I see a large IP on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success. The place 3000. Double.
Right. That's misinformation. Morty clearing order inbound. Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five totally. We are experts. Founder Mel. 5.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Double blades. Triple blades. Double kill. Cop is waste. Team Deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right. Clearing order inbound. Get up.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark clearing order inbound. Five good. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder and... You're watching TBPN.
Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026. We are live from TBPN 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 doubted it, did you? You doubted, 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.
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 it 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 talked to, you know, 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.
Which is why I asked Schulte yesterday.
What are free limits going to be?
Well, that's why you asked him that.
Just, it was just random that you asked. I 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 is the free experience going to be like Sunday if somebody downloads the app, sees the ads, they're like, I want...
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, like, 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 and...
To me, I don't care as much about hype.
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.
I understand why that one...
Is Free Cash. Get paid real money.
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 GPT-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.
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 TBPN 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's 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, 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, you know, prompt engineering. But the 4o fans really care about that specifically. I think there's some sort of parasocial relationship, 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, I got to bring back Clippy.
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.
Which is very, very strange.
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 to the, 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, you know, 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 like 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, and 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.
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.
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?
Not as, 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. Yeah. Just not as, not as sexy of 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, yeah, it's getting beat up a little bit now, they have like that massive position in OpenAI that feels like fully in solid place. They got the IP, they got, you know, 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. 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...
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.
Open up Reels. It's AI. Like, they are recommending all sorts of stuff and...
Yeah, so much inference. LA Purchaser says he could, 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, it wasn't, nothing about the earnings, like people can feel the emotion and the energy right there wasn't, they can...
There wasn't anything to, like, obviously the business is doing great, but there wasn't anything to, like, 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, the 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...
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.
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, you know, 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 kind of the, that'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 like falling back to first principles and just talking about...
Yeah. He keeps repeating, like, oh, if you just look at, like, physics.
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, Manolis 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 know, 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...
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 like during the workday with people in San Francisco. So it was somebody who would like 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, yeah, it feels like 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, you know, they seemed a bit smaller than normal pints maybe. 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...
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 like 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, like, yeah, you need massive, you know...
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. Apollo, 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.
Yeah. They can hire Ilya for like an hour.
I know. One hour consulting call. Get...
He's got to get on. Get in.
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Tae Kim 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.
Tae Kim 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.
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.
Behind Disney's search for a lasting successor to Bob Iger.
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 go 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.
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.
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...
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. We got to talk about the Utah...
Have you heard of the world before?
I've never heard of Dirty Soda before. Have you heard of this?
Yeah. Yeah. This is big in Utah.
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.
You have friends who live in Utah?
It's like soda and they put like cream in it and stuff, right?
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.
Really? I didn't know pebble ice was at risk.
No, no, no. I'm talking about, I'm just saying 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...
It's 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. Yeah.
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.
Yes. 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.
Okay. Okay. At least originally. 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.
A matina. Mexican Coke. Yeah, it's fun.
Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. 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.
Wow. 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 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... now she has... 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 her 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 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... pro magazine.'
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 he 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.
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.'
That's crazy. So over the top.
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 a 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.
Yeah. 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.
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.
Do not break... exposed. 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?
Oh, he got 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.
Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. 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?
