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Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026. We are live from TVPN Ultradome Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's a white suit day. The market's out for the rally. Don't check what the market did yesterday. Check what it's doing. You never doubt it, did you? Doubt it, you bought. When the fear and greed index was on full and nowhere post scared for its life. It happens. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.
We have a great show for you today, folks. We have Doug O'Laughlin from SemiAnalysis joining to break down Claude Code. TJ Parker's hopping on. We got Max Levchin, part of the PayPal mafia, co-founder and CEO of Affirm, and we're going into Databricks territory. It's going to be fantastic. We also might have a surprise guest for you, folks. Anyway, Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are used by agents. Get on there, folks.
Big week. Bottlenecks. Bottlenecks. I mean, we're going to talk about the Claude Code moment, the Claude Code psychosis, sort of the software singularity. Doug O'Laughlin's coming on to talk about his experience, why he thinks this is a key inflection point. Tyler Cowen was talking about this with the 5.3 launch, Opus 4.6 launch. Like, there's clearly signs of a takeoff. It feels like a slow takeoff, but there's a whole bunch of sort of recursive compounding elements that are starting to form.
A recursive, you say? Yeah, recursive. Literally recursive. Like the models feed back into themselves, give them more tasks. We saw this with Gas Town. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on at orchestration that's interesting. And so I wanted to sort of reflect on if there's going to be a break, if there's going to be a damper on the party, if someone's going to pull away the punch bowl, who's it going to be, the semiconductor industry or the energy industry? At the start of this year, I said it was going to be the year of energy. I still think it's important to think about energy because that will be a bottleneck, but this year...
And not even just because of AI, just for overall human flourishing. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And yeah, so we had some great conversations this week. Sam Altman, we talked to Dylan Patel, we talked to Schulte, we reviewed what Ben Thompson was saying. Dinesh interviewed Elon. So there's a lot of new data points about how people are thinking about the trade-offs between semiconductor fabrication capacity and energy production capacity. So I wanted to sort of crystallize where I think the debate and consensus is right now.
So first I'll tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. So there's been this tick-tock going back and forth in the AI supply chain. What's the key bottleneck to growth? It does feel like you have to work at an AI lab to really feel the bottleneck. For most people, they're just like, I open the chat app, probably ChatGPT, I ask it a question, it gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not really hitting rate limits. The rate limits come when there's big moments, the Studio Ghibli moment.
I've always felt the rate limiting is very real with using Anthropic products. Yes. If you're... Which is why I asked Schulte yesterday. Yeah. What are free limits going to be? Well, that's why you asked him that. Just, it was just random that you asked. Also was interested completely in the context of... Yes, it was completely in the context of compute.
No, but they've consistently been compute constrained. At least they've talked about it more than most, and users have talked about it quite a lot. So I'm just quite curious what the free experience is going to be like Sunday if somebody downloads the app, sees the ads, they're like, I want LLMs without ads, even though no other popular LLM actually has ads yet.
Yeah, I do wonder about the Claude app experience. They're pretty upfront with you about the fact that if you're on the Opus model, you'll hit your rate limits faster. And even just a couple prompts deep, it will take a second and kind of compact the conversation so it can keep talking to you. Like, I know they're increasing the token context window, but it feels like it works fine, but it is a smaller user base.
Although I'm very interested to see where it goes in the app store. ChatGPT is still at number one. Grok is oddly doing incredible in the app store, way higher than X, the social networking app. Yeah. For no obvious reason. I mean, there's just not a lot of hype about Grok. Like, they're doing okay on benchmarks. Obviously, Elon has a very solid playbook for scaling.
To me, I don't care as much about hype. Yeah. When it comes to the app store, there's plenty of apps on the app store that have no hype. One of the top is, it's called Free Cash. Free Cash. It's number two behind Gemini. I understand why that one is Free Cash. Get paid real money. Yeah. Hot on ChatGPT's heels.
Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build code-backed prototypes.
As part of, we have the OpenAI-Elon lawsuit as part of that. What if part of the settlement agreement is OpenAI has to give 4o to Grok? Let them... I mean, they might just wind up... Yesterday was seriously one of the craziest experiences if you weren't watching our Sam interview live and honestly the entire show.
Yeah, there was thousands of messages from people from 4o soldiers saying keep 4o. Keep 4o, throwing hashtags. You don't see hashtags that much anymore, but they were throwing hashtags around keep 4o. So I think maybe if Elon can negotiate for that.
So thank you to the TVPN army, the day ones. We will never switch up on you. We'll never let the money change us. We'll never forget where we came from. Yeah, Bobby was going to... You guys in the chat were doing overtime work keeping things somewhat sane. There's not much you can do in that situation.
Interestingly, a lot of people were saying, oh, is it bots? Because there is this world where, okay, if you're playing really, really dirty, you could be a different lab and you could say, okay, this 4o thing, maybe it's a little bit of a deal, but I could amplify it with some fake bots that post more, generate extra content. It's very easy to generate a post that sounds like a deranged person and then you could just amplify it and it would all of a sudden look like, oh wow, there's millions of people that are affected by this.
But I don't think they were bots in the chat. Like, the messages looked human to me. They weren't copy-paste. We get spam in the chat every once in a while. We get this spam for a company that wants to route us to a specific URL to buy stream viewers, basically fake our account. And so that bot knows, go around and find live streams all over Twitch and pitch the Twitch streamers fake bots that will watch the stream to help them climb the charts, right? So that business model makes sense for those people.
You have to do like seven other steps to get to the point where, like, okay, you're a rival lab and you don't like OpenAI and you're trying to create a headache for them. So you create all these bots and then you have to have the bots ready to rock on a YouTube chat that you had an hour notice for. Like, that's pretty hard to set up all these YouTube accounts and it's not like the 4o... say you're not OpenClaw pill. Okay. Okay. Maybe it's possible, but it didn't feel like they were bots and I think the chat agrees.
For telling these people, save me. Yeah. So there was a Reddit group that shared the stream link, so they all came here. There were some bots, but it felt pretty crazy. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see 4o is fully going offline. It's already very hard to reach. You have to go in to turn on legacy models and it's going offline right around Valentine's Day.
I think February 13th. And I don't know how they'll respond. In truth, it feels odd to me because it does seem like you can get the 4o experience elsewhere with a fine-tuned open-source model or prompt engineering. But the 4o fans really care about that specifically. I think there's some sort of parasocial relationship with even with the UI, with the app, with everything that's going on. They feel like it's not something that's perfectly replicable elsewhere, which is just a fascinating, weird time that I don't think we've ever seen.
Because people were upset when Facebook launched the feed and they were like, we want to go back, and they made these groups and the groups got a lot of amplification. Ironically, some people were upset when Microsoft stopped investing as heavily into Clippy. That's true. That's true. But I was never logging on to a Twitch stream and saying, bring back Clippy.
And yeah, the notable thing is they didn't seem to be able to process that it wasn't just a show about Sam because even after Sam had left, they just kept going. Yeah. Which is very, very strange. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I hope all of those people are able to find peace and hopefully help in real life.
Yeah. Yeah. Very odd. Anyway, back to the bottleneck. Back to someone that's helping unblock the bottleneck. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and... I got an issue, a slight correction. Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. I think Railway is actually contributing potentially to the demand. Potentially, but that's, you know, it's important work.
Anyway, so right now it feels like chips are the more important piece of the bottleneck to talk about. Sam Altman put it this way. I asked him, like, chips versus energy, what's the bigger bottleneck right now? He says it goes back and forth, but right now it's chips. It's different at different times. It may get solved on its own. Normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding as a society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world and we're going to fund that and we're going to get the whole supply chain and the talented people who make that happen would be a very good thing to do.
And so why do we have a chip bottleneck to begin with? Semiconductors have been doubling and we've been on this Moore's law curve. What's interesting is that the semiconductor industry should be better equipped to avoid a bottleneck because it's already been on an exponential, whereas energy production has just been flat, sort of like a malaise for a long time. Getting that unstuck is hard, but I think that's a problem for 2027 potentially.
So the chip bottleneck comes down to consolidation. Power plants, data centers, cooling technology. There's a bunch of suppliers in each of these industries and you can parallelize them and you can steer resources from adjacent areas to focus on AI projects specifically. Even a company like Boom Supersonic can turn into a turbine manufacturer and there's a lot of other industries that are able to move over.
And Dylan Patel gave us some extra context there. So he said the semiconductor industry is used to doubling the amount of transistors made every year or two. Part of that is more advanced nodes. Part of that's more capacity, whereas the energy industry in America wasn't built for that kind of growth. So initially people weren't creative. They were like, let's build these combined cycle gas plants. But now we've realized, yes, there are three main manufacturers of turbines. And for combined cycle, you've got GE, Siemens, Mitsubishi, but you've also got medium-speed reciprocating engines.
Turns out Cummins can make about a million diesel engines a year, and those can generate electricity. I don't care about aesthetics and I put them in West Texas, easy. And so there's all these different areas where you can reallocate. You can't just take an Intel CPU and do anything useful in AI with it. It's just... Elon also on Cheeky Pint with Dinesh and John talked about the Tesla team adapting. He thinks they'll have to actually make turbine blades because they can get a lot of the other components, but they may have to actually make those. Okay.
Yeah. So back to the leading edge fabs. It's a completely different beast. These fabs cost tens of billions. 30, 50, 75, 80 billion I've seen to build, and it takes three, four, sometimes five years to go from breaking ground to actually getting up to producing volume. And we have like the perfect example of this because TSMC announced a plant in Arizona in 2020 and in 2025 it's still not producing at volume. It's doing really well. It's great, but that's five years and it's not just like, oh yeah, it's as effective as what's in Taiwan.
And so ASML is the only viable producer of EUV lithography machines. And so there's this bottleneck within the chip bottleneck, which is the TSMC supplier, ASML, and they ship around 50 EUV machines per year, maybe 50, 60. Each one costs $350 million. And leading edge fabs need dozens. So if you want to build a bunch more fabs, you need a bunch more tool makers.
And ASML has its own supply chain for different lenses and glass and all sorts of stuff. They work with Zeiss, Trumpf, a whole bunch of different companies, and that supply chain is not very diversified. So you have another bottleneck even deeper in the supply chain. And so all these vendors are highly specialized.
And then even after you get the fab built, there's still at least a year of processing engineering, maybe 12 to 18 months where you actually work to get to high yield production. We're seeing that in TSMC Arizona. And TSMC just has decades of intellectual capital locked in the heads of engineers that they can't easily transfer or parallelize. And so this has made TSMC the real bottleneck. Hyperscalers are pushing capex numbers into the hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll talk about this more in the show.
But the supply curve for leading edge wafers is relatively inelastic. There's also this bullwhip effect when during COVID we weren't shipping cars, so a bunch of people cut back on demand and so that pulled things back and it takes years for these to work through. Then you get overcapacity. Everyone demands way more and then you overexpand and then you collapse and it's this constant. And the further out you are in the supply chain, the more the bullwhip affects you.
So TSMC controls 90% of the advanced node market with Samsung and Intel far behind. And this is why Ben Thompson, aside from the geopolitical concerns about TSMC, is really urging tech companies to wake up. And so he says the reality that hyperscalers and fabless chip companies need to wake up to, however, is that avoiding the risk of working with someone other than TSMC incurs new risks that are both harder to see and also more substantial.
So there's a huge risk if you say, you know what, I'm going to go and place a huge order with Samsung or Intel, or I'm going to take a huge risk and be the anchor customer of their new cutting edge leading edge fab. But Ben Thompson is saying there's a risk to not doing that. And he says, except again, we can see the harms already: foregone revenue today as demand outstrips supply.
Today's shortages, however, may prove to be peanuts if AI has the potential these companies claim it does. Future foregone revenue at the end of the decade is going to cost exponentially more, surely a lot more than whatever is necessary expense-wise to make Samsung or Intel into viable competitors for TSMC. You really got to wonder what conversations are like between Jensen and TSMC right now.
Yeah. Given that it just doesn't feel, I mean, Taiwan is, TSMC is not, they're certainly not going out and making kind of going risk on, right? They're staying relatively probably more conservative than some of their downstream customers would like.
Pop quiz. Do you know where TSMC is listed? The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Just be like TSMC. Just build a $1.5 trillion semiconductor company. That would be nice. We need more of these.
Anyway, let's move on to the hyperscalers. Compound 248 says, poor Jassy, Andy Jassy. He's going to learn something about Amazon today. When Google announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing offense. But when Amazon announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing defense. Ipso facto. So Amazon said it will spend $200 billion this year on AI buildout. This is from Bloomberg.
But this is worrying investors that the company's colossal bet on artificial intelligence will pinch profits while it waits for the investments to pay off. The shares fell in extended trading. The company reported spending $130 billion on property and equipment in 2025. Analysts expect those expenses would reach $150 billion this year, but Amazon's saying we're going to $200. We're going all in.
So the stock's down maybe 8% in after-hours trading, likely back up today because things are going better, but we'll see. How is Amazon doing today? Down, but not as violently as it was after hours last night after earnings.
So over the last month it's sold off 15%. Yeah. And a lot of frustration from Amazon shareholders. Obviously they had the fastest growth in 13 quarters and the stock is still down 10%. Amazon looking back over the last five years to early 2021, only up 23% over five years. So, of course, you did quite a lot better if you bought after the overall ZIRP sell-off.
Yeah. Just not as sexy a narrative as the rest of the hyperscalers. Zuck obviously is a huge beneficiary of advancements in AI. We see that with the accelerating ads market. Microsoft, even though it's getting beat up a little bit now, they have that massive position in OpenAI that feels like fully in solid place. They got the IP, they got a real hold on the AI question. Google's obviously in a fantastic place. Nvidia clearly, but Amazon's had a little bit rougher.
Yeah, yesterday was just such a strange day. Reform Trader says software stocks are cooked for not investing in AI. Mag 7 stocks are cooked for investing heavily in AI. Hope that helps. It is crazy. You need to do both. Invest and don't invest.
Oh, this is the image. I love this image. Wait, what's this from? Matt Damon in... Which one? I don't know. In Rounders, I watched last night. We were just talking about this. That's Rounders. I thought Good Will Hunting for some reason, but same era.
So this is a summary of the 2026 capex numbers from the hyperscalers. Google is going to do 175 to 185 billion versus 120 estimated. Meta is doing 115 to 135 relative against 110 estimated. Tesla's going to 20 billion from 11 billion estimated. And Amazon, they were estimating 145, but they're going to do 200. And so they're going all in.
One of the top comments here is very funny. It says, what exactly is Meta buying? They don't do anything with AI. That's not true. They open up Reels. It's AI. They are recommending all sorts of stuff and so much inference.
LA Purchaser says, talking about somebody says, is English Jassy's first language, ripping off the headphones. And they say he could just say this is a generational investing opportunity. The TAM is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating. We are the market leader. We are investing to be the cost leader. What we did in retail, we are doing here. The more money we spend, the more excited we get about the opportunity. There is a very tangible ROI. We see it. You're going to see it in the numbers. You are seeing AWS accelerate. It will keep accelerating.
He says instead we got a word salad where you can pick your own conclusion. Yeah, it wasn't... nothing about the earnings. Like people can feel the emotion and the energy right there wasn't... there wasn't anything to rally around and get really excited by, right? There's zero vision.
And yeah, even in the Cheeky Pint Elon episode, you know, Dinesh and John are pushing Elon on the data centers in space thing. And I thought that Elon could have done more to really get people basically the same thing that TAM is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating and we are investing for that future. Right. It was a lot of like trying to justify putting it up there. Yeah.
Yeah. When they were saying like, hey, there's a lot of land in the US. We can blanket the US with solar panels. We do a lot here. And so again, I think people are getting kind of caught up in the details. Yeah. When if you're going to spend, you know, you would hope AWS making this kind of investment, that they have more conviction than Tyler does on the opportunity, right? I don't know if that's possible.
Tyler's in the white suit. He's looking good. Yeah. Looking good, Tyler. Yeah. Round of applause for Tyler. Round of applause for Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
This is a classic Elon thing where he will lay out a vision that takes 10, 20, 30 years, but he says it's going to take 10, 20, 30 months. And so you have to sort of grapple with the short term, but still you can't lose sight of the long term because we did get rockets that land and we did get space internet and whatnot.
Yeah, I think he said like 36 months is his estimate for when we start getting compute in space, like probably 30 months I think. But then so there's like the shorter term thing. But then he did talk about terawatts in space, right? So like the US is currently like half a terawatt, but we're going to be putting terawatts in space of compute.
He's sort of falling back to first principles and just talking about... Yeah. He keeps repeating like, oh, if you just look at physics. Yeah. But it's kind of this catch-all term he uses when he doesn't really know what to say. It seems like... Yeah. Well, yeah. It just seems like the physics, it all checks out from the physics calculations, but when you map that to the economic realities, the human capital and financial capital realities, you're just looking at a very long timeline.
And he doesn't like talking about thinking in decades. Even though it's very clear that he does think in decades, he just doesn't articulate things in decades because it seems like the short-term bull case for space data centers is basically just regulatory, right? It's just going to be way too hard to find the actual land.
Yeah. Didn't Well, Manidis post something about that? He said that it's going to become really, really difficult to build any data centers in the United States. Although you can certainly go to other countries with that. I'm sure there's plenty of countries that would love the jobs and the taxes. You see India already saying, hey, we'll just take a slice in 20 years. That's how AGI-pilled they are. They're like, come build a data center here. You can be tax-free for 20 years, but then we're going to be making money in what, 2046? They're ready to rock quickly.
Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You wanted to talk about Magnus in the chat. None of you know physics. They were feeding him drinks. Chill out.
It is actually crazy. I mean, we've never seen a Cheeky Pint episode where they actually drank. They did drink on this one. That was the main feedback from last year. Everyone's like, hey, great show, cool concept, great guest.
Well, they were filming a lot of them during the workday with people in San Francisco. So it was somebody who would pop over, film an episode, and then you got to go back to work. So you don't necessarily want to be chugging pints, but it is funny that Elon took down three pints or four pints or something. You did the math.
So we'll talk about this later. There's some posts, but they seemed a bit smaller than normal pints maybe. So is it really... but I counted three like full glasses.
By the other thing, so Sam was obviously quite bearish on space data centers in the near term. It is worth calling out that there was a rumor last year that he was kicking the tires on Rocket Lab. You remember that? So I think like long-term, I'm sure he'll want to have his own space company.
But I think he would rather, like if there's a hype cycle, he doesn't need it to be about him. He can let this one pass by and focus on the other things that are going on with the business because there's so much going on with the business. Like if you add too many narratives, it can actually confuse things. The X, XAI, SpaceX combination is crazy, but the space data center thing actually does sort of streamline the narrative in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean, I think Elon... Dinesh asked a question about this, which is like, oh, it's so crazy that SpaceX, they have this super ambitious mission, but they keep seeming to find these good businesses on the way, right? So first it's Starlink with Falcon, and then with Starship, it's like, I mean, do we really need that many Starlinks? But if you can get space data centers, yep. If you're putting up terawatts of compute, then yeah, you need massive...
OTP in the chat says, dude just turned 21 and he can already eye a... He's been studying the last week.
What did Bubble Boy say? $660 billion of capex this year on AI data centers. To put a number like that in perspective, this is more than what we spent on the US interstate highway system, $630 billion. More than what we spent on the Apollo moon program, $257 billion. More than what we spent on the International Space Station, $150 billion. It's more money than Walmart's revenue last year, $650 billion. It's about 25% of all military spending globally.
It's equivalent to buying 50 Gerald R. Ford aircraft carriers. It's the equivalent of spending $1.8 billion a day, $750 million an hour, or $1.2 million a minute. This year alone is without a doubt the biggest project in the history of capitalism, and we are spending it all. We're spending all of it in one year. God's sake.
He did, Bubble Boy did do the inflation adjustment here. The Apollo program cost something like $25 billion back then. Yeah, putting it into perspective, France announced an initiative earlier this week. They want to lead in AI research. So through their France 2030 program, they have invested more than 30 million euros in this initiative.
Macron says, science has found its home. And Sean Frank says, France is investing 30 million in this new AI initiative. That's how much Google will spend in 90 minutes. No joke. Every 90 minutes, Google will spend 30 million on capex this year. One company. Wow. One company. Yeah. They can hire Ilya for like an hour. I know. One hour consulting call. Get... He's got to get on. Get in. Yeah. Intro. Hit up Rad.
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Takehim is breaking down the Nvidia news. The stock is up 6.22%. Nvidia shares barely moved in after-hours trading last night. Yeah, this is what I said. I was like, Amazon just announced that, hey, we're going to spend, you know, what are they going to buy with those? I mean, they will buy Trainium and Inferentia, but they're going to buy a lot of Nvidia. You know it.
Takehim said, you all know I was already insanely bullish on Nvidia's NVL72 super cycle this year. These capex numbers from Google and Amazon blow away even my most optimistic expectations for Nvidia's main end consumer market.
And we also saw from Greg Brockman that GB200 is off to the races. The Blackwell chips are now in full force over at OpenAI powering 5.3. There's a little bit of debate over whether that was involved in training or inference, but it doesn't really matter. Blackwell's here and it's going to improve things. And that's probably good for chip designers, which Nvidia is obviously one of.
Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Stephen over at Lambda was the one who sent me that post from France originally.
Yeah, you were... he was... you were not kind. You were making fun of him. But it's a good post going all in on AI with $30 million. It's really like the... it has the... what's it called? $1 million because you're not aware of inflation because you've been frozen for 50 years or something like that.
Let's go over to the Wall Street Journal. Yes. Behind Disney's search for a lasting successor to Bob Iger. Yeah. Company's succession committee reviewed information on over a hundred candidates before the race was narrowed to two.
100. This seems crazy. Update your LinkedIn. If you were reviewed, you got to put it here. So the trio, which is Bob Iger, Josh D'Amaro, and Dana Walden, they were meeting in Disney's executive dining room. The trio sat in a private room with panoramic views of Disney's studio lot and surrounding San Fernando Valley, where Iger discussed scenarios the board of directors was considering.
Could tomorrow we got to... is it D'Amaro or DeMarco? DeMarco. Doug DeMarco. Is he related to Doug DeMarco? D'Amaro, chair of Disney's experience business, including theme parks and consumer products. Walden, co-chairman of the entertainment business, lead the company together. What about with one in charge and the other as deputy?
D'Amaro and Walden, who by that point were the finalists to succeed, said they were open to all the scenarios. Disney's board of directors was scheduled to meet in the same building and hold its final vote on who the next CEO would be the following Thursday. People close to the company predicted D'Amaro would be given the top job with Walden in an elevated role to ensure she stayed. The only surprise, it turned out, was the timing.
Keenly aware of the intense public anticipation, Disney's 10 directors, including Iger, voted unanimously Monday to make D'Amaro CEO and Walden president and chief creative officer. We were ready to go and I didn't like sitting there with the news, board chairman James Gorman, who led the succession process, said in an interview.
And yeah, that was really fast. Rumors hit the various outlets and then it was like confirmed immediately live. That was smart.
At an employee town hall, D'Amaro described the moment as surreal and said he was initially embarrassed by his reaction. I got a little choked up when they let me know because it's a big responsibility. It is a big responsibility. His ascension will, save for any unexpected snafus, mark the end of a decade-plus search for a lasting successor to Bob Iger that has been marked by delays, missteps, and reversals.
Employees said they are happy to have the biggest question about the company's future finally resolved and anxious about what a former parks leader running the company with a veteran television executive as his top deputy will mean for Disney's... Let's give it up for veteran television.
So Gorman had previously run a leadership succession project at Morgan Stanley. He took over Disney's process in 2024 after joining the board. He said the succession committee reviewed information on more than a hundred candidates and homed in on several outsiders along with four Disney executives: D'Amaro, Walden, entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman, and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro.
Gorman said the board interviewed the candidates formally and in intimate lunches. They conducted 360 interviews with Disney executives, talking to subordinates and colleagues as well as bosses. By last summer, the race had narrowed to two candidates. D'Amaro and Walden traveled to Orlando in August to present their visions for Disney's future at a board meeting. The Wall Street Journal previously reported this.
In ensuing months, they met with board members in a less formal setting. Both executives talked to Iger frequently about what it took to run a company like Disney. Employees noticed and gossip was rampant. Staffers speculated about whether D'Amaro's background in parks would hurt him, given that Bob Chapek had also run the company's theme park before his short-lived tenure as CEO.
Yeah, that'd be wild. Hey, we had a misstep with a parks guy. No more parks guys. Yeah, Disney's leaders wanted the succession process to be as clean as possible without runners-up leaving the company given the Chapek fiasco. We wanted to get this right, said Gorman. As a result, few were surprised that Walden was named president, a position no one has held at Disney in 20 years.
With a recommended retention bonus worth $5.3 million, Walden's chief creative officer position is a new one for Disney. Some in the company's movies division are nervous about what Walden's rise will mean for their business, which she hasn't worked in before and now she oversees it. But there she is with the Founders Award at the International Emmys in New York, getting an award.
A few company leaders... Founders podcast award? I don't know what the Founders Award at the International Emmys is for. Like, it's not for a founder because she's an executive. It's a prestigious honor bestowed by the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to individuals or organizations making a significant impact on global television. Okay. Founders. Let's go.
Anyways, let's move on to Dirty Soda. Dirty Soda. We got to talk about the Utah... Have you heard of the world before? On Dirty Soda. I've never heard of Dirty Soda before. Have you heard of this? Yeah. Yeah. This is big in Utah. This is big in Utah? Have you been to Utah? No. How do you know that it's big in Utah then? It's like my friends sent it to me on Instagram. They're like, look at this. Okay. All right. What is... You have friends who live in Utah? It's like soda and they put cream in it and stuff, right? Okay.
Well, we'll dig in. I think we'll let the Wall Street Journal get the facts straight. But first, I'll tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card.
A mom with five children ages 6 to 16 in St. George, Utah, Nicole Tanner didn't realize she was on to something with dirty soda. That's what the creator of the chain Swig calls spiking Coke, Mountain Dew, or Dr. Pepper with fruit purees and flavored cream served in plastic cups stuffed with pebble ice. Microplastic. Nightmare. Nightmare. Really? I didn't know pebble ice was at risk. No, no, no. I'm talking about the plastic cup. Oh, the plastic cup.
Her business took off a few years ago when pop star Olivia Rodrigo was in Utah filming that TV series High School Musical and posted an Instagram photo holding a cup from Swig. Now #dirtysoda is the hashtag. Big chains want in. McDonald's recently tested Sprite with lemon vanilla syrup and dragon fruit. Taco Bell swirls teal-colored Baja Dream freezes with vanilla cream and calls it a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Dirty Freeze.
Oh, we forgot to ask Sam Altman if he's going to issue a Baja Blast because he did the Code Red. It's time for a Baja Blast. It's time to Baja Blast. He's back to the top. Maybe that's what the Super Bowl ad, Codex. Oh, that would be Baja Blast. Codex collab campaign for the builders.
Yes, TGI Fridays last year started offering a line of dirty sodas that can be amped up with shots of Jack Daniels or Hennessy.
That sounds... When I hear dirty soda, I feel like it's spiked with alcohol, but apparently it's just...
Dirty Sprite. That's like...
Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's right. The future. Yeah, that's...
And drive-in chain Sonic has encouraged customers to make it dirty by ordering creamer and mix-ins with their sodas. While the heart of dirty sodas may still be Utah and the Mountain West states, Swig has expanded to around 140 locations across 16 states. That's fast.
This is insane. To me, this feels like a really tough business to be in long term because if the product becomes popular...
Everyone has it immediately. You have no real IP.
Right, because you're just using sodas off the shelf.
So yeah, I'd be interested to see what happens to these 140 locations even though the product is a hit. Tanner's main investor, family investment office Larry H. Miller Co, brought in a professional chief executive who has taken other companies public, and he is talking of an eventual initial public offering for the chain which had around 100 million in sales last year.
Tanner, I mean, these must be incredibly simple to run. It's literally a box. You have soda and creamer. So I could see even... they don't sell food or anything here. This is like such a simple...
'We're doing what Starbucks did for coffee, but for soda,' said Swig CEO Alex Dunn. So Alex Dunn says, 'Pull up here.'
6:00 a.m. on the way to the gym, grab a big soda.
I feel like you'd need more caffeine if you really wanted to displace Starbucks. People will really just stop at a dedicated place just to get a tasty soda. That's a crazy...
Gabe. Gabe is sharing a quote from Future: 'Dirty soda and a styrofoam. Spend a day to get my mind blown.'
Oh, LH Miller was the owner of the Utah Jazz. Interesting. Tyler, did you have more context here?
Well, I was just going to say on the caffeine thing, isn't the whole point that it doesn't have... it's like not caffeinated, right? Because they're Mormon.
Oh, okay. So it's a Utah thing, I think. So, yeah.
Or there's like a little caffeine, but you can probably do caffeine-free Coca-Cola or something.
I started... I did something recently that felt really wrong, but the result was good. I mixed a yerba with a Mexican Coke.
Yeah. Mexican Coke. Yeah, it's fun.
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Tanner grew up on an Idaho dairy farm, the fifth of eight children. She got her associate degree in office education. That is a sweet degree.
Who runs office education here? Office education. We need some... Maybe we do.
Here's how you use cloud code. Here's how.
And started working in marketing for a library system software company. Let's give it up for library system software company. I bet you this is a more durable business than some of the other SaaS out there.
She got married and by 23 started a family. Tanner started working for Mary Kay selling makeup and skin care products and eventually building a team of 18 consultants. Let's give it up for MLMs.
Yeah.
I think they would dispute that, right?
Yeah. Anytime you... they don't like the pyramid scheme term, but I don't know. Maybe all...
Multi-level marketing, I think, is just a strategy, right?
In 2007, the Tanners moved with their five children to St. George from Colorado. She was a 38-year-old mother of five, craving caffeine and tired of watered-down fountain soda when she decided to turn her cravings into a business in 2010.
Oh, wait. Overnight success.
So coffee wasn't a choice. Tanner is Mormon and adherents typically traditionally abstain from coffee, but you could have caffeine in soda. I didn't realize that. That seems like a loophole. Interesting.
This is... I love this. Tanner and her husband used savings to avoid taking out a business loan to buy a 700-square-foot commercial building in St. George with a big parking lot.
It's like people are like, 'Oh, I moved to San Francisco and I had a mattress on the floor. I have so much conviction.' Okay. Buy a building for your untested soda company with all your savings. That's real conviction.
Lever up. Get the mortgage.
Her idea was to serve super cold soda with a twist like lime, fruit, or purees.
Tanner initially leased a fountain machine from Coca-Cola. When she asked PepsiCo for the same, Tanner said the company took a pass. Soda rivals typically push restaurant chains to stock their products exclusively. So Tanner bought two-liter bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew from grocery stores.
I love seeing your face when you ask for a Diet Coke on a plane and they say, 'Is Pepsi okay?' And you just say, 'Absolutely not.'
After about a month, Pepsi relented. She said...
She started with limes, lemons, and six flavor shots. She recruited her eldest daughter and niece to work in the store. Her 15-year-old son held up signs outside advertising that job, not going away sign.
I've been getting so many sign-spinning reels with the 'you broke my heart'... you know that one guy? But I see all of his reels and it's just like him being like, 'I don't have a job.' And then this is crazy. He can actually spin that into an interesting digital ad business because he could just do the sign online because the video...
I honestly never see what's on the sign though because it's spinning so fast.
No, I know. But use that as a lead-in to promote Ramp.
Good.
Tanner, in the beginning, priced drinks at a dollar for any size. That's crazy. I didn't know you could get anything for a dollar in this country anymore. Helping draw students from nearby Utah Tech University, a local news broadcast found customers waiting to get a mango puree Mountain Dew or Big Al soda.
That's interesting. I saw the... I don't know if this is a Big Al soda or Big AI soda.
So they said a few years ago Olivia Rodrigo promoted it and it went viral. I thought this business was only a few years old. I guess...
No, it's an overnight success. They started overnight success.
That's pretty remarkable. Yeah.
After customers started referring to Swig's Dr Pepper and cream combination as dirty soda...
Tanner latched onto the phrase, encouraging customers. They got to... they got to pay Future a royalty here. I won't stand by that.
They should get Future as an influencer. That'd be good.
Yeah. He's like, 'When I said dirty soda, I meant...'
By 2017, Swig had grown to more than a dozen stores. The staff was spread thin and Tanner realized she lacked the expertise to grow further. She and her husband separated in 2020.
RIP, and is no longer involved in Swig. And I hate when I'm just like reading this incredible story of entrepreneurship and then they kind of interrupt the flow there.
In 2025, she married Greg Robinson and they continue to live in Utah. Good guy.
'It was held together with some duct tape and hair pins,' said Andrew Smith, a Utah-based investor whose Savory Fund invests.
Oh, they took a majority stake. Interesting. They bought that.
Very cool.
In recent years, Swig has gotten a boost from the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a reality TV show chronicling a group of Utah-based TikTok influencers.
Interesting.
We're at Swig, so I can tell you exactly what my Swig order is.
It's sparkling water, sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach, sugar-free vanilla, raspberry puree with a fresh lime.
Anyways, what a cool story. Yeah, Tanner says, 'We're in extreme high growth mode right now.' The company estimates it serves over 2,000 drinks at a single conference.
The White House has posted 'biggest.bull.run.ever.starting.period.'
Did they post this? Scroll down.
Yeah. No. So they're sharing a fake screenshot from Truth Social where Donald Trump says, 'Let the gains begin.'
I mean, he really did call the bottom...
At least a local bottom of veracity in truth.
No, I'm just saying like if you bought Nvidia when this fake post was shared by the real account...
Is what White House post is not even the real account, right? That's just a fake 14,000-follower account. So everything about this is fake.
Everything about... and then they follow up, 'I highly recommend you follow White House Grandpa.' It's like, what are we doing here?
Very strange. Absolutely. Well, do your own research and get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, not from fake news on a podcast. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service that isn't fake news.
Goldman Sachs is tapping Anthropic's AI model to automate accounting and compliance roles. Embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back office work. It was one of my first jobs...
Bull market and forward-deployed engineers for Anthropic.
Like it will be funny if true diffusion requires two decades of just millions of consultants working with businesses of all sizes to implement AI systems.
Yeah, probably. I mean, the task horizon every time I see it, six hours, that's amazing. And you were making the comment of like, how many times do you really sit there and spend six hours working autonomously?
But there's a different frame which is like a consultant can come in with a goal and work pretty much autonomously for like months. And so there is a world where to not have a forward-deployed engineer in the loop, you need the task horizon to be like years basically.
Yeah.
And building a company takes your whole life.
Exactly. Yeah. So you keep the doubling going, which I think puts us back... I think it puts us at like 2035. It's about a decade until you get to like the task horizon is a lifetime, is like the average life expectancy of a human.
Pull up this article from The Wall Street Journal.
Okay. What are we looking at? Which one?
Anthropic aura-farmed The Journal this week. This is one of the most insane headlines. It's the week Anthropic tanked the market and pulled ahead of its rivals. Once a distant second or third in the AI race, the company is moving to the front with a focus on caution, coding, and business clients.
Well, they didn't fully aura-farm because The Journal sort of takes a shot here. It says, 'Anthropic once appeared as an also-ran in the chaotic race for AI supremacy. This week, the sophistication of the startup's products upended the stock market.'
'A simple set of industry-specific add-ons to its Claude product, including one that performed legal services, triggered a days-long global stock selloff from software to legal services, financial data, and real estate. Then, Anthropic unveiled Super Bowl ads that taunt rival OpenAI.'
'On Thursday, Anthropic unleashed its most advanced model yet, capable of synthesizing data and analysis, running teams of coding assistants, and functions akin to product management. Shares of software companies including Salesforce, Intuit, and others fell again Thursday, although less precipitously than earlier in the week.'
'The viral moment for Anthropic's models is quote the most important thing happening in AI since ChatGPT's launch,' said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, who I know, Ball.
Everyone knows Ball on this show, who writes an artificial intelligence newsletter. Quote, 'It's infinitely interesting.'
'Industry prognosticators and AI evangelists have spent months foretelling the toll Anthropic and other sophisticated AI tools would take on software-as-a-service companies that were darlings of the previous internet era.'
'Tools made by companies such as Workday, Monday.com, and Adobe have become the digital backbone for American corporations. Anthropic's tools, however, which include agents that can act autonomously to carry out increasingly complex user requests for hours, have offered a preview of the threat sophisticated AI models pose to entire companies.'
It's a good article. I mean, obviously, we'll see how fast the diffusion happens. Some of these systems have things that you cannot simply vibe code.
We'll talk to Max Levchin about is it possible to vibe code a financial software product, a global payments network. Can you vibe code a bank charter or money transfer license?
And I think more and more companies will emerge and there might be a divergence between companies that have moats that are resistant to software-based disruption, but then maybe they should trade at a different multiple. So there's sort of a re-evaluation of the market broadly.
Yeah. You also can with the payment stuff. I'm again, I'm super excited for us to talk with Max, especially on this week when PayPal is obviously in the news. But you can imagine a world where it does become possible to technically vibe code a global payments network.
But various regulators just say like, hey, we're going to start having requirements. You need to at least have 100 people on your team, right? Things like that.
That's interesting. You know, basically if you're getting inundated with a bunch of requests of somebody that's like, 'Hey, I started this company a week ago and now I want to be able to process payments state by state, globally, etc.' People are just going to be like, 'Hey, this is probably not responsible.'
Yeah. I tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses.
I want to vibe code a payments platform where when it's payday, a humanoid robot comes around and just does a money spread in your face and just says, 'Here's your cash.' That's the future. You don't need none of this money transmitter license, none of these recordings.
Yeah. Oh, Tyler's got the money spread.
You're actually quite amateurish at your money spreads. From what I've seen on Instagram, there are levels and you are on level one.
You need to learn all the different ones. The money counter spread. That's not bad. That's not bad for anyone watching.
But I want to see it go all the way down your arm in an S. Okay.
Exposed first-time money spread.
Future would be mocking you.
Rookie money spread. Rookie.
Claims to love. Claims to know all about dirty soda. Never been to Utah.
Claims to be able to money spread. Can't do a money spread.
Can't do a money spread. Bro, wait. Do you have like 20 bucks on you?
You're supposed to say, 'That's what I thought.'
That's what I thought. That's what I thought.
He can't even hold his mic now.
He can't hold the mic button.
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Take him in a funny take. He said, 'Y'all are clowns. Clowns. The Anthropic legal plugin uses software. It doesn't replace it. In fact, the co-work legal plugin uses Microsoft 365, Jira, Slack, and Box software to accomplish its tasks. No one in Anthropic has replicated any of these applications with ones coded by the company's Claude Code agent.'
What is this X that you can put up there?
Yeah. Yes. There are plenty of situations where the token cost of regenerating the software is much lower than just using the software. And so people will use the software.
Jim Cramer said, 'Anthropic's power is so daunting that all they have to do is say they are going into cybersecurity and that's the end of the group. I don't want to be against them, but they are not the all-powerful firm that they think they are.'
Well, we'll talk to Doug O'Flaherty about exactly how powerful Anthropic is and whether he has vibe-coded everything in his life or if he is still using an operating system at this point. Who knows?
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Joe Weisenthal shared yesterday, 'Silver down 19%. Anthropic must have launched a silver extension.'
Yes, it's just chaos in the markets. It's just absolute chaos everywhere.
One of the most chaotic weeks of my adult life.
Yeah. But it's been... I mean, lots of green shoots, lots of interesting projects, lots of interesting applications and progress all over the place.
Derek Thompson said, 'For me, the odds that AI is a bubble declined significantly in the last three weeks and the odds that we are actually quite underbuilt for the necessary levels of inference usage went up significantly in that period.' Basically, his AGI pill.
'I think AI is going to become the home screen of a ludicrously high percentage of white-collar workers in the next two years, and parallel agents will be deployed in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels.'
And Kevin Roose over at The New York Times, host of the Hard Fork podcast, says, 'This is why everyone was freaking out about Claude Code over winter break. Once you see an agent autonomously doing stuff for you, it's so instantly clear that all computer-based work will be done this way.'
'This is why my serious AI policy proposal is to sit every member of Congress down in a room with laptops for 30 minutes and have them all build websites.'
Yeah. Get a podcast.
So we were joking about this yesterday with Scholto, like we maybe need more long weekends for AI adoption, but I wouldn't be surprised for a big company to actually do something like this, which is like, hey, we're going to have the next Thursday, Friday off.
Hackathon. Yeah, basically.
I mean, Congress is a whole other thing.
You got to go to Congress, sit all the Congress people down and get them vibe coding. What would they build? I feel like they don't use a lot of software. So there's not that much to build. Like they're so abstracted away from it. It's all lunches and phone calls and dinners and meetings.
Like there's not that much that actually... this is the thing with like OpenClaw. There's some people asking like, 'What are you actually using it for?' And people are realizing like, a lot of my day is not interacting.
You know the thing that I wish I could automate?
Okay, you can do that. Have you seen Earth Class Mail? There are a few of these virtual mail...
It sends it. It sends it.
So basically you forget your home address. You don't share it anywhere on the internet. You never put it anywhere. You only use this other address. Mine was like 830 Market Street in San Francisco. All of the mail would go there if it's addressed to me. It gets opened by a robot, scanned, and then you have a web dashboard, but also it just goes to your email and then you can actually say...
So they've been a pill for decades.
Decades. No, it was really important when you set up a business, you use a fake address or one of these virtual mailboxes and then you can actually click a button, send this to me physically. If it's like a magazine or gift or something, you can say keep this or you can say shred it.
And then you have a virtual representation of it forever and you could run an agent over it. So maybe that's the next thing you pick up is a virtual mailbox. That would be good.
How does that work though? There are certain situations where you need your ID to match like your utility bill.
So you just still, I guess, you just use your home address for utilities but use...
Or passport. Like there's usually other ways to prove residency besides the bills. Also, I don't know if you can actually get the utility bill to not go where the utilities are, but hopefully the utilities don't leak it.
I'm talking about like the broad, like, you know, your address gets on the internet and then it's just like spam and like credit card offers and stuff like that.
I'm just saying I never want to open up a physical piece of mail again. I want it to come someplace, have an AI agent like, you know, you go on a toll road, just pays it automatically, right? Stuff like that.
Optimus opens it for you, takes a picture...
Does a money spread, walks to the post office, mails the next letter, mails the track. This is the future.
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It does. Michelangelo drawing just sold for 27.2 million. Let's hit the gong for that. Over 13 times its asking price.
We're bringing down the gong.
The Renaissance master earned a record sum with this sketch of a foot.
Let's bring down the chapel.
Let's hit the gong for the Michelangelo painting and then...
Give it a clean head.
Team is... Let's give it up for the team for really dialing in the special effects.
Congrats to Michelangelo. Overnight success, Angelo.
What do you think, Tyler? Overvalued, undervalued? 27.2 million.
I think I'm going to have to go with Tyler Cowen. I'm pretty sure on Marginal Revolution I saw this earlier this week. He said way overvalued.
Way overvalued.
What was the thesis?
I'll give you the bear thesis. Look at the picture.
It's just like a... Yeah, it's a foot.
It's a foot. It's not even like a painting. It's just like a sketch. I think we know what's going on. There's people that are into this stuff. I'm not going to judge, but it's not me.
Newly rediscovered Michelangelo drawing of a foot sold for 27.2 million at Christie's on Thursday, a record for any work created by the Renaissance master, in a sale likely to kick the art market into high gear. Previously unknown red chalk sketch is one of only a handful of Michelangelo's surviving studies still left in private hands.
My AI diffusion model could do this. That's the new phrase. My kid couldn't do this, but my AI diffusion model certainly could. This is not that impressive. Not a 27. Maybe at five. Give me a break.
The five-inch drawing depicts the right foot of the Libyan Sibyl, a blonde prophetess wearing a creamsicle gown painted onto the ceiling of the eastern end.
Let's get the feet off of the screen.
Get out of here.
Moving on. Back to business. Catrini says in response to Opus 4.6, 'I have not shied away from buying scary dips. Neither has Ben on our team. Producer Ben always buys the dip. Buying tech in 2022 is scary.'
It's really good that 'buy the dip' is like so... people have really... it's really the backbone because 'freak out and sell everything' would really be bad for our capital market.
Okay. So buying tech in 2022 was scary, as were banks after SVB. I bought plenty of stocks when COVID seemed like potentially the end of the world.
But this doesn't really seem like an overreaction in software. If anything, it's delayed. It's a rational response that isn't even trying to front-run the capability improvement. The capability is here. I respect anyone who is actually smart enough to know who survives and thrives. I just don't think I can foresee that far ahead right now.
And Gary Tan has a devil's advocate. 'I think the bottleneck will still be knowing the details of what to build, which depend on what your customers need, not even necessarily what they say they want.'
'I use these tools daily close to their full power and they're amazing, but the flashy demos are all examples of extremely precisely specified tasks in example-rich domains. Build a compiler, build a web browser, etc. These have very specific rules on what success entails.'
And I've seen like the Gastown, so one of the big demo projects was like replatforming some open source software to Rust. And it's like that's pretty verifiable from start to finish.
If you're looking at like build a new social network, it's like, okay, how do you get distribution? Distribution is still really, really important. Like you can vibe code stuff, but driving traffic is harder than ever. What are you thinking, Tyler?
I just need to clear something. So before I said Tyler Cowen was talking about...
Yeah, Michelangelo. That was incorrect. He was actually talking about a Rembrandt. It was also a sketch. Okay. It was 20 million.
20 million. But that one... Okay. Okay. Thank you for the fact check.
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'Wall Street logic right now,' says Chris Camillo, 'punish big tech for wasting capex on AI, punish SaaS because AI will replace them, and punish GPU manufacturers for selling the chips that power the waste. Sell everything. Sell your dollars.'
'Remember to lock up your capital in late-stage private companies at the tops,' says a16z, that I think has been deleted. I can't see it, but I can see the screen.
So anyway, the fear-greed index is at five out of a hundred. Extreme fear. Extreme fear.
Yeah. I mean, good timing.
Freak out and sell everything. This is Lindy.
I mean, he posted this last night.
Yeah. And then 4,000. I think this might have turned the tide. This might have turned it.
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Thoma Bravo managing partner Holden Spaht says, 'I just finished a week of board meetings with several of our portfolio companies and their strong results in growth and profitability seem to be, in my view, another piece of evidence against the overwrought headlines that AI is eating software.'
'Anaplan, Bottomline, Coupa, Dayforce, and Qlik for flight are navigating the AI transition quite well with Q4 bookings growth of 22% on average and high margins.'
'These are large companies operating at billion-dollar revenue scale, not small startups. And the growth numbers look to be accelerating, not decelerating.'
'That kind of growth doesn't square with the notion that enterprise customers are cutting software spend so they have more money for new AI applications. We don't view our portfolio companies as being caught in an either-or, zero-sum competition like that.'
'They're building and integrating AI functionality into their products and customers are voting with their dollars. Systems of record with powerful AI and agent capabilities built to enterprise requirements and workflows have shown themselves to be quite capable of profitable growth, and I believe the value of profitable growth will endure in the face of technological change.'
Let's go. Not biased at all, but I think this is what we want to see, right?
Six months ago Google was considered disrupted, now it's accelerating. Today SaaS is considered disrupted, now SaaS is accelerating. Let's see.
Certainly not time to take your foot off the gas if you're building a SaaS company. You got to figure out how to survive, how to thrive in the age of AI. Can't be asleep at the wheel. You got to be building, you got to be innovating, you got to know your value, you got to... you want to know what really makes your company valuable.
Tom Dale says, 'I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.'
I saw another post in the same vein from somebody saying, 'Well, at least we're getting it over with before everyone else, right?'
Software engineers might be prepared for a new reality just because they're probably closer to the beginning of the wave.
Justine Moore has the other side of it. She says, 'I love how everyone is saying SaaS is dead. Like you're going to get the Fortune 500 to ditch Salesforce for a CRM vibe coded by a 13-year-old.'
And Matt Levine says, 'What's kind of funny is that people on this website have internalized, quote, you hire McKinsey for air cover and a throat to choke if things go wrong, but they haven't internalized, you hire Salesforce, Workday, and Atlassian for very similar, albeit not identical, reasons.'
And there's some disagreement. Montag says that's not even remotely true. And Matt Levine says wrong. This is the other Matt Levine, by the way. This is not the Bloomberg writer. This is a software guy with some finance thrown in. He's been at a16z and JP Morgan.
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Alexander says, 'Just to be clear, people are shorting the economy of bits just as software EBITDA margins are about to run to 70% and rotating into the economy of atoms into mass unemployment.'
Rotating into the economy of atoms into mass unemployment. I don't understand.
I'm saying like if you're buying Disney right now saying like, 'Okay, they have the parks business, they have it, it's not as immune to AI disruption, but then if a bunch of people are unemployed...'
They're not going to go to Disneyland.
In theory. Well, we'll see. Theoretically.
They might go more. Who knows?
The fact that crypto and silver are getting clobbered at the same time as SaaS stocks makes me think that the AI disruption story is a little bit too pat of an explanation for what's going on. There might be something else going on in the global economy.
Yeah. This is why giving Anthropic full credit for the correction in The Journal, it really amps up the aura and the power.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean it's great for...
And people are running the numbers on like, okay, so you know, yeah, the valuation of Anthropic probably doubled, an extra 300 billion, but we're seeing like a trillion-dollar selloff. It's like, is that really the exchange rate that we're talking about here? We will see.
Jensen is pushing back on the 'AI will kill all software' just like he pushed back last year on the DeepSeek panic. Let's play this video of Jensen.
What software is... software is a tool.
There's this notion that the software industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI. You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them.
It is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself. Let's just give ourselves the ultimate thought experiment. Suppose we are the ultimate AI. Artificial general robotics. The ultimate AI, the physical version of us.
You could of course solve any problem because you know you're humanoid. You could do things. If you were a human or robot, would you use a screwdriver or invent a new screwdriver?
Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer? Would you use a chainsaw or invent a new chainsaw? It just don't... First of all...
Ideally, they don't use it at all.
A lot of disagreement in the timeline.
But do you understand what I'm saying? If you were a human or robot, artificial general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools? The answer obviously is to use tools.
And so now do the digital version of that.
If you were an artificial general intelligence, would you use the tools like ServiceNow and SAP and Cadence and Synopsys, or would you reinvent a calculator? Of course, you would just use a calculator.
Okay, I completely disagree. So like if you're... yeah, if you're a robot, you'll use the calculator, right? Like you'll just build the calculator if it costs you a lot of money to use the calculator.
So like I think like, you know, digital... that like agents will like use Salesforce, right? But if Salesforce becomes like very expensive, if it's already fairly expensive, at some point it becomes even cheaper to just build it themselves and then you run.
Yeah. Especially when they're like, 'I can work the equivalent of 2,000 lifetimes today.'
Yeah.
Yeah. Like obviously there's use for tools, right? Like OpenAI doesn't... or ChatGPT like will write out a Python script to run some like big math problem, right?
It's not going to like use tokens to...
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. At some point if a single prompt can say like, 'Build me a clone of this software and replatform me and onboard all my customers and employees to the new vibe-coded version of the software and maintain it for free.' Yeah, you have a problem.
But as long as the cost to reimplement the software and replatform and transition over...
John Palmer in the X chat and Deepo in the YouTube chat say, 'Would you watch TBPN or reinvent it? Would you invent a new podcast or listen to a podcast?'
Yeah, Caner in the chat was talking about trains, the indomitable will of trains or the unstoppable force of trains. I'm just being extremely bullish on trains. I don't know. Just trains. It was just like a very, very random train anecdote.
Yeah. I just like that there was a hype train for trains in the chat.
Schmosby says, 'You met me at a rather illiquid period of my life. It's rough out there.'
Yeah. I mean, going back to Jensen, like...
It's in Jensen's interest for the markets not to collapse, even if he doesn't necessarily believe this. Even if Tyler's take is right.
Yeah, it's all a matter of timelines. I think like the models are expensive to actually go and reimplement something very, very large and replatform when the current thing is working.
Did you see this screenshot of some mapping software suggesting you could go straight or you could go in a loop?
This is car guy software.
Yeah.
Who's car guy software? Like this map is probably made by somebody who just appreciates a nice drive.
This is actually Google Maps, but basically it's like you could go in a straight line or you could take a right and go in a massive loop and it's eight minutes slower and it's like, 'Would you like to go the slower route?' But yeah, if you want to do a hot lap, like go for it. I guess that's a good take.
We got to actually pull out the post from Amtrak. Amtrak hired a poster.
Oh, this is where the train...
Okay. Yeah. Sorry.
This was one of the posts of the week. Amtrak says, 'The unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.'
Yes, that's... Yes. Yes. Yes. This is what he was quoting. I thought it was so funny. 'The unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.' How many likes does that have? That's a banger.
54,000. That's great.
Let's go over to the Guinness tally. Tyler has it. He counted it up. He sat down. He studied the Doreš, Cash Patel, Cheeky Pint crossover episode with Elon Musk. And he counted three pints for Elon, four pints for John, and three quarters of a pint for Doreš. But there's a suspicious refill.
Yeah. So, I mean, it's a bit hard to really tell because...
So if you're tracking Doreš's, you know, volume, right, throughout the episode, it kind of goes down and he's at maybe like, you know, 80% full and then it goes back up.
That sounds like a refill.
But it's like a direct... So it's after a... there's like an ad read and then it goes back up.
So the question is like during the, you know, whatever happened during the ad read, right? Did he just like slam it?
He filled back up all the way or is it just kind of a, you know, partial fill?
I think you got to give him 1.75.
Okay. Can we pull up the screenshot?
Because the other debate was just around the actual size of the pints?
They look like full pint glasses.
So, yeah, if they look like full-size pint glasses. Another photo of Elon holding the pint. Yes. Three down. You got to pull that up, Tyler. Put it in the production. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. It's here. This is really important. Yeah. You see this? And it's like, okay, that looks pretty small in his hand. Little small. And then let's click over to Timothée Chalamet. Timothée Chalamet. I mean, he's a smaller person, but it looks the same size to me. I think these are fair pint glasses. I think these are accurate. I'm not seeing anything that's...
So Timothée is 5'10", Elon is 6'2". Okay. So, slight height difference, but I mean, I feel like... yeah, maybe... is really mauling that. Maybe. Yeah, I think they're just potentially wider. I think they have... and this is the kind of hard-hitting analysis that you could really only get on this show. No other technology media is really breaking down. I'm going pint analysis. I'm going normal-sized pints on this, but it is an interesting optical... Yeah, this one looks incredible. It's a little bit of an optical illusion. It's close. It's close. I mean, either way, even if it's a half pint, John drank four. So, that's two full pints. Even if it's a half pint, you know, I think these are full pint glasses. I'm going full pint.
Okay. You know who else is going full pint, John? Who? The founder of Crypto.com. Oh, yeah. Who just bought AI.com for 70 million. Let's go. Big, big, big... $7 million. He is running an ad for AI.com. We don't know what AI.com is yet, but I'm assuming you're going to be able to get some artificial intelligence there, much like you get crypto. It's a response. Haven't been people saying if you're in crypto, pivot to AI. Took it literally, right? I'll read through this. Chris, founder says, 'Plans to launch a new site with a Super Bowl ad this weekend. The founder of trading site Crypto.com just bought AI for 70 million.' He actually bought it last year in April. Highest price ever disclosed for a domain sale to launch a new entrant into the AI race.
The site will offer a personal AI agent that consumers can use to send messages, use apps, and trade stocks. Mhm. It's very, very American. Send messages, send memes, order DoorDash, and trade stocks with your new AI agent. 'Last year, an opportunity came up for me to acquire this domain. And I thought if you take a long-term view, 10 to 20 years, that AI is going to be one of the greatest technological waves of our lifetime, and so it would be a good investment.' Mars did not comment on the purchase price, which was confirmed by the deal's broker, Larry Fischer of GetYouDomain.com. Huge win for Larry. Larry, shout out to domainers. 'With assets like AI.com, there are no substitutes,' said Fischer. 'When one becomes available, the opportunity may never present itself again.' Of course, AI.com was pitching itself aggressively to all of the different labs. Everyone was like, you know, Anthropic's like, well, we may not have anthropic on X, but we do have anthropic.com. We do have claude.com. Who owns AI.ai? That's a good domain because Claude owns... or Anthropic owns claude.com, but they also own claude.ai and they reroute claude.com to claude.ai, which is normally the opposite of the flow that you'd go. You'd start with the .ai or the other TLD and then as soon as you get the .com, you would reroute everything to the .com. Anthropic, so AI... they're using the .ai as their main domain. They're rerouting. Maybe they're guilty. Oh yes, maybe they just like supporting Anguilla. Tyler is using AI.com to launch a personal AI agent. Is it... your Gen Z? Is this cheugy?
Wait, what is cheugy again? I don't know. Cheugy is like Gen Z slang. I think it's like millennial slang. Really? I don't know. It feels a little cheugy to me. I'll say that. I know enough about that. It feels like cheugy. It's chopped. It's Dubai. Dubai would want like the name of the thing, but it's chopped. Cheugy is a slang term often used by Gen Z to describe someone or something that is uncool, outdated, or trying too hard to be trendy. Yeah. Typically referring to millennial trends from the 2010s. So, it's a dig at millennials from the perspective of zoomers. Makes sense. It describes a post-basic aesthetic that is slightly cringeworthy, such as 'live, laugh, love' signs, skinny jeans, or side parts. Okay. Interesting. Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let's go over the mansion section. There's some good stuff today. Hit me. We got a bunch of stuff. So, Miami's Coconut Grove. They're calling it Billionaire's Grove. The ultra-wealthy buyers have discovered Miami's once-sleepy Coconut Grove neighborhood. Cam in the X chat says, 'Cheugy is being carried by millennials.' Okay, interesting. Thank you, Cam. Van says, 'What an unc term.' What an...
Once known as a bohemian enclave, Miami's leafy Coconut Grove neighborhood is quickly transforming into a billionaire's playground thanks to a string of mega sales in the area. Unlike hot spots like Miami Beach and Indian Creek, the Grove, with its massive banyan trees, winding streets, and small gated communities, was little known to people outside of Miami until recently. 'Most people hadn't heard of it unless they were local,' said real estate agent Danny Herzberg. 'Now, the secret is out in a big way.' And it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal mansion section. Since late December, Google co-founder Larry Page has spent $188.4 million on three properties in Coconut Grove. Well, businessman Jorge Mas, a co-owner of professional soccer team Inter Miami. Okay, but what did he actually do? Yeah, that's a good question. Look him up. He just says he's a businessman. Just getting introduced as a businessman is incredible. Well, that's a life. Jorge Mas, president of Real Zaragoza. Okay. Is he really just a soccer guy, I think? No. American billionaire businessman and chairman and largest shareholder of MasTec, a Miami-based construction and engineering firm founded by his father. Let's go. There we go. So he spent 100 million. Both of those properties are within a few miles of a waterfront estate billionaire Ken Griffin purchased in 2022 for 106 million, a Miami record. Locals are now competing with out-of-town buyers for homes, real estate agents said. And housing prices in Coconut Grove, especially for waterfront property, have surged. The median single-family home sale price in Coconut Grove was 2.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, more than doubling from under a million dollars, 995,000, in 2019. So more than double in just six years. A $10 million home is now a $50 million home. Wow. Live, work, play. Coconut Grove was a hub for nightlife, galleries, and artists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. But its retail and cultural scene faded. The housing market became kind of sleepy. Then about a decade ago, the neighborhood's reinvention began with the redevelopment of CocoWalk, an open-air mall, and construction of luxury condos was introduced. $20 million penthouses came to the Grove for the first time. When COVID struck, an influx of families relocating from out of town were drawn to the area, which is walkable with high-end restaurants and retail, but little tourist activity. Part of the Grove's appeal is its proximity to downtown Miami and the Brickell neighborhood, where Griffin is building a new headquarters for Citadel. The Grove also has prestigious schools like Ransom Everglades School and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart. Although the Grove isn't gated, there are a small number of gated communities within the neighborhood such as Ye Little Wood, the Moorings, and Camp Biscayne. 'They're subtle, hidden, lush. You don't know they're there. That's a big appeal.' The condo boom. New condo buildings have been at the epicenter of Coconut Grove's market resurgence. 'A decade ago, large new luxury units were relatively unknown in the area,' said a developer. 'People thought I was crazy,' Martin said. But his gamble paid off. Martin sold his own penthouse in the building for 17.8 million in 2023. Now CMC Group and Fort Partners are developing a Four Seasons-branded condo in Coconut Grove. Prices range from 5 million to 16 million, excluding penthouses, which are expected to sell for $120 million combined, although that is far more expensive than any other condo sold in Coconut Grove to date. 'We think it's achievable,' said Colombo. A great name for a Miami real estate person. The buyers looking for that before they would only consider Miami Beach. Now those buyers have Coconut Grove on the radar. And there's bigger homes, too. The average lot size in Coconut Grove is under an acre, which is smaller than lots in other luxury enclaves. That used to deter buyers who wanted more land. But since 2020, developers and end users alike have been expanding existing properties. People are starting to knock on the door of the neighbor next door and put together bigger assemblages. For example, Page bought an $11 million waterfront property owned by the late restaurateur Jonathan Lewis, then acquired an adjoining property for 15 million. Page also purchased a nearby property for 71.9 million from Aryeh Sloane Lindemann. A few waterfront homes in Coconut Grove are highly sought after, agents said. He recently sold a $16.5 million bayfront estate owned by Suzy Welch, the widow of former General Electric co-chairman and CEO Jack Welch. Wow.
I'm sick of Miami. Can we go to the mountains? What else we got?
Let's go to the mountains. What's the next story here? Well,
That is actually my general experience with Miami. It's amazing for a week.
Then I'm ready to mix it up.
Well, we could go to Manhattan or we could go to Beverly Hills. What do you have in mind? Neither are particularly mountainous, but I guess the hills are more mountainous. So, there's a California villa here built for James Cagney. Do you know the famed Hollywood film star James Cagney?
Never heard of him, John.
Wow. What were you doing in the 1930s and the 1940s when he was making gangster films such as Angels with Dirty Faces? Good movie.
He built the stone villa around 1939, property record. You don't know how to name movies like that.
Angels with Dirty Faces, coming to a theater near you. Buy your tickets today.
A year later. So he died in 1986. A year later, his widow, Frances Cagney, sold the property to the current owner, Steven Dunn, founder of the baby product supplier Munchkin. Dunn didn't respond to comment. Cagney lived in Beverly Hills while filming, but otherwise spent his time at his farms in upstate New York and Martha's Vineyard. Actor Robert Wagner, a friend of Cagney's, wrote in a 2014 Vanity Fair piece, 'The California house was unpretentious, but had a studio with a wooden floor and a record player where Cagney practiced dancing.' Wagner wrote. After purchasing the Beverly Hills estate, Dunn expanded the villa to approximately 6,000 square feet with three bedrooms, said a listing agent. In the 1990s, Dunn purchased an adjacent parcel, combining the properties into a compound spanning five acres. In addition to the main house, the property has a pool and a roughly 2,500-foot guest house. Over the years, Dunn has added guests. I don't think it has a moat, but does it have a lot of stone?
I know the stone was, you know, signaling maybe there's an alligator moat.
So, 38.5 million, six bedrooms, multiple houses, tennis, pool, and your favorite, pickleball.
Tennis, tennis court, and a pool.
It has a pool cabana with an outdoor kitchen. It's landscaped extensively. It has pickleball courts. What do you think? 38.5 million for a six-bedroom.
You like it? It's high at 38.5.
It looks like it would withstand a wildfire.
Yeah, that's true. That's true. The luxury market in Los Angeles is picking up after battling major headwinds, including a mansion tax and geopolitical uncertainty.
World in the chat says cop the estate, boys. New Ultradome.
We might have to, John. While we were live, our latest Ultradome, we had an offer in on. They're out for... We've had truly... If anybody has just a big building in the center of LA, we want to give you money for it. Let us do it. We've had such a fascinating time trying to get the entertainment industry in LA has collapsed. It's a ghost town. It's a modern Detroit. And yet we cannot find a building. I don't know why people like me. I keep talking trash about them in this town. You got to glaze. You got to triple glaze them. It's the best. It's the best town. We just want to build it even better.
Yeah. All we're trying to do is bring media back to Hollywood.
It's not degrading at all. And you say it like that. Maybe we should move to Milan. It's the gold medal housing market. They're saying the city co-hosting the Winter Olympics is a fashion hub with Europe's hottest luxury residential market. When the world's winter sports elite gather this week for the opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. They're starting this week.
Have you been to that arch?
No, I've never been to Milan.
I've never been to Milan. It's a fashion and design hub that has long been the country's main economic center. It is increasingly becoming a tourist destination, and in 2017, Italy introduced tax laws favorable to new residents, which led...
What about a data center? Yes, let's convert a data center with that original arch aesthetic.
For sure. Yes. Would really... would fix me, it would fix Tyler. I mean, imagine it. We don't know how to make data centers that look like this. Everyone's talking about... everyone's talking about putting them in space. Why can't we convert some of these...
We're not just putting them in Milan, we're putting them in the most expensive neighborhood in Milan.
That's Brera. Brera is a small exclusive neighborhood just west of the city's premier shopping district around Via Monte Napoleone. Residential real estate in Brera, where most homes are apartments, is currently the city's most expensive. Brera's high-end sector had an average sale price of $1,868 per square foot. What would it cost to put Colossus there? How many square feet is Colossus? I want to know how many because we got to go apartment by apartment racking NVL72s in Milan in the Brera neighborhood specifically. A renovated duplex sold for just over $28 million, the most ever paid for a Milan apartment. The adjacent Quadrilatero della Moda, or fashion district, home to brands like Gucci and Cartier, was once the city's most expensive, but Brera has suddenly surpassed it. It's more livable. Well, for now, until we put these data centers in there. You can walk to the shops, but you're not living in a shop. People want penthouses with views, and there's a couple other things in Brera. I don't know. Maybe that's the location of the next Ultradome.
Let me tell you about Apploving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Tyler, what's it going to cost me to put a Colossus-sized data center in the Brera district in Milan? The neighborhood in Milan that costs $1,800 per square foot.
Okay. So, apparently, Colossus one is only 785,000 square feet.
So, it's only going to be like 1.4, 1.5 billion.
I mean, to build a gigawatt of a data center is like 50 billion, right?
Yeah. That's like in that range. So, I mean, this is like...
It's a no-brainer. As is interviewing Doug O'Laughlin after earnings when he's suffering from Claude Code psychosis. Welcome to the stream, Doug. How are you doing?
I'm doing wonderful. How are you guys doing?
Can we pull up that video that John painstakingly made this morning that completely flopped? I'm very excited to have you on the show. It feels like that scene in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which I saw, where Sonic and Shadow team up and join forces to talk about CapEx and agentic coding. What's new in your world? Is Claude Code still top of mind, or are you still churning through the CapEx numbers from earnings?
Are you somewhat of an agent for Claude now? Like you work for Claude?
I do actually. I think I mostly just move my information back and forth, you know. I have pretty much, I think of it as like my manager, you know, like it tells me what to do and then I go bring the information and I bring it to my co-workers. I bring it back. All day I'm just on Claude Code.
How many prompts are you running right now? Do you have any threads going?
Okay. So, I have seven threads.
Seven that are running right now or not running, waiting for your input?
I'm waiting for my input.
We'll let you get back to it. Why don't you just have an eighth that just may... Let's talk about orchestration. Have you played with Gas Town? Are you thinking about abstracting yourself to a higher level?
Okay. So, Gas Town is pretty intense. I don't think Gas Town's going to work out. I think it's going to be agent swarms.
Okay. Okay. Explain the difference between Gas Town and Agent Swarms.
Okay. So, Gas Town is probably the most forward-looking thing I've read in a long while. He talks about how he created this self-healing tool process to essentially pass all these beads across and have all these workers and ways to self-repair the agent workflow process. And I read it and I was like, dude, this is brilliant and also crazy. It feels like the ravings of a madman. And then I proceeded, well, I was also in my madman era. Like before the New Year's when you had 2x usage, I pretty much was literally railing Claude Code constantly. I think I had four 14-hour days.
It was beautiful. Okay. So talk to us about what you're actually building because we're talking about SaaS apocalypse. It feels like there's a debate over build versus rebuild all...
your tools from scratch to save whatever your SaaS fees are.
Yeah, even yesterday was notable. OpenAI comes out with Frontier, which is... you look at that, you got to look at this graphic, which feels like it was made for a Fortune 500 CEO or management team to kind of understand it, and it's like, here's more SaaS to replace your other SaaS, right? It's like, you know, you got the system of record down here, you have a bunch of agents in between, and then you've got different applications that you're using. And meanwhile, Anthropic's just like, we're making a really smart digital guy that can do whatever you want.
Yeah, so I think there's like two really interesting ways. I think OpenAI is like the Fortune 500 selling it from the top, if that makes sense, and then Anthropic is like, here's your Claude Code agent, sell 20,000 of them. Did you see the Accenture partnership? I think that's really interesting. So like if you go back...
They're doing 30,000 people at Accenture. What do you mean?
Like 30,000 people at Accenture are going to learn how to Claude Code.
Oh, and then be deployed into different companies?
Maybe they just replace Accenture.
I mean, that's what they're going to be doing, I think.
Okay, wait. So what do you mean? If Accenture folks are using Claude Code, wouldn't they be using it on consulting projects internally to companies?
I think they're going to be using it internally, and then they're going to be doing all these consulting things. Because if you think about it, one of the issues is like, you know, when you had SaaS, one of the biggest issues of changing from one CRM to another was effectively being like, hey, everyone, you have to quit your jobs for like 10 months to figure this out. The implementation, like you'd have tons and tons of consultants to do that, and I think that's what the entire partnership is. So essentially, people are going to be implementing Claude Code, and there's 30,000 people at Accenture who's going to do it. And then on the other side you have Frontier, which is like the Fortune 500 way of being like, here's your plan, come to us and we'll build this whole thing, blah blah blah. So yeah.
But is reimplementing your CRM really the lowest hanging fruit for America's greatest companies? It can't possibly be. There must be new ideas, new problems to solve, new tools to build. Like why are we just going to shuffle the chips around the board instead of doing something productive?
Okay, so I think the system of record refresh is going to be really awesome because, you know, it honestly does feel kind of boomer if you think about it. It's like the big data now, everyone can have the big data now. But I think the automation that you've always dreamed of is actually going to happen, and the system of record is just going to essentially have hooks out to all these other things they're going to build on top of it, which is mostly like, you know, the Frontier thing. Yeah. And essentially all the information work is just going to be like all on the agent, and everything else is going to be like the place where it lives and is stored for fees.
Instead of me having someone... let me use my personal stack as an example. We use HubSpot for example. The sales team... or what's... how many more podcasts should Dylan do this month if we want to hit our goal?
That's totally different. We don't actually have like our, you know, the big... yeah, sure, how many more podcasts... like that, right? I could just vibe code it. It would just be like, hey, can you run this analysis for me? And in a perfect futuristic world, it'll go into the CRM, pull all the information of all of our inbounds, make it be like, hey, the day after Dylan goes on a podcast, there's like 25 people who come in, the conversion rate is X, you could price it at this. Dylan, quit your, you know, stop working and effectively just like hit the podcast, you know, like exactly. So...
You could do this with anything though, like just information, man. Like it's...
It's going to be pretty sick, but I think all the SaaS companies are going to essentially just become hooks for all the crap they built on top of it.
Yeah. Did you see Jensen yesterday was kind of defending some companies like SAP and ServiceNow and saying, 'Hey, if I was a really smart humanoid out doing work in the world and I needed a screwdriver, would I just invent a new screwdriver or would I just take one off the shelf?' And so that was like his defense. Tyler here took the other side of it and just said there's going to be a lot of situations where, especially in a software-only environment, it's easier to just build a very specific workflow that you need that you would have gotten from a SaaS provider versus, you know, you don't need to actually rebuild the entire platform.
Yeah. I think we're going to be building a lot of screwdrivers. Like things like the thing that's important is like, okay, you're not going to rent a truck, right? Like you're not going to build your own truck, but your own screwdriver, 100%. Like you're doing this big ginormous job, you need a hammer, you'd be like, 'Okay, pull it out of my belt.' Okay, but you're not going to be like, 'Uh, I'm about to move 700 tons of like here to here. Uh, I need to rent a truck.' You're not going to build the truck.
And so that's what I think the systems of record are going to look like. They're going to look like places where actual data that cannot be vibed, effectively, like what's your inventory, cannot have any hallucinations, right, like your ERP. But all of that will just be hooks for everything else because all the information is just like pulling, retrieving, making the correlation, running the charts, like fixing that all the time.
But then... but then how do you square the fact that a system of record is way less sticky if you have agents that can work around it to switch you over to a different system of record? Like that still ends up putting massive pricing pressure.
So to be clear, I don't think it's good for everyone. Like I think my favorite analogy of this is like there actually is a very old-school type of software that's like existed for a long time. All the stuff on mainframes, it's all out there. Yeah. And you know, like funny enough, mainframes still grew like 6% a year or whatever. Someone has the real number from like 2002 to 2020.
So like they're going to grow, but it's just going to be like a very different vision of the world that I don't think people are ready for.
And the adjustment period is the big problem because all the stocks are priced like they're not going to be mainframes.
And also just for context, mainframes are like, hey, there's one of each company now.
There's one each. So I think with all these, whether you're a system of record or you're some vertical software, you're going to need to show insane revenue growth in a truly AI-native product, otherwise investors I think are going to continue to not be able to create a super compelling narrative why you should own it during this period of uncertainty.
Yeah. I mean, pretty much what happens, and we're going to go like investor brain, when anything goes X growth, the multiple goes massively down.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you're actually coding, what you're building, like what the software is? Because from the demos that I've seen that you've posted, it feels much more like you have an agent that can do knowledge retrieval, data transformation, build dashboards, charts, and like knowledge work as opposed to truly replacing software tools at this point. But have you built anything that's like long-lived and runs like daily, or is it like something you keep revisiting because it's now a piece of software that does a job?
So the Claude Code commits, the Claude Code commits is now software that lives and runs every single day. That's like a scraper, right? And then that lives in a database and that will run forever. There's like a lot of other tracking price data tool stuff, like a lot of the scraping that we're like... that is not like publicly available. Like we do a lot of that. Like we had a data team just do that, and now effectively we can really accelerate that, so everyone can do that. Sure. There are other little things that I think are like heuristics, like little skills of like I have blind spots that I consistently make over and over, and I'm like, hey, I know this blind spot's an issue, blah blah blah, you should like consider this in this case. I don't think it's like the galaxy brain software, and we're very far from there because if you actually play with these tools a lot, context rot is real.
Yeah. So... is it... how fast is it getting better? Because it feels like we're seeing the meter go...
Scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary, scary. So I started vibe coding with Claude 4, and it just wasn't... or sorry, Opus 4 on Claude Code, and it just could not one-shot...
websites in the way that 4.5 and 4.6 can, and if it just marginally improves from here, it feels like why would I pay for like any kind of UI/UX if it's just going to be generated at a good enough quality?
Yeah. How did you process the new models this week? 4.6, 5.3. What's the review?
If you don't, if you can't immediately notice the difference between 4.5 and 4.6, start polishing your resume. You are cooked.
Yeah. Yeah. You just got automated by an agent.
You got... um, I think 4.6 was a little disappointing, if I'm honest with you.
I think it might have been Sonic 5.
Oh, that's what people are saying. That's the conspiracy theory, right? But what does that mean?
Um, the original Sonic 5 leaks were that it's like as good as Opus 4.5 but with 1 million context window and specifically trained for agent swarms.
Sure. So wait, yeah, but practically does that just mean like same quality but faster, cheaper at least for a token?
And then they make more money.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Better margins. How are the margins looking for the labs right now? There's been, there was a bunch of like FUD around it, but it seems like from all the leaks it's been like 50, 60, 70%. Pretty good.
Yeah, if you X out all the free users, it's always really good, right? But honestly, Anthropic has no free users, or like on a relative basis. So their margins are ironically like, kind of on a like-to-like basis, kind of not as good as you think.
Yeah. Um, can you break down a little bit more of the thesis of the 'Claude Code is an inflection point' article? What the key takeaway, who you're speaking to, what update you wanted to share, and then I want to go into some of the pushback and your response to that.
Yeah, sure. Um, so first I think the thing that makes me really excited is the first time since Chain of Thought, I feel like we have a new scaling that feels very, very different and hardcore, and I can actually see my entire life day-to-day change.
Um, I think I can expect some version of a Claude Code harness to be effectively all my information work from now till the future.
I am a daily user. I was not a daily user before, and I expect to continue to be one.
And that's kind of what happened with the reasoning models. It went from like you could ask it stuff but it might hallucinate to like the answers are good, like you can pretty much rely and there's going to be citations and like it's going to be 99.999% usable for things. So you just have a question, you get that, maybe not great at certain things, but in general like it delivered on the initial like chat experience that I think a lot of people were looking for, and then they became... Yeah. Um, how much do you think Anthropic cares more about winning in consumer than they've let on to date?
Uh, no, I don't think so.
Everyone, uh, everyone who works there is exactly like what you think it is. Yeah.
They're exactly who they say they are.
