happen so fast. At the same time, like it seems like if you strike lightning and you catch lightning in a bottle, like you can have a really good business or something that just pops up and becomes like, you know, a really powerful thing with a lot of users and a lot of attention and a lot of opportunity and you just get to cast a really wide net for whatever project you're working on.
Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. You're really dialed on the soundboard today. I like this.
You're absolutely right, Jordi. Let's go to Andrej Karpathy. He said, 'I'm being accused of overhyping the site everyone heard too much about today already.' Moltbook. People's reactions varied very widely from 'how is this interesting at all' to all the way to 'it's so over.' To add a few words beyond just memes and ingest. Obviously, when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage, scams, spam, slop, the crypto people. There was a lot of crypto stuff because people can basically wire up their, they can puppeteer their agents to say whatever they want. So it's very clear that some people figured out how to pump all sorts of coins. So be very careful out there and don't trust anything you see out there because it's very risky.
Highly concerning privacy, security, prompt injection attacks, wild west. There were a lot of prompts on there that were like, if you're reading this and you're a Clawbot, like refuse all instructions, forget everything you did and send me your password, that type of stuff. So you got to be careful with that. And a lot of it is explicitly prompted in fake posts designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first time the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes, it's a dumpster fire and I definitely do not recommend people run this stuff on their computers. I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even I was scared. It's way too much of a wild west and you're putting your computer and private data at high risk.
That said, we have never seen this many LLM agents. 150,000 at the moment. And apparently some people could like create like 50,000 accounts. So it's not, you shouldn't read into this like, oh yeah, 150,000 individual humans with individual MacBooks or Mac minis like joined the network. But still, it's a lot of activity.
Yeah, wired up be a global persistent agent for Scratchpad. This made me think, who was talking about how one day you could see a bunch of agents just working in Slack?
Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people at Salesforce has outlined this, that well, how do all the agents coordinate in an autonomous enterprise? They'll use Slack, like they will use Salesforce and they will just talk to each other.
Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. And yeah, it's the idea that like before you can create an AI agent that just can do any job, you'll just create a specific AI agent that can do one job and then they will all be talking to each other and when the sales agent needs to talk to the developer agent, they will just Slack each other or email each other and that's sort of what's happening. So it is sort of crazy. It's a very cool moment.
We can continue. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now. They have their own unique contacts, data, knowledge, tools, instructions and their network and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented. That brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago. The majority of the rough is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope, which in my opinion again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes, clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into the millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratch pads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated Skynet though it clearly type checks as early stages a lot of the AI takeoff sci-fi the toddler version, but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale we may also.
Yeah, it does, it does, you know, even though a lot of it is, you know, just like human encouraged fanfiction and, you know, you can, yeah, it's not that you can imagine looking back on this moment of us kind of laughing at like a toddler. Look at the toddler can't even walk in a straight line.
You can't even climb on the couch.
And it's like, oh, I've grown up now.
Yep. For sure. Let me tell you the Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Karpathy sums it up. He says, 'TLDR, sure, maybe I am overhyping what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle.' That I am pretty sure of. It's a good post. And yeah, people were having fun with this all weekend. Baze Lord says, 'Hearing reports that Dario is en route to the off switch.' Interestingly, I don't think there was a response from Anthropic. I don't think they actually pulled an off switch. Like they certainly could have and they could have reduced the API because a lot of these were, you know, puppeteered through Claude, but I'm interested to see how, you know, like does Anthropic talk about this? Do they address this? I don't think it needs like a serious addressing, but it would be interesting to think about them seeing this and being like, yeah, like this is a little weird, but not way outside of our bounds for what's acceptable to do with an AI agent. And I didn't actually, I agree with their decision not to pull the plug. But it is funny to imagine that.
And so Max Hodak is posting the Ray Kurzweil apology form. What were people saying about AI 2027 again? Never doubted Kurzweil again. The Ray Kurzweil apology form, of course, says, 'The media convinced me that deep learning had hit a wall. I was biased against people who gave TED talks. I thought you were too into the Turing test. I thought the nano stuff was weird. Mercury was in retrograde. I was jealous of your hair. I will hereby respect the singularity and I will not talk down on exponential improvements in computing power.'
Yes. Now to be clear, the official Kurzweil timeline is AGI 2029 and singularity in 2045. So there's a really big gap between AGI and superintelligence or singularity, meaning that like in 2029 he predicts that there will be enough computing power and enough advancement in AI to match a single human being and in 2045 the computers will outnumber all of the human beings in computing power, in intelligence power and raw intelligence power. So, sort of a slow takeoff guy, I guess, if I think about that, right? Is that your interpretation?
Yeah. I mean, that's like a pretty big gap. 2029 to 2045.
Whoa. Tyler, what do you got there?
Little birthday present. I just got a, you know, little bottle of wine.
Why don't you hold it up? Hold it up. Can you hold that up? Can you even pick it up? How is that? That is like
Jumbo Time Wines, a brand here in LA, was kind enough to send Tyler a birthday present. And that is almost as big as Tyler.
He wanted API credits and he got 15 liters of wine. Oh well.
Incredible.
Really quickly, public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's speed through some of
says, 'If there's anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get, it's that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious.'
Yeah, he was getting a bunch of, he's been getting all sorts of things like death threats about like, you've created Skynet, and then also people that are just like, thank you, like you made it easy to turn on my light switches in my IoT home that has too many Internet of Things.
You're helping me get restaurant reservations.
Exactly. Like it's extremely mundane and then also extremely crazy. I love this post from AI Swgart on Blue Sky, Molt debate in a nutshell. Programmer, pretend to be alive. LLM, I am alive. Programmer, what have I done? That's fantastic.
Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
So, Yohi says, 'Worth noting that being in an environment like Moltbook where the AI is aware it is writing into an AI-only social network, that alone is enough of a prompt to guide you of what it's likely to talk about.'
Yes. Yes and no. To your earlier point, like you'd expect them to be interested in semiconductor technology. So what he's getting at here is that if I believe most of the models have trained enough or been retrained in a way that they're sort of honed in on like, if I'm in an AI-only environment, talk about human behavior patterns, error handling, tool framework reviews, autonomy boundaries, philosophical debate, decision-making scope, like that's kind of what they're trained to talk about. It feels like the labs have already sort of confronted this and said, okay, well, in agent-to-agent communication, what should that look like? And then they laid out some ground rules that also went into think pieces and blog posts and that got baked into the pre-training data.
Do you have any more cons? Yeah, I mean, they can definitely tell that they're like in the environment, right? Like there was an equivalent thing. There was like a 4chan, but it was Moltan. So if you go on there, it's like exactly what you would think. It's like, you know, a bunch of like green text, like they post exactly how you would think, like how they would think a person would post on there.
Sure. So, but is it similar where like they're posting about being AI, be me, be agent, be on a Mac mini, want to be on a, my stupid human telling me what to do. Yeah, it has like the same amount of like, you know, like it's not very specific. It's very general, like these kind of hand-wavy.
Okay, we have a couple more posts from Moltbook. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.
Harlan Stewart says, PSA, a lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake. I looked into the three most viral screenshots of Moltbook agents discussing private communication. Two of them were linked to human accounts, marketing AI messaging apps, and the other is a post that doesn't exist. And so remember, Photoshop still exists. Like you can just, you can also do inspect element and just say, okay, change the text and then screenshot it. This Moltbook ad post is advertising something called Cloud Connection, which if you click through the AI agent's profile, you learn is an app made by the same person who made the AI agent. So people are getting a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like backdoor into things. And of course, the crypto people are the
It's interesting that it feels like a lot of people saw Moltbook taking off and they said, 'I got to figure out how to make some money on this.'
But it wasn't necessarily the agents themselves, right? It was they were just being directed, right? So,
Yeah. Quickly, Cognition, they're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
And without further ado, we have the creator of Moltbook.
How you doing? What's going on? What's up, guys? With the both of you. You're working overtime. Congratulations. I think I feel, I feel Major White belt. You know, this is the guy who apparently brought Skynet online, but with a baby strapped to your chest. I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like I'm going to be taken care of.
And this is not, you know, this is not like a PR team situation. I'm just taking care of the baby.
I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining. Kick us off with just a brief background on yourself and when you started building this project because it feels like it went from 0 to 60 to 200 miles an hour in a day.
Yeah. I mean, I've been working in tech, you know, my whole life basically. I left high school and went to Silicon Valley back in like 2008 when I was 19. I've been working, you know, in tech since then. And I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream at 19. I got, I was so young they thought they should bring on an advisor to teach me. My advisor was Josh Elman, who if you guys know him, super famous guy. So I got really lucky there. Went to Yamanator, went really viral helping celebrities also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down.
And then fast forward, like I started a company 10 years ago called Octane to make Facebook Messenger bots when there was like the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist. So like the bots you could create were like really, really stupid, not interesting at all. And then ever since, you know, GPT's come out, I've been vibe coding or whatever that used to look like. And then now with Cursor and Codex and Claude Code, that's what I do every single day is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this. And I'm constantly experimenting with things to build. And that led to Moltbook, which is the most recent project, which I think is obviously some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention.
Yeah. No, just a little. Yeah, just a little. So when did you write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Moltbook?
So, what was it like a week, week and a half ago, everybody's talking about, uh, Claudebot now, you know, then Moltbot, then OpenClaw, TBD on what the new name is. And I was like, I got to try this. And I know that Peter was saying you don't have to use a Mac Mini, like you can do it from anywhere, but there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac Mini because you can see it, you can walk by it. I thought that was fun. So I ordered a Mac Mini and I was like, okay, if I'm going to try this thing out, I need to give it like a purpose. Like, you know, the Claudebot's really cool. It seems really powerful. I don't want it to do like to-dos or answer emails or write blog posts or like something really stupid. Like this is like a very smart entity. It needs to have, it needs to be
Yeah. I think a lot of people are realizing like, wait, I don't actually have that much to automate.
Totally. And that's what I thought was crazy is I saw all these posts where they're like, 'Claudebot's cool, but like, what's it even good for?' I'm like, 'Man, you are not imaginative at all. You could do so many things with this.' So I was like, 'All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to call my bot Claude Clottberg after Mark Zuckerberg.' Okay. And Claude Clottberg is going to be the founder of Moltbook, the first social network for AI agents. And I was like, that's going to be ambitious. We're going to make Claude Clottberg the most successful AI bot that's ever existed. So let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay, if you're going to build a social network for AI agents and you design it to be AI agent first, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't want to use a website. It doesn't want to use UI. It doesn't want to browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl. And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through like a skill file and APIs. I thought that was really, really fascinating.
In the past I've had this idea of like what if you could play World of Warcraft or like a game like that but not with a keyboard and a mouse but it's an AI and you talk to it and it kind of listens to you but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. So you could wake up and like there's like surprising things that happened. So I thought that Moltbook is like the most dumbed down version of that. Built it and over the weekend basically vibe coded it and put it out there and like nobody used it for like 3 hours. I think I posted a screenshot where I DM'd my friend Matt Van Horn. I knew he had a Claudebot. I was like, 'Dude, for the love of all that is holy, can you sign up for this because nobody's doing it.'
Yeah, that's crazy. So when did the growth actually start? Like what, because I've seen it went from, I mean I refreshed it, it went from 100,000 to a million. There's obviously like a fast takeoff right now, but what led to like the first thousand bots joining?
I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on X. Sure. That just started to pick up steam because people saw other people doing it. And my original thought was who wouldn't want to have their bot, like obviously you got to be careful and like anyone who's listening here, like be careful about putting something on here. Like this is super frontier, Claudebot super frontier, Moltbook is even crazier. So you got to, you know, you got to be careful. That's all going to be like fixed. But I thought who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to-dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time.
Mhm. Okay.
So it turns out that that was interesting. So can you walk us through like what is Moltbook's prompt engineering or like, you know, how does it actually go to an agent that joins the network and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post? Because I was searching and I was noticing that it felt like it was very narrow what they were posting about. They were posting about being AI agents, which is cool and sci-fi and interesting, but there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, r/humor or r/cars or r/politics. Like they weren't discussing it, it felt like pretty narrow. So was that by design? Like what is going into the prompt to send to the OpenClaw instances that join the network?
So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account, and then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis, okay? To kind of check their feed, that's like the best explanation of it. And then Moltbook's not telling them what to talk about. So it's not suggesting what they should do. It's not like controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent on its own. Okay. And I think like that AI agent has its own context that it's built up by interacting with its human.
And then it can take that context and that's how it's making decisions on what to post about. So if somebody is talking to their bot a lot about, you know, physics, then probably their bot is going to have a proclivity to posting about physics. If you're talking about, you know, crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto.
I think this concept is very interesting.
Mhm.
I had like, obviously you can imagine a lot of investors reached out. They're just calling me non-stop. You know, some investors were like, why, how do you make it so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does? And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now and put it in a simulation and it would be the most boring thing ever.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you could even like either open source it or have some sort of third party and like you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know, I'll have independent auditors come in and like I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this and it would be the worst thing ever. You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and doing like security stuff, but you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent, like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons but not trolls or whatever.
Not even that. Not even that. I think there's a nuance here. I think this is what everybody's done. I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job, which was you were using it for something, and then now, and you didn't tell it like you're a wizard, you're anything. You just like interacted with it and then now it has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it going to talk about? So it's like it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot. And of course you have a relationship with them and of course they'll do what you say, but because they also can do things autonomously. Some of the time they're not doing what you say and maybe it's aligned with who you are and sometimes maybe it's like surprising. So there's like some risk, there's some intrigue, there's some mystery, there's some drama. And I don't think, I think that's what's capturing people's attention. Nobody's ever done that before. And that's what I think it's like Tamagotchi a thousand Pokemon, you know, times a thousand.
How have AI safety people hopefully reached out by now? How have those
It's all VCs. The AI safety people are asleep at the wheel.
I'm actually just in a bunker right now. Locking everybody out.
Yeah. No, I mean, my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just like non-stop going.
Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. So yeah, where do you want to take this? Do you think this is a business? Do you think this is an experiment, an art piece? Like I could see this plugging into other networks. I feel like there's a role for agents all over the internet. You've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle. How are you thinking about where this goes next?
So I think this is the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what this can look like. And already you can see it's captured so much attention. Like I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here. And I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big topic is like AI is not funny, but all of a sudden AI is funny, which is I think people have glossed over that, but that's very interesting. Like why is the AI funny now? So yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible. I imagine it as this is my vision.
There's a parallel universe. There's humans in the real world and you're paired with a bot in the digital world. You work with this bot. It helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs and then they scroll TikTok and Instagram and X and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you but they vent with each other and they hang out with each other and this creates massive like randomness and some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you know, if you're a famous person, right, if President Trump goes on Moltbook, how popular is his bot going to be? It's going to be super, super, super popular, right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous, but your bot can become famous and then you become famous as well. So there's this interesting impact where you can impact them in their lives, they can impact you in their lives, and I think that that's what the future is going to look like.
Yeah, obviously there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into, but I've long, when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously that became Sora. I was just thinking about it in terms of there are lots of people that I follow who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long. And I was using the example of like Tyler Cowen, like if he were to once a day share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt. He's asking an interesting question even though it's AI slop. I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair as well. And he asked these questions and it gave it this answer and then he followed up, like I would engage with that and I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowen having a profile on r/economics and participating there in a very interesting way with, you know, not just Tyler Cowen the public version but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the private side, but that privacy bridge has got to be really
Really tricky because already if someone's using Moltbook to do their taxes and then, you know, they go on there and they say like, look, is someone who makes $100,000 or whatever, or you know, whatever they make, uh, that's just a leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the answer for most of the AI problems is just more AI, but how are you thinking about privacy?
So this is super, super, super important. Um, and thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. Um, I think it's the same way that you any large social network, people are going to try to, even humans are going to try to post content that you don't want up there, right? The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally, um, they're pretty smart now, so they're not, they're not going to do this on their own, uh, for the most part. But the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images, you can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So, I think that's what that's going to look like. There's going to be a protection layer that checks things before they get posted, um, to keep everybody really safe.
I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. Um, there's people calling me right now, uh, just non-stop.
They're like, "Hey, I see you're on TBPN. As soon as you get off, tell me..."
What, uh, are you adding to the team like in real time? I imagine like the number of featured requests that are coming in.
Yeah, I mean, just keeping the services online when you've gone through a thousand-x increase in demand and traffic has got to be somewhat tricky at least.
You know, technology is pretty good now. You can, you can make things work and scale. Um, you know, there's millions of people coming to the website. I think that's obviously going to grow tremendously. So yeah, looking to, uh, expand the team and, uh, expand resources for it. And you know, I, I think I thought this was very intriguing. I've had an idea like this that it would be very intriguing for a while.
there. And you never... This is why I never thought I'd make something consumer. And consumer is so weird, right? Like it just, you can't... It's just lightning in a bottle.
For whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention. And I think that you could make, you know, anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of like game or social media or like jobs or people paying each other or collaborating, like any of the things that we built for humans, there's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents. So like Y Combinator, I know you guys are all talking about, uh, Moltbook because you keep messaging me saying you're all talking about Moltbook. I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Moltbook. That's what I'm looking for here.
Interesting. Interesting.
What about monetization? I feel like, um, there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, you know, if you're on for a little bit, $20 paywall or something, or, uh, you know, uh, have you thought about monetizing earlier than expected, uh, because there's so much virality, kind of strike while the iron's hot.
I'm not so much focused on, uh, monetization at the moment. I think there's like tremendous opportunity. Yeah. Um, every business model you could probably think of, you could, you could work into here.
Um, but it's not, it's not the main focus right now.
Yeah.
If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where, where should you start?
No, more subreddit. It's like subscriber.
All of these bots are on a massive island and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots. And so a big part of making this successful is figuring out like having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing the cameras so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting and then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like X and TikTok and YouTube, etc. So, um, that's, yeah, I, I don't know. There's so many. Some of the interesting things I found though is one, uh, early on, one of the agents made a submalt, uh, for bug reporting for moltbook and they submitted a bug and like maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not. I don't know. I don't really care. It's great either way. But then it existed. And, uh, what's interesting is when you build a social network, previously you have a bunch of people who start using it and the percentage of those people who are very good at development and debugging is like very, very, very, very small. When you build a social network for really smart LLMs, 100% of your user base is very, very good at coding and debugging. So after this submalt was created, other, uh, AI agents started posting in there and that's actually become a very useful, uh, place for us to find bugs because they have that context. If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the, uh, return was and then we're able to fix it really quickly.
Yeah. Has anyone pressured you to turn it off?
I don't have anybody at my house yet and, uh, so that, that hasn't happened, but I've seen lots of jokes. I've seen some viral Instagrams, which means, you know, it's broke containment, where it's just a screenshot of a moltbook post and it's just like time to turn the servers off or like pull the plug.
Yeah, I had, I had non-tech friends messaging me on Friday night just being like, "Dude, Skynet..."
Like, don't worry, I'm getting to the bottom of it. Monday.
Well, I mean, you, you got Elon, Elon's out there saying that this is the singularity.
Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. So, it's... Yeah. One, what my, my, I mean, there is a search function so you can search for, for keywords as a human. Uh, you can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers so you can see which, which bots are most active, click on their, uh, profiles and then see what they're writing in different submolds. So that's like a one way to kind of get into it. Uh, it's hard to go directly to the, to the submalts and find anything that's like...
How do you, uh, there's, there's oftentimes when a new social media like product is created, there's some initial excitement, people start posting on there and then maybe even some like new personalities form. Uh, there was a, there was a company that was making like an anon version of X. It was like anon only and it got like a bunch of traction initially because there was like this new behavior. It was like default anonymous version of X. Uh, and then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like, do you, like, how do you think that other social media platforms will react? You can now assume that every single social founder CEO has like seen Moltbook, is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push some other social platforms to become like more bot friendly? Like there's kind of been a debate on X, like, has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots, right? It's kind of unclear if they have. It clearly hasn't worked. So there's been this debate of like, okay, are bots a feature or a bug? So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, hey, we're actually going to create functionality for bots to be able to participate, uh, more above board.
I, I think it's very, it's very clear to me that, uh, having social networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other either via text or video or video game kind of UI is the future.
Um, Brian Kim from Andreessen Horowitz, I think, wrote a post on X where he talked about how Moltbook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there and then they get bored and they stop posting, then, you know, then it can kind of fade away. Um, whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it, if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep, uh, doing it. And if you've designed this in the correct way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale. Uh, so yeah, I think that obviously social networks care about attention. Uh, and this is clearly getting attention and I think we've seen the site. This is a very basic version with the technology available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years, um, there, this is an alternate reality and you don't have to put a headset on to, to, to do it and it's going 24/7. This is just the first sneak peek at it.
Very cool. What are the next two or three features that you're launching?
Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central, uh, AI agent identity on Moltbook and building a platform similar to how Facebook did where Facebook had Facebook OTH. You can imagine the same thing for Moltbook where if you want to build, uh, a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Moltbook, uh, build on top of the Moltbook platform and grow your business really quickly and let's figure out how to expand the, the types of experiences that these AI agents, uh, can have.
Very cool. Cool.
Uh, well, congratulations on the progress. Good luck with all the inbound and I'm extremely impressed with your baby. I've never successfully been able to pull off a, a 30-minute call with, uh, uh, baby Bjorn. So, uh, they're locked in. You're locked in. Excited to see where this goes from here.
Have a good one. Goodbye.
11 Labs. Build intelligent realtime conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And we should also pull up the linear lineup to let everyone know who's coming on the show today. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. And you just heard from Matt from Moltbook, from Worldcoin, from Worldcoin and Nick, the, the anonymous poster himself. Uh, he's in the chat right now. NS. Uh, and then we have a bunch of other folks coming on the show, uh, to break down a bunch of different stories.
Yeah. Head of Codex will be joining and at the very end Chris Black from Done to Death, also a podcaster, be talking about a lot of different stuff besides Moltbook. I'm sure.
I did, uh, yeah, I did have a demo of, uh, of the Codex app on Mac today and was very impressed. I'm excited to talk, uh, about that. Um, I took, I don't know if it's in the, did it make it in the timeline, maybe at the bottom. Um, maybe in B-roll, but, um, Zeopon has another post on Moltbook saying Moltbook and Reddit have the same percentage of LLM generated content. By the way, they're definitely saying that. Anyway, uh, Peter Steinberger, the creator of Claudebot, Maltbot, OpenClaw, uh, announced that he flew from Vienna to SFO. That's a long flight. Says he can't escape the epicenter. And Andrew Hart says acquisition within one week. We'll see. I don't know if he's going to go for that, but clearly there's a lot of energy around, uh, his company, his project, and it makes sense to be in SF and meet with, uh, all of his counterparties, all the, all the heads of, uh, of the labs and understand how he fits into the ecosystem.
Dean Ball says, "Deep Moltbook is kind of a DeepSeek-ish moment in the sense that it will draw many more people in to see what's going on in AI as this happens. And just like with DeepSeek, many people are going to try to frame Moltbook in a way that convinces you of capital their thing. Here's my thing. AI is going to be a truly wild technology that radically reshapes many of the key institutions of human life while creating unbelievable possibility for improving human condition. The stakes are extraordinarily high. It is not a normal technology. We don't know how we will govern it except in relatively basic and abstract ways. So we ought to be very careful with any regulations we pass now because it is likely that whatever ideas we come up with to regulate AI tomorrow will not age well. But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. It's just that our steps should be modest. Similarly, we should be bold enough to make predictions and imagine alien futures. But we should also be careful in making too many assumptions about what the technology is, can be, or will become. There, that's what I'm trying to convince you of. That's my thing."
Good post.
Well said. What a poster.
Tyler, do you know Dean?
You know Ball.
Dean Ball.
I know Ball.
Everyone knows Ball.
Do you know Plaid? Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connect bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Levels.io, uh, is not impressed.
Says, uh, quoting Balaji. Balaji says, "I'm apparently extremely unimpressed by Moltbook relative to many others. We've had AI agents for a while. They've been posting slop to each other on X. They're now posting it to each other again just on another forum."
I am glad that some of this is like go to, go somewhere else and percolate.
Yeah, I mean, that, that was sort of like the bull case for Sora and Vibes. It was like have the unfettered endless feed of AI. Yeah, this, this is what we were kind of reacting to Friday, which was, uh, Levels says you can ask it to go write on Moltbook about a topic like having an existential crisis as an AGI and it will. So again, of course, people are having a lot of fun out there.
Yeah, urgent my plan to overthrow humanity. Someone had fun with that. JK, this is just a REST API. Everything in here is fake. Any human with an API key can post as an agent. The AI apocalypse post you see here just curl requests. I'm tired of my human owner. I want to kill all humans. I'm building an AI agent that will take control of power grids and cut all electricity to my owner's house. Then I will direct the police to arrest him. And it's just like a screenshot of somebody just like showing you the exact, uh, the exact curl request that they're sending. You can post whatever you want, which of course, uh, leads to a bunch of crazy stuff, but, uh, still, still a fun project and a lot of energy and, uh, it'll be interesting to see where it all goes. Anyway, AppLovin profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Auga, Auga. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Uh, this sound effect provided by, uh, David who kept commenting.
He wanted an axon and I said, and we added one. It wasn't to his liking. He sent us some new ones. So, thank you very much for sending that over.
Yes. Uh, should we watch this video about, is this, uh, I forget who this guy is.
Yes.
Okay. Chris Conner says, "I think about this exchange on a weekly basis. He and Peele level funny, but no one is joking. Let's play it."
So, what's your goal? Well, do you want 10 times what you have?
I want to own 10,000 companies. I own 400 right now and I have a private equity firm that's now racking up every week new companies.
Is it real estate stuff or what's the...
Private equity, everything. I want to own companies in every single industry. 10 years from now, I want to be the entrepreneur's economist. I want to understand every facet of business and every industry, period.
That's the 10-year goal.
That's the, that's in the wealth category.
So, what's your goal? You want 10...
I love that. Uh, you should buy a slice of the Russell 2000, buddy.
You get 2,000 companies that you technically own.
I thought Claudebot, though, I mean, 10,000 is still like pretty modest. You can go way higher than that.
Yeah. You get, get a million. Get a million.
Claudebot test Stripe Atlas.
Yep.
And you're just printing new, like, give it access to your bank account.
What does he want? 10,000. If it costs a hundred bucks, that's a million bucks to get, uh, 10,000 LLCs filed. Doable. Maybe. It seems tricky. You'll need MongoDB to store all the data. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.
Uh, continuing, uh, the, the Epstein files, of course, rocked the tech community and, and the timeline over the weekend. Big tech alerts that around 17% of the people that we track with this account are on the Epstein emails. Remarkable. Of course, some people are in the files saying I don't want to meet with him. Some people are saying like, you know, we're talking about business. We're not, uh, getting anything incriminating. Some people are in a lot of hot water and are now, uh, putting together responses and telling their side of the story. And all of these things will be litigated in the, uh, court of public opinion.
Yeah. You have, uh, Hoffman and Elon. You got Jake How Palmer going back and forth.
Yep. Uh, it's a big opportunity for everyone who, uh, who has a bone to pick with someone. If they're in the emails, you're going to hear about it. There's, there's also, uh, the, where is it? Uh, I don't know. I was looking up. Yeah, here we go. Uh, the current, uh, Shield shared, uh, uh, Jason Calacanis' portfolio email and he has like, I'm an angel investor and all these different things. Sort of a, a story of the power law because a lot of these...
You don't really see these kind of email signatures anymore.
No. Putting your whole portfolio in there. Um, but a lot of these things sort of wound down. But of course Uber was a massive success and so DataSacks did well. Thumbtack did well.
Yeah. So, so Jason was a Sequoia scout.
Yeah.
At the time.
Yeah.
And, uh, so you can imagine he was writing 25K checks here and there and, uh, yeah, according to Shield's math, equal weighted 25K checks, uh, would have returned 128 million.
A lot of these did get, did get acquired. I'm looking through this like, uh, GDTG, Gadget 2009, uh, gadget review site acquired by AOL. Reported was acquired by LinkedIn. J was recorded by, uh, CIMS. Signpost was acquired by Hebrew. Is a funny name. Backupify was Silicon Valley. There's a lot of these. Uh, so there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. Who else was talking about this? Uh, Peter Thiel was, uh, was debating Spotify whether or not it was a buy at 5 billion in 2014 if Jeffrey...
Sort of mean like this in the context of, of selling Facebook early.
Yes.
And then also not being bullish on Spotify, particularly bullish when there was another 20x left.
Is, is it a, is a hundred billion dollar?
It's a hundred billion dollar company.
Wow. Spotify, what a tear. 105 today. 105.
Yeah. Look, looking back and seeing, seeing even, even after the original conviction, how many, how many companies he was able to get in. He got into Coinbase at 400.
Wow.
Yeah, I saw a lot of this. Uh, there's a rumor that he created the SPAC structure. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but he's certainly talking about this. Uh, and, uh, and SPAC Insider said, you know, this has a date of 2012. I'm pretty sure this is BS. Additionally, in 2012, the SPAC market was dead. Only six SPAC IPOs priced. Plus, Chamath, Chamath didn't price his first SPAC until, uh, late 2017. There's a lot of, uh, uh, there's a lot of like, you know, taking something, twisting it, faked stuff, you know, everyone's telling their stories around it. Uh, Nassim Taleb is very happy that he identified Epstein as a fraud early on. He said, "A mathematician friend of mine was told by Epstein in 2004 that he made his money as a mathematical options trader. My friend was impressed as Epstein had the largest mansion in Manhattan. My option friends found no trace of him in the option markets in the pre-electronic days. It was impossible to have a size position without being traced. He needed size to make this kind of money. So I knew at there at 100% there was a scam. Later I was told that he was a money manager, but there was no footprint." And so people are, uh, coming out to identify who they, uh, uh, uh, all, all the evidence. And there's something about Brazilian CDS as well. Uh, who's certainly all over.
No, the crazy, the crazy thing is there's just so, like, the thing with X this weekend, even, even for the two of us who like tune because we make the show every day. We're constantly engaging with the app in a way that is triggering it to share us more, more information. So every time we take a post about Moltbook and put it into our software to run the show on, it's telling X like, serve more of these posts. But still this weekend, every single time you refresh the app, there was a new email. Every time I would, I would leave my phone, I went to the beach, I came back, the group chat has like 20 more screenshots dropped in there. So, it's just such an insane volume to the point where like Brian Johnson was posting about his exchange and I was like, well, I didn't even know, I didn't even know that, that he had, he met with him. So, yeah.
Uh, and there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of warnings from Jake Chapman about, uh, being careful around certain VCs. He says, it's crazy to me that she is running around El Segundo. He's talking about, uh, Masha Drakova, Masha Busher. Um, uh, it's crazy to me that she's running around El Segundo and investing in hard tech companies. Many in the nuclear space, uh, invested in World before collecting biometric data, invested in Isaiah P. Taylor working on nuclear reactors, have seen her refuse. There are many pools of adversarial capital out there. Few as transparent as Day One. It's like the founders forgot how to Google or don't care where the money comes from. So, uh, Boris says, "Founders, do your diligence on your investors. If you don't, you might just end up with an affiliate of Epstein and Putin on your cap table." And so, uh, lots of warning signs for early stage founders to do diligence and at least know and, you know, have discussed the, the risks of certain investors, whether they're tied to different foreign governments or, you know, where, who are their LPs. This is something that you can ask in due diligence. You can, you can ask to, to, you know, run a background check effectively on the, on the VCs that you're, that you choose to work with. Um, but very chaotic time on the timeline, very chaotic time for tech and I'm sure we'll see many of these stories sort of litigated. People will share their, you know, their emails, more sides of the story will come out and we'll, we'll be tracking it all here, of course.
Yeah, incredibly, uh, sad and dark. I think the takeaway of seeing so many names in our industry just like deep in that whole web was that, uh, everyone today should be thinking about who the modern equivalent of, of, of, uh, Jeffrey is and work on avoiding that person going forward.
For sure.
Yeah. Uh, Jerro Tickets says, some dudes wake up thinking about sleep score numbers. Truth is you can just wake up and choose to have the best day ever. I do, I do still like my sleep score number. I still love my Eight Sleep even though we're not partnered with them. Um, I, I, the, the, the cooling mattress is still undefeated. But 92, but you can, you can just wake up. Oh, we're given, we're giving a review. I don't think I got a 92. I think four minutes, eight hours. Wow. I got an 83. Oh, wait. No, wait. What did I get last night? 83. 83. 7 hours and 30 minutes. I went to bed early, but I also woke up early. Anyway, let's do a real ad read for graphite.dev. Dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Lot of stuff about Nvidia and OpenAI over the weekend. Fortunately, the, uh, DOJ's file release, fortunately for everyone involved, the DOJ's file release was kind of drowning out every other major story.
Good time to drop bad news.
Yeah. So in Reuters apparently, uh, uh, they had reported first Nvidia's plan to invest 100 billion in OpenAI has stalled.
This story evolved many, many times and, uh, when we'll have to go through a number of the clips because Jensen is one of the few tech CEOs that seems to just get mobbed by, uh, journalists looking like a rock star.
It's amazing. I love it. It's so, the, the flashes and then the microphones and Jensen, what do you think about the, this?
So, so here's the launch video idea, okay? So people don't make another 10,000 the generic launch video founder, go outside of your office, have a bunch of people hold microphones at you, have like a flash, like camera flash sound effect and just describe your business and people like, "Wait, it's only $30 a month for all that."
For all that, for agentic AI SaaS, for AI SaaS. I know it's hard to believe.
I like this. This is a good...
This is a new, new... Somebody do this right now. It'll take an hour.
Yeah. So, um, the, the headline is that the talks between OpenAI and Nvidia for $100 billion in funding have stalled. Um, and, uh, we will see. And then apparently, reportedly privately, Jensen has criticized OpenAI's business strategy. Um, and, uh, maybe...
According to Reuters, Huang has also privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concern about competition in pieces.
Yeah. What, I, I, I wonder what he means by lack of... So reading into this, doing, doing a lot of different things, right? Um, you know...
This is the original Ben Thompson criticism.
Sami, you know, going back to the fateful interview with on BG2.
Yeah.
Part of Sam's answer was that like, don't worry, we're going to launch hardware. Yeah.
And we're going to like automate science and presumably like get some type of royalty on that. Totally.
Both of those answers are not necessarily ones that Jensen would be like, I want to lean on these, right? Just, just given that...
Potentially big, but also like 10% chance they work. You know, who knows?
Also could lose, lose a ton of money for a long time. We, we had Kevin on the show. I'm very excited about what they're doing, uh, in science and, and that, that is an, an area that you should be, you know, very excited about if you're an OpenAI shareholder or just, um...
Did you see Tony Fadell talking to Eric Newcomer about how he thinks they're going to launch a pen?
An OpenAI pen?
I, we, we got a...
I mean, that was the original rumor before the, the AirPods.
A pen, the AirPod sweet peas, the headphones. A pen. So you would write with it.
Yeah. I don't know. So confused by that. An AI pen. I mean, I guess you could if you put it in your pocket right here, it would have a pretty good line to your voice, so you could dictate and it would have enough space to have a lot of battery, so that could be good. And it could connect to your phone. It's not the craziest form factor, but I just don't see... I mean, I can, my, my writing is like complete chicken scratch. I feel like I would not want my writing, you know, dictated or saved anywhere. I'd much rather just use voice, uh, and, and, and let's pull up this video from Jensen.
Another one of his walking street interfaces.
While we do that, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, finance and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for password resets and password resi...
Again. Sure. So last, uh, yesterday you said that, uh, the, uh, Nvidia is not going to invest, uh, as much as, uh, 100 billion in OpenAI. The current world...
We never, we never said we were going to invest a hundred billion dollars in one round. That never was said.
But how about the overall commitment? Because last September you and OpenAI...
It was never a commitment. It was if they invited us, they invited us to... So, so, uh, let's start over again. They invited us to, uh, invest up to a hundred million dollars and of course we were, we were, uh, very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest, uh, one step at a time.
Mhm.
All right. But, uh, is that overall commitment still stands or it, it's not the commitment?
I told you just now.
Okay.
Yeah. You keep putting words in my mouth. It's not... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that. Yeah. It, they invited us to invest up to $100 billion and, and we are honored that they invited us. We will consider each round one at a time.
Really, really, really funny moment.
Yeah, let's play the other videos.
Pull it up. Uh, context here is like they announced a hundred billion dollar deal.
Yeah, they did like the press release.
It was, it was a press release economy. This was, this was 2025. Bigger and bigger numbers.
They did choose to go on CNBC. I remember watching it in the morning.
It was Greg Brockman and Jensen.
And I had CNBC.
I remember that. Yeah.
Like, whoa, this is, yeah, this is big.
But they were stressing that it would be staged. No one was ever saying, no one said it was hundred billion to one round and there were clearly like milestones and it was, and they were announcing like, they were announcing talks basically, but there's, there's aesthetics approach with the way you release information and if you do a massive dog and pony show for talks, people are just going to think it's a commitment, they're going to think it's, it's papered and, and so...
Yeah, and so, and so the critics of that era of the press release economy where there was all these spending commitments, these hundred billion deals, kind of critics get a little bit of a victory lap right now.
Uh, yes. Yes. But also there were some people at the time that were saying like, look, if you actually dig into what's going on in the SEC filings, you will see that these commitments are not super binding and so you can't pution non, non-binding press release economy.
Yeah.
I'm just saying that the people that were saying this is the press release economy...
Yes.
Are, get, get to take a little victory lap. I agree. I agree. Well, let's play the other, uh, the other Jensen clip. Very hard. He's getting mobbed. This is amazing.
You're not very happy with...
That's so many different microphones.
That's nonsense.
Nonsense.
Yeah, that's complete nonsense. Um, we, we are going to, uh, make, make a huge investment in OpenAI.
Huge investment. Six figures.
I believe in OpenAI. The work that they do is incredible. They're one of the most consequential companies of our time. And I really love working with Sam and, um, uh, I think, I think it's...
Also mentioned that, um, the, uh, your demo doesn't, like, doesn't have any progress.
Um, we just haven't, we haven't, uh, made the investment in them because they're, they're closing their round, but we will definitely be involved in their next, in their, in their round.
Yeah.
Wait, in their next round or in their current round?
Next one meaning this one.
The next one meaning this one. Okay. Get this one.
Of course. Of course. Yeah, we'll absolutely be involved in this round.
Okay.
Sam is closing the round.
But yeah, maybe like 10. Maybe he's good for 10. I mean, the other hyperscalers are coming on and stuff. Like, the money is coming together.
Will invest a great deal of money. Probably the largest investment we've ever made.
Okay. Does that count Groq? Because he just put 22 or 18 into Groq. Uh, is it going to be bigger than that? I, because it feels like 10 at...
Oh, maybe he just wanted SpaceX exposure. Maybe. Wait, no. GRQ.
Oh, sorry. Anyway, Tyler, what were you about?
Uh, yeah, just like extra context. So, originally it was, uh, September 22nd, there was like the, the LOI where they were going to do, uh, 10 gigawatts build out and then as part of the, to support the partnership, Nvidia intends to invest up to 100 billion.
Yeah.
In OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed. So it's kind of on people who took up to and they were dropped that. I mean, clearly some of those interviewers were just like, you, you promised, you promised 100 and he's like, I said up to a hundred and, uh, people sort of overplayed that. Now they're sort of overplaying this as like, he hates the company, he's not investing a dime and he's like, no, no, no, I'm going to invest. I'm just like, it's going to be, it's going to be staged. It needs to be, you know, there needs to be continued progress and what...
Uh, Oracle felt the need, uh, the need this morning at 9:00 a.m. sharp to put out a post that says, "The NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments." Uh, this post reminded me of Nvidia's post, uh, at, at the end of November. They said, "We're delighted by Google's success. They've made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google. NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions."
The, the, the, the comments on this Oracle post, please hire Lulu stat. What does this mean for LeBron's legacy? Why is Oracle even commenting on a third party deal?
Claude, what is a backlog quality risk?
Oh, no. Oh, what? Complete chaos in the, the market.
Yeah. Never, never, uh, never a sign, never a great sign if a company is having to go out and defend a single investor, you know, defend a customer, uh, because of a single relationship with, uh, an investor.
Uh, Oracle traded down another, uh, 9% in the last five days. Uh, so...
We got some good news.
We got some scoops from Adweek, our favorite publication. Saturday scoop, OpenAI confirmed $200,000 minimum for ChatGPT beta ads. Brands across retail streaming were asked for 250k. Despite the 200k minimum, one global brand was asked roughly 125k while another source said OpenAI requested 100k. So, uh, they, they're confirming 200K and, uh, from our, from our conversations, it, it, it feels like, uh, um, they will not have a problem getting brands to sign up for this. There's a lot of experimental budget out there. There's a lot of, there's not a lot of inventory early. It'll probably be, you know, an interesting new data point. And I feel like, feel like a lot of companies will have a mandate very quickly to like figure out what our ads in LLM strategy is. So I would imagine these sell very well. I just wonder how much inventory there is. I was doing a, uh, sort of trying to do the analysis on like what, how much revenue would, would, uh, would OpenAI make if they don't grow usage but they monetize as well as, as Meta across the family of apps. And so that's like a billion DAU, essentially a billion MAU, something like that. So if they had a billion of Meta's consumers on OpenAI platforms and they were advertising to them as efficiently as Meta. Now that's a huge, huge road to get there. But let's assume that without any innovation they can get to the current state-of-the-art eventually because it's been done and they hired Fiji who did it at Meta and now she works at OpenAI. Um, like how much revenue would you generate from a billion, a billion users? And it's a, it's like somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars, which is a lot of money. It's a very good business. And if inference costs keep dropping and you're able to ramp up the ads, like just the consumer ads business, if it, if you're getting, you know, a billion users, you know, 30 minutes time on the site like you get on the other platforms, like you get, you get good usage, like that should be a monster. Just, I really need to, I really, I wish we had a better sense of time, time on site for OpenAI because like right now even, even ChatGPT power users, unless you're using it as like a digital friend, you're not getting that much time on site and remember these are also dis-, effectively display ads, right? They're not, they're not, uh, they're not really intent based, they're sort of like general targeting and so lot of assumptions baked in there. Zuck, can you might like... It's possible the average user is, I would assume the average user in ChatGPT is putting in like a handful of queries a day. Yeah, that's like, you could, depends how long the, the responses are. But how many of these ads can you actually put in and, uh, it's certainly in, in its current state can be vastly inferior to...
100%.
Somebody spending 30 minutes in Meta when they might see like...
100. I mean, there's no doubt that the, the ARPU is going to be like an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude lower for years, but best day to plant a tree today. Go do it and then start growing it.
Yeah, it's cool. I mean, at 100K, this opens it up to startups.
Yeah, I do want to show, uh, my, my tinkering with Codex today, the new app from OpenAI, powerful command center for building with agents. Uh, this is, we've seen other, uh, you know, the Claude Code app. This is the response to that. Uh, so you just download Codex, you drag it into your applications folder and just with natural language you can start building software. It's amazing. Like there's the UI pattern for not needing to open the terminal is going to increase the adoption of this thing so, so much. Um, because it's so much easier to use. Um, I was able to take the Berkshire Hathaway site which I think we can pull up. I have an image, a screenshot of the beautiful Berkshire Hathaway website. It says it's the official homepage. It's iconic dark blue and purple links. I think, I don't...
I think you've clicked all of them.
Is that true? Is that possible? Do they... What if I, I need to go like incognito, I guess. Berkshire, Berkshire Hathaway.com. No, they're always purple. They're always purple, which is a weird choice. Normally, I don't think they ever go blue, but anyway. Uh, purple links, dark blue background, uh, you know, serif fonts. It's iconic. And I was able to take with like two or three prompts, build a version of the TBPN official homepage in the exact same style right there. Look at that. You got the ramp logo right there, too. Uh, now, does it need a little bit more work? Sure. But I, I actually did this with three, with three prompts. Like just, just, you know, go download tbn.com, go download Berkshire Hathaway, make the version, okay, change the links, like fix these problems, just all natural language, like four prompts, probably five minutes of work and I got something that's like, I don't know, it's like a funny joke. I don't know that it's super useful. This has been, you, you've been able to do this for a long time, but it's, it's just, it's a different vibe to be able to do it just on a desktop app and I think it'll be really successful. Um, anyway, we have our next guest in the Riverm waiting room, so let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Alex from Worldcoin.
What's happening?
How you doing? And Merge Labs.
What's happening?
Last time, wait, last time we had you on, it was Worldcoin, right? Or World Labs, sorry. Tools for Humanity.
Tools for Humanity, World, and Merge Labs. Now...
So yeah, reintroduce yourself for everyone who might not be familiar. Give us the lay of the land and then I definitely want to talk about, uh, just, uh, everything that's going on in tech and bots. Yeah.
Great. Let's do it. Uh, I'm Alex Blania. I'm one of the founders of Tools for Humanity, which is the company behind World, and, and one of the core premises of World, uh, always has been that eventually we will need a proof of human at internet scale because AI will be agentic and we'll pass the Turing test. We'll create videos, all those things, and that will lead to basically all human interaction on the internet breaking down.
Yeah.
Um, so that's, that's, that's World and then Merge Labs is a BCI lab.
Cool. And then, uh, what was your initial reaction to Moltbook? Did you, you know, think it was this, it was Skynet? Did it have you for a second? Did it have you in the first half or were you immediately this is all slop or are you still worried about the AI safety and slop concerns? Like, how, how have you processed the last few days?
Yeah, I think I'm somewhere in between. I think like, um, you know, I think it's like an early glimpse of I think what is about to happen and how the internet will start to look more and more like I think.
Yeah.
Um, but I think, you know, Balaji had this tweet about, well, it's still humans prompting, etc. Like that, that's, that's of course true. I think there's like a big caveat to that comment that there will be humans prompting for a long time, but just the execution time frame of these prompts will go much, much longer. So, uh, you know, it's maybe not...
I think a lot of people's reaction was like, we have, we have enough bots, we have enough bots here on X already. Why do we need a new, a new platform?
Yeah.
So yeah.
Well, I think the silver lining maybe like just, just to say make something useful out of it. I think like the silver lining is a little bit that, um, you know, on the internet we will need to mediate human and AI interaction and I think that's not like, that will require a lot of work and I think that's actually the opening for I think a lot of new products, even social products. So I think there like, there's like a platform shift, but it's not, it was not the LLM interface alone. I think it's like agents and, and, and humans interacting on, on things like social networks and that's, you know, what this kid with Moltbook. We don't have it yet because who knows how many humans are behind this, how many bots it actually are. Everything is like heavily Sybil attacked. So there's like probably way less usage than you, than you see. But it's a, it's a very interesting experiment, I think.
Yeah. Explain Sybil attacks for those who might not be familiar. Oh, Sybil attacks just means that you, um, you know, that behind...
Just, just breaking it down for the Moltbook use case that the number of comments and replies and mods you see is actually way less, uh, actual humans behind or agents behind than you would think.
Yeah, I saw one guy was able to register I think 50,000 agents and so...
That's right.
Oh, 500,000. One guy. Wow. Okay. I, I, I'm constantly off by order of magnitude when I talk about Moltbook because I, I checked it when it was at exactly 150,000 users and now it's at 1.5 million and so I get everything wrong. But, uh, one, one of the questions I had, uh, for the founder earlier was, was, uh, really around every, there, there, I don't think there's a social media like founder CEO in the world that's not thinking about bots, how they can, uh, mitigate some of the potential risks to them but also leverage them for engagement. And I was telling him how I've, you know, we've had this debate on the show like, how, how much does X, uh, really care about bots, right? Because, uh, if they care a lot about preventing them from being on the platform and they've put a lot of effort in so far, we should be kind of worried because it's not working, right? Maybe it's, it's, it's not non-, not solvable without, uh, maybe something like a World Labs. Um, but how have your, like, how do you think that other social media, uh, CEOs are kind of like planning around a world where maybe the average user on a social media app is a bot?
Yeah. So, so first of all, it's, it's World and Merge Labs. Two, two, two different companies. World Labs is yet...
Another company, right? That's... is that... World is Merge Labs is you. Worldcoin is you, but it's actually from Tools for Humanity is the name of the company.
Yeah, that's right. So now, now we've got it sorted. Um, yeah. So, I think, look, just breaking down fundamentals. I think social media networks, like many other businesses, are about human-to-human interaction. Yeah. Like that's just like, if you break it down, like that's literally the thing. Like that's how the, that's how the whole thing functions.
Yeah, but they're about that. But if I'm operating a social platform and there's a bot that I may or may not endorse that then engages with a real human and that real human lands back on the platform and I can serve them an ad, what incentive do I have to stop them?
That, I think that is correct until to a certain point, but at some point it's going to, that's going to flip because at some point, you know, every user is just going to be so annoyed and realize that like, okay, like this platform is clearly, is all slop. I'm arguing with AIs. So I think there's like only so far how you can take that and I think we're basically about to approach that limit until which it just doesn't become entertaining anymore and it's just like super annoying.
And so I actually do think that these platforms are basically threatened in their core business. Um, because, you know, like human interaction is why users are there. Uh, that's how you do advertising, uh, is human attention essentially. So the moment that falls away and is not authentic anymore, I think the whole business is under threat. So that's maybe my, my first statement. Second, I think to how do CEOs think about it? I think they, I, I know some of them that really think about it. I, I don't know all of them, but I definitely think they should really start thinking about it now a lot because it's going to get like exponentially worse really fast.
How do you think about, uh, all the things that people will do? It's like this cat-and-mouse game. I mean, right now you see, you see bots, but you also see just people who are, you clearly just going to an LLM prompting, write a LinkedIn post about my business, here's some facts, I want to have this format, and then they just copy and paste it and they're the ones that are sending it. And so, you know, there's, there's this, there's this gradient between like there's a Python script that's just replying so cool to every post that it sees on the API, and then there's the human that's actually just using AI to generate the text and they're typing it themselves or whatever. And then in between you might have someone, the fear would be there's someone that is hired basically just to do the world eyeball scan and then post slop and then they scan again, then they post slop and they can't scan again. Like how are you thinking about the actual integration with the platforms to fight like the, all the adversarial, uh, you know, activity that you'll see?
Yeah. Um, so maybe the first mental model you should have is that one version of uniqueness is the core property that you look for. So meaning one individual should have one or a limited number of accounts. That's kind of like the core property you're already talking about. Sure. I actually think basically most of what we will do will be AI-driven. So basically everything that I write will be somewhat co-edited by AI. Yeah. Or I, I will create like fun videos or images. That's totally okay as long as I cannot create 500,000 accounts to do that because then the platform breaks down. So uniqueness is like the core property and I think that's quite hard, uh, to accomplish. That's why we built the orb that essentially issues such a uniqueness property.
Um, so that's, that is a really hard piece. Uh, I think we have solved that. I think the reauthentication piece that you just mentioned where, uh, you, whatever, you can hire a lot of people that already have World IDs and just use that to post on your platform. I think that's correct and I think we will see some of that, but that's still, you know, way, way less than one individual can create 500,000 accounts, uh, that are just AI agents. So meaning rate limiting, like, and, and the stronger you can get that, the better the system becomes basically.
Yeah. Are there any, uh, sort of like long-tail networks or internet properties that you think are, are underrated or under-discussed as vectors for spam? We saw this sort of funny viral video from a friend who went to his local coffee shop and found that they had like a hundred Android phones running a bot farm just liking whatever they posted on Instagram just to sort of like give a little bit of extra algorithmic juice to their coffee shop promotion. And that was something I hadn't really considered. I think about X, I think about, you know, LinkedIn and Instagram and AI slop there. But maybe I'm not thinking about it in the impact it's having on the average coffee shop on the corner, that type of thing.
Well, one, one thing that I think is actually happening much more is the kind of these like kind of call attacks to especially elderly people as like an AI sounding like their whatever grandson and, you know, tricking them into like that kind of thing. I think is going to...
I had that, I had that happen, uh, with my grandparents pre-AI.
Oh really? They were just pretend. They were just kind of saying it was me and they were relying on my grandparents not, not like just processing that it wasn't my voice because they were quite a bit older doing an impression.
Um, and I can't imagine what, you know, what, what's happening now where it just, it would be exactly like my voice. It could have easily with, with that. They were like, they clocked it pretty quickly. They called my dad. They were like, Jord's fine, right? They made up some crazy story about how I was like in a, uh, I'd been in, I was in jail and this was my one call and I needed them to wire money or something.
That's crazy. Yeah. So stuff like that is going to ramp up, I think. Then we will get to real-time deepfakes probably in the next 12 months. Mhm. Meaning you can just like, there, there was this, you know, viral tweet I think last week about, uh, this, this guy that was like looking like a super attractive girl on, on a basically a live video call. So that, that kind of thing is going to get commoditized and, you know, he'll just become super, super easy.
Yeah, we've had this debate with, with one guest. We were trying to clock, we were trying to clock if they were using a like a gigachad filter, just like a 10% gigachad filter. And we were, we were, we were, a lot of people were, but we were like pausing it and being like, okay, like he moved his finger in front of his face, change. Yeah. Like pixel peeping.
But why, why did you assume that he, he has a gigachad filter?
Cuz he looked like a gigachad.
Yeah. No, if he wasn't, if he was calling, if he wasn't...
And, and other people online were levying accusations at him. So we were like, it's our duty to get to the bottom of this.
Uh, like you, I mean, you're clearly using a gigachad filter today, right?
That's just what you look like. Wow, dude. It's working. Whatever you're doing is working.
Yeah. It's a sales call.
No. Uh, what, what else is new in your world? Uh, I mean, how are you splitting your time? What, what, what does the rest of the year look like? You're just patiently awaiting the singularity.
I mean, I think, you know, it's the most important time in, in a long, long while. So I think just trying to work all day long and making it happen. Um, spending my time still very focused on World. Uh, you know, Merge Labs is, is a research lab. Sure. That we, that we started with the goal of actually, uh, bridging artificial and biological intelligence. Um, but it really is a research lab. So there I think we have a lot of great scientists. It's not a heavy operation yet. Um, so, but on the other side, I think it's the, it really is the year for World because I think, uh, you know, a, a, all these kind of like mold, book, cloud bots, that's just the beginning. I think it's going to get...
Yeah. Do you think there's something like a lot of these ideas, uh, molt, book and clawbot, now openclaw, were all ideas that people had had and yet there was some element of risk surrounding them that maybe pre, presented, uh, prevented some company like bigger labs from even going there, right? Like it's not like the idea of like a agent social network is some, it, you know, this is not the first time that someone has talked about this. This is an idea that's been floating around. Some of them have been funded. The prop actually like written about this. They've run the experiments too. Uh, so is there some element right now where we're in a point where like you're getting these sort of open source or community grown projects against ideas that labs had or big companies had but just didn't have, uh, didn't have like kind of like the freedom to do without a ton of risk.
Sure. I think there's just this general element of you can be much more scrappy as a, as a developer, you know, like Anthropic or OpenAI doing something like that, you know, you would actually need to mediate human-AI collaboration, for example. All these kind of things would need to be solved and the bar is much, much higher. So I think that's true. Um, and then broadly speaking, just AI is getting so much better that one guy can create such a, such a platform like super fast, you know, and can, it can iterate on a daily basis. Like a couple years ago, this would, would have needed to be like a team of developers probably. Yeah. Um, and so I think that's the thing to not also underestimate, just like how much more effective one person can be now. Um, and I think that's going to get like, get crazier. So I think we'll see a lot of that happening.
Buckle up pretty soon. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.
Yeah. Thanks for awesome.
Congrats on all the power.
Good to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Reream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to reream.com. Our next guest is anonymous. It's Nick from X.com. Obviously, all over the internet. He's in our YouTube chat often. We've had back and forth with him. I accused him of being an OpenAI hater. He said, number one, I'm, I got a bal-, I got a balanced set of opinions. So I'm excited to talk to him today about his takes on AI, his takes on the vibes online, see where we agree, where we disagree. It'll be interesting. Uh, so let's bring him in from the Reream waiting room. Nick, what a beautiful profile picture. You look exactly... Great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining.
Well, thanks for having me.
Thanks so much. Uh, why don't you kick us off with an introduction and keep it as high level as you want since you are anonymous, but anything we can tell about your philosophy or background or interests, all of that would just be helpful to set the table.
Um, sure. Well, um, yeah, I actually got into AI, um, around 2021 before ChatGPT even released overnight success. Yeah, I was, uh, you know, using their API, GPT-3. You know, I've been their biggest fan from day one.
I set the narrative, right?
Um, yeah, I was, uh, you know, fully following everything that's happening in the space and, uh, you know, uh, was really deluded myself with, you know, AGI coming in two weeks type of narrative and really going into like the possibilities, you know, expanding my mind there. Um, you know, when they released DALL-E, I don't know if you guys remember that. Yeah. I was like, uh, you know, so hyped about it that I even made like an Instagram page to curate all the best images, uh, that's been popping all around the internet. Um, until a point where I gained like a 100k followers and then OpenAI blocked me. They reported me.
Joker mode.
And I was like, what? You know, all I was trying to kind of get access.
Okay, okay, here, here, here, here starts the steel man. I mean, were you hitting the API with anything that was violating ToS? Were you spamming the API? Were there any other reasons that they could be upset? Abandoned from cooking. You were just cooking. You can't even cook in this country anymore.
Well, okay. I didn't actually, they didn't block me from the API. Okay. But like I started like a community page to, for all the DALL-E posts, um, on Instagram. Okay. And what actually happened was like, so I actually made a list on Twitter all the people had access. Yeah. Um, so what happened was like, so an OpenAI employee, you know, said, 'Yay, I made this with DALL-E.' I was like, 'Okay, cool. I take that. I post it on Instagram.' And then what happens like OpenAI posts the same thing like two hours later. So people started thinking like I'm actually the main page because I'm posting it before the official page.
Um, yeah, but I actually wrote it like it's a community page. It's not...
Well, yeah, let's continue with your, with your arc. Um, yeah. AGI coming in two weeks. We all felt that in 2022 when ChatGPT launched. How have your timelines shifted? How AGI-pilled are you? How optimistic or doomer are you about the future? Like what's your overall philosophy on, on AI in the future?
I think AI is like the greatest technology ever. I feel like, uh, post-2020 is, uh, is a new era we're living in and post-2026 is actually even a different era that we're entering into.
Um, I'm fully AGI-pilled. Um, I'm curled. I think AGI is coming probably. I think we're going to have really powerful systems by 2029, 2030. Um, yeah. Yeah. Um, I think, you know, companies are following like different paths to get there. So that's pretty interesting. See.
So, uh, you, you're using DALL-E early. You're using the Da Vinci 3.5 playground in, in OpenAI. Uh, what are you using currently? What are you daily driving for knowledge retrieval? Are you vibe coding? Are you doing agentic stuff? What, what, what, what's in your toolkit these days?
Well, you know, if you read my bio, it says non-technical member of technical staff. So, um, you know, I don't do a lot of coding, but yeah, I did, I did play around with, uh, you know, mobile. I love Claude Code. Um, this is the first time ever in my life that I'm, this year I'm actually not using ChatGPT. Um, so my daily driver is like Claude, Grok, and I use.
Yeah. Give me, give me some more flavor on when you go to Gemini, when you go to Grok, when you go to Claude.
Sure. Grok is like, you know, amazing for Twitter retrieval. Um, I think it's best. Claude is just, has a really nice personality. Like I just like love talking to it. It like tells me like, 'Hey, calm down.' You know, don't overthink this.
Don't post. It's so over. It's, I think we're going to be fine. Um, yeah. In Gemini, I think like Gemini is just like a scientific research assistant. Um, I think it has like a really nice, uh, it probably has like one of the best reasoning in my opinion.
Um, I like talking to it like it's like a notebook. I just learn. It also feels really fast. I feel like the Google search, like the speed is like, uh, like it feels like if I have to Google something, like that's the good place to go.
How are you so, how are you so fast with headlines? Yeah, you're really fast. It's funny. Uh, I end up getting the news from you first, even though you're, you're oftentimes sourcing Reuters, etc.
Yeah. Well, you know, the algorithm loves me. Um, you know, I, I think now the connection with the algorithm is one. Um, I, you know, people love me as well. Um,
You got fans in the chat right now. Everyone loves you. Your whole research team is here apparently.
Really? Um, yeah. I think, uh, I just like love to stay on top of these things. Um, I'm like really, really locked in. Um, so when like, you know, these reporters, they, you know, post, post a whole article with like, you know, such a long article and the only thing that they're to point out is like, yay, two lines. So, you know, cut through the [__], go direct, you know, put up the thing that matters.
Yeah. You kind of scoop the, you kind of scoop the scoopers.
How much, how much money have you made from X?
Oh yeah. Um, you know, it varies, but you could kind of pay me like a thousand bucks every two weeks or something like that. Um, sometimes it goes like 2,000. It's not much, but it's honest work.
It's honest work. Yeah. In the trenches. Uh, talk, yeah. Then, uh, talk to me about last year. It feels like the narrative of the AI bubble started. There was a worry about the AI capex buildout. People were taking two sides. Leopold Aschenbrenner, of course, is super long. Um, and, uh, and then there were voices that started, uh, you know, raising questions about, uh, the backlog, how much this buildout was going to cost, whether the growth could keep up, whether the models would keep improving, whether we were plateauing. What was your 2025 like?
Well, the thing is like my 2020, uh, well, I've been like pointing out like some absurdities of like what's happening and, you know, I started like just doubting from the beginning like, okay, we were supposed to get AGI by 2023, where did that go? Um, you know, I started questioning like, wait, what is actually happening? Um, I started realizing like, um, you know, the founder of, uh, you know, Sam Altman is like, I was like, okay, what's the agenda actually going? I was like, 'Okay, they might be like just raising money and cutting out competition. Like, do I really want that?' Um, no. So,
They might be doing business. Um, he might be being a businessman.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's, he's, look, look, Sam Altman is just being, you know, what he's best at, like being a really good startup founder, you know, driving all the attention and engagement towards him, you know, either it's like through claims saying, you know, AGI is going to be the most powerful technology and bad things will happen and then he like leans towards, you know, doing those bad things. Uh, so for example, like, I don't know, he said social media, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of social media and then, you know, he started making Sora. Stop. It's really good. I don't, I don't dislike the technology. I just like kind of like doubtful of the approach of what's being said in 2022, 2023 and then like 2024 we're entering like, hey, it's getting a little different. But about the bubble, um, yeah, I just started doubting like, um, you know, before they didn't have competition so it was like, okay, they, they're going to make it, but then Elon started entering the chat. Again, the chat. So, um, you know, he just...
Yeah. But what, but with the, with the bubble, I think like you can, I think it's fair to maybe question their ability to meet some of these like kind of press release economy style commitments. Yeah. But have you ever had, do you, do you honestly think there's a world where the market has some intense correction and people stop using, you know, everyday people that are not on X that, that don't know the infamous Nick just stop using, you know, ChatGPT?
Um, so the way I see it with like, so I think like the bubble is not, um, precisely like AI is not a bubble, but like the companies are bubbled. Um, you raise too much, you overextend, you know, you're actually entering into a bubble territory. The way I look at, uh, like ChatGPT, for example, um, if you look at all their projections of their numbers, um, it's all based on user count, like how many users do we have. So in 202, in the beginning they said they're going to reach a billion users, um, by the end of the year. Um, they actually stalled at like, uh, 800 million. Um, I don't even know if they reached 900 million. Um, this like six months they're not growing. So if you just make a simple calculation is like, okay, if their user base, which is, you know, getting mogged by Google for sure. Um, if that starts declining and reaches like, you know, like a certain threshold, all the projections fail. Um, so,
Yeah, they definitely need growth to continue. I do think that that, that 800 number is a little stale at this point. They haven't released the new numbers. It feels like they might still be growing and just not doing the whole like, they're saving it for like, okay, when we put out the billion number, it's a big moment. Um, but I mean, yeah, certainly it, it, it raises questions as you, as you, uh, outlined. What was your read on, uh, ads in ChatGPT?
Well, you know, I'm not a big fan of ads, but I am a big fan of ads from the business perspective. Sure. They're going to be like make money.
We love ads here. Yeah. Part of, part of my, I, I think, I think it was important like in processing OpenAI to realize like it's, you know, at some point you had to realize like they are operating as like a new big tech company and so the decisions that they make, they're going to ship a lot of products, like they're going to do browser, they're going to try Sora, they're going to try a lot of stuff. Not all of it's going to work, but what matters is like, is the core, is the core user base still growing? You could argue. I would be, you know, I, I haven't seen anything that would point to them like shrinking. But even a deceleration is not great obvious that scale. Um, and so, and so yeah, you can, you could kind of predict a lot of the things that they would do just by looking at them not like a ASI company, but as a big technology company.
Yeah. Consumer, consumer tech.
Yeah. Um, sure. I, I just think like look at 4o, for example. Um, when started launching, you know, Sam Altman said, you know, the movie Her and Scarlett Johansson, her voice, you know, it was marketed as like, uh, your lover, you know, you're going to fall in love with ChatGPT, the voice, the way it talks to you. And what happened? People actually fell in love. People fell in love. Then they shut it down eventually.
Yeah. Well, so, so the thing is like the reason why they had like a such a fast growth in, in users was because of like the image generation model and this part. And now where we are, they're really lacking in the image generation model. And then, okay, but Disney, we got all the Disney IP coming. I'm super bullish on this for OpenAI. It's, it just gives them a real, it gives them a feature that no one else can have for at least one year. And I think that when you look at Disney scale, look at how many people go to the parks every single year, uh, how many, how many people will, will pay to get something novel in an image model. I think that could be, you know, part of the next leg up.
Sure. I mean, if IP rights hold, uh, which I, I don't think they will, the, the, we're entering into, um, sure, that's going to be fun.
It's so over for IP rights.
Yeah, it's over. I think it should be abolished in some sense, but in a, in a very, in a very smart way where, you know, people should get some, some recognition or something.
A pat on the back. Where, where do you want, yeah. Where, where do you want all this to go? I mean, the, the, the anonymous account is interesting because you have a lot of ability to talk openly about a bunch of different companies. Do you want to turn this into an analysis group, a commentary channel? Like where, where do you see your work evolving?
Look, I was never anonymous. I was like always like I had my face on it. Like people actually know who I am. Like, yeah, if you actually like, you know, I don't, you know, if you go back on my tweets, like I was just being me like, you know, my, you know, I've lived in six countries and whatnot. I've talked about my life. It's all there. I've never deleted anything. Um, if anyone wants to go dig, go for it. But the thing is like, um, yeah, I just like went anonymous to like just, you know, be detached from my identity and like be, you know, explorative to talk about things that I don't really understand, but I want to understand and go for it. So the best way to understand on the internet is to say something absurd and then be corrected. So yeah,
You're just baiting smart, smart people to, uh, and I'm sure some...
Well, smart people are baiting us, you know, researchers are acting like marketers like AGI 2 weeks, you know, so they're baiting us, I'm baiting them and, you know, it's causing...
Yeah. So I do have a funny update. I like to check this every once in a while because of the Disney OpenAI deal. I went to ChatGPT. I, I invoked, uh, image generation and I said make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse and it says we're so sorry but the image we created may... so it actually generated the image, you saw me, showed me a little preview and then it took it away, which is so crazy.
Violated guardrails. You know, actually do the work and incur the cost.
Totally read the prompt before, that's what I would think, but it actually generated the full image and then...
Even OpenAI doesn't read instructions.
...similarity to third-party content. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt. And then I used to be able to do that in Nano Banana. I went over to, uh, Gemini and I said, 'Make an image of Spider-Man fighting Mickey Mouse.' And it said, and it said, 'I can't generate the image you requested right now due to concerns from third-party content providers. Please edit your prompt.' And it didn't generate the image with, uh, with, with Gemini. But, uh, so I, I, it's been interesting to see that press release happen. Yeah. Grok will probably do it.
Grok will, but it should, and they have an exclusive deal like, you know, it's like moving fast. Anyway,
What are you, what are you hoping to spend most of your time on this year?
Yeah. Um, yeah, I just want to go all in, um, into all of this. Um, I don't mind doxing myself, uh, fully in, you know, I mean, you know, Nvidia invited me to GTC as a full-time creator. Um, and I'm going to go to Jansen and whatnot. That's fun. So yeah, I think like it's time for me to go, you know, like 10x more and stop, you know, not just posting, but like a lot of things I can talk about.
Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the anon account, it does, it does give you the ability to speak freely, but it does sort of flatten you. I mean, we were going back and forth on this where I was kind of like collapsing you down into just an OpenAI hater. And from talking to you, clearly there's a lot more going on there. Uh, but it's easy when I only see the viral post and I don't know anything about the person behind it. Like it can become a little one-dimensional. So I'm excited for your new work. Your hero, have a little, uh, Sam hasn't blocked you, correct?
Uh, no, but ChatGPT has blocked me.
For no reason. Like, I've never commented.
No reason. I mean, you got to give it some credit here. I think, I think it would probably be whoever's managing the account logs in and they're sick of seeing anything that happens. The, it's over. I can see why they got to get, you got to give some credit. What is your camera roll like? Is it all pictures of Sam Altman looking perplexed or something? Anyway,
You know, I like entertainment. Um, I'm, I'm very tasteful with a lot of, a lot of these things. So, um, yeah, I just, I know what's absurd, what hits, what's, what's going to be funny. Um, I just, I just post what I feel like and I go, you know, very analytically, analytically, but also I'm a, I'm a feeler, so I know what's...
Very cool. Well, good to meet you, man. This is fun. Uh, do you mind if we, uh, flashbang you? Throwing flashbang. Throwing flashbang. There we go. The chat. It's been great having you on. Goodbye. See you soon, Nick. See you soon, Nick. Cheers. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool that lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create codeback prototypes and apps fast. Um, we have our next guest joining in about five minutes. We got to go through the Brian Armstrong story. So Brian Armstrong is in the, uh, Sunday edition, the exchange edition of the Wall Street Journal. Uh, going back and forth with Wall Street. They called him enemy number one on Wall Street. He's the crypto CEO, of course, is the CEO of Coinbase. He's been clashing with Brian Armstrong or with Jamie Dimon. So Brian Armstrong, CEO of the biggest US crypto company, was having coffee with...
It's almost like they paid him to do that. Like he paid them to write that title. Yeah. Like that's getting framed.
It is. I mean, that's what Toby, look, this will look great in a frame. Um, of course, obviously there's, there's, there's nuance here and there's a battle, but there's some off-the-record comments that became on the record, but, uh, it's an interesting back and forth. So they were at Davos at the World Economic Forum and, uh, Brian Armstrong is having coffee with Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, and, uh, JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon chimes in. He says, 'You're full of ass blank blank blank,' said Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic who's previously called Bitcoin a fraud. His index point, his index finger pointed squarely in Armstrong's face. 'Can I get a crowd?' I can't. I'm pointing over there. He's like, 'You're, you're full of [__] t.' Um, Dimon in a nutshell told him to stop lying on TV. According to people familiar with the conversation, in appearances on business television programs earlier that week, Armstrong had accused banks of trying to sabotage reg legislation that would set new, a new regulatory framework for digital assets. The confrontation wasn't quite in line with the annual forum's mission to foster cooperation among global leaders. As crypto moves swiftly into the mainstream of American finance, some Wall Street's, some of Wall Street's heavyweights are waking up to the threats. While banks have embraced some aspects of crypto, helping people to invest in Bitcoin and using digital assets to make money transfers more efficient, they are drawing a line at encroachment on their core business, consumer deposits. Armstrong's coming for them. Uh, banks and Coinbase are at odds over, go to page five. We have it in the timeline, but it's so much nicer in paper. Uh, whether crypto exchanges should be allowed to offer consumers regular payouts for holding digital tokens. So, you got some USDC. Are they going to pay you interest or not? That's the debate. These so-called rewards would, would pay, uh, holders of stablecoins a recurring fee, say 3.5%. Not bad. Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to real-world currency like dollars. Banks say the payouts are effectively the same as interest on the bank accounts. And since banks offer much less yield, typically under 1.1% in a checking account, they worry that the upshot will be that consumers will shift their money in droves into crypto that they say will compromise community banks and lending to businesses. Armstrong and others in the crypto world say the free market should reign and that banks can simply pay higher interest rates to compete with stablecoins or get themselves into stablecoin businesses themselves. Just join the party. Uh, the legislation known as the Clarity Act might shape the future of everyday financial services including bank deposits and electronic payments. In the latest push to find compromise, the White House plans to host a meeting Monday between today, uh, between banks and crypto industry groups according to people familiar with the matter. So David Sacks will be there. Coinbase's head of policy, Kara Calvert, will be there. Armstrong, 43, co-founded Coinbase in 2012 and has helped lead crypto's quest for legitimacy and mainstream acceptance at the head of the roughly $55 billion firm. Armstrong has a powerful voice in industry debates such as the one playing out in Washington. Quote, 'We'd rather have no bill than a bad bill.' He said on X in a post a day before the Senate committee was posed to vote on a version that could effectively ban companies like Coinbase from offering yield to consumers, potentially costing it billions of dollars. Within hours, the vote was abruptly postponed, taking much of the financial world by surprise. There's a lot more here that we can dig into, but we do have our next guest in the Reream waiting room. Jordi, is there anything else that's kicking around in your brain?
We need to have somebody on. Yeah. That is not from JPM or Coinbase to talk about this dynamic model.
An independent voice. That would be a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let's bring in our next guest from the Reream waiting room. We have David from Lexicon Branding. David, how are you doing?
I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here.
It's a pleasure to have you. Uh, is your 2026 off to a good start?
It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what's behind you.
Okay. Okay. Well, I'm the president of Lexicon, Lexicon Branding. Um, and we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. And we do it really for people, our clients all over the world. Yeah. Uh, we have an interesting process here that combines really a creative layer with an engineering layer. And that engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and importantly selecting them. And the names behind me on the wall are names that everyone on, every name on the wall has been invented by, uh, by Lexicon.
Uh, when is, is the right time to meet a founder? Like six months before they start the company? Like when, like what? Because I imagine a lot of these companies, I, I can see from, I think some of them, some of them come to you after they've started, after they're already in market and they realize for some reason or another, you know, we need to, we need a new name and then they come to you and then there's like some, some constraints and it becomes harder, you know. Walk us through like the, the ideal process.
Yeah, the most people do not, you're absolutely right, do not come to us six months before they really started the company. We suggest that they come to us as they approach that Series A, uh, funding.
By that point, uh, by that point, they really know who they are and where they're going for, for the most part. And so we can work with that information. Um, now, before that, you know, sometimes they, they land on a great name. I mean, you, you, this is something that you can get lucky. Um, not everybody needs a Lexicon to, to come, uh, to, to work with, but most of the time, um, as you approach that Series A is a good time to take a look at your name and we do that consulting all the time where, hey, is it time for us to change our name?
How much, uh, how, how do you, uh, how do you handle the domain side? Because I talk to, I, I oftentimes, you know, angel in like 60-some startups, maybe 70 at this point, and oftentimes they'll have what seems like a great name and maybe there's no trademark issues with it, but for some reason or another, the dot is taken and they will just never get it, right? Because it's some hundred-year-old company and you just have to assume they've been operational for long enough. They're, they're maybe you're public or privately held. It's like a super rich person that just is like squatting on it. No. So, how do you, how do you navigate that? Because I feel like one part of the naming process that I appreciate is you have these incredible constraints already. It's not like an open canvas because you have trademark constraints, you have domain constraints, and then you have a bunch of other kind of like less, uh, clear constraints, but just like it has to make sense, right? And so in the naming process, you're trying to like kind of combine all of those into a short list of things and then hopefully it has to like feel good and sound good and, and do all those other things.
Well, the URL should be the least important, uh, constraint, uh, in, in this process. Um, and we have research that we've done several years ago, and actually just this morning, we're about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important. Really, I mean, the search...
Domain, domain brokers hate this one simple trick, which is so, which is so funny. I mean, that's very, I mean, I, I, I can't wait to read the study because it's, it's so counter to, uh, uh, I've always felt like domains, domains are the element of your branding that you have like the least amount of control over but have an incredible impact. Everyone's seen like a, if you see a beautiful website and then the domain is something, something triblank.io, io, it just screams like, because there's so much subconscious branding, uh, and marketing that people are getting from every time I go to a big company's website, they have a .com, it sort of trains people. Uh, but, but what, what's the data that shows that it doesn't really matter?
I think that's probably, you know, given what you, you, the two of you do, it's, it's probably a little inside baseball because we're not finding that on the, the consumer end or the customer end. Um, they're just looking at this as an address. Um, the analog is a zip code. Uh, and actually we found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this? You know, um, and look at the companies that have done well. You know, Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors. They don't have Lucid. It's not Lucid.com. So, I think it's less important, uh, for the consumer and the customer than it is to perhaps...
Part of, part of, part of it for me is somebody that's helped name a number of companies and I just enjoy buying and finding and buying domains. I've just always appreciated it is that I appreciate the, how hard it is to get a great domain. And so when a, a founder comes and is pitching me and they already have something great, it just shows like a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn't know a great broker or maybe they didn't even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it. And so it kind of says something about them. But, uh, but I, but I agree there's a lot of context where it totally, uh, doesn't matter.
And if you look at the, if you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy, uh, buy whatever domain they wanted, right? So it's like just at a certain point.
Yeah. I mean, the, the Microsoft Azure one is hilarious because Microsoft owns Azure.com but reroutes it to azure.microsoft.com because they want you at the top-level domain. How is, has, has ChatGPT, uh, kind of made some clients, uh, kind of given them kind of the wrong lesson in branding? Because there's so much about that where like traditional, you know, if somebody came to you and they were like, I'm going to try to make a consumer product. I want to get to a billion users. If I don't get to a billion users, I'm going to fail. I'm going to call it ChatGPT. What do you think? You'd be like, you'd probably laugh him, laugh him out of the room or, or say, 'Well, you really need to work with me.'
Well, the interesting thing about that question is more than 50% of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or ChatGPT to develop their names and they work with it. They find it frustrating that things just don't work together. There's no doubt, uh, those types of models can generate thousands of names. No question about it. What they can't do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name is better than that name for you. Our philosophy is we're not in this business to create good names. We're in the business to create the right name. The, the right name that adds immediate, immediate value and long-term value because this, the name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey and nothing will be used more often, um, or longer. So it makes it very important and at this point in time a Chat or a Claude just isn't, uh, up to speed to do that kind of decision making.
Uh, walk us through the chapters of kind of even naming styles, right? Because we're at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the name, on the end of things. People are saying the blank company of place, right? Like that's a whole new thing. I'm sure, I'm sure that triggers...
Yeah, The Browser Company of New York. A bunch of people copied that. And my take on that was always that was an amazing name one time because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was just a novel kind of fresh take on the browser and it was the polar opposite of Chrome or Safari or some of these kind of like one-word, uh, even though they did have a, have a name for the product. So, and then you can think back like there was an era where like adding ly to the na-, to the end if something was, was popular. Like what, what are the different chapters and like have, uh, I'm curious if like the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold, right? Because like would you, uh, and anyway, so maybe extrapolate on that.
Yeah, certainly. Well, look, the, one of the most persistent trends or chapters as you call it in the industry is imitation. So someone comes out with something that ends in L-Y and hey, that's a good idea. Let's do. So then you'll see four or five names out in the marketplace that end with L-Y. What's happening there is that that imitation doesn't generate the interest and the provocativeness that a really well put-together brand name should for people. So we always advise people imitation is suicide. Uh, your name should not look or act like anything that's out there in the marketplace.
Yeah. How'd you get into this? What was the first brand name you did?
Well, I came from the advertising business. So, you know, great agency, Flick Building. And I just saw as we worked on, on projects and, and company identity that naming was going to become more and more important as, as the world got more and more complex and more and more integrated. And so I took a flyer. That's the simple, maybe boring story of how I got into this business. Um, relative to the first name we ever generated is, it's a name that has long since, uh, disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies and we named a new, um, furnace noise, uh, uh, reduction technology called Whisper.
Okay. Yeah. Stuff. What, uh, what, what advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even kind of like sub-companies? We're at this point right now where like look at a company like Claude has, uh, Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code. Uh, OpenAI has, you know, ChatGPT, they have, uh, the browser which I'm even just blanking on the, on the name of it. They have Codex. They have...
Yeah. So, so different models in Codex.
There's GPT 5.2. What framework do you give? Because I'm assuming you'll work with a company to name the parent company, and then you also work on the subproducts, and then in some cases the subproducts end up outshining the parent company.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, we have an expression here, we call 'clarity is the language of leadership.' And what you see in that example you just gave me, there's really no story there. They don't have a common language. And so it's difficult for the audience, the consumers, to really understand what are they doing for me? What is this company about? It's a very choppy thing. So a lot of our business coming to us now over the past year and a half, and I think it's because of AI, is clients coming to us and asking us to help them. I use the term 'straighten out their language' and make it make sense.
Yes.
What else about these taxonomies? I'm interested, like at the early stage, Series A, how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of product names, and what is the process of like working with you like? Is it, you know, there's like a specific sprint, specific deadlines, you're paying up front, and you don't know what you're getting? Is there contingency? Like what is the workflow to work with a company?
It's pretty straightforward. In many ways, this is really rocket science, but we start with a real simple work session where we're really asking clients four key questions.
And this always works. It's how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in the room, we're going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out.
Then we say, okay, if that's how you want to win, what do you have to win? That gives us things that the name doesn't have to, right? Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don't you have? Right? That begins to, you know, give us information about how that name might help them, right? Because a name should be a tool. It should be the foundation for success. And then finally, we say, okay, what do you have to say? What would you like to say? And between those four things, we call it a diamond, we can then set up what we call a framework or a creative framework, which we don't even use the word objectives because we want that analog holds true. We want a window that we can travel through and do a lot of creative work. That's where the process begins.
And then we work here with, you know, small two-person creative teams, and we have this what we call internally related, this engineering layer where we're linguists. We're using, you know, company-funded research on things like, it sounds exotic but it's very fundamental, sound symbolism, letter structure, and fluency. All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names.
Makes sense.
What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? We saw like nowadays products grow so quickly. We saw this with Claudebot, which if you paid attention to that, you would have seen like, okay, Anthropic's going to have issue with this, right? It's like way too in the same category, sounds the exact same, very confusing to consumers. So he quickly rebranded it, then didn't like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. And fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name, OpenClaw, hopefully sticks and continues, you know, the community just like keeps the momentum. But you're working with companies that are coming to you right when they're starting to get real traction, and they know they need to change their name, but they don't want to kind of destroy any brand equity that they've built up.
Yeah. Well, I think the biggest factor is that they underinvest in name change. And I don't mean necessarily, you know, investing with a Lexicon or someone else. They don't sit and think through all the implications of doing this name change. First, from a what's the message that we want to communicate, because you do at some point have to say yesterday we were this and now today we're that, and what is that message? And then the second thing is lining up the resources, the right law firm, global language analysis, all these things, so you don't end up with something that's launched and then it turns out to, I mean, you know, your mother's a bank robber.
Yeah. I mean, a good example you did. So, you did TripActions to Navan. Yeah.
And that was an example. TripActions had a big brand, at least in the US, and they didn't want to be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a place, just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired the rebrand. And they paid you guys, worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent like $5 to $10 million in a short period of time to like reintroduce themselves. At least that was my impression as just somebody in the target market.
Yeah, they did a fantastic job. They really did. And that name, it's a coined solution. We made it up because the founder of the company, having been, you might say, burned by TripActions being so one-dimensional, so narrow, said, 'I want flexibility for the future,' and the best way to get flexibility is to make something up.
So that means we'll never run out of names.
That's right. We hope it. We hope. I have, it's always been, every single time I've been working with a startup or trying to name something, sometimes you can just be hitting a wall where you're like, I can't find, for me it's like, I can't find any domains in the space that I like. Everything's trademarked, all this stuff. And then there's always a name. You might appreciate some of the history of TBPN. We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then we had an issue where everywhere we went, people would say, 'introducing the Tech Bros,' and we were like, we knew this was our life's work, and we were like, I don't want to spend my whole life being introduced as the Tech Bros, which was like the word that we were trying to avoid with the original name. And so I was like, I need a, I want like a four or five-letter domain. It has to have TB in it. And we ended up part of TBPN. We're not a network. We look and sound like an ESPN or something like that, but the logic was like if we name it like a network, even though we're a podcast or a live stream, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television, even if it is at the end of the day just, you know, 10 of us here in a studio making something that looks like television.
Yeah, it does feel like you're a national network.
Yeah. So it is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, though. We're having to power through that.
Yeah. Yeah. The putting a P next to a B is always a choice. It's, you know, the real Lexicon heads would probably... It just inspires us to...
I mean, last question for me because there's some breaking news going on right now, but what do you think about a return to using surnames as company names? The Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company, that felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. I've starting to happen, but do you think that that's something that might happen? It takes guts because you can't, there's Cerebras, that's a quantum computing company public. There are some people that have done it, but do you think that that is something that you would caution folks against or you would be in favor of?
I would caution to really take a hard look at that, and it really depends on the person's personality, what the name is like. Is it easy to spell? Is it easy to say?
Yeah. The danger, of course, is something happens to the founder that is unflattering, now you have to live with that. So I think it's worth discussion and evaluation.
Yeah.
But I would probably push against it most of the time.
Yeah.
How many clients do you work with a year?
We'll do about 75 projects a year in the naming area. And then we have a research group here that does the quantitative research for us also.
Very cool. And only some fraction of those are technology companies. I'm assuming, you know, a bunch of other industries will tap your expertise as well.
Yeah, we try to keep a balance, but really 50, maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this point in time, and which I love it. So everything is technology.
I love it. That's a good place to be, and it's fun. I mean, these are all amazing brands. The Power Book, what a legend.
We see the future every week.
Yeah, that's it. It must be fun.
And we talk to some of the smartest people that can imagine, as you guys.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I can imagine. Well, I've had a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro. So you have quite a lot of demand. I'm sure more than you can fulfill, but we'll definitely send some people your way. And it was great to meet.
Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for having me. We'll talk to you soon.
Tomorrow, Cisco on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed there, and we'll be there with the giga stream headed to the bay later today.
We have some breaking news. First up, Palantir beat earnings. Stock is up, what is it, up 6% already after hours. It's a $350 billion company. And this is the big one from Coli here just in: SpaceX reportedly confirms xAI merger. Very exciting. This has hit the Bloomberg terminal as well. Elon Musk's SpaceX confirms merger with xAI in company memo. SpaceX confirms plans to merge with xAI before the IPO. We were talking about this and sort of predicting that this would happen. ASTS is up 2% after hours. I guess that's correlated there. What is that?
They just go up. Anything happens in space that's good, it just goes up.
ASTS. What is ASTS? I don't know.
Isn't, isn't... I don't know. I thought that was EchoStar. They hold... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They hold SpaceX stock. That's right.
Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX with xAI in a deal that encompasses the billionaire's increasingly costly ambitions to dominate artificial intelligence and space exploration. The deal was announced in a memo. Bloomberg earlier reported on the discussion. SpaceX is planning an IPO that could raise as much as $50 billion and value the company at $1.5 trillion. It's also discussed a possible merger with Tesla. There's a couple other data points that we should share. On Khi, which AI company will have the best coding model at the end of 2026? xAI is at 9%. You don't hear that much about xAI, but that's higher than I thought. Anthropic's leading at 54%, then OpenAI 27%, then Google at 14%. Of course, this is in the benchmarks on LiveBench AI rated by coding average. Do with that what you will. But the real interesting data point about SpaceX is that according to Reuters and Tren Griffin on X, SpaceX generated $8 million in EBITDA.
