I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Position.
Overnight success.
The place 3,000 double, right?
There's misinformation. Clearing order inbound.
That's just wrong. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here. We are experts. Founder Mel.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Fight is win.
Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple flip.
Clearing order inbound. Come on, get up.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Market clearing order inbound. Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dump, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital.
50th anniversary of Apple. We're very excited. Eddie Cue is joining at 12:10. We're going to go through his story.
Has to be one of the most elaborate April Fool's jokes.
Building a company for 50 years. Yeah, that is incredible.
It's a hilarious just create trillions of dollars in shareholder value. Like just kind of as like the bit with your voice.
Yeah, it's great. I can actually hear you really well in this cuz I have three sets of headphones on now. I have headphones.
You can't even tell that I've got these new AirPod Pro Max.
Anyway, we are very excited that Eddie Cue is joining. We're also excited about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Well, we're also excited about the rest of our linear lineup. So, let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agent agent.
We have Eddie Cue at 12:10.
Gary Tan's coming in. We have Aaron Terzus using fresh data signaling. He's got fresh data signaling a rebound in small business hiring and labor market activity.
We have Top from Arena Physica.
Oh, we printed out both Abashek DS. Okay.
Got a new product turning web agents from monitors into autonomous task executors. And of course, Gary Tan as John with a new line of code world champion. Yeah. Line of code world champion. I think a lot of people have questions about how much is Gary doing himself? What does he think about the future for YC companies? I think no one really disputes the question that in the vibe coding world the roles change, everyone's sort of coding, pushing code. Very interesting to hear. YC's typically gone after teams that are highly technical. Does that change in the future? There's a lot to answer and of course we'll be digging into GStack and Gary's list and trying to understand what the goal is there, what's real, what's a meme. He's obviously trolling people. He's a master of the timeline. So that will be fun to dig into. But we got to kick it off with this video from NASA administrator and more importantly former TBPN guest Jared Isaacman. He says, 'Tomorrow we launch at sunset. Tonight, Artemis 2 waits on the pad, ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century. The next era of exploration begins.'
We have the countdown here right next to John.
So, it is about 4 hours and 20 something minutes until the launch starts. They might delay by a few minutes. Who knows? They might scratch entirely, but if things go to plan, the official NASA stream is up now. But stay with us and then once we wrap in about three hours, head over there and watch NASA take you through the final stage of the Artemis 2 launch. But let's play NASA administrator Jared Isaacman's video because it's very exciting. This is what I lived for as a young child and what I live for today.
Kennedy Space Center in more than 50 years.
50 years. Very, very, you know, a lot of people have been going back and forth SpaceX versus SLS. I think it's more rockets the better, more space launch capacity the better. I want 10 of these companies. I want them all to be successful.
Very exciting. Well, we will be following it closely throughout the day. We might get updates. We might have breaking news. Appo Structure says you can hate SLS for being obsolete, massively late and overbudget. I certainly do, but you got to concede it looks incredible and I couldn't agree more. Importantly, some people were joking around saying the space shuttle is launching today. They're not using the space shuttle because they're going farther than they normally go with the space shuttle and the space shuttle was decommissioned. So then the astronauts will be in pod on top capsule mode.
Blake Scholl shares, I'm genuinely excited to see America headed back to the moon. Back around the moon, but Artemis is a moon dog. That's a good wombo. We have a really good wombo wombo. Wombos are the new meta. We'll be breaking it down soon.
You don't even need to explain it. You don't. It's just plainly rain is lore and explain explain.
Yeah. Yeah.
Remember that Apollo did not result in durable progress in space. It marked a literal high point for more than half a century. The cost of space access remained prohibitively high until we had a rebirth of space entrepreneurship. Thank you for showing the way, SpaceX. Apollo was history's greatest tech demo, the moon landing. This is inspiring. It shows the triumph of ingenuity, science, and reason. But also, Apollo led to half a century of stasis and regression.
It was fundamentally uneconomic. Contributed to creation of a cost insensitive space agency and supply base. All more concerned with perpetuating their own existence, more concerned with make work jobs than accelerating human progress. Now we're going back to the moon essentially the same way we did in 1969. Again, uneconomically, again with central planning, a disposable rocket, no answer to how we create a self-sustaining lunar economy. Again, we're taking communist approaches in competition with the communists.
Communism didn't work for the Russians and it won't work for America either. The sooner we can get done with this moon doggle, the better. But there's also reason to be optimistic this time around. There's a nascent commercially vision for the moon. Lunar hotels, mass drivers, data centers in space, helium 3, the commercial programs that gave SpaceX an early assist show a different and better path forward. This is where the better future lies, and this is where America should be focused. America should take the moon, and we should take it the same way we took the American West. Let's encourage and protect lunar value creation.
How about a homestead act for the moon?
Most important, let's stop dumping money. And more importantly, the time of our engineers and scientists on glory projects that will never lead to a better future. It is indeed time for another space race. Last time we fought communism with communism. This time let's remember what made America great. This time let's fight communism with capitalism. Yeah, there's some good points in here. I think the flip side of this is that we are in a wildly different position than 1969 in terms of the maturity of this lunar economy, the space ecosystem. We have SpaceX filed for IPO today. You're looking at a trillion dollar company. It will instantly be one of the largest companies in the world. It already is, but in the public markets when it goes out. And so you have a lot of companies and startups and venture capitalists that are fully ready to commercialize any findings that come out of this and see this as an inspirational moment. And overall it just feels like 1969 the capital markets, the entrepreneurship, the capitalism was not quite ready for okay, let's take this to the next step. Let's privatize this. Let's build businesses around this. It was much more of a science experiment that went off into its corner and then was not immediately capitalized on. But I think this time could be different. At the same time, I do understand what he's saying. Ryan and Hunter over at Pirate Wires shared, they wrote about this mission in Pirate Wires today and they shared a quote from Jared last week saying this time he said the goal is not flags and footprints. This time the goal is to stay. America will never again give up the moon. Mhm. So, I think generally aligned with what Blake is saying.
Tyler, what's your take on this?
Yeah, I was just going to say I think Blake is kind of underestimating the value of just like vibes. Yeah. Like people have been like pretty blackpilled on the moon.
Totally. I think for the LA, I mean basically since everything kind of stopped. Yeah.
So if you can just have like a white pill everyone's like sure like maybe it's not a good idea to continually launch these to the moon. They're not economical. But if you can just get one and say like, 'Yeah, we actually we can still do this.'
I mean, it's over budget, but as a percentage of GDP, it has to be a fraction of what we spent in 1969. So, on a relative basis, it's maybe a better investment. And yeah, I do think that there's something that's just inspiring about being able to do something like this and prove that we still got it.
I also like from Hunter and Ryan's post that they're dropping the article. It's just Moon, right? It's not the moon.
Yes. Yes, I like this idea. Yes, we only got one, so we can just say moon. It has its own name, you know. You don't say the California, the Texas, the Florida. You just say moon. You say Texas, Florida.
Let's watch this video of Neil Armstrong ejecting just seconds before his lunar training vehicle crashed.
Space cowboy. True heroism here. This is such a crazy video. I had no idea this happened.
Good music, too. What is this? Interstellar. Yeah.
Like, how did he know it was not going to go? Oh, it's tipping. Okay, I would definitely know. That would be very obvious that you would want to get out of there at that point. Wow. And he gets out of the parachute. I wonder how much of that was like planned to be, okay, we're testing the ejector seat or he just knew, okay, I got out.
Yeah. Why haven't I seen this video? It's been available on the internet for a long time. It just doesn't get a lot of views. Well, it is getting a lot of views today. It was nicknamed flying bedstead for good reason. It looked like a bed frame and it flew like one too. Yeah. Flying that on Earth. It's not exactly the most aerodynamic vehicle but Ki has a market on when will Artemis 2 launch. It is soaring. We are now at 89% before April 2nd. So 89% chance it launches today. Basically 92% chance that it launches before April 4th. And there's more information there. So in general even if it scratches all the way to the end of April, you're still looking at a 95% chance. So everyone is very optimistic that this launch will happen and we're excited to keep following it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business's AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use to keep their apps working. So Jamie Dimon's been on an absolute tear. He is hiring people. He's restating his vision for America. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. He has a plan for JPMorgan to rescue the American dream. That's a very exciting idea. And it is in the Wall Street Journal. I think it's in the print edition maybe today, which I'd love to see. Jamie Dimon, is he in here? I don't know.
Anyway, let's run through Jamie Dimon's plan for America. He's running. I think he should. Jamie Dimon thinks the American dream is on life support and he is planning JPMorgan Chase to step in. The nation's largest bank announced the American Dream Initiative on Tuesday, a commitment from JPMorgan to support small businesses, home ownership, access to healthcare, and other economic priorities that Dimon believes are crucial for the well-being of Americans. The bank already finances all the above and says it's ready to put more resources into the effort. Dimon, 70 years old and CEO of JPMorgan since 2006, has long worried about the future of the American economy and wealth inequality. More recently, he has warned that the country is sleepwalking into economic stasis thanks to bad policies and rules that make it hard to invest in new ventures and run companies. 'I am deeply frustrated by our own policies in America,' he said last week at the Hill and Valley Forum, which we covered. 'We've become like Europe. We're unable to move and change.' That's strong words. JPMorgan hasn't been slowed, bringing in more profit than any bank in US history. But it reaches across Main Street and Wall Street and does better when the whole economy is chugging along. Dimon has a habit of making big commitments in tune with the zeitgeist. JPMorgan announced a $1.5 trillion investment platform focused on national security and supply chains last year just as the federal government started to invest in critical suppliers. It made a $30 billion racial equity commitment after the murder of George Floyd and a $2.5 trillion climate change plan in 2021. Now the bank is committing to adding three million new small business customers on top of 7 million today. They want to get to 10 million. And it wants to lend them up to $80 billion over the next 10 years through loans and support for community oriented banks and investment funds. The bank reported $33 billion of loans to small businesses and other customers at the end of 2025. So they want to expand significantly. It's just a 30% bump in total number of small businesses, but they want to basically triple the amount of the loan book broadly. 'The American dream means you can buy a home, start a business, you can build wealth, and you can afford health care for your family.' JPMorgan's head of corporate responsibility, Tim Barry, said in an interview, 'We want to bring our capabilities and make that more real to families and customers.' Barry, the chief operating officer, said they're helming the new American Dream Initiative and acknowledged that a lot of it isn't really new. JPMorgan has been looking to grow deeper roots in the cities and towns where it does business, rolling out specialty branches focused on community education for years. It has invested big in cities where it has found business friendly leadership including Detroit and San Francisco. The initiative and ambitious goals are supposed to jumpstart JPMorgan bankers and employees to do more. 'When we think about the impact that we've had locally in a place like Detroit, we know that success can be replicated in other places.' So they are opening up the pocketbook to spur small business. Very exciting. In other Jamie Dimon news, he just hired or recently hired Warren Buffett's protege. There's a profile in Barron's by Andy Serwer. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn't usually make high-profile outside hires for his senior executive team, preferring instead the homegrown variety. That makes Todd Combs, formerly a top investment manager at Berkshire Hathaway, poached and brought in to head up JPMorgan Chase's new $10 billion strategic investment group, an exception. Except that Combs is hardly a bolt from the blue. I like that. That's a good turn of phrase. Having served on JPMorgan's board since 2016. Okay, so he's a board member, so he clearly knows everyone already. 'I know the company well,' Combs tells Barron's in his first interview as a bank employee. 'I know everyone from Jamie to the operating committee and the next layer of management. I'm well aware of the balance sheet, the excess capital, and how Jamie and the team think and operate.' Like the bank's other top executives, Combs, who's been CEO of Berkshire's Geico Insurance, is still settling into his new office on the 47th floor of JPMorgan's new Manhattan headquarters. 'I hope you don't mind the warm office,' says Combs, a tennis playing Florida native. 'I don't like the cold,' he says. Combs mapped out his new gig, which began in January, on a two column chart he sketched on a notepad. Interesting. He's old school.
He's not creating a second brain. He's just ripping it on a notepad. On the left are five rows of industries such as defense, supply chain, re-industrialization. On the right are their future manifestations such as defense tech, US semiconductors, respectively. 'The plan is to invest in everything our country has outsourced and abdicated over recent decades,' Combs says. 'We want to invest in places where the puck is going so that America can control its own future.' That means deploying the group's $10 billion into middle market and large companies in US defense, aerospace, healthcare, and energy sectors to help them grow. Recent investments include mining company Perpetua Resources and defense tech startup Shield AI. Combs, who reports to Dimon, will also act as a special adviser to the CEO. Combs's endeavor is part of the security and resiliency initiative JPMorgan announced in October in which the bank will commit to facilitating $1.5 trillion in investments for companies deemed critical to the national economic security and resiliency. He joins the initiative's external advisory council chaired by Dimon which includes Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Condoleezza Rice. What a stacked roster.
Combs says investments come to him directly or through Jamie or other senior bankers. What about the Trump administration? 'There are times that they'll reach out and look for our help like Intel. I can imagine. We want to be a good partner to the government regardless of who's in charge. It's the GOP now. It can be someone else in the future. We're trying to let capitalism send the right signal. We'll look at every opportunity on its own merit. We want an impact and a return.' Highly regarded as an investor, Combs is a boyish-looking 55. He helped return Geico, which was burdened with outdated technology and bloated costs, to profitability. Berkshire watchers thought he might play a role in the company's post-Warren Buffett era, either overseeing its multi-billion dollar investment portfolio or its massive insurance operations, or he could have been up for other high-profile jobs. But why this one? 'It's a unique opportunity with both Jamie and the institution and the mission of the job,' Combs says. 'This is critical to the future of the country. You want to find things in life that are big and important that are worth doing and doable.' Combs has an anti-bucket list for his new role. 'I had about 10 or 12 things that I didn't want.' The anti-bucket list is sort of underrated. Your anti-bucket list is just never go skydiving. I don't want that to happen. Never buy a supercar. Never visit 30 countries. Become super car-less. It's just the dumbest thing. No. He says, 'Jamie and I would talk every day after he brought this role for me. I didn't want to be measured on VaR, which stands for value at risk, a statistical measure that quantifies financial risk. I didn't want to get bogged down in bureaucracy.' None of that occurred. 'In fact, it's better than I could have imagined. I'm sure there will be rough spots that will happen when I make a bad investment, which is invariably going to happen.' Was jumping from board member to management awkward? No. He says, 'I'd like to think that there's an implicit trust factor because of the decade of relationships. I don't need years of random interaction getting up to speed.' He talks about riding the subway with Lori Beer, the bank's global chief information officer, back to our respective residences the other night and talking about our tech roadmap for a specific vendor. 'We're being pitched on a $500 million deal and walking it down the hall to Troy and Doug, the co-CEOs of JPMorgan's commercial and investment bank.' As for Combs's role as a strategic adviser to Dimon, he says that's about looking at the bank's operation from an outside perspective. 'It's a kind of investor mindset. You see failure everywhere all the time, whereas maybe inside a firm you can have an insular view.' He didn't talk much about his time at Berkshire. He said, 'I was back and forth from Omaha to DC for six years running Geico. That was a long time. I'm very proud not to go down that rabbit hole of what we accomplished at Geico. Berkshire is an animal unto itself that is completely unique.' I like that he's probably just saying like it's a unique animal, like it's a unique species, but I like to think that he's like it's an absolute animal. It's an absolute dog.
Well, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Why is no one talking about Snapchat?
Ironic. What's going on? Capital came out Snap now with a well-executed activist campaign.
Let's see. I'm pulling up there. It does feel like there's a big opportunity with AI better targeting. Like I'm receptive to this pitch, but I want to hear it from Irenic. I know that this is an activist shareholder. This could be very confrontational.
Yes. They come out with a website now.com. You land on the website, they hit you with snapback to reality.
Yep.
So, taking a fun approach here, they say Snap has the potential to be a great company and a double AI winner through meaningfully improved operating efficiency and monetization. Irenic has outlined six steps to 7x Snap's share price to $26 per share. They put together a presentation as well as a letter. I'll kind of read through some of the highlights. They say it's Snap's crucible moment. AI creates a dual-pronged opportunity for significant cost cuts and accelerated product development. So they go into cost improvements, monetization, governance. On the cost side, they want to spin or shut down Spectacles. I'm sure Evan is like already happening, right? There was that was happening.
The spin is seemingly in the works. There were some leaks over the last 6 months around that. So I would expect that to happen. Mhm.
They want to rationalize cost. AI can and should replace many existing roles. Now remember the constant criticism of Snap has been the stock-based comp. If you actually look at it, from the kind of rough math we were doing like every 10 years, they're basically giving the entire company to the team. And so investors, long-term investors have been very frustrated by that. And it always has been weird because I understand that like back in the day when they were competing directly with Twitter and Meta and Instagram and Reddit and all these different upstart high growth social networking companies. I believe the talent war thesis it makes sense that they would have to probably pay top dollar. But you have to imagine that as the business has stabilized there are people that would come into the organization that would be happy to just have a salary and just do the work because it's better than working at another company. It's not necessarily like the AI talent war or that the social media talent war that I'm sure happened back 10 years ago. It's a different time so maybe different structure.
Yeah. So, Save Snap Now is recommending a thousand person RIF to get fit and competitive and to empower your highest performers.
It's again, if you're Evan reading empower your highest performers, you're probably thinking like, yeah, oh jeez, I never thought of that. But again, they do have 5,261 employees as of late 2025. So this would represent roughly a 20% RIF, not block level cuts, but more in line with what we're seeing at Oracle, Meta, some other tech companies that are going through a transformation.
On monetization, the recommendation is to improve monetization, which I think is a good idea for any business, but they say AI will massively accelerate product development and enhance advertising monetization tools. Again, everyone by this point should be well aware that Meta has done a fantastic job in leveraging AI ML to just make a better and better and better ads product.
And they say product improvements across users, advertisers and subscriptions to break out of Snap's monetization ceiling. Then they say deploy AI properly, monetize Snap's proprietary AI data sets and then concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic. Again, Snap partnered with Perplexity and it seemed like Snap got a fantastic deal out of that. It was something like a $400 million deal if I remember correctly. Some of it was stock in Perplexity. Yeah. But there was a huge cash component and unclear if the other companies mentioned, Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic, would have been able to match that how aggressive Perplexity was getting. And so it's possible Snap's logic was hey we can do this deal with Perplexity and then it's native in our app. It's easy enough to swap it out at a later date. Let's basically take the cash while we can get it.
Yeah. I saw this post from Sean Frank that somewhat relates. He's talking about one of our sponsors, AppLovin, which I will tell you about in a second, but he said, 'In less than 12 months, I've spent $2,872,000 of my own money profitably on AppLovin. I don't own the stock. I don't trade the stock. This is the net amount that left my bank account.' And he shares a couple other points and he says he's spending $17,000. So $2.8 million on AppLovin, clearly like a scalable large platform. Spent $17,000 on Pinterest, $266,000 on Reddit. You have to imagine that Meta ads are up there. But the question is like for a lot of advertisers, Snap has not become this like oh sure, maybe it's not going to be your number one platform, but it's like in the marketing mix very regularly. And I think a lot of that should start working. Even if the pool isn't super deep, even if you don't have 99% of your customers there, maybe only 20% of your customers are there, but even if they're there, you should be able to find them. And AI can help that. And so I would expect that if this works, you'd see like really solid data from Ridge saying like, 'Oh yeah, we're spending on Snap.'
Yeah. And they've been experimenting with Snap as far back as 2018 when I was hanging out with Sean and Connor back then. They were getting results on Snap but there was a ceiling.
So then finally they want to on the governance side commit to investing in safety and capital return. Use newfound cash and profitability to further invest in privacy, safety and parental controls and allocate new cash flow generation of capital return and demonstrate conviction in Snap's creation. Yeah, it's interesting on the parental control and safety side. I don't think Snap has been able to stay out of at least Lanier's targets.
Oh, they ended up they settled before it went to trial.
Meta and Google fought it.
And so yeah, I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I think that they've been trying to sort of step back from all of that.
Yeah. And then on the corporate governance side, giving shareholders a vote can unlock a multiple re-rate through broader index inclusion and enabling one vote per Class A share still preserves Snap as a founder controlled company probably like 10x voting power or something like that. Anyways there is a 70-page slide deck that they put together with all these different recommendations.
Well the market's reacting really positively to this and I think Evan Spiegel has shared some statements that sort of mirror this actually. It seems like there's maybe a little bit more reception than you might expect. The stock's up 14% one day after publishing this piece. Says Bo Weinstein. Adam is a rockstar in the making. So smart. Definitely worth a follow. And that's cap is carried no interest gave some feedback on Irenic. He said a few critiques feedback. Daily opens are not equal to time spent on app. Meta clearly have higher time spent on app and therefore parity on monetization is flawed. Arguing that Snapchat can hit targeting levels of Meta is fallacious. The amount of data that Meta has on me versus Snapchat is astronomically different. I guess I'm open to being proven wrong since you compare it to AppLovin who IMO has always used other targeting sources. Three proprietary data slide is a one-time flash in the pan moment. Sure, some companies are selling deranged amount of data, but that's not lasting ARPU monetization. Although it is fair to call them out on it. I like the monetization per user slide. I think my feedback around Snap's ability to monetize relative to those peers stands literally screen time is much lower and you don't have data for targeting the way peers do. And what else was relevant? Calling out the founder's net worth growth was either god tier, petty, or brilliant or some combination both. Fun presentation.
Presentation. Well, you can go check it out. Irenic Capital has posted it. Save Snap Now. You can listen to our interviews. I think a TBPN slide or quote made it into one of these presentations which is very where was it? I think we're in there. Yeah it was on the slide AI should be an accelerant for Snap's core ads business. So Zach had said on Q4 earnings he said we're also working on merging LLMs with the recommendation systems that power Facebook Instagram threads and our ad system. Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Adam at AppLovin said, 'If we believe that AI technologies are going to be two times more efficacious in 5 years, just based off of that, if we do our job right, our system is going to be two times more predictive for its task, the sequence of problems that it's predicting in 5 years.' And Evan said, 'Our smart campaign solution suite, including smart targeting and smart budget, uses AI to identify incremental high-value audiences and dynamically allocate spend across objectives, reducing the need for manual setup and ongoing optimization.' And then in our interview, they highlighted Evan saying, 'As you look at glasses in the near term, I wouldn't expect AI to be a major accelerant.' Mhm.
So well since we mentioned them, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. It's in beta already.
Yeah. So anyways, closing this out. Irenic clearly thinks that he says specifically Snap is a special asset. He thinks it has a ton of potential. He's overall positive. He just thinks like, you know, he really wants them to get in the game. And I think that honestly a lot of people have felt the same way over the years, but have just ultimately been frustrated because some of these things that seem somewhat straightforward just haven't been done.
Okay, I got to go back to the moon. We're going back to the moon. I'm going back to the moon because Artemis 2 is launching in 3 hours and 52 minutes and 4 3 2 1 seconds. Because Brandon Gahl wrote the Op-Ed today in the TBPN newsletter about some of the technology that they're using to document the trip and it's a very different take, very live streamer coded of us. We only care about the camera equipment that's on board. Obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but it's a fascinating deep dive. So let's read through this so that everyone has the update on how you can actually experience this because there's a bunch of interesting deals that went into documenting this. So as you know today the NASA Artemis 2 mission will launch sending the Orion spacecraft carrying a four astronaut crew on a high energy free return trajectory to get to the moon and back in about 10 days. It's longer than the Artemis 1 mission which was six days by the way which went around the moon but uncrewed. Yeah. Can you imagine the stress when you're just like being sent straight out into space and you know there's a big turn coming up and it's pretty important that you actually don't miss the off-ramp. Yeah. You can't be like texting and like miss the off-ramp. If you miss the off-ramp, you're going to Saturn. You're rough. It's over for you. Orion will enter a 24-hour highly elliptical orbit with an apogee 44,000 miles above the surface of the Earth. For context, the ISS orbits at 200 to 280 miles in altitude. So way way higher, 100 times higher or 200 times higher. During the first day, the crew will test critical life support communication systems. After reaching its apogee, Orion will essentially fall backward towards our planet. This will cause the craft to start picking up massive speed. If you scroll down, you'll see that the path is a little fishy. And I think a lot of the tinfoil hat crowd are going to be suspicious about the path that the rocket will be taking because it's fishy. It's fishy. If you scroll down, don't you think that's fishy? That's a fishy orbit. That's just a fishy orbit. I don't know. I don't want to be too conspiratorial about this stuff, but like it does look like a fish. It's a fishy orbit. It's fishy. Anyway, as it approaches its perigee, for those who are just listening on audio, it literally looks like a fish. As it approaches its perigee or the lowest point in its Earth orbit, the crew will conduct a systems review, wake up the main engine system, organize the cabin to make sure radiation shielding bags and water supplies are positioned to act as shelter in case of a solar flare. Put on their survival suits and strap in. They're locking in. So Brandon said it's shaped like a figure eight. I think that's very generous. I think it's shaped like a fish, and I think you should have just said fish. There's a little bit of truth zoning that needs to happen right now, but it's not bad. It is a figure eight. It is elliptical. But I'm gonna still say it looks like a fish. After the burn, the crew will take more than four days to reach the moon. The craft just coast there. A lunar flyby where it will orbit the moon at a maximum altitude of 6,000 miles, a minimum altitude of 60 to 70 miles from the surface of the moon is expected to happen Monday, April 6th. It will probably end up being the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth due to the high altitude at which they'll orbit the moon. And remember, we still don't know if this is like Apple, another elaborate April Fool's joke. We could get to the countdown here and Jared Isaacman could say April Fools, but let's continue.
Yeah, imagine if that giant rocket they cut it. It's just cake. That would be a good one.
NASA is essentially aiming for a Netflix quality live stream on the flyby. And this is what the video creators, the content creators, the live streamers, this is what we care about. It will feature 4K UHD video streams that beam back to Earth with a 3-second latency and some additional latency from encoding and terrestrial distribution using a Frontier laser communication terminal that can transmit data at 260 megs a second. The stream will probably be compressed to 1080p for live video, but it will be saved in 4K. The craft has 28 dedicated cameras on board, externally mounted and astronaut handheld. Externally mounted cameras will be on the tip of each of Orion's four X-shaped solar arrays and they can rotate which will allow them to take selfies of Orion with the Earth or the moon in the background.
We got selfie sticks in space.
Space. Selfie sticks in space. This is sci-fi now. These specific cameras will be heavily modified versions of the GoPro Hero4 Black, which is interesting. The GoPro Hero4 is a pretty old camera, but they probably had to start working on this. You know, it's a 9-year-old project, so they probably locked in the specs a long time ago. And then, of course, they started ruggedizing them. So, that camera on the left,
making the GoPro even more rugged.
Yeah, basically, they actually have to. There's a lot of radiation, there's a lot of pressure and obviously no pressure when you're in a vacuum. The which uses a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor and can shoot 4K at 30 frames a second. NASA contracted Redwire Space. So, it's not all communism over here, Blake Scholl. There's some privatized companies involved in the process. Give us Let's give it up for Redwire Space. They ruggedized the cameras to protect them from the vacuum, extreme temperatures, and intense radiation of deep space. Some of the external cameras won't even generate imagery for the public. The optical navigation camera, for example, is a high-res monochromatic sensor that feeds image data of the moon and earth against background stars to Orion's central computer, which runs machine vision algorithms to calculate the craft's exact position and velocity. They're doing SLAM in space. Inside Orion, astronauts will use tricked out Nikon Z9s, handheld cameras that can shoot massive 8K video at 60fps. NASA actually entered into an agreement with Nikon to develop these for Artemis 2. Astronauts on the ISS use unmodified Nikon Z9s, but because Artemis is going into deep space, the cameras needed to be ruggedized for the conditions out there and power optimized for the huge data transfers the cameras will need to make on the ship, which can be incredibly power intensive. Nikon even wrote a dedicated operating system for the cameras for this. Wow. Finally, NASA partnered with National Geographic to essentially record the footage for a documentary during the mission. The launch is expected no earlier than 6:24 Eastern time, 3:24 Pacific time on NASA's YouTube. They are already broadcasting the live stream. The main program commentary starts at 12:50 ET. So they're going to start talking and that'll be a lot of fun to follow along with. Throughout the course of the mission, NASA will broadcast real-time coverage from Orion's cameras as bandwidth allows. This will be on the agency's YouTube channel. So they're going to just like really embarrass us with this 10-day live stream. We've been talking about we will say, 'Oh, we're doing a giga stream. We're going to interview a bunch of founders from YC.' And it's like a 4 hour, 5 hour, maybe a 6 hour show. They're like 10-day 10-day live stream. Nice try, TBPN. Yeah. It'll be rough for us. Anyway,
I mean it's still almost unfathomable the amount of risk that these astronauts are taking on.
Yeah, our thoughts are with them for sure. For sure.
Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses. And let me also tell you about vibe.co where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. So, the Kit Kat heist. This is the story you all have been waiting for. KitKats, the candy bars were stolen, and in massive quantity. The Wall Street Journal has a story of how the company reacted, how they turned a massive KitKat heist into crisis PR gold. We've seen this before. People were talking about Tucker Carlson having his nicotine pouch shipment stolen and how it sounded like the plot of a new Fast and Furious or Zoomer Fast and Furious movie. Well, something similar happened to Kit Kat and they took advantage of it and made the best out of it. So Kit Kat, of course, is owned by Nestle. But let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal had to say. Just how much are 12 metric tons of stolen Kit Kat bars worth? A lot of promotional gold, it turns out, says the Wall Street Journal. It was the brazen chocolate heist heard around the social media world. Oddly, this is the first time I'm hearing of it. I don't know why. I don't know how I missed this. Had you heard of this before?
Yes, you had. Okay. Yeah, I've seen this.
I literally found out about this in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know why. I only heard about this in the reaction, but anyway, it's an interesting story. So, over the weekend, Nestle confirmed that thieves had swiped 413,000 units of Kit Kats somewhere along their way from a factory in central Italy to Poland. Both chocolate bars and in the
truck carrying them remained missing, though no one was hurt in the theft, it said. With the Swiss company lost in chocolate, though, it gained back in a public relations coup, as did multiple other companies quick to hop on the meme bag bandwagon. We need to pull up some of these memes. I haven't seen any of them. Uh, we've always encouraged people to have a break with Kit Kat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate, the company said in a statement.
I don't get it. You have to... they would have had to steal the chocolate for it.
Two. Yeah, they stole the truck. I mean, it sounds like Fast and Furious. It sounds like they stuck it up and then you said, 'Get out of the truck. You got to call C.'
They took the truck. They took the truck.
Wow. They took everything.
Uh, yes, it really happened. Uh, a spokesperson confirmed that it wasn't an early April 1st joke. Uh, taking their cue from Nestle, other companies soon joined in with some social media spoofing. 'We would like to share our thoughts and condolences with KitKat following their sad news,' the account for Domino's Pizza in the UK posted Monday morning. Then it added, on a completely unrelated note, 'We're pleased to announce that we'll be selling a new Kit Kat pizza.' It's very silly. Charlotte FC, the Major League Soccer club in North Carolina, jumped on the same riff a couple of hours later. 'On an unrelated note, we are happy to share that we will be offering roughly 413,000...' I don't know about you, John, but I love when large corporations can just jump in on the fun.
And it's extremely millennial. This is like, this is my culture is not your costume. If you're not a millennial and you're the one posting this, like, stop. This is only a millennial has the right to post jokingly as a corporate account.
Uh, the discount airline Ryanair, meanwhile, simply posted a cartoon of a photo of one of its planes with a face in the jet's mouth, or five bitten-off KitKat bars. Not long ago, most companies would have said little, leaving it to law enforcement authorities to disclose such a potentially embarrassing revelation. Now, any bad news is good news as long as a corporate brand can turn it into a viral meme.
I wonder, I wonder if this is a global crime ring that also came after Alp the Carlson nicotine patch.
It's possible. Or it's possible that they're going to try to combine them, you know, kind of 1 plus 1 equals 3 type situation where they think that, you know, merging KitKats and nicotine could produce, you know, incremental value.
Who knows? Who knows? Typically, uh, nicotine products are much more economically dense. So, uh, a single can of pouches, uh, might retail for anywhere between like six and $10, whereas a Kit Kat might be the same size but only retail for a dollar. And so, uh, stealing a truck full of, uh, nicotine products is typically like 10 times more economically valuable than Kit Kats. But who knows, maybe the thieves weren't thinking about economic density when they chose to stick up this particular truck. Um, what do you think about this take? It's a masterclass in public relations. Like, I agree with your intuition that like, oh, this is not that funny. Like, this is sort of just like corporate cringe. It's a little rough. Like some of these, like I'm not getting belly laughs out of this, but just in terms of corporate comms strategy, this feels like the best of all possible worlds.
I think it's like a reasonable thing.
Am I entertained? No. Do I think that it was worth doing?
Yes. It's like the least bad.
Does it make me want a Kit Kat? No.
Also, no. Yeah, but like I was not thinking about Kit Kats and now I'm thinking about Kit Kat and now I'm thinking... I just think I've never really had a Kit Kat and thought, 'Oh, that was so good.' And so now I'm just remembering that why I don't care about KitKat.
I think that, you know, the two options were, you know, put out some sort of like serious sad statement about how you got owned basically. I think that could have been funnier.
That might have been funnier. It was just, uh, yeah. Maybe a CEO viral video would have done the trick that kicked off. This reminds me of that McDonald's burger thing that sort of all the talk about all the brands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where does that go nowadays? Other companies want to profit from potential buzz from a rival's misstep, too. After a video of McDonald's CEO taking a polite bite into a burger went viral this month, top executives from Burger King, Wendy's, and Wendy's pounced with similar videos in a light-hearted dig at their competitor. McDonald's said his new big burger, the Big Arch, got a sales boost for all the attention, too. So, it worked.
Wait, they got a sales boost from having the CEO.
They claim that getting dunked on, all press is good press. That's their claim. I don't know. Uh, it doesn't seem crazy. Like, you know, we found out about the Big Arch. We talked about the Big Arch. We sort of processed the value prop at least.
Yeah. I keep catching you leaving early. You're like, 'Oh, I got to get home. I got to pick the kids up from school.' And I just, I drive by the local McDonald's and John is there. He's got in the passenger seat 20 Big Arches and you're just plowing through them.
I don't think so. I don't think so. It's like not for me. I'll stick to the other.
Microsoft is in talks with Chevron.
Engine Number One over 7 billion Texas power plant. That's good news.
An investment fund, uh, with Chevron and Engine One over a long-term deal for a giant power plant in West Texas to provide electricity to a large data center campus. The proposed natural gas fired power plant is projected to cost just 7 billion and initially generate 2500 megawatts of electric gigs. 2.5 gigs. That's a huge campus. Wow.
That's really, really good. Chevron, Microsoft, and Engine 1 have entered into an exclusivity agreement related to a proposed power generation and electricity offtake arrangement. Uh, Chevron and Engine 1 had previously discussed some details of their proposed power plant, um, but not the end user of the electricity. A deal with Microsoft would secure a long-term customer for the plant's output and help finance construction. The project, which could be up and running before 2030, still requires tax and environmental approvals as well as agreement of commercial terms. Um, Microsoft is a longtime backer of chatbot maker OpenAI, is doubling down on constructing data centers. The pause is unpaused. This is fully, we are in unpatcha, is going all in on AI. Uh, access to reliable baseload power is emerging as a key challenge, one that the Chevron and Engine Number One partnership expects to address given its extensive natural gas production in West Texas and contracts for large turbines. What is LNG doing right now? Is natural gas spiking? It spiked in November and December, but is actually fairly low and is down since the start of the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. So, uh, it at least does, uh, you know, Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe was telling us that although the energy markets are somewhat intertwined, uh, oil and natural gas do not move in lockstep because of the production, supply, consumption. Are you a net exporter? Are you a net importer? Uh, so the pain at the pump does not always translate into pain at the data center, which is I guess good for data center operators. Uh, the Permian produces so much natural gas, a byproduct of oil, that it often overwhelms pipelines. As a result, some gas has to be burned off because it can't be transported where it's needed, making the region an ideal location for power plants. I believe these are called peaker plants, where the offtake, uh, you know, normally it's just getting flared off, just going into the atmosphere. You capture that and turn that into energy there, but then you're stuck with electricity maybe at some weird mining plant where there's no houses, so there's no one to power. So, the next thing you do is you build the data center there. And that's sort of the queue lane of why Crusoe started mining Bitcoin at peaker plants, at natural gas plants. Yeah. They, you know, had extra natural gas. They flared it off. Used the very cheap or almost free energy to mine Bitcoin. And of course, quish is a wombo for quirky and niche.
Quirky and niche. When you're trying to explain the lore, you say you're Lorraine-ing something and quish. Lorraine is the quirky niche lore explained.
Uh, Apple just removed Anything.
Under million dollar vibe coding app that lets anyone build iOS apps with prompts from the App Store. Also blocking updates for Vibe Code and Replet.
Uh, the founder tried moving code execution to a web view. Still rejected.
The walled garden versus AI builder war is here.
Uh, so Apple has been saying, according to some reporting in The Information, that they don't have anything against vibe coding specifically. Yeah. But the apps still have to adhere to guidelines.
Yeah. And this particular policy has been in place since like the start of the App Store. I remember Facebook, uh, you know, dealing with this when they launched their initial mobile app, which was, uh, it was an app but it would load a lot of HTML and it was like, and that was sort of slow. They went back and forth, but there was always a question about like how much custom code could Apple, could Meta or Facebook at the time serve within the Facebook app? Like could you have Farmville exist as its own app on the Facebook mobile app platform like it did in the Facebook desktop app? So when you loaded Facebook on desktop, you could load Farmville basically as like an iframe and the Farmville developer, Zynga, could change Farmville, add upgrades, do whatever they needed to, and that would all be vended through Facebook. And of course, your internet browser doesn't care what you're loading, but the App Store is different and has had different terms of service for a very long time. Um, mostly because Apple's one of their primary pitches to customers is that, hey, we review all the code that will run on your phone. And so we don't want that code to change after we review it. And so we have a process for reviewing it. And that reduces the risk of bloatware or crypto mining behind the scenes or spam or, you know, viruses, all sorts of different stuff that is the value prop for why people choose to buy iPhones. And so, uh, Apple has maintained that for a long time. Uh, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now agents.
Specifically mentioned guideline 2.5.2, which is the rule anything apparently violated. Apps should be self-contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area. Nor may they download, install or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test code may in limited circumstances download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.
Uh, Anything launched on iOS in November with no issue and the tool has apparently been used to publish thousands of apps in the App Store. Yeah, you can imagine Apple being like, this app is pushing so many other apps into our review process. We got to make it stop. Uh, the app lets users create and preview vibe code apps on the iPhone and it raised 11 million at a valuation of a hundred million back in September. Um, apparently Apple have been blocking updates to the app since December. So it's been basically a full quarter that it was frozen. Um, but clearly users are excited about the product. So I hope they can work something out quickly. Well, uh, global venture capital dollar volume has incredibly spiked. Look at this chart. Uh, bunch of interesting things about this chart. So,
Market clearing order inbound.
Indeed, it's pretty loud. Uh, so Ryan Hoover, uh, shares the chart from Crunchbase here. Uh, Q1 2026 was absolutely massive with, uh, global venture capital dollar volume spiking from, uh, just over a hundred billion to, uh, almost $300 billion. So a massive, massive growth. A lot of this is OpenAI and Anthropic, but even if you remove those two rounds, it's still up 40% quarter on quarter. What's interesting to me about this is what has been happening for the last 10 quarters before Q1 2026. Like it's felt like a funding boom. It felt like we had the ChatGPT moment at the end of 2022. 2023 was the start of like, okay, let's, you know, lick the wounds from the ZERP era and start ramping up venture capital. We saw new funds raised. We saw more deployment, tons of up rounds. We're always hitting the gong and yet the prior trend line was pretty flat prior to Q1 2026. It feels like venture is still in this like K-shaped dynamic. I don't know.
Yeah, I mean the answer here is that, uh, this is not venture at this point.
Yeah, that's a big factor, right? You have these, the biggest companies in the world investing tens of billions of dollars into single companies. Yeah. And so of course the chart looks insane, uh, because this is the largest, you know, the largest private financing ever.
Yeah. Uh, is Julia Black getting the scoop of the day? She says new funding, new model, new policy push. I think it's a scoop. She says exclusive. Exclusive: OpenAI preps policy push. Uh, she says OpenAI will begin releasing a series of policy proposals next week meant to spark conversation about how to rethink the social contract. It's going to be an interesting year.
Uh, she asked the question: is OpenAI's chief futurist prepping for a major breakthrough or just another hype cycle? Um, and you can go and read this on Vanity Fair. Uh, Vanity Fair, the tech publication.
Yes. I mean, Julia covers tech very well.
There's a lot of good stuff. Uh, Metab over at OpenAI says, 'We are excited to share a new paper solving three further problems due to Airdos. In each case, the solution was found by an internal model at OpenAI. Each proof is short and elegant and the paper is available here.' So, there's a breakthrough for you.
Yeah. Prince asked, 'Would you be able to comment on the delta between the unreleased model and GPT-4 5.4 Pro?' If I'm reading correctly, you tried fewer than 10 identical prompts for each of the three problems with GPT 5.4 Pro and that GPT 5.4 Pro got the first problem correct twice. The result which you link in the paper plus one other similar solution, the third problem corrected twice. Interesting. Um, I saw another interesting paper from Google that apparently just repeating the prompt twice improves LLM performance. Did you see this, Tyler? So if you say like, if you say like, 'You are Shakespeare, write me a poem,' because of the way the tokenization works, like when it first processes that 'you,' it doesn't know, uh, it like, it starts thinking and it doesn't necessarily know what's coming, right? It doesn't know that Shakespeare's coming. So if you just repeat the prompt, the exact prompt twice, it improves performance on a bunch of different benchmarks. And it's this funny paper because it's like something that anyone could just do at home. It's like the classic like prompt engineering thing.
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you would think that wouldn't work, right? Because like still like, you know, you attend to all the previous tokens at the same time, right? This is the whole...
You would think so. I don't know.
Yeah, but I remember like early on there was all these things where yeah, you would prompt like 'You are Shakespeare, write me a poem' and it'd be a way better poem than if you said 'write me a poem,' right? Or like pretend that you're Terence Tao when you solve this math problem, way better, right? Yeah. Whatever in the training data, you know, whatever, it just knows to go down that path as opposed to like the other paths of like, oh, it doesn't pull any April Fool's jokes because it's not being an April Fool's jokester. Yeah, there's these, uh, you know, basins or whatever if you can like the personality basin where you can get the model to act like a certain thing and it does much better on that.
At the same time, I think this paper was specifically on like vanilla LLMs and I think reasoning like solves that even more because you're basically repeating the prompt a bunch through, you know, unpacking it, compressing it, doing whatever you need to do to actually set the LLM up for success in answering the question. Um, and so, uh, it might, uh, sort of hydrate through that process into something that yields those results. But, uh, interesting how simple some of these, uh, some of these hacks are.
Uh, well, in biggest number news, yes, yesterday, OpenAI announced the closing of their latest funding round. Yeah. Hit the gong.
It would be an honor, John.
Probably the largest gong hit.
Oh, two upsized round. Remember they did upsize a ton.
Yeah. So Sam pulled out some of the highlights. Uh, post-money valuation of 852 billion. Nvidia remains the foundation of our infrastructure, our training fleet, and the majority of our inference stack to continue to run on Nvidia GPUs. We are now generating 2 billion in revenue per month, raising over three billion from individual investors. ChatGPT is the overwhelming leader in consumer AI with more than 900 million weekly actives and over 50 million subscribers. Our ads pilot reached more than 100 million in ARR in under 6 weeks. Momentum is just as strong on the enterprise side, which now makes up more than 40% of our revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026. Codex now serves over two million weekly active users, up 5x in the past three months with usage growing more than 70% month over month. And they talk about, uh, the vision for a unified AI super app, one app that lets you, uh, basically access every product that OpenAI is making. So, um, ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and other agentic capabilities. Yeah, I'm very excited about, uh, linking Codex to ChatGPT in some way because right now there's really, I mean, you can sort of set reminders, but there's very little that you can do if your question requires building some sort of like small system. Like the textbook case that I'm thinking of is like, um, if I want a deep research report of, you know, how the Artemis mission did, uh, when the astronauts land. I'm probably going to see that on social media, but, uh, what about just automatically letting me know, uh, one year from today? Remind me that the Artemis 3 mission is coming. Give me, you know, an estimated, are we on track? Pull all the news that I probably won't be following that closely because I'm not like a daily consumer of space news, but I might be interested later. There's all these different things where, um, where you could track things, but you need to build something that just sort of runs.
Entering a new era. Our astronauts are now Twitch live streamers.
YouTube. But it's fun. It'd be fun to, uh, to get over on Twitch.
Um, well, there's some other news. Apparently, new iPhones are being packed into the suits of the Artemis 2 crew. Uh, Owen Spark says, 'There's something very familiar about the iPhone look that will make the moon feel accessible. We are going to see the lunar surface through the same lens we used to capture our own lives every day.'
Oh, that's cool. Take some phones. Uh, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal about smartphone proves too big for most. We were debating this earlier and I'd like everyone else to chime in, too. The original iPhone launched in 2007 had what was considered the largest smartphone screen at the time, 3.5 in. The biggest iPhone now is more than double the size of the original at 6.9 in. Um, or is, yeah, is now more than double. Wow. Um, in 2019, the introduction of Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold introduced foldable devices to the masses, opening up like a wallet, that has a 7.3 in display. And Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold in 2026 when fully opened unfurls to roughly the size of an iPad. And the journalist in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, can a smartphone be too big? Tyler, what do you think?
Yeah, I'm in favor of a, you know, smaller phone. Okay. I have, this is a 16 Pro Max, but it's not Max. It's the normal one. So,
And why don't you want a bigger phone? Why? What if you're on a plane and you want to pull it out and like watch a movie or something? Do you just...
Yeah, but I feel like if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop. It works great.
But you don't always have the laptop with you, or I mean you always have it in your backpack. Like what if you're like on a train or something? You've never thought about getting an iPad with a cellular connection and then maybe like a strap on the back that you could hold and be able to hold it up to your head and use it like a normal phone?
I was seriously considering the iPad mini for a while just as an everyday carry phone. You could do it. I don't know if you can get a phone number on it.
Like is that even going to fit in my pocket?
It would fit in my pocket. I tested.
Does it fit in your suit pocket though?
It would definitely fit in the suit pocket. You should get all of your suits custom tailored so that you can fit an iPad mini in here. I don't know. Um,
They what? They confirmed.
Zyt says, uh, is on Twitch.
They're re-streaming. Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream NASA, go to restream.com. Hopefully they're on Restream.
Uh, is joking around. He says Elon filed for an IPO on April Fool's Day. Uh, and apparently they filed last night. So off by just a little bit according to low, but, uh, but yeah, on the news, June, on pace for the kind of June listing.
June listing. Okay. Um, yeah, we'll have to track that. That will be fun. I think a lot of people are really excited. Uh, should be good. Uh, Austin Larson says, 'Our team at Google is releasing more details on the recent npm Axios supply chain attack. Notably, we now attribute this activity to UNC 1069, a financially motivated North Korean Nexus threat actor active since at least 2018. We made this attribution based on their use of Wave Shaper V2, an updated backdoor previously used by the group alongside clear overlaps in C2 infrastructure.' Check the blog. And they wrote more about it on cloud.google.com.
Um, and yeah, we also have an expert from CrowdStrike coming on the show tomorrow. Adam Meyers, uh, is going to come on and help us break it down, which we're very excited for. Uh, in a note to staff this morning shared with Max Tani over at Semaphore, Business Insider said it is giving out a new quarterly AI award for best use of AI at the company. The winner gets $400. Uh, as soon as we talked about this this morning, Tyler asked us to create a similar award, uh, seemingly signaling that he's quite confident.
You think you can win this one, Tyler? Could take it home. Everyone feeling pretty confident right now. We'll see, you know, once the incentive goes out, right? You know, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. We're going to have a lot of people in office gun for this. But I still do want to, uh, run that experiment of like the race to see the true leaderboard of how long it takes everyone at our company to generate 10,000 lines of code as fast as possible because there's a bunch of shortcuts that you could take. Tyler thinks he can do it in like 5 seconds, but for other people, it's going to be a lot of copy paste. It's going to be figuring out how to open a text editor. Like everyone's on a different learning curve here, so I think the results would be interesting.
Yeah. So, I'm feeling pretty good about my odds there.
Okay. Yeah. Well, uh, head over to business.
Anyways, I think this is smart. I would say that maybe add a zero to the number, but, uh, given that BI is, you know, a massive company, right?
Mathias Döpfner knows that money doesn't grow on trees. Okay. He's running that thing as a real business. He's a businessman.
Uh, Rebecca Torrance is scooping.
Scoop is Valor Atomics, a nuclear energy startup backed by Palmer Luckey. PL, backed by PL himself, has raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation. There's no investor named here, so that's still unclear, but, uh, Isaiah and the Valor team have been on a tear. They're talking about building clusters of small nuclear reactors to power data centers and they got some access to some government programs and government resources and, uh, it seems like there's been a bunch of blockers that have been knocked down one after another. Uh, he's been on absolute tear. We'd love to have him back on the show, uh, to chat more. Uh, Augustus Dico is having fun with it. 'Ooh, I'm going to invest in another energy company besides Oklo for ba ba ba reasons.' Uh, that's what you sound like. Do you see how far they've come? Do you understand that they will make the world's energy? I love that he's pumping up his buddy. Uh, always riding with the crew. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
In other nuclear news, apparently Utah is going nuclear to keep ski runs cold for the 2034 winter game.
How does that work? Explain.
State says neutron... This is in townlift.com.
State says neutron-based atmospheric technology could lower ski run surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees and offset drought impacts through enhanced snowpack retention. Interesting because when you've given your case for Alaska historically, you've talked about how with abundant nuclear energy, you could take an otherwise cold area and just warm it up, but they're thinking about cooling things down. State officials confirmed Wednesday that Utah has entered a $1.2 billion agreement with a Vienna-based energy consortium to install three micronuclear reactors along the Wasatch mountain range as part of an unprecedented effort to stabilize snow conditions on Utah ski slopes ahead of the 2034 Olympic games. The project, uh, designated the Wasatch Atmospheric Retention and Mitigation Initiative, or WARMY, could make Utah the first state in the nation to deploy nuclear-powered atmospheric cooling infrastructure at altitude. 'Utah is not going to sit back and let the climate dictate the terms of our 2034 legacy,' said a spokesperson for the governor's office of economic opportunity who confirmed the project has received preliminary approval under SB14, the legislature's infrastructure acceleration statute, which removes local government approval authority over projects designated as state economic priorities. Uh, so apparently Juniper Peak selected as the first nuclear test site. I'm sure everyone at Juniper Peak will be thrilled about being able to ski around a nuclear test site. Uh, the three micro reactors are proposed at elevations above 9,000 ft in what project documents describe as thermally neutral subterranean containment pods.
I like the sound of that.
Designed to blend with the natural terrain. So anyways,
Well, we have some other news. Uh, Will Depew, I think he won April Fools with the joke that he had. He says he is joining DeepSeek. He says, 'Like many of my friends, I set a goal at the start of 2026 to become more Chinese this year and I plan to fully follow through on it. After nearly three years at OpenAI, I have decided to leave and pursue new opportunities. After much deliberation, I'm thrilled to announce that effective today, I'll be relocating to Hangzhou to join DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. LTD, dedicated to building Chinese-style AGI. I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to become a billionaire in RMB.' Uh, he had a lot of fun with it. We had fun putting up a card and, uh, we're big fans of Will Depew. Well, without further ado, we have Eddie Cue in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in from the TV. Eddie, how are you doing?
What's going on? It's great finally to be here. I've, uh, wanted to be on this show and I got to tell you, I've gotten more text messages from friends about being on here, including my kids, than, uh, probably anything I've ever done. So, it's great, uh, for you to have me.
That's amazing. And what a special moment. What an amazing time. Uh, I would love to just start with some reflection. Uh, I want to hear, uh, particularly about your first decade at Apple. What was that like? Um, leading, you know, what led you to the company? What were some of the first projects you worked on? Uh, sort of take us through some of the early history.
Yeah, I was lucky. I was a junior in high school when the Apple II was out and I wanted to be an architect and when I discovered a computer I realized I wanted to be a programmer and engineer. And, uh, I said there's two things I want to do. I want to work at Apple and I want to meet Steve Jobs.
Uh, and dreams come true. Here I am 38 years later at Apple. I came in as a programmer and, uh, was working on HyperCard and, uh, sort of the precursor to blue links with lines underneath, uh, linking. And I've done so many things here at Apple. I've had an amazing team and continue to have the... I'm working with the best people in the world at what they do.
Yeah. What was the lore of Steve Jobs like when you first sort of heard about him? Because you know my generation knows like the iPhone keynote. There's videos online. There's interviews. There's whole books. There's multiple books written. But what was your experience learning? What drew you to Steve early on in your career?
I just think it's the innovation of creating these products, uh, that let people do amazing things. Uh, and I felt that way when I was using the product. The attention to detail of those products. There was a connection that you could just feel.
Um, and so it was more than just what you could see and, uh, and then it let me do things that I couldn't imagine doing before. And I think that's something that we've continued over our 50 years.
Yeah. Can you talk about the launch of the original Apple online store? I feel like a lot of people assume that this always existed. No, it was a Herculean effort, I'm sure. Uh, what was the inspiration? What was the backdrop there? What was the mood like as you entered into that market?
Yeah, it was a crazy time because people forget, but in those times we sold all of our computers through channels like CompUSA and local computer stores. And the idea of building an online store and selling direct, uh, there were a lot of people inside of Apple even that felt like if we did that, the channel's going to walk on us and they're going to stop selling. And, uh, Steve and we wanted to move forward and be able to do custom configurations so people could order exactly what they wanted. Yeah. And, uh, we thought it was something that customers, you know, it was just beginning, but it was something that customers really wanted. And, uh, Steve and I and a small team worked on it and built it and launched it at the same time that one of our, you know, best products we've ever done was the iMac, uh, the Bondi blue one with the clear. And so we launched the store and the Bondi blue iMac at the same time. And I remember at the end of the day we were wondering, you know, Steve, I came by his office and he's like, 'Well, how did we do on the first day?' And we had sold a million dollars worth of iMacs. And we were high-fiving each other and going, 'This is amazing.'
How did you drive people to the... Did you just have apple.com? Were people already typing in apple.com? Like, how do you tell people that a website is launching before you can go viral on social media or do live interviews on, you know, how do you promote this?
Yeah, we were lucky and then we had apple.com already and so some people were coming from that and, uh, and so that part was a little bit easier. And in those days you relied a lot on press interviews and print.
And so we did a lot of... Okay. You know, you'd want to be on the cover of, uh, you know, a magazine and the front page of the newspaper and so we had all of that, uh, pretty well. And I think our design when we did this, it was called good, better. You could buy different configs and change them. But our design for shopping for a computer in a Mac at that time, um, was something no one had ever seen. It had all of the things that we cared about. The simplicity, uh, really easy to check out, easy to buy, all of the specs and the questions you would have, things that were difficult when you went to other sites. Uh, I thought we did a great job and it really resonated with customers.
Yeah. Can you help me understand like the services division of Apple is massive. It's a huge growth engine. There's so many interesting, uh, pieces of that. I want to go into a lot of those, but when was the first time in your career that you realized that there was something that you could sell or actually, uh, turn into a business line that was not a physical product and would live in this services category? When did services even become like a division or concept or an opportunity at Apple?
Yeah, I think we started as a hobby. Uh, you know, there wasn't a lot there. It was very early days of the internet and doing things like email and, uh, things like storage and the cloud, but it was very, very early. The thing that was a big change, uh, for us was really music. Yeah. And it was iPod plus iTunes.
And, uh, that was something that truly revolutionized music. Uh, and it really gave us a whole different perspective of what services can do. When you take the hardware product in a sense, the operating system and the software and the services and you tie them together, which is something I think we do better than anyone. Yeah. Uh, it really showcased when we did iPod plus iTunes. And so all of a sudden, uh, we did that. Not only did we do it for the Mac, but we also did it for Windows.
And so it opened Apple to a whole new ecosystem of customers that had never used our products before, but were using iTunes and iPod for the first time.
That was my first Apple experience was iTunes and iPod on a Windows PC. Yeah. Uh, and now I have 25 Apple. My first is I was so loyal to Apple products that I refused to get a PC for gaming. And so I worked, I probably reffed like 300 soccer games, like some absurd amount to get the maxed out MacBook Pro at the time because I was just so loyal that I was like, I'm not... I've got to, if I'm going to play video games, I'm going to do it on Mac.
Yeah, it's great. You know, when we launched iTunes on Windows, I remember we did a poster and Steve called it on the presentation. It was like hell froze over.
Yeah. Uh, what was actually getting iTunes off the ground like? And how was it different than the other just motions that Apple had developed? Because it's not only a software product, but it's deeply linked to rights holders and agencies and musicians and you have to get so many different groups. It feels much more permissioned than just building a computer and selling it. Of course, you need manufacturers and you need a lot of people on board to build a computer, but it's a very different go-to-market or building motion. Like, how was that different?
Yeah, it was painful because, um, I think there were three pieces. You had us, you had the label, and you had the artist.
Um, we were really good with artists. So, which is something we've always been about, the creators. And I think when you look at all the things that we've done, um, the two primary people that we focus on and think about are the customers that are using it and the creators that are creating all these incredible products. So we had a good relationship with musicians at the time, but we really didn't have any relationship with labels. And ultimately they did control the environment. And, uh, at the time they had a different perspective. You know, it was really the beginning of Napster and piracy. And instead of thinking about, you know, how to move forward into a future, their view was to lock things down, um, and really stop it. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 99 cents and they kind of told us to go pound sand. Uh, they weren't really interested in us at all. And their idea was they were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services and we told them like, what you guys are doing is not going to work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. Sometimes you could price a hit higher than like some random song on an album.
Yeah. I mean, it was all over the map.
And part of the pushback against like just 99 cents a song, I mean, uh, is like, you know, typical Apple style, just like let's just make it simple, easy to understand. Uh, but was their pushback like kind of concerned that people would, you know, hey, we're used to getting people to just buy an entire album and maybe what's going to happen if people just buy, you know, a song here or there like...
Yeah. The problem was whether you sold it at $1.29 or 79 cents, that wasn't going to change that. The key to... there were two keys to 99 cents that, um, we really believed in and people didn't see. There were two primary things. Number one is when the price is 99 cents and it's consistent, you never have to think about price.
And so you would preview a song, decide whether you like it or not, and if you did, you bought. And so there was never any billing transaction that you had to think about because you knew it was 99 cents. It's not a lot of money at the time. And it was really easy to do. The second thing was that people could never do that because at 99 cents, if you're charging a credit card, you would lose money because credit cards have a fixed fee and they have a percentage that you pay. Well, the fixed fee and the percentage on a 99 cent song was like a quarter.
And the vast majority of the money went to the labels. So, every time we'd sell a song, we would lose money. Um, and so nobody wanted to do that and so no other service did that. What we decided to do is as we were building this, and I remember it was a huge discussion because we would lose a ton of money obviously if you're losing on every song. We said, 'Look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song. You're going to buy a lot of songs when you go on there.'
Uh, and when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time? So, let's keep the transaction open for a period of time. Let's call it 24 hours or eight hours. And everything you buy we're just going to give you and then we're going to charge you at the end. And so therefore that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just 99 cents. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars and the fixed fee didn't matter.
Interesting. Uh, how important was it to position iTunes as sort of a step up from the status quo, uh, from like the Napster era and a positive? Because I feel like anytime the economics of an industry change there's natural uncertainty from artists and iTunes did represent a change in the economic structure but it was such a great countervailing force. How, what were discussions like at that time about positioning the economic opportunity that, uh, that artists would have in the new regime?
Yeah. I think we wanted... during that time the music business was cratering.
From an economic point of view.
Um, and our feeling has always been, uh, the vast majority of people want to do the right thing.
And they want to pay artists.
Um, and so but what they don't want is they don't want to be forced into something that doesn't make any sense or isn't really friendly or isn't the right way to do it. And so we were... that's part of the 99 cents. Uh, it was part of like you can in those times you...
We were burning a lot of CDs. They had limitations on the number of burns. We didn't want any limitations because that's not something a customer would understand. And so our feeling around this was, if you let us do this, you're going to grow again as opposed to cratering. And I remember Steve asked me once, this was before we had launched, he says, 'Well, you know, what is success around this?' And I said, 'You know, honestly, I don't know. I'll go ask.' And so I went into Universal Music and I asked them, 'You know, what's success for you guys in this business?' And they said, 'Well, if you could sell, you know, a million songs in a month, anytime in the first six months, that's success for us.' So I came back, I said, 'Okay, that's the goal.' Then we sold a million songs in the first six days.
That's amazing. I love it. That's great.
Yeah, so it's like that's what we, you know, obviously it surpassed even our expectation, but it was an example of if you give people the right way, people are willing to pay, but it has to be done well.
So talk about the shift to subscription because it feels like a much more natural experience for all the Apple services that I subscribe to. What was the thinking? How long, like what were the hurdles along the way to get to the current situation with Apple TV Plus where you can, you know, consume everything? Was this just a market dynamic? Was it something that you saw in the future early on and it was more of how do we get there smoothly? What was the process?
Yeah, the key to this is it's hard to remember this now because we're so used to it, but it's having internet connectivity anywhere you are, and all the time. And pretty much almost, it's almost impossible now to be anywhere and not have, you know, actually fast internet. And so that allowed a whole different thing because before that, you either didn't have it or you were paying by usage. In a sense, you wanted to limit the amount that you actually used. And so things like downloading and keeping things on device all the time was really important. When you have unlimited, in a sense, internet access or network access, then you can provide all these capabilities and not have to worry about whether you have it downloaded or not. It's now invisible to you. You don't even think about it.
Yeah, most of the time we put things on device just to cache them or whatever, but you don't need to worry about whether it's on your device or not.
Yeah. We have a question from the chat. It's a bit random, but I'd love to know your favorite keynote moment throughout your career.
I'll say, look, there are two. There's a personal one, which was the first one when we launched the iMac and the Apple Store, because that was the beginning of turning Apple around and it was a big moment for Apple. It's hard for people to imagine this, but Apple was going bankrupt at that time, and Steve came back, and that moment was the beginning of a change where at least we knew now that we weren't going to go bankrupt. And so it really gave us life, and so it was an incredible moment. And I remember going backstage with Steve after it was done and hugging, actually, because it had gone so well and we knew that was a big step. The second one, and honestly now in hindsight I completely underestimated it, was the iPhone launch. It's the only time I made my wife and my two kids come to the event. They were eight years old, and I was like, 'This is a historic moment,' because I had had the ability of using the iPhone for a few months before we launched and played with it, and it was just amazing. It's the coolest, best thing I had ever seen in the world. And so I thought, 'Ah, this is going to be amazing.' Now I completely underestimated it because now you look at it and go, 'I don't even know what the world is like. What would you do without an iPhone?'
What lessons from Steve or kind of memories do you find yourself coming back to the most in the present day of Apple?
Well, I think something that, you know, people take for granted, but nobody worked harder than Steve. You know, and these things don't come easy. And he was the hardest worker of anybody I know.
How did that manifest? Like long hours, just deep focus?
It's focus and long hours. What it was, was there were only two things that mattered to Steve. And I think when people ask me what's the difference between Tim and Steve, the reality is that's not the right question. And the question is, what's the same between Tim and Steve? And, you know, their work ethic, they worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things: their Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers. Believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going, but it was never the primary thing. And so those three things are something that I still, you know, take to heart, and I feel that's what I try to do and how I feel.
Can we talk about F1? I love that there's a movie and also you can watch the actual races. This feels deliberate. What's the strategy? It seems to make a ton of sense, but how long has this been cooking? What's the thought process? I remember it must have been last year. John had talked about this on the show, wanting this to happen, so to see it come together the way it has been amazing. And it seems like soccer, football sort of faced a similar strategy, but I'm very interested in how you see different media properties connect together.
Yeah, look, the F1 thing is personal. I've been an F1 fan for a long time. You know, I learned about F1 by going to the library and reading magazines because, believe it or not, F1 just wasn't televised at all in the United States. So you didn't know anything about it. So I knew a lot about it. Stefano, who's the CEO of Formula 1, is somebody who was at Ferrari and then later on at Lamborghini, and I've known him. So when he took on Formula 1, I remember meeting with him in London and saying, 'You know, we're not quite there yet, but someday I hope we can be working together on F1.' And so I always envisioned that there were things that we could do that no one else could do. The movie came about separately, not kind of related, but this idea of doing a movie and Jerry and Joe Kosinski, it was really Joe's idea. And I just love the idea because there hasn't been a huge racing movie. Most racing movies have not done that well. And I thought there was a real opportunity with F1 to tell an incredible story. And Brad Pitt and the cars and the excitement, and that we would for the first time have enough technology to show what it was actually like to be in an F1 car, because when you watch on TV it kind of looks like they're on a Sunday drive. It looks pretty easy. You don't get the G-forces. And so we had these ideas of taking the iPhone camera and putting them all over the cars and different ideas that we thought would give that experience. Now the movie took a lot longer because we had to go through COVID, strikes, all kinds of things. But it turned out spectacular. And when we would show the movie, one of the questions we would ask to people in the US is, 'How many of you have seen an F1 race?' And the truth is very few hands were ever raised. And then after the movie, you asked them, 'How many people would want to see an F1 race?' And, you know, every hand went up. And so we thought, 'Wow, if we did this together now and these ideas of how we can really innovate on the whole experience of what it's like to watch an F1 race, we really can make a difference here.' And it's been great. We've done three races so far. The ratings are way above what they've ever been in the US. And so we're just getting started, but things like multiview, 30% of the people watching F1 races are watching with multiview, so they can get different cameras, see their favorite team. So it's definitely changed a lot of how people are experiencing it.
That's amazing. Apple racing sim, you'll have two buyers.
Yes. You know, we just did Vision Pro with Sim Racing, so you could do that.
So there you go. We got it for you.
Yeah. The racing and in the automotive world has a man on the inside. So we're...
I'm the strongest supporter of the Vision Pro. I watched another movie in it this weekend.
Jordi, if I call John at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, he's always...
I love the product. I'm a huge fan. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. It's truly been an honor.
It's truly been an honor. Congratulations on 50 years. What an amazing accomplishment. We'll talk to you soon.
I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And let me also tell you about Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And without further ado, we have Aaron Terzus from Gusto coming into the Riverside waiting room now, the TV panel room. Aaron, how are you doing?
Thanks so much for taking the time. We were very excited to dig into some of your research and reporting. But since it is the first time on the show, would you mind introducing yourself, some of your background, and what you do for a living?
Sure. No, I'm an economist by training, currently working with Gusto. Previously been through the tech industry at Glassdoor, at Zillow, at a company called Convoy. Started my career at the Treasury Department.
Okay. So maybe start with like what is unique about being an in-house economist? What data do you have access to that others might not? What data is anonymized? Like, how do you do your job? And what are you actually looking for? What are the questions that you're trying to answer even?
So most economists play with this public data that the government produces. That's great. It's been around a long time. The really exciting thing about being an in-house economist is that there's all of this data behind this private wall gate. We get to understand what is happening in the economy. You know, sometimes we pick up on things before the official data say, sometimes we pick up on trends that the official data aren't necessarily showing, kind of what's happening beneath the surface. So it is this really exciting place to be as an economist.
Okay, let's go into some of the findings, but first I want to know about like data skew and how you account for the type of customers. You know, Gusto is a sponsor. We talk about small and medium-sized businesses. So I imagine that you have some sort of calibration step where you're adjusting your internal data to some sort of benchmark to make sure that you're not biased towards your particular sample set. Right?
Absolutely. Such an important point. Gusto is like a small business payroll platform. We do reweight our data so that it reflects the broader labor market, the broader small and medium-sized business ecosystem.
And how do you do that? Do you have ground truth data that's public that you can reference against?
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the government produces this census of all small businesses based on industry and size, and so we take that distribution and match our internal data to that distribution.
That makes sense. And then so I mean the big question is the small business jobs report. What is the health of the American economy? What is the health of the small business community? What questions were you trying to answer and where did you wind up?
I mean every month we get this headline jobs report from the BLS. We're watching for this Friday. I think what we're trying to do with the small business jobs report is get a much firmer pulse on what's happening with small businesses in particular. So businesses with less than 50 employees. You know, that is the majority of businesses in the American economy, but just a small minority of total employment. So it often gets buried in the headline jobs numbers. And we know they're a driver of job growth. They're a driver of innovation. They're a driver of kind of the bread-and-butter work that gets done in our economy.
Yeah. And where does net hiring stand? Give me some of the headline numbers. What are expectations? What should we by default assume is happening? I mean there's a lot of doom and gloom in the economy honestly broadly because of geopolitical conflicts and nervousness around AI, but what are you actually seeing?
You're right, there is a lot of doom and gloom. Our headline jobs number for March showed that small businesses created about 120,000 new jobs in March. That's an exceptionally strong number. That's one of the strongest numbers we've seen since 2022. And you know, I think it's important to note that's not an outlier. Other kind of payroll providers are showing similar strength. So I think this narrative that we all have in our minds of the great freeze, kind of business is paralyzed by uncertainty, that's in some ways last year. I think 2026 is shaping up to be the great unstucking after being stuck last year.
That's amazing news. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, I can throw out a bunch of random theories off the top of my head, but you know, like this is paired with just yesterday Oracle slashing staffing over cost. Like there are big headline attention-grabbing job cuts that are happening at name-brand companies, and that news will fly very far because everyone knows Meta, everyone knows Oracle, and maybe they don't know that the small business just down the street actually increased headcount by 20%, but they only added two people, so it's not going to be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. But is there some sort of, you know, how crazy am I to think about, you know, the large companies maybe being overstaffed and maybe changing their business model so they need to re-calibrate, whereas small businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence, maybe trying to do more, trying to expand, trying to compete, and so they're actually expanding their labor force even while the bigger companies have like much larger questions to ask about, you know, what happens over 20 years?
Yeah. Big business scraps big headlines, and you think about the shocks that our economy has experienced over the past year, the past few years. Big businesses are kind of, I say like a big freighter. They, you know, they're a little bit more resilient to the tsunami, but they have a really wide turning radius. Small businesses are like a schooner kind of, they're, you know, they have to adapt and pivot really quickly in response to these shocks. And I think we saw that, you know, big businesses are just catching up, whereas, you know, all these shocks we experienced last year, small businesses are already ahead of the curve and are thinking about what comes next.
Yeah. If you were tasked with doing job reports for the federal government, how would you approach it given your exposure to having access to data sources like Gusto? You know, everyone by now is kind of used to seeing a jobs report from the government and then, you know, a few months later or six months later you get these massive revisions and it's sort of confusing and it feels like we have all this real-time data and like the data of people like adding an employee to Gusto and starting to pay them is like much, much more obviously accurate real-time, and so it feels like the process could evolve, but what's your view?
Yeah, I was a government economist. I have enormous respect for government economists. They have a big job. Their job is to look at the 40-year trend in the economy. These are tools that were designed, you know, over multiple decades. The reality is kind of there is so much data exhaust, real-world exhaust right now in our economy that we can capture, and companies like Gusto are, you know, we don't have data from 1963, but we have kind of much better data from what's happening right now. And so I think, you know, the two go hand in hand, they complement each other. One's going to give us that longer, more stable view of the economy, the other's going to give us these deep windows into what's happening in different parts in real time.
Do you have any insight into subcategories of jobs, how job titles are changing? I keep using this example that we're a small business. We have 10 people on staff and we have Tyler, our, you know, intern who's basically a full-time software developer as well as a co-host of the show in a hybrid role. We have other folks who have vibe coded whole systems, but in a previous business, if I was building a media company, I would have had to think extremely hard about developing like a software engineering organization and I would have assumed that would have been extremely costly, a very big build versus buy decision. Instead it was just, oh, we hired Tyler because we liked him. He can do a bunch of different things and he starts vibe coding and all of a sudden we have six systems and they all work really well. And so we've become like this hybrid tech media company. We're developing video games now, too. That happened randomly. But we're not a game studio. And so I'm wondering about just are you seeing any data that suggests that more people are picking up hybrid technology jobs or software engineering jobs or even if the titles are changing yet? Anything you're seeing on that side?
Yeah, everything's in flux right now. I think all the traditional lines that used to be bright lines of businesses are being blurred. People are taking multiple hats. You know, founders are doing more things. You raised a really good point. You know, you think about how does a big business hire? You know, you ask for a head, the head goes to your manager, the manager sends it to finance, the finance sends it to recruiting, etc., etc., etc. And that's, you know, a week here, a week there, you're talking about months. When the small business hires, when you hire, they decide, oh, we need someone yesterday. Let's hire them on next week or the week after.
Yeah. What economic data points are you tracking that are potentially upstream of small business hiring in particular? Because, you know, we all know, you know, gas prices surge, consumers feel pain at the pump, they cut back on travel, the economy potentially decelerates. There's these like logical chains and then, you know, in the big companies it might be like interest rates or something, geopolitical risk or tariffs or there's all sorts of things that could drive, you know, hiring at the large scale. What are the biggest needle movers that you would watch that might lead to some expectations about what might happen over the next couple months in the small and medium-sized business market?
Yeah, I mean obviously you look at things like kind of hiring and job openings, that's plans that are already in place, but almost more important than that I think is sentiment, you know, expectations particularly among decision makers who have the power to shape the future. So, you know, things like kind of CFO expectations, CEO expectations, that's how business leaders are thinking about the future. And, you know, future is partly prediction, future is partly creation.
Yeah. How good are those surveys? I feel like I've been a hiring manager for maybe like 15 years now. I don't know that I've ever answered a survey. Maybe I just did it and I forgot about it. But is it broad-based? Are you confident that enough CFOs are actually picking up the phone or answering the survey? Because you could imagine that some of the most high-performing managers are too busy hiring people to answer questions about whether or not they're going to hire people.
Totally. And this goes back to the conversation we were having about the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources. When the government goes out and surveys people, there's a lag in response, bias in who responds. When we're looking at payroll data, that's not kind of responding or not. I see what you're doing. And so in some ways, you know, that just gives, particularly for smaller businesses where people are busy, they're not picking up the phone, they don't have time to twiddle their thumbs, kind of responding to a government survey. That's capturing a real, real, real phenomenon.
Yeah. How are you thinking about feeding that into Gusto's actual product offering? Because I could imagine if I'm in there hiring someone and I sort of get like the survey after I hired one person, hey, planning to hire more people next quarter, and it's just a, you know, like leave a five-star review type thing on an e-commerce website. That would probably have a very high, you know, survey completion rate. Are you looking at doing more to get like qualitative or quantitative data that's more optional from the user base?
That's a really cool idea. I certainly have not thought about that. You got to pitch it. Surveying people in the platform, that's something we haven't really done a lot of, but cool idea.
I would love that because even just more qualitative, just, you know, with LLMs there's so much that you can do to compress down qualitative data and whatnot. Like there's so many interesting things you could do. How is AI changing your approach to work?
It's a great question. Yeah, I obviously kind of, it's completely transformative. It's transforming the way certainly I work as an economist. I think it's transforming how everyone works. It's transforming how businesses start and hire. I think there's just a growing body of evidence that AI is making it a lot easier to start a business, to incorporate, to do all of that front-leg work. And on top of that, it is changing kind of the skill profile that you need when you hire. You need more of these people who manage processes, particularly at the start.
Yeah. And then day-to-day, I would randomly predict like IPython notebooks a few years ago. Is it all like command line prompts today? How is that changing for you?
Yeah, I mean kind of I still work a lot in Python. But, you know, I'm doing more things at once and I think that's true for most economists, kind of anyone who's, you know, kind of in some ways it's lowered the barrier to getting that data and that's great because that accelerates decision-making, that helps these businesses adapt in real time and pivot to a rapidly changing world.
Yeah, it's very cool. What a fun position to be in. Congratulations on the success and thank you. I'm sort of laughing in my head about imagining you if you had like a secret LLM subscription back when you were working as an economist for the federal government. They're like, 'How does Aaron do what he does?' Just sitting there.
Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.
Let me tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
