You're watching TVN. Today is Monday, October 5th. There are 80 days till Christmas. We are live from the TVPN alone, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Tennis money, save book, easy, corporate card, bill, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We are 80 days till Christmas. Okay, so October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas.
Totally. And it's because everyone is gonna be looking so close. But there's a distraction feel so far. But but there's a distraction. And yeah, you're right. Halloween. Halloween. If you go up to someone, you say, "Hey, there's only 80 days till Christmas." They'll be like, "Why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween?" They'll start looking at you like you're crazy. You're not crazy. They're crazy for thinking that it's not worth counting the days till Christmas in October. There's only 80 days. Get ready. Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas. That's right. That's what I've always said. So, keep counting down those days. Ignore the distractions. Or don't, but we will. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Okay. Who wants to play these AI generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted a uh article that said, "I don't want to play your m your AI generated mod that puts Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2 inside of Minecraft." They don't want to play them. Tyler, what do you think? Do you want to play these or did I have to force you?
I'm actually playing it right now.
Okay. Well, Tyler's playing one of these AI generated mods. And it's very interesting because the mods are uh Whoa. We got the infinite loop. Infinite loop. Very cool. Uh anyway, production team's working on it. Anyway, uh we've seen a lot of these. We talked about them. We pulled up a random one uh that we actually did an Instagram reel of of uh I think it was uh Minecraft in Elden Ring. I've never been a big Minecraft person, so it wasn't uh it wasn't big for me. This uh is uh Tyler's playing Modern Warfare 2 in Minecraft. But what's actually going on here? Tyler, explain like how did you get this installed? What is what is this?
Uh, yeah. So, so from my understanding, um, it's basically like the there's no you're not really like putting one game into another. It's fully like a a Rust engine and then you're pulling assets from both games and like kind of pulling them together somehow.
So, like it I I had to buy Modern Warfare 2 on Steam.
Yeah. It's using the actual game assets and the same thing for Minecraft. Like it's using the actual assets. It found them online.
Interesting. And then I basically had Codex like set it up, wire it So, I can run it on Mac.
But it's like fully featured. Like I can I can mine, I can build.
You can build using the Can you get a nuke?
I don't know if I can get a kill streak. That's the question. I got to figure it. It's not Modern Warfare 2. Doesn't make any sense.
Um, there are actually a whole bunch of different uh different ways people are modding things. It's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. like the classic like the most like the the most approved or like company approved mod might just be uh something like you know there's a Fortnite skin and you get to and I don't know if they actually did like a Batman skin or Spider-Man skin but those skins come over and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over. It's purely just okay the Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider-Man looks like. They made a Fortnite model out of the Spider-Man like character and then you can play as them and everything is integrated fully. You're not going to risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Um, now these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways.
Yeah. I'm playing. Could you try swimming?
Okay. Yeah. Swimming is a little bit broken and that's the nature of the the vibe coded slops.
Yeah. Are you drowning though?
I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water.
There's no Yeah, the the mechanic is because Yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare 2, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know. Um but uh uh some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. others uh are actually merging two games. For that Mario and Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, uh the mod actually borrows a subsystem called lib smd from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll we keep politics out of video games. Yeah. Please. Uh so what they'll do is they'll they'll they'll download the actual binary like the code that is on the cartridge. They will convert that into just a file that's on a computer. You can run that in an emulator but then they can actually reverse engineer the underlying code from what has been compiled. So you get basically a bunch of ones and zeros and there are tools that will look at that and work backwards to understand what the actual game logic is. Uh, and so an example is like in the game code you might have like health equals 100, but in the compiled code it might just be like some memory address like x like 0x 1 2 3 4 fc and and then you might work backwards in the decompilation step to figure out that that's the health. So a bunch of things happen in the game's played as things are changed and updated that game state is then is then sucked out into the decompilation file. Interestingly the NSA is involved. No, we can't keep politics out of game development because they're actually a lot of these game modders are actually using software from the National Security Administration, the NSA. So, the NSA has a GitHub with an open source project called uh uh what what is it actually called? It's called Gedra, and it's a it's on the National Security Agency's uh uh GitHub. It's a it's a software framework for reverse engineering software. Uh, and so you point this thing at the game and you wind up getting more of the code and then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler, okay, I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can trickshot this. No, no. Oh, he did it. He did it. Come on, Tyler. Why little? Can we get a Can we get a content warning? I think it's Minecraft. Anyone at home focus game? Um, but there there is something else going on now that I hadn't seen before. I don't know if this was popular in the modding community before. Uh, but there there is a there is a version uh you might have seen uh we and we can try and pull it up. Ark web. It's uh Batman Arkham Knight pass through Spider-Man mod. So you play as Spider-Man in the Batman game and you're So you're in Arkham and what's funny about this is that the two games feel very similar. So they mesh very well together. Um but from an intellectual property perspective, this should never happen because of course Marvel is DC or it's Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney and uh Batman is owned by Warner Brothers. These two companies are direct competitors and so they should never really be collabing in this way. Um but the fascinating thing about this is that it's not just they took the Batman game and created a Spider-Man character. It's actually running both games and then it's passing data between the games to create this experience of being Spider-Man in Arkham Knight. So what's happening is like the mod goes into the Batman city Gotham grabs all the geometry, all the collision data, all the all the geometry of like where that building is. It takes that and in real time it passes it to the Spider-Man game which is actually running a different physics engine. So it has to translate all of that. Also the two games use different uh they use different uh coordinate conventions, different axes and different units of length. So, it has to translate all of that, create that in Spider-Man and then uh and then also keep both of them running like uh the controller input because normally if you have a controller on a video game, it'll just be on one uh one game at a time and if something's in the background, but you can see there's like yeah bugs already. Uh and this is like part of the problem. Um and then uh and then it needs to actually merge the graphics and so the games use different graphics systems too. This feels like it'd be so much easier if it was two games that were built on the same underlying technologies. Uh, but through the power of SLOP, they're able to sort of merge these two in real time and get them actually running at seems like near 60 fps. Um, and then even when you go into they don't show the fighting, but I think when you go into the fighting, you switch into like the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider-Man system. So, you're using Arkham's free flow free flow combat. It's very, very odd. Um, but the end result, it looks great and it feels like it's almost ready to serve as a reason to be like, "Oh, I I love that game. I want to play it again. Why don't I give it another spin?" Sort of a new game. Plus, you get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered, rebuilt, could be an interesting reason to go back into a game that you loved with a different twist this time. And stuff like this happens all the time. I mean, the the even like the latest sequel to Spider-Man was the same city, but just a different character. Uh, and so some different mechanics, some different story elements, but a lot of the same assets. Uh, but it was still a reason to jump back in for a lot of uh, players. Um, but all of this is the classic 9090 rule. Have you heard of this?
Coined by uh, one of the greatest of all time, Tom Carill at Bell Labs. uh he said when it comes to software engineering the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time because you you get 90% of the way there and you're like great I only have 10% and then you spend even more time on that last 10% no matter how much you estimate it things always grow in scope and so when you think about the the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything rel relative to We're looking at five years.
You're looking at five years.
You're looking at five years. Yeah. Uh here's Minecraft in GTA. Similar the sort of multiplayer first person shooters, you could imagine actually that being like relatively straightforward to get a a working version that would be fun.
It all just depends on how you scope it.
Yeah. Because if you're just talking about you're only changing the textures, like you're using the same model from from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not going to introduce too many bugs. But as you as you include a different physics mechanic, a different explosion, like all of a sudden you're introducing so much risk that you could fall through the map or things could not collide correctly. You got to go rewrite that collision software that triggers something else then. And and all of these demos, none of them show the actual like playing the full game. Like there's a mod to bring uh Minecraft into Skyrim. It's called Skycraft, I think. And in the developers documentation for like the open- source implementation of this mod, it says like don't start the game normally, like do not try and play the opening sequence. It will break. you should start with like the alternate starting point that starts you further into the game because it's uh it's so broken. Um and that's just the nature of being in the slop era. So, um the interesting thing is that all these mashups they they feel like tailor made for the short form video era because you watch one of these for 30 seconds, 60 seconds and you're like, "Wow, that's amazing. I have dual nostalgia. I love GTA 5. I love Minecraft. Put them together. Double love. It's amazing. Everybody is uh you know getting like millions of likes on these videos, but uh no one has actually played these all the way through. No one is sitting back down and being like, "Okay, yes, this is actually as good as GTA 5, which a lot of people played for a hundred hours or more." Same thing with Minecraft. Uh the base game remains dominant in terms of like actual entertainment value. This is this is pure uh meme value. And so it feels like it's another Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, but for video games. And the Harry Potter Balenciaga video by Demon Flying Fox that was released March 15, 2023.
Can you believe it's been three and a half years since that? That's a while, right? That's a while.
Yeah. It makes me think how how did they make it at that time?
That was AI video. That was the best AI video was. But what they did was it was you would train a dedicated model on every character. So they would train a model on Harry Potter or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically just his face and then they would use AI generated imagery to to generate something that looked like a you know sort of art station style Balenciaga runway show in a uh in a Harry Potter scenario like at Hogwarts. And Midjourney at the time was pretty good at that style. the the the the the dark like sort of odd backgrounds. Like it was okay if it had some hallucinations in the background because it leaned into that because it's a dark fashion show in a castle. You don't really have a strong reference point for that. And then they would run the face swap and then they would animate that image just a little bit. And then there was a ton of editing to actually to to make it so that you would never linger on a single frame for more than a second or two. And so you'd move on. Um, but what was the conclusion from seeing that there? I mean, at the time people were like, "We're going to be watching in full AI movies next year." What was your conclusion? Did you have one from the Balenciaga?
Yeah. I mean, it's just like um these are all like very novel ideas, but at some point like now I've seen like I've seen a bunch of different games that have been ported to each other and it's like, okay, there's another. It's like, oh yeah, you put Minecraft and Mario and I kind of get the idea. And it's notable that like Flying Fox did many many sequels and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree. Uh and and still has a YouTube channel and I think posts a bunch of stuff, but uh we didn't get Daniel Radcliffe at a Balenciaga runway show and we also didn't get a fully AI generated movie uh within three and a half years. Um, and so it was still a heavily important tech demo though. And um, I do think, you know, there will be a breakout video game mod that sees heavy assistance from AI in the near future. Um, but the key is like crafting a really innovative uh, strategy loop. Like that's what Dota 2 was. It was a spin-off of uh, World of Warcraft, I believe. Uh, it was a it was a mod um that that came from there. or maybe it was from another game, I forget. But um uh there are plenty I mean Counter Strike started as a Half-Life mod. like there are clearly games that can be birthed from that and the fact that you have AI tooling to speed that up, you're just moving a lot of people into the indie developer category who can move things faster. They're still going to wind up spending, you know, 99.999% of their time in the last 1% if they want to break through. But it's it's cool that many people will see this and be like, I got to make a mod. I got to make something. I've always had this idea for this game and now I can actually go and get started. although they will obviously need to uh lock in for a long time to get something actually polished.
Uh anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Um let's move over to some news in the timeline. Uh Theo is optimistic about this. Millennial age gamers are about to become more pro AAI than the average SF tech bro. uh because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare 2. Um I I do think some people will see this and be like, "Ah, this is cool. I like this." But uh there are still plenty of gamers who are like, "I don't like AI at all for a bunch of reasons." And and they and they bring that over. Um there there was an interesting chart of I think I think for I think for the gaming community to become broadly pro AAI a very wellloved franchise has to release a new game that is noticeably better or bigger because of the technology.
And until then, I think people are just going to be like, you know, again, these sort of combinations are cool, but uh until I I don't well, one, I don't think they can really get users because of all the IP issues, blatant IP, but uh but yeah, I I think you're going to need to see like GTA 7 and it's the entire world, right? And for for people to get excited. And I don't I don't know that that that's even a path that they'll take. I like that uh lawyers are extremely pro AAI now because they're like I'm going to get so much business from this. Um yeah uh yeah is this uh Zelennials FTW shared by Antonio Garcia Martinez in from the the economist seeing a monster quote how serious do you think the risks of AI are of AI causing serious harm? everyone is basically moving to the right. They're more uh they're more worried just in the past two weeks, three weeks. Um just through from August 28th to September 18th, except for millennials aged 30 to 44. They saw Jacob Coxin. They saw Daario Amade. They saw the SNL sketch. They saw, you know, the Ezra Klein interview and they were like, "Yeah, I was worried before, but I'm good now." Which is kind of crazy.
Less worried than ever, apparently, according to the economist.
No, it's it's it's a narrative violation.
Yeah, it's a narrative violation. But, uh, yeah, everyone else is uh is is getting increasingly more worried. And of course uh the top of that chart uh that is the voter base 45 and up. So um if you're if you're seeing even 65 plus move to you know 40% very serious that's that's going to move uh that's going to move some elections.
Jim Proer says it's a fascinating outlier. My hypothesis, we're the gen most comfortable with this degree of technology change and uncertainty due to coming of age through the internet and mobile.
Yeah, I mean a lot of millennials are are in a are in a very fortunate position with like not gotting not getting caught off guard by brain rot and slop and and screen time addiction. It's like we sort of got brought up in the craziest era and then have and then have seen the the the the ch the children data and can fight back on that. So I think a lot of people in their 30s and 40s are like, "Yeah, I'm set up for success. I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one." That type of thing. So uh it feels a little bit more uh like there there's a danger, but it's known. It's like uh it's like we also grew up with cigarettes, but we were like yeah, we knew we knew the risks of cigarettes, so we were like, "Yeah, we're we're gonna treat that accordingly."
Only when you're drunk. All right. Sean Frank, our first guest of the show today.
Let's go through this when he's here.
We can go through it live.
No. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. I'm agree. I'm agreeing. We're going to go through it right now. You're like, "Actually, I decide when we go through." Yeah. Let's bring this up when we get to them. Uh the whole the whole segment. Uh yeah. Yeah. I mean, whatever you want. I think I think the the the interesting crossover here. I mean, we're going to talk about data brokerage. Sean Frank got an offer to sell Ridg's data. He turned it down. Um but, uh we we'll talk to him about the the the the rationale there. Uh the interesting thing is from Dan Romero. Uh he thinks that there's a private equity opportunity to buy old video game IP and then offer a $10 unlimited mod license per game or $100 per bundle. So um so yeah, like taking all these old games and then setting them up for uh for you know use in AI systems. So, when you go to a model and you say, "I want to make a first-person shooter that I can hop in a car and it's a racing simulator, and then I also want to be able to skateboard." Instead of needing to write all of that logic from scratch, you could just pull like the actual racing game that they licensed off the shelf. Uh, Counter-Strike 2, I mean, Valve has has created a a insanely robust modding uh, system, and they actually created a new mode in CS2 called Rush, and it's built entirely in their modding system. So, they're like leaning into this in like a closed source way, but they will allow you to build an entirely new game in their game. And there's a lot of examples like that. Everything from Roblox to Fortnite to, you know, plenty of others that have had modding tools for a long time. The question is just like how do you interface with the uh with with the models directly.
Suds says looking for 500 megawws minimum of 250 max 2 gawatt of powered land for a port go company is completely price insensitive and has billions behind it. Ideally electrified shells already built. Uh my first thought here was isn't 2 gawatt data center going to cost you like $100 billion. So so you're like you're like going to buy a house and you're like I'm very price insensitive and they're like cool well the house is you know $50 million and you're like well I have $5 million but I'm price insensitive. Um uh yeah so there's I'm sure there's coke. It's like I bought some stock and poor And so when you're getting into when you're getting into two gigawatt territory. So Chase Lock Miller goes I think we can help. It's like there's just not that many not that many folks that can get you uh two gigawatts. But uh worth a shot. Worth a shot. I mean he got half a million views on this. He probably got to the right people. Yeah, right. So effective. I wonder I wonder who is who's spinning up two gigawatts because wasn't wasn't Meta's uh Hyperion or Prometheus site like two gigawatts. This is like hyperscaler territory, right?
Like there there are just aren't that many like startups that could be like it's funny to to to you know own meta and be like my portco like portco is very like small coded right but you're just like yeah like my port. So, Hyperion is designed to deliver 5 GW.
Okay. Okay. So, it's not meta. We ruled them out.
2 gawatts by 2030 is their plan. And then 2032 is when they get to five.
So, um you know, there's this uh there's this news story going on in uh in um No, it is it is it is it is noteworthy that um you can uh you can have billions behind you and and still not have anywhere close to what you need to secure that kind of capacity.
Yeah. Fun fact, uh if you had a one gigawatt data center, pretty significant, and you were willing to burn the entire Amazon rainforest, you could power it for 35,000 years. Not bad, right? There's a lot of worry that the Amazon's going away because of Balsson. People are worried the lungs of the earth. We need to maintain the we need to maintain the uh the Amazon. But it is an incredibly Would you defend the Amazon?
I think so. It is a hard trade-off because every other industrialized country was like, "Yeah, we burned all our resources. Now you're the last one with them. Don't burn them." So, it it is a tough It's like a It's like a you know, uh industrialization for me, but not for thee. That's the That's the real tension there. Anyway, um what's Will Manita saying? He says, "Probably worth noticing that all the guys that were shilling high fee SPVS 6 months ago are all now all have power data centers they'd love to sell you." Um, interesting. How are those high fee SPVS doing now? Probably. Okay.
Um, uh, John, question for you.
Do you think it's fair game to ash your Nature Valley bar out of the window of a car, or is that kind of like too close to living? It does produce an insane amount of crumbs.
Have they never thought to do a V2 of that product?
It's like I know. I know. I mean, for how how around Nature Valley bars were, it does feel like they've completely fallen off.
I haven't seen I like I used to see a Nature Valley bar once a day.
Yeah, they did sort of have one in stock. It's kind of fallen off.
What happened? What happened? Tyler, can you do some research into Nature Valley sales at the same time over the last 30 years, my entire life? Just from just from a health perspective, doesn't the insane crumbliness of the Nature Valley bar give you sort of reassurance that you're eating like actual food? Because a lot of protein bars these days are so mashed up, you're like, I don't know what kind of ingredients are in there. You had to you had to destroy like 50 cows and 12 pigs and this much milk and this much corn to like make this amalgam. And with the Nature Valley Bar, it looks like what it is. It's just like bunch of says one a day, baby. They haven't gone anywhere.
Putting up numbers still.
Uh the other uh resource people haven't really been talking about at all, maybe they should, is construction paper. Selene says, "You don't really hear about construction paper much anymore. Back in my day, this was always felt like it was top of mind almost constantly." Top of mind. As a child, certainly. So, I know construction paper useful for just drawing on. It's thicker. Yeah. The ink doesn't go through the paper. That's a benefit. But were people actually constructing things with it? I know people would make those those loops like those chain daisy chains around holidays, perhaps Christmas.
Yeah, it's more of a Christmas ornament than anything else. But I don't know that I I it it feels like if you were building like a real diarama, you would get out the cardboard. So maybe maybe maybe cardboard just squeezed construction paper a little bit. And I mean, have you seen those cardboard cutting saws? the it's like a saw designed to rip through cardboard because people get a lot of boxes. But that's also had the knock-on effects of if you're if you're an ambitious child and you're trying to construct something significant that might last the test of time, you might forego the construction paper in lie of the cardboard. What do you think is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper? That's interesting because because there's an eco angle there, John, right? It's like people getting a lot more e-commerce products today. There's boxes coming through the house all the time.
Post scarcity on cardboard in most households, especially ones with children because you're ordering a lot of things online. There's a lot more cardboard around. I know the last few construction projects I did, cardboard was my material of choice.
So, maybe that's what's going on here.
I'm glad we got to the bottom of it. I'm trying to find uh the best way to get exposure in the market to construction. Construction paper.
Uh it's almost a perfect store of value over the last five years. There's Fab Fabria Italana. Okay. Lais, Ed, Aphina, Apheni. Okay. Um it's been completely It's a half a billion dollar company. Completely flat for the last five years. So, more on this on the next episode. Uh, we we got to talk about topic crawler.
Iman spent half an hour going back and forth with chatbt so it could make me a tool that spits out link for any topic he's researching and it actually gave me exactly what I wanted in the picture below. And then the followup only two minutes in and I realized how dumb this is. reinventing the reinventing using the tool to create use the tool to create the exact same tool. I mean, the funny thing is I I don't know if this was I don't know if this was like created as a joke from the start and the whole idea was like let's just be funny uh in the first post because the the punch line will be in the second post or if he actually went through this. But uh it does speak to the fact that like a lot of the a lot of the functionality is really buried like just the just the ability to like put something on a cron job is like not advertised anywhere. You know this, right?
Yeah. Like if you if you if you want to like get a a weekly digest of like where the swells are the biggest across the world for surfing like you can totally do that. You don't need to build the tool. You don't need to write a line of code. You don't need to host anything. It doesn't need to use anything else other than chach. But you would never know that from any of the marketing really because there has never been just like a crown jobs are here or like whatever you'd call it like scheduled tasks are here and there's like a national campaign. very very difficult as the models get uh and the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people. Um but it's very fun.
Very cool that you can build your own Google in in like you know 30 minutes.
Have you seen uh let me Google that for you?
So it's this uh it's this website let me google that.com and you type something in and then you generate it and then you have this link. you can copy the URL and um and I'll share it in the production chat because it's a it's a funny it's a funny you gota you got to do the actual the actual thing and so you send this to someone if they ask you something really obvious like how do I get to how do I use chat QBT and and then it it moves the mouse I think you click the first one that was empty I think you need the second one the second one has the actual the actual punch want there. Here we go. So, how do you use chat GPT? You send them this. Let me Google that and it and it just Googles it for you and then you just and it just loads Google or whatever. Uh you can close it. But um it it literally just goes and like types it in for you. But anyway, um what are people putting in their IRA lately?
Yes, babe. Our retirement is in Charizard. I have a little bit in my Roth and 401k, but we can fly or cr But we fly or crater with Charizard. Fly or crater is funny funny terminology. Uh, is there a way to uh to get a Charizard into a tax advantage retirement account? Has that been done yet?
Anyway, there must be. Well, if you are investing, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You got to invest like the best. You got to do it.
Uh, this hit me over the weekend, John. This was this was big.
One horse pulls 4,000 lbs. Two horses p working together pull 32,000 lb. And it's getting community noted.
Record dead weight pulls by pairs of draft horses top out around 17,000 lbs. Okay. Near 32,000 lbs. The popular anecdote this is based on which is Dave Ramsey also uses 8,000 pounds for one horse not for wrong on every dimension but the idea stands I mean it made me think John it made me think what what are we doing with just one horse here we got to get two horses permission permission to order another horse a twin horse no wait did you see the uh did you see the the the Beverly They're auctioning off the be the that bear sculpture that's on Rodeo Drive.
This was on uh this was on Facebook Marketplace. They want $95,000 for it. Do you know what I'm talking about? The GM.
Is that a bullish Is that a bullish indicator? They're like, "We have no use for this bear anymore."
Maybe. Maybe. I sent it to Buddy. I can pull it up. But we can also move on. Talk about that later. It would be cool to get a large statue of a bull and a bear here in the Ultradome fighting, you know, battling over market conditions. I'd like it. I'd like it. Uhion this is a lot of people have been talking about this. We didn't want to have to talk about it because it's not, you know, the the nicest topic, but we'll talk about it.
Why is tossing boiling oil down a ladder during a siege always a one-time trick? If I were being sieged, I would have 200 guys all boiling three or four cauldrons of oil each. If you come anywhere near the walls, you're getting scalded.
Yeah. You should just have like a continuous flow of oil pouring down. It was or or a closed loop. Oh, like a waterfall. Instead of a wall, you have a waterfall of hot oil that's just constantly there.
That would have completely reshaped the It would have one shot. One shot the Your defenses would have been impregnable. Uh, fascinating. Anyway, uh, the million-dollar homepage is reborn every decade in a different form. A Tik Tok girl is selling ad space on her wall to pay for tuition. They're calling it the TBPN effect. Uh, not bad, kid. She says she's selling ad space on her wall. Is this presumably uh in her dorm room or something? $500 for one huge spot, 50 bucks for a smaller slot. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Maybe pretty good play. Resourceful. Yeah. Million-dollar homepage was a was a really good bit back in the day. You'd buy individual pixels and people have people have redone it a few times. I mean, I guess the the the Reddit the place was sort of a free version of that, but uh it was it was it was pretty cool. Uh you can I mean Delta just taking blow after blow because you can now watch Cheeky Pint on your United flight again. Really really just showing that United is is a you know is a serious highly commercial airline. They don't want you watching movies, TV, music. They want you watching the Cheeky Pine archive.
You got to learn from Susan Lee.
And I'm hoping this means that we're going to see more episodes of Cheeky Pine hitting the timeline. And it's been about a feels like a six-month holiday, but it's the hangover.
You take a break. The hangover had a hangover. They're taking a break, resting it off, sleeping it off. Yep. They'll get back in the pub soon. That's right. Oracle is putting $10 million in the N into the Nashville Symphony, re reinstating the 2026 2027 season and recalling musicians and staff who were set to be furled October 18th amid a financial emergency. That's great. Give it up for Oracle and the Nashville Symphony. It shows a real sense of civic resp. I love this. This is great. More tech companies should do this. Go and solve little problems like this. Everyone loves it. Um, what else is going on? Uh, the Brits have turned their back on their day ones. British people are apparently buying Chinese knockoff Land Rovers. Uh, especially lookalike Range Rovers. They love Chinese cars. The Ju7 made by Chinese Cherry. I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week. Now, we got mosquitoes in the Ultra. Take off. We got mosquitoes. Get the flies. Heads up. Heads up. You think you can get it? No, I don't want to. Go for it. Run around. I'll read this while you fight the mosquitoes. It's a
Nice little side quest. Get the tracking cam on him while he goes and hunts it down. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaking of CrowdStrike, I mean, incredible performance. George Kurtz and CrowdStrike Racing put on a clinic yesterday. Incredible comeback. They had some setbacks early on in the race, but made it back to the top spot and won the entire season in LMP2. What a year. What a year for CrowdStrike Racing.
Well, let's go over to this. I want a review of the Temu Range Rover. Jordy, you got to let me know what you think. When Mark Thulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jaecoo 7 was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. The 33-year-old from England's South Coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese SUV at the equivalent of around 50K, half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is visually similar?
We'll see. Its resemblance to the 56-year-old British luxury brand has earned the Jaecoo a double-edged nickname, the Temu Range Rover. "My first reaction was, 'What's the catch?'" he said. A test drive convinced him that buying the Jaecoo was a no-brainer. No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the United Kingdom, where Brits like him are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status-signaling styling and technology. It does look pretty good inside.
Yeah, calling it a Temu Range Rover doesn't quite work because I would expect that the car is just better in most ways than the Range Rover. You know, when you think about like a, you know, that Temu branding for a product, you think like it looks good in the image and then in person it's like it falls apart.
Yeah, it falls apart. It's a mess. I would expect this car to be actually pretty solid.
Yeah, probably reliable. Yeah, they're very good at making products.
Yeah, I wonder how much these Chinese brands have rolled out dealerships and service departments because that seems like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that potential buyers are worried. Whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand, it can be really tricky if the brand goes under while you own the car because there's just nothing really to work on. A lot of people went through that with the, what was it, Fisker Ocean. With Fisker Ocean, I think Fisker maybe went through restructuring and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.
Yeah. Every once in a while I see a Fisker on the road and I'm just like, incredible.
Which I saw Jay Leno in one recently. And the Fisker Karma, it does look like, I don't know, I would expect it to be like the modern Back to the Future car. Like it's like the new DeLorean. It's so unique. It's not quite as striking, but it's still very cool.
Wait, the Fisker Karma is not an EV?
The Karma is not. The Karma was a hybrid.
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Every time I've been seeing a Fisker Karma, I've assumed it was an EV and I'm like, what do you have, like five miles of range, like a 2012 EV from, you know... I mean, beautiful designer. The lineage there is, I think the founder had designed some other iconic cars in the past. Anyway, only Russia and Brazil, developed economies that mostly buy cheaper models, have imported more than the UK. The Fisker Karma might be a buy.
You think so? How much is it?
20 grand for a Karma. Certainly stand out. Turn heads for 20 bucks or 20k.
20 stacks, 20 racks. The UK, a cradle of the car industry, showcases what could happen in America if Chinese cars were let in. Range Rover began a press release trumpeting Jaecoo's early sales success. Is that a press release from them? Are they just dancing on their enemy's graves?
That's crazy. We got to figure out who actually posted this Range Rover thing. Winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque, the smaller one. The managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire, said the appeal was simple: it looks expensive, it feels expensive, and then you find out how much it costs. For now, Chinese cars are essentially shut out of the large US market by high tariffs and restrictions on Chinese software. President Trump in September repeated his openness to Chinese cars produced in American factories, alarming Detroit. Oh, that's interesting. He wants the jobs. He wants the manufacturing base, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers just don't want more competition. So there's actually some tension there. Interesting. Congress is debating a bill that would permanently ban Chinese cars on US roads. The spectacular growth of Chinese brands in Britain this year has been led by Chery, China's top vehicle exporter. Through September, its sales more than tripled compared to the previous term. Customer open-mindedness.
I just don't understand why they don't use a name like Cherry for the actual brand.
Like I imagine that could work.
Well, it's not spelled how you think. It's C-H-E-R-Y.
Yeah, still better than J-Coup for an international market.
J-Coup. We got to talk about the Topolino.
The Wall Street Journal is saying that it's the greatest car ever invented and they'll never go back.
Take me through it. But first, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
They're not quite saying that. "My week in a $15,000 micro car: joy, guilt, and 25 mph road rage." Fiat's all-electric isn't fast and doesn't get far, but the Italian company thinks it's just the car some Americans need. "What the f is that?" a driver of a luxury sedan exclaimed at a busy intersection. "Is that a real car?" said countless passersby. So funny. Indeed, the Fiat Topolino, a $15,000 electric micro car that tops out at 25 miles per hour, is a real car that Americans can buy right now. Can you spec it with red velvet on the rope?
You can spec it with matte black and red velvet so it looks like you're driving a nightclub. I think you got a winner. The Topolino, which went on sale this summer, is a bet by the Italian brand that Americans and two-car households may be open to a much smaller and slower ride for their second vehicle. At just over 1,000 lbs, it seats two people and is powered by a small electric battery that gets 46 miles of range on a full charge. It is sold in one color, mint green, and comes in two variants. One has doors, a heater, and a glass sunroof. Then there is the Dolce Vita, which swaps in ropes for doors and includes a rollable soft top roof. Many onlookers ask if it's even legal.
You can take the roof and the doors off this thing.
"This is so not functional," said Alexa after jetting across a busy street to get a closer look at the Topolino, which translates to little mouse in Italian. But so far, demand has exceeded expectations. Fiat, which initially shipped 300 Topolinos to the US, says 30% of its dealers are signed up to sell the pint-sized car. The Stellantis-owned company owns the Topolino. It's got a particular audience. It doesn't step on anything else that we do as a company. There's nothing else like it. I totally agree. I think they deserve car of the year. I haven't driven it. I haven't seen it, but I like where it's going.
Fiat Topolino at $15,000 or the Chery knockoff Chinese Topolino variant for 800 bucks, which when you go...
They are going to make this the price of a phone.
They're going to make this the price of a phone. Like...
Yeah, that's a good point. How much? I don't know.
I mean, I would imagine that a lot of the savings of competing with Range Rover are just the margin, the badge value. I would be surprised if they can make this for under five grand. But at 8 grand, at half price, they actually might move more units because why spend 15 when you can spend 8.
I say move to lease only.
You will own nothing and be happy in the Topolino.
But imagine pulling up to Car Week in this, rolling deep with 20 of your best friends, you know, in one of those sort of snaking across the road.
Be a Topolino or base 2027 BMW 3 Series.
Autoblog called it surprisingly good-looking. Jordy, I want your take. Is the base model of the new 2027 BMW 3 Series surprisingly good-looking to you, Jordy? Take a look at that and tell me what you think.
So, I don't, I mean, I've never been a BMW guy, but I feel like every time a BMW gets announced, everyone hates it. And then a lot of them end up growing on people. And I don't think you should judge a new model based on the base version of it, right? Because people buying the base version are typically not like massive car people or anything. They're just buying effectively an appliance. So anyways, people obviously hate it. And they're bringing up a bunch of cars throughout history like the E36, and saying like we have to return to these older editions, but I don't know. I just think it's fine. Like, it's just not that big of a deal.
It's fine. I think the interesting thing is that it just feels like they've been dancing around with different design motifs, especially on the front grill, for the last 10 years, and they haven't really found their footing. This feels like a response to the last round of backlash around the sort of front kidney grill that people didn't like that looked like buck teeth, and they got a bunch of pushback about that, and they said, 'Fine, we'll change that.' And now people don't like this. But people have been warming up on the older styling, and so you're in this weird like constantly dealing with feedback, but the build cycle is five, six years or something. So you're refreshing.
Pull up this image of the 3 Series evolution.
Because oh yeah, everyone wants to go back to these super boxy versions, which again I think are cool, but part of it is that you've seen them in, I don't know, you're a movie guy, you've probably seen these cars in 50 movies, right? And portrayed in a cool way, and that helps a lot in terms of how you think about the vehicle. Now, pull up the Shrek spec of the new BMW 3 Series, and let's take a look at that and see if this does anything for you, Jordy.
Pretty. It looks actually like pretty.
People will look at you with a straight face and say, 'This is ugly.' They'll look at you and say, 'But didn't push the frontier with this new model.' Right.
Yeah, and they're willing to just lie straight to your face. So anyways, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I'm excited to see how it eventually looks in its GT3 form factor. I think the current GT3 Evo is like an amazing looking car for what it is. And I think by the time that these new elements like the new grill and the lights and everything get built into different form factors, I think people will come around to it.
Anything else on cars today? Any other car news? We got another FSD video out of Jason Oppenheim who sold a Bentley, bought a Tesla Model Y and is blown away by FSD. It is an inflection point for sure. People are excited about it. Sean Frank, who's coming on the show in just a minute, was singing the praise of the Tesla just what a month or two ago and we were like, I don't know about that. And lo and behold, here we are. Well, we also have Bryan Johnson coming on to talk about health and endurance racing in about an hour.
Let's see. Would you buy this BMW 3 Series DAR edition? Look at this. I think...
Is this just you and ChatGPT right now?
No, this is official. Officially made.
See, this thing looks insane.
It does. Yeah, this would be good.
Give me 10 of them right now. Tires on there going across the country. And the last story we got to get to is Apple plans to introduce new privacy controls for Mac users, warning of the risks growing around granting broad data access to third-party software including AI agents. So your iMessage data is not, I don't think it's encrypted when it's on your hard drive. So you can potentially give an agent access, like just read, just be able to edit my files, and then it can also read your messages and maybe you don't want it to, and maybe you want that to be a specific permission. And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, Ben Thompson seems like he's on the verge of going Linux on the desktop because he's been very frustrated because he runs a headless Mac Mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen, but most of the time he's just having an AI agent write pieces of software for him, but those pieces of software need permissions. And the permissions are UI popups. So you have to jump in and click the button and say yes I allow it to read from the network or interact with the screen or interact with the file system. And so he's been very frustrated by this and is sort of questioning whether Apple, they're so clearly set up on the hardware side to take advantage of the hardware boom, the hacker boom. But he went back to Paul Graham talking about the moment maybe 20 years ago where like all the best hacker software developers were using Macs. Mac became dominant in like the startup ecosystem and then it just became like every company just provisions Macs and MacBook Pros for basically everyone regardless of what they're doing. And there's this question, Apple's in this tense moment of you know how much freedom should they give, how much privacy should they give, how much flexibility should they give to the user, how responsible is that. You can, if you take all the guardrails off and you're on Linux, the agent can just do anything. That's a benefit but it's also a risk. He also shares a fascinating anecdote that his Mac Mini got hacked, like there was some system that was on an open port came in and installed a crypto miner, but his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said like, 'Urgent, you've been hacked. We should do something about this.' And the AI agent was like, 'Oh, no, no, you don't need, you shouldn't use me right now. I should sit this one out.' And he was like, 'You're dead wrong, man. You're fixing this.' And it did. And it went and reset the Mac, like you know, cleared all the, it closed the port that was opened so the hackers couldn't get back in and then also cleared out the crypto miner. But it's very funny that it was like this referendum on like you creating more vulnerabilities, but you're also able to fight them because typically that's something like if there was a crypto miner on your computer, you wouldn't find out until you were like, 'Oh, I'm trying to do some stuff. It's slow. Let me go figure it out.' Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay, it got it fixed it. It detected it later downstream. Instead, it's like 15 minutes.
Wild. Such a wild scheme. Yeah.
Where you're hacking, I'm sure millions...
If they're getting to millions of devices they would actually have a meaningful amount of compute.
Interesting one. Mark Gurman reports since becoming CEO, he's talking about the Terninator. He's immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. People familiar with the department say he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times a day. Cook typically visited for about an hour monthly.
Tern is locked in. I'm very happy about this. So much of Apple's interfaces have just become completely horrible over the last...
It does put the pay cut in a different perspective because he's working more hours while making less and so he's getting pinched both directions.
On the hourly rate he's way below Tim Cook. He was pretty close on the top line but given that he's maybe working more hours...
You think Tim had the time but he just decided to, I don't know, what was he doing for the other 158 hours in a month or something that he was working.
He was thinking of what gifts to get the president.
Yeah. Well, New Balance recreated the iconic Jobs keynote image for the 1992 shoe of choice. Do you think these will be... the 992? Do you think these will be popular?
I mean, they're really fantastic.
They're really fantastic shoes.
They are. Okay. So you think they'll sell well? Even though people will be like, 'Oh, this is the Steve Jobs shoes.' If you're in SF...
They're just a great pair of shoes.
A great pair of shoes is a great pair of shoes. Yeah. Okay, we'll leave it at that. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And we have Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, in the TVPL Ultradom, coming on down here in person. Good to see you. How you doing?
What are you, a little bit of table? There we go. The New Balance 992s.
Okay. So, wait, what did New Balance actually do?
They just recreated the image.
They've been selling that exact shoe for like 30 years.
Okay. Okay. So it's not a new limited drop. It's definitely out of style right now, but it's still a fantastic pair of shoes.
But I think that the beautiful thing with the 992 is like you can just wear the same pair of shoes over and over and over and for like five-year periods over the course of your life, you'll be like, 'Wow, I think this guy Sean is like, you know, he's got taste.'
One, I'm a style icon. Check it out, dude. Rocking the Palantir Tennis merch. No, their numbers just came out. I mean, they're privately held. New Balance will do $10 billion this year.
They're mobbing the other shoe companies. Nike's going down.
Oh, yeah. Nike is in trouble, right?
I mean, Hoka just reported numbers. Horrible quarter for Hoka and Deckers.
I mean, on getting crushed, but...
Dude, you say they're not cool, but a lot of people buying them.
Yeah, that's not synonymous with cool. Volume. A lot of people shop it on Temu.
Not a hotbed of high fashion.
Yeah, Deckers is an interesting company. They have Hoka, which just went on this crazy run. Didn't they buy Hoka for like a few million dollars?
I think it was under $10 million.
Yeah. And now it does like billions a year. It's like a...
Four billion. Yeah. Four billion a year.
Yeah. Crazy business. They have Uggs, too, which again kind of all these, when once you have an iconic silhouette, you actually have some type of durable revenue from it, but there's still this crazy up and down. And you know, they got into slippers and like that had like a cool moment maybe, you know, 2020 or whatever.
Yeah. They have a big crush with that.
But they used to have a bunch of other brands. It's really just those two now. Like they report all the other brands as just like other and it's a big category.
Yeah. It's like Tees. You remember Tees?
Talk about not being cool.
Back in the day. Back in the day if you had a pair of Tees on, a couple Nature Valley bars and some construction paper, you could do anything. You were ready to take on the world.
Yeah. That's good. Who's putting out more FSD miles? You Tesla boys, Tesla fanboy.
Oh, dude, you got a Tesla.
You know, he was texting me like talking mad. I was like, 'Bro, you have to get a Tesla. It's so easy.' I mean, I'm at like 95% FSD, maybe more. 98.
There's some bug in the software where it says I've done zero FSD miles, but I've done hundreds at this point. The one real issue with the Tesla is like having to charge your car in all these like super seedy places.
What are you doing? How are you driving?
I went on a road trip Friday. I went to the new wave pool in Palm Desert.
And there was no way. They advertised the range and of course they're like, 'Well, don't charge the battery more than 80%.' Cuz it's not good for the battery.
Crank it up, bro. You do it anyway.
Yeah, I'm going to do that. And so the problem is like gas stations have all this like super prime real estate and the supercharging stations will be in just like these dark sketchy parking lots off the main road or whatever. So you end up like hanging out by your car just in like not the best places.
Yeah. But now if someone tries to shoot you, you can drive off. That was a feature they added.
What do you mean? Like if it's a Texas gunshot, it just drives. But you definitely don't want to be in the car while it's charging.
No. It used to be you couldn't drive when it was charging, but now you can.
Oh, you can just zoom off.
That's great. That's great. So, it just rips out the...
Yeah, that's crazy. The only Tesla charger I've seen is like at Harris Ranch up the five and that's a very nice stop because you go in, you get a steak. It's great.
Isn't the smell horrific?
Not inside the restaurant. It sort of gets you ready for the experience of being on...
Back when I was a kid driving by Harris Ranch.
Yeah. You put on the circulation beforehand.
I would be the prankster in the back.
Oh, you and child locks on. I would roll down the windows.
That's brutal. That's brutal. So you didn't sell your data. You turned it down.
What'd they offer you? 15, something like 10, 5.
We're talking... I would maybe take that deal.
Hey, hey, hey, all the labs, this guy's got a price.
Wait, 15 million? Yeah, maybe. No, it was like... Yeah, there's a bunch of companies now and like there's a viral post that... Yeah, there's like four ads back to back like all these different...
I've been seeing the Micro One ads for sure and then I've seen a few other people post about that.
Okay. Cuz they have an aggressive affiliate program. I don't know if you guys were part of it or not.
But they will, if you're willing to make an intro to a brand, they'll give you 50 grand. So like as soon as I did that post about not...
Yeah. For an intro to a brand. So I did that post and I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm not going to sell.' 50 comments being like, 'But if you do want to sell, please use my link.'
Oh, wow. Very interesting.
But yeah, 480 grand. It just wasn't worth it.
Why? Why? It seems like it's, you know, I know it could be a Faustian bargain. We can get into that, but it's free money. It looks like free money for a lot of companies.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of, you know, historically throughout all of human history people have said there's no such thing as a free lunch, but AI is changing a lot of things. It's possible now that this time is different.
Yeah. Well, look, if you get a bunch of cold emails from people all offering you six figures, there's probably something else going on.
I mean, I'm sure you get like text messages and emails daily for like lines of credit, too, right?
I can show you 50 of them.
So many. It's so annoying.
But what actually worries you about potentially selling data? Because right now if I go to any LLM and I ask how much is Ridge doing in revenue, it will probably estimate that on things you've said on podcasts and like open web data. And then if I ask to build a financial model that models the margins, it might be able to get close with like first principles thinking like it's a McKinsey associate, but it's not going to have the actual data. But if you sold the data and it wasn't de-anonymized, it might actually wind up in the training data. Is that the fear? Or is it someone being able to go to an agent and just say like, 'Build me a direct Ridge competitor.' And it's like, 'Well, you're in luck, buddy, because I got all the data.' Is that it? Or what makes it unsettling?
I think, I mean, at a high level, it's like you run a business that does hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and taking...
Taking half a million dollars to risk any, to introduce any incremental risk, right? There's already all this risk to running a business. You know, like you sell, you know, technology products now. Who knows where that market goes? You sell fashion apparel style products that again go through cycles and risking the golden goose for not even one egg is crazy.
Yeah, dude. We're talking just like maybe an egg white out of that, right?
Yeah. So I'm not very worried about...
Yeah. The first is, to Jordy's point, 480 grand is not that much money. Sure. Right. Privileged position to say that. I know a lot of people would love it, but you know, I could probably negotiate up to maybe a million, maybe two million or whatever, but still it's like...
The castle. King the castle.
It's just not going to make that much of a difference on the year, right? You know, we're up 50% this year. We're already doing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.
So it's just not that much money. Number two, I think the LLM platforms are going to get the data anyway because you're using that.
Yeah. Like, you know, Codex is an amazing tool I use all the time, right?
I mean, if you're in the enterprise plan, they're not training on the data, but there's still other ways that stuff gets...
They're going to keep adding features and it's like, hey, if you just give me a little more data, a little more data gets better and better.
You know, Astra is already amazing. Like in two more version cycles, it's going to run my entire business. Of course, it's going to have all my data and they're like, 'Hey, we have to train to make it a little bit better.' Be like, 'Oh, sure.' So I think they're going to get it for free anyway. The third thing is...
And there are other companies that have the data like Shopify has your data. Totally. And like AWS might store the data and they just have different retention and what they can do with it. The Micro One offer, the data broker offer is like we're taking the data, we can do whatever we want with it, right?
Yeah. And they do claim that it's no customer data. They're like, 'Hey, we're not...'
They'll do de-anonymization, right?
Yeah. And they're like, you know, um...
There's probably some indemnity, so like you're not going to get sued for selling your data or whatever. But still, it's like, look, if I'm getting random cold emails non-stop for 480 grand, I think we're probably in the beginning of the AI wave. Maybe it's going to be $4.8 million in a couple. So you're holding out.
Yeah, I'm holding out. So if you want Ridge data, go ahead and just email me. You know, $30 million offers.
Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Do you know other companies that have taken it?
Yeah, there's a whole list of companies taking it. I mean, look, it's been hard for consumer the past couple of years and, you know, if you add in tariffs or whatever else is going on, like, you know, all the consumer brands are like posting up negative growth if they're public. It's like, you know, they're shrinking 3%. A lot of people would take that offer just to have some cash coming in.
I wonder how valuable it actually is. I always thought that like the coding data would be valuable, but the e-commerce stuff, I mean, I guess they want the Slack as well, like how business processes run, so then the models can...
Yeah. Sometimes when I hear about a company that sold their data, I'm like, I don't want your data in the models that I'm using, right? Because I don't want to live like you, dude. Undoubtedly, like right now, if people are desperate to take that money, their business is probably not going great. So they're going to have a big cohort of customers in the data that are just like, here's how not to run an e-commerce sprint.
Yeah, but that could be valuable, too. You know, there's a lot of Reddit comments that were downvoted and that was like, oh, that one doesn't make any sense, or that one doesn't answer the question posed by the Reddit thread. Like the anti-signal is as valuable as the signal sometimes.
Yeah, that's a good point.
What about agentic commerce? Are you seeing traffic from Muse, traffic from Instinct, traffic from any of the AI platforms yet? It feels like with the Shopify integrations, you're set up to be one of the products this holiday season that gets suggested as if somebody goes in there and says, 'Hey, I'm doing some Christmas shopping for my family or my husband or brother or something.' You could pop up. Are you seeing anything yet? Are you anticipating anything? What's the state of that?
Yeah, we've seen very little traffic start coming from agentic platforms. But LLMs still drive, I mean, an exponentially growing part of our traffic. Sure. So like, and the conversion rate on those is just so high. You know, a conversion rate from a ChatGPT search is like 25% or whatever. Someone's clicking through, they're actually going to make a purchase. But I do think it's a great time to be one, selling everywhere, and then two, as big as possible because, you know, I do think Muse will end up, I mean, having 200 million downloads or whatever, like it's going to be, you know, super used and I think shopping is going to be a huge use case. So being a top spender on Meta is incredibly popular. Like I think it's going to make you more popular on the platform.
Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. You kind of get there for free.
Yeah. And then Amazon, you're giving them so much data via the ads platform. It's not even just about like making sure your landing pages are discoverable to Muse because you've already have a relationship.
And what I've heard from people at Meta is that like they're not going to monetize it anytime soon. What they want to do is if they can just get people to like make purchase conversions like happening inside that app. It's just something they couldn't have done, you know, and all that data they lost over iOS 14. Like it's just going to make your ads perform that much better. And so if you're a big spender, you'll get that data cycle started sooner.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
As a brand, somebody that is selling products online and getting demand from a bunch of different sources, how do you expect the economics to work out of these agents? Because like we've talked about this a bunch on the show and my view is like if an agent wants to have a high take rate, they have to be generating like new demand that wasn't already in existence because...
They're just going to take another 30% from the humble e-commerce operator.
No, but like if you're running a bunch of Meta ads and somebody gets excited about your brand and then they go to their agent and say like, buy this product, I want it. Yeah. You don't want to pay again to acquire that customer because you already effectively did, right? They have to like understand their user well enough to suggest Ridge at a point in time where they're not already like sold on the brand to drive like an entirely new customer.
Yeah. What I think they'll end up doing is they'll try to eat from both ends. So like they're going to keep the Meta business, you know, where they're generating all this demand for you and then how do they actually monetize the agent? It'll just end up being payment processing fees in excess of 5%. Right? It's like Stripe is, you know, somewhere between a quarter of a percent if you're on debit card or, you know, 2% using an AMX. I think they'll just say, 'Hey, it's 5 or 7% payment processing through Muse.' And maybe that stacks on top of the Shopify rates, so you'll end up losing 10% over there, but that way they can get half of your revenue off of just making you spend money on ads and then also treating it like a payment processing app. So I think that's how they'll maximize it because I do think they'll have a problem. It's like, how can you take more out of this? And they'll just position it as a different percentage coming out of the same pie.
And that would look like in the Shopify payments dashboard, you would like turn on, I'm accepting that payment at a higher rate just like stores can say, look, I don't, there's plenty of stores that are like, we don't accept AMX because it's a higher rate, right?
Yeah. Well, yeah, basically essentially. But like you can just turn on sales channels like inside of Shopify. That would be one of those.
It would just be Muse would be a sales...
And it would just have its own fees tied to it. I wonder if they'll do that versus just trying to come in at the same rate as the credit cards. Like, we were talking to somebody who builds credit cards, like branded credit cards that are, you know, more tech-enabled, for like Kroger, for example. Like, you know, you go to Sears or you go to J.C. Penney and you get like their credit card. And we were thinking like, well, it would make sense that like if Instinct or Muse had like their own credit card that they provision for you in the app, you apply to a credit check, you get it, you're paying it off, but then they're able to take the interchange fee and give you points or tokens based on what you spend or something like that.
Well, you know, Meta already has Meta Pay, and I'm sure I can already put Meta Pay on my Shopify store. So this would just be Meta Pay with its own rates just in Muse, and the products are just served via...
Yeah. I mean, they did a ton of legwork on that with the stablecoin effort and whatnot. Like, they were definitely trying to get that going, but it never really broke through. I mean, it sounds like you don't even have Meta Pay enabled, even though, you know, there's no downside to turning one more thing on. I guess it's the clutter.
Yeah. And also, it's just really hard to, like, get users to use a new payment method, right? It's like, you know, Shop Pay did an amazing job forcing on everyone's phone. So it's like you take Apple Pay, you take Shop Pay, you take PayPal, you take normal credit cards, and then like there's all these buy-now-pay-later people all competing for ad space, and then it's really hard just to, you know, have another thing on there.
Yeah. What about the other side? I think it was Eric Seufert or maybe Ben Thompson were talking about like one of the no-brainer but potentially less sexy plays that Meta could make in AI would be an AI agent for dealing with the ads manager. And I know that a lot of people, you probably have hooked up a variety of AI agents to the...
But isn't the ads manager already just like an AI agent for getting you to...
Is it just a black box, or do you actually need a layer on top of that?
Well, Manis, one of the main use cases that they rolled out was we're going to be the agent for...
It's Bill Gurley. Is that Bill Gurley?
Yeah, that made so much sense. I mean, Jordy was super excited about that. And when you logged in, it said we can run your ads for...
That. There was a bunch of calls like trying to roll that out. They had to roll it out, but they're definitely spinning it up again. But, yeah, how much of a headache internally is managing the ads manager?
Every year they remove some features. I mean, look, we have three full-time people at Ridge whose job is managing the ad account. That is getting new creative in, it's understanding what's going on, looking at the data. There's third-party tools like we use Northbeam and whatever else. Like it's moved past just being and looking at the ad account.
But dude, I mean, it's a pain in the ass. It always crashes, right? It'd be so great to just eventually Meta's vision is like they want to fire their sales staff and just like you give them a big bucket of money and then they find your customers.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it does feel like it's a ways out. Jordan, what's the state of e-commerce infrastructure as a category? Does it still feel investable?
I don't think a lot of people are investing in it right now.
Does that make it a good time to invest?
You know, it's hard to say. Like e-commerce enablement, like e-commerce widgets or whatever, right? Like the site builders probably got steamrolled by landing pages. Even large companies who have, you know, like Postscript of the world, I think they're staring into the future being like, I don't know what's coming and I don't know what to build, right? I've made a couple investments in like e-commerce tools that I think are really cool and AI-enabled right now, but I just think, you know, if SaaS is feeling a pinch, e-commerce SaaS is for sure feeling a pinch, right?
E-commerce already isn't cool, and then SaaS is super uncool right now. It's just a very ugly time.
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. What else are you seeing on people actually using AI internally to run operations? Like last time you were saying maybe demand planning had sort of evolved in the AI era. Is there anything else? I know creative was sort of early glimpses, but where are you getting leverage these days?
Dude, every model gets better. So I mean demand planning I think is totally solved. Project management, task management, totally solved. The data and analysis I think is totally solved. Yeah, I just did my Q3 reporting and it's three prompts, right? Because all the MCPs are set up, like I have all the data flowing in like my harness of choice, and then three prompts I have my full Q3 report, right? So finance is going to be totally solved. And then creative, I mean it's there, right? If you go into any Facebook ad library, I just think like it's all AI. We're still paying a lot of, you know, humans to make, you know, UGC for us, right? And we have great, you know, blending that in with other stuff. Yeah. And it's really the humans are just good at scripting and concepting. We're way more on the cutting edge than a model. But when it actually comes to visual production, the models are all there.
Interesting. Interesting.
Is there... it feels like we're headed to a point where like a human will still have a great idea for an ad concept, but then agents will run and just like clone it really quickly because we've seen this already where like if you guys create a great ad concept, I'm sure a bunch of other brands will like mimic it very quickly and then you'll run it for however long it works and then you have to find the next one. Is that happening already where you can basically just have agents trolling all the different ad accounts finding what's working and then running their own tests?
Yeah. And that is like a new version of e-commerce software that's rolling out, right? Like it's, you know, we call it like an ad strategist or a creative strategist, but like the AI version of that. And they are just going across what's trending on TikTok right now or what your competitors have in their ad account and they're pulling, because Facebook ad library is open, like they're pulling all that stuff in. Yeah. And then giving you a million concepts, but it's still humans are coming up with the best concepts and then it's just replicating it via AI.
Yeah. What do you think of those AI slop ads that actually ship you the physical slop? I saw somebody saw an ad for a pool floaty in the shape of a tank that came with like a squirt gun and you would like spray the water around and it looked super fun and he bought it and it was very like cheap and it barely worked, but they did actually ship it. Have you seen any of these? Is this like a larger octopus-like superstructure or is this just like independent people? Have you traced any of this stuff down yet?
Well, there's always been shitty dropshippers. Okay. Right.
This is like that on steroids, basically.
Yeah. And it's just that with more rapid, better ad creative. The whole problem with, you know, dropshippers is you try a thousand brands, like literally in a month you might try a thousand different products, different websites, and then you find one that works. Yeah. And this is now it's just way easier to do it. You can have better creative. But that person should be lucky they actually shipped it because there's a whole, you know, culture of just no shipping.
No shipping. Just like, wasn't that the Escobar phone? I think that never shipped.
And there's people on Twitter who sell courses teaching you how to no-ship.
No-ship. There's a term for it.
It's like you're just stealing.
That's insane. What about the macro? I'm interested in how is inflation top of mind for you whatsoever? Is that something you think the models can actually help you grapple with? Like what is the optimal pricing? Should you raise prices in a time of inflation? Like a lot of the Ridge history has been during low inflation periods. We're now going into higher inflation, but the Journal is pretty optimistic to say the mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. So spending doesn't seem to be down, but every company has to deal with inflation one way or another, right?
Look, nothing has broke the American consumer like since, you know, 2008, what the American consumer spends. No. Yeah. That being said, look, as long as you have sales coming in, as long as you have great new products, I think you'll be able to win in this economy. But if you do look at the S&P 500 and you remove out AI-enabled companies and just look at like discretionary consumer, sales are going to be down probably an average of 5% this year, right? If it's the Nikes, the Lululemons, like there's very few e-commerce brands or brands in general crushing it right now. So I think, look, we're going to have a great year. We're going to continue to grow. I think customers are really happy with what we're doing. I think more there's a lot of stories like that, but the macro level is like, you know, Oura...
I talked to J.P. Morgan that day that that IPO got pulled.
There was like, you know, full teams working on that. There's people on the floor about to get rich and they pulled it back because...
It was like 4x oversubscribed.
I know it's low, but it's still like they had filled the order book. Like they did their job and that's a lot of people that they were coordinating with, you know? It wasn't like, oh, no one showed up. There were lots of people who were like, oh, I'm getting shares today, you know?
Yeah. So like all that work was done on the finish line. They pulled back and I think it's because like, dude, Nvidia just posted the greatest quarter in human history. It's like, why the fuck would I want to invest in that or Reformation or Lululemon for that matter? Like, why? So I just think on the business side, the businesses are more durable than ever. I think they're going fantastic. But, you know, if you want to do an exit in the next 12 months, I don't think it's happening.
Yeah.
What's going on with live? And specifically TikTok. How is TikTok changing at all, you know, post-acquisition? Feels like we're what? Nine months out from maybe six. But...
Yeah, look, TikTok is actually going, you know, phenomenal. I think there's the current playbook for e-commerce brands is you find a bunch of great TikTok affiliates. Okay. Okay. You incentivize them with high commission rates, but also a percentage of ad spend. You have them make a bunch of great creative and then you run that creative everywhere. And it's just a way that like overnight a brand can have a thousand people making great content for them. Like we have a Discord full of people making great content for us. So like our TikTok Shop revenue is in the six figures, but it enables growth on Amazon and everywhere else.
Yeah. Which is, we're like a top 50 TikTok Shop brand. So like we're doing a good push there and I think it's working out. But like the spillover is what it's all about. With that being said, you know, that's really just like this creative flywheel aspect. It's like getting like all of these videos and posting them. You know, you asked about live in particular. I was talking to TikTok. They know like live premium shopping isn't going to work in America, but like they're experimenting with new models, which is like auction, right? So if you...
Why do they know that? They just looked at the data and they're like, 'This doesn't work.'
They keep trying it. And like, you know, they always point to Vietnam as like the success story. Like it does work in Vietnam. But like there's thousands of people who do it full-time in Vietnam who make an average of $500. And to like have a full-time US salary be a live stream shopper, that GMV has to be so big off those live streams that like the math currently isn't working. But it is working for auction, right? So like a Whatnot competitor. Like if you go on TikTok Live right now, there's people opening up Pokemon cards and auctioning it off and they're very excited about that, right?
Yeah.
This AI influencer, the boxer Jean Philanthropen...
Dude, there's a whole network of them. It's all Higgsfield.
There's a whole network of them. Do you think, I mean, the end of this story was like he dropped a coin on Pump.fun, sort of boring end, but do you think that there's a world where brands will partner with AI-generated influencers or potentially even incubate their own AI influencer? Is there a world where you just say, 'Okay, we have this specific target market, let's work backwards from the content that they want to see and let's do the Higgsfield thing and have someone run this whole process from start to finish and this person will be like an in-house, you know, content creator.'
Yeah. But I would challenge that like...
I wouldn't call this person an influencer. I'd call it like, you know, content. Yeah. Like and your feed is just a content feed. So yes, like, you know, I don't think anybody's following this person and like being like, 'Oh, I really want to be like the AI boxer guy or whatever.' But I just think we're going to see way more unique AI content coming out. Just like it's going to be an explosion of it.
I guess the question is like, do you think the number of different faces in Ridge content will become more concentrated or less concentrated over the future? Because you could potentially go to a world where every ad has a different person in it because you're able to either hire or generate a different character, or you have really like four archetypes and there are four characters and they're consistent across years of content and you keep seeing like your Steve who's like the avatar of this particular cohort. Do you have a read on which way it'll go?
