I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Clearing order inbound. Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Report your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Bike is wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade.
Let's just roll. Right. Mark clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark clearing order inbound. Five good. I see more journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, February 19th, 2026. We are live from the TV alum, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use your corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
To practice that handshake tutorial. In case you were wondering how to shake hands with your friend or with your enemy, it works. It's the same. It's the same process. You grab the hand with great force.
And underrated while you can establish dominance. You can handshake clearly.
Huge missed opportunity for Sam and Dario to crush each other's hands to the point where the other one is bleeding and crying and really set the tone. They have to rely on voice transcript.
Exactly. Exactly. It would have been much better to just watch crushing in the hand. You know, you do those like strength training for a reason.
Every once in a while, you don't want to get caught lacking. Anyway, there's big news today. We're canceling the SaaS apocalypse.
RIP SaaS apocalypse. It occurred from January 2026 to February 2026 and it's over now. We're declaring it over. No, it's not entirely over. Who knows where the market will go?
In many ways, it's just getting started.
In many ways, it's just getting started. But I do think we're starting to see a bifurcation in the sloppable companies and the unsloppable companies. There should be some divergence between companies that have figured out how to integrate with AI, how to retool their business model or just show that their business model was strong all along. And we'll go through that.
Yeah, there's a category of SaaS that is SaaS, but they will be fine.
Yep. Totally. Totally. Should we watch... Have you seen Pacific Rim?
We got to watch this pump up speech.
Because this gets me fired up. We're canceling the apocalypse. It's movie night again in class. This is from Pacific Rim. We're going to minute 22 in here. Jump ahead because this is one of the greatest speeches.
You don't want to watch. You don't want to.
Okay, we can watch the full... It's raining. It's raining. We'll watch the full thing. We'll watch the full thing. It's my favorite movie. This is honestly my favorite movie. I might watch on Apple Vision Pro this weekend. Who knows? It's such a great film. And did you know the director of this film won an Academy Award? That's right. This is an Academy Award-winning director at work.
Del Toro. He won for Shape of Water. He did not win for Pacific Rim, but he should have because this film is fantastic.
So, the storyline: aliens, giant alien Godzilla-like creatures called Kaijus have descended upon Earth. And only robots that are as big as the Godzillas can fight back. But you need two people. It's much like us. You need two pilots because the mental load of driving the robot, being in the drift, is too intense for a single person. It will drive you crazy. So two pilots, two Jaeger pilots must pilot the ship together and share the load. And so they both punch and then the robot punches. It's amazing. It's a great film. You'll love everyone.
He's got a good speech. You're known for giving great speeches just like this. This is a Jordi Hays original right here.
Yes. Movie day again. Welcome to the stream, Ryan. Today.
Things aren't looking good at this point.
The end of our time. AI is upon us. We've chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other.
We must believe in the stocks of the SaaS companies.
There is not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone.
No public company shareholder will stand alone. We stand with you.
We face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them.
We're bringing the fight to the Foundation Labs.
We are cancelling the apocalypse.
We're canceling the apocalypse. We're canceling the SaaS apocalypse. Woo! And then the greatest soundtrack ever.
I only really had to ever give one speech like that last year, but it hit.
And we did and we got through.
We powered through. So anyway, we've lost a lot of good soldiers, a lot of good market cap out there during the SaaS apocalypse. $2 trillion, something like that, maybe. It's been rough but and I mean truthfully like the narrative does make sense like agentic AI systems, copilots, foundation models like these are disruptive innovations fundamentally. They're counterpositioned against traditional seat-based SaaS pricing. We know this. Legacy companies will be caught in a jam because pivoting the entire business model is difficult. You can't just flip a switch and start charging customers in a completely different way. Your investors will freak out because your finances will be deeply unprofitable all of a sudden in the public market. Just very like it'll take time to build back up. And also like company cultures and organizational structures are aligned around particular incentives and so you have to rewire everything for a different business model and that's really hard. And that's why people are sounding the alarm. This is a disruptive innovation. This is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. The AI version of you know X, Y or Z company will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.
Yeah. And even the safer bets like the system of record, there's this concern around okay well can an agent just kind of re-platform you? Like does that... if you can onboard to a new system faster, does that decrease the lock-in? But yeah.
Continue. So the SaaS apocalypse was always a little bit of an indiscriminate hammer. It felt like I mean there was one article in the journal that was like Anthropic launched a legal tool and that caused the selloff and it's like well could be that or it also could be Claude Code or it could be OpenClaw or Codex or Spark or like there's a million different things going on in the AI world. That one just kind of took hold but it became this like indiscriminate hammer that just kind of hit every company and during earnings season every CEO had to talk about AI and the threat of AI. But I think we will soon be finding out what companies are truly unstoppable, as you put it, and actually benefit in the AI future. And there's a bunch of early signals. So let's run through them. First, Google's comeback. I mean, this was the first victim of the apocalypse. This one happened like a year or two ago. Why would anyone search Google ever if an LLM could get you a better answer and fewer clicks? Of course, Google quickly caught up to the frontier. They launched AI Overviews. They flexed DeepMind's research previews. They showed off the power of the TPU. Core business is surviving and thriving due in part to Gemini helping understand intent so they can deliver ads on longer more complex searches. So Google's been doing fine. They're sort of already building back from the SaaS apocalypse that they experienced. Then you have Meta. Will user minutes migrate over to LLMs? Will Sora destroy Instagram overnight? Will slop clog the feeds? Maybe, but not before Meta's transformer-based Gen model absolutely destroys ad targeting and just makes everything so much better and re-accelerates revenue. And we've talked to a lot of folks about that. And so Meta is doing very well even though they haven't like figured out their AI strategy, rolled out any of the new crazy frontier models from MSL. Like the business is great because they're, you know,
Yeah, I think they certainly argue they have an AI strategy which is to use AI/ML to make really good ads.
And they've been doing it for a decade.
But it's more on the product side, right? So is it the Metaverse? Is it net new products? Is it Meta AI?
Yep. And so it gets more interesting when you go to the smaller companies, not super small, but Spotify doesn't really need to invest in generative AI. I heard a good analogy that was like should Spotify have released a guitar so that people could make more music? Like no, because people will pick whatever tool is available and then they will release that music on Spotify and then the algorithm will sort it. And so these artists if they're using AI tools or maybe they're just prompters, whatever you want to call them, they will bring AI music to the platform. It'll be filtered by algorithms. Slop will be in the trough. But only the most delicious slop will bubble to the top of the trough. So it's good to be in the trough business as long as you have an algorithm that sorts the slop from the more sloppy slop. I don't know.
Current data shows AI music currently underperforms dramatically on a percentage basis. Like the number of AI songs is huge, but the number of actual minutes watched is low. Even if that flips, Spotify still benefits. Let's switch over to Shopify. You can definitely vibe code an e-commerce website now, but Shopify is not a major cost driver for most businesses that use it. You're talking maybe like $1,000 a month for some companies, and it's a lot of headache that they just don't have to even think about. And then there's a whole bunch of advantages that Shopify should benefit from in the AI era. It's very full-featured, so it's actually hard to replace. Setting up a new store is faster than waiting for a prompt to return. Like it's all pre-built. And it's just like create a new copy in the database of Shopify when you set up a new store. And then AI tools benefit from all the context and data that Shopify has across the entire platform. And then lastly, agentic commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. It's just a front end to the checkout. Much more mobile or...
So if it's driving activity, that's actually a net benefit.
And so there's a whole bunch more examples. Roblox is another interesting example. I heard a crazy stat. 67% of global non-China spending growth in the gaming industry last year went to Roblox. Like gaming had a bad year. Roblox had a fantastic year and I think the stock's down like 50%. And so, you know, yes, you can vibe code a video game, but the Roblox network and ecosystem is already at scale and it's absolutely dominating and they're monetizing a ton. And their monetization on a per minute basis is I think like five times lower than other platforms like if you comp it to TikTok or Instagram. And so whether it's ads or more in-game currencies or something like the willingness to pay should go up. Now there's still a question about you know do folks age out of Roblox, how long can they keep these customers on? Will they get older folks to rejoin Roblox at some point or join Roblox for the first time at some point? But certainly you know not probably a beneficiary of AI vibe coding and being able to build more stuff and again filtering the different apps that are built so that Grow a Garden or Steal a Brainrot can be power law outcomes within that ecosystem. That's the value of filtering and being an aggregator. Lastly you got to consider Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been duking it out with Jim Cramer on CNBC over seat-based pricing in an AI era for over a year now. And it's 100% true that there are some amazing AI-native CRM startups that are aggressively trying to eat Benioff's plate. But Anthropic is hiring a Salesforce admin. We put up a card for this because we really enjoyed this. But where was it? Did we put this? Yes. Unemployed vibe coder: 'Bro, SaaS is dead. You can build a CRM in minutes. No modern company is going to buy software ever again. Repost and I'll send you my PDF that killed Salesforce.' And then Anthropic has a job listing for a Salesforce admin because they're growing so fast and so big that they need someone just to be a full-time job managing their internal Salesforce project that's so big. So...
Is this revealed preference? Is there something else going on here? Is this all going to be reinforcement learning data for them? Who knows? But at least for right now, they're going to be paying Salesforce. And time will tell. And then lastly, you know, the SaaS apocalypse, it might arrive in full at some point, but and we'll start to see real revenue declines, which I think would be like the real signal of major disruption. But Figma just announced 70% growth in weekly active users, 40% year-over-year revenue growth. We have Dylan Field coming on the show in just a little bit. He'll be on at 1:30 today. And so there's growth all over the SaaS ecosystem, and things don't seem to be decelerating or slowing down. It's definitely go time, though, and it's time to revisit sources of strength.
It's time to become unstoppable. It is war time. It's founder mode time. And at least you need to explain why you were never sloppable in the first place. And that's what Harley at Shopify did a really good job of on the earnings call. He got so many questions he had to back up and just reexplain. You know, people got in the weeds on the AI checkout thing and he had to reexplain like no, like agentic checkout happens on top of the Shopify checkout. The economics are exactly the same. They're exactly the same. So like don't worry basically.
Yeah. So going back to the fax machine example, in 1999 was the first year that showed a significant drop in the sale of physical fax machines. They dropped by 10% in a single year.
And so that is not a 'okay growth just started slowing'. It had been slowing up until that point, but it was slowing and then it like fell off a cliff.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let's also pull up the Linear lineup and tell you who's coming on the show. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents.
We have Sigil coming on to talk about Web 4.0.
Web 4.0, a new AI agent project that he's working on where AI can deploy, transact, and pay its own bills, run micro economies without humans in the loop. Then of course we have Saagar Enjeti from Breaking Points coming on. Always a fun conversation. And then Dylan Field coming on to talk about their earnings and everything that they're doing with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and all of those folks. And then we have Peter from Code Metal announcing his series B. Eric from Freeform, another series B. And then Ljubisa from Talos announcing a $169 million raise building model-specific AI chips. So banger lineup today and can't wait to get to those folks.
Should we read through this Goodwill Hunting meme? This sums up the SaaS apocalypse pretty well. And I love this meme template from malinvestment.jpeg. 'Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast Dario Amodei was probably on. Now you think it's the end of white-collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're going to be convinced of that till tomorrow when you get to something big is happening. Then you'll install ClaudeBot on a Mac mini, vibe-coded dashboard on top of a Postgres database and say we're all just a couple Ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That's going to last until next week when you discover context graphs. And then you're going to be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.' 'Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just business logic on top of a CRUD database.' 'You got that from Satcha's appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter or is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcasts, then pawn it off as your own idea to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who's long SaaS. See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple of years you're going to start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you drop 30 grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come up with the same conclusions you could have got for free by following a handful of EC accounts.' It's great.
I love that meme. That's fantastic. Anyway, there's another post in here to close out the SaaS apocalypse. Buck says, there's a long history of dominant platforms vertically integrating and consuming the entire economy. That is why the largest companies in the world today are railroads, utilities, steam engine manufacturers, and CPU producers.
Great. Very, very good. Let me tell you about Tuvapuffer. Serverless vector and full-text search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Bland hit the timeline yesterday. They unveiled Soulja AI, the first rapper to augment your voice with AI.
Soulja Boy or use his voice yourself.
I want to see with sound. Of course. I want to see what Soulja Boy.
I was the first rapper on YouTube, the first rapper with his own star, the first rapper with the iPhone, and now I'm the first rapper to automate his voice with AI. Bland, baby.
People, I thought this was a fun concept.
But many people did not. It didn't really resonate. It definitely got attention. I bet they drove a bunch of business from this.
1 million views, 600 likes.
Yeah. Usually on a million views, you want to be sitting somewhere around 30,000.
Couple thousand. No, a couple thousand likes. I mean something that people love and genuinely resonates will get upwards of 20,000 or more.
Anyways, I think it's cool. I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this kind of thing. Celebrities coming in. I think Soulja obviously is not at the peak of his career, so it makes sense for him to dip his toes in here. And I bet this was surprisingly affordable for Bland. So hopefully they got some business out of it.
So yeah, it's interesting. ElevenLabs has Michael Caine, Burt Reynolds, Richard Feynman, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dr. Maya Angelou, James Dean, Judy Garland, Albert Einstein. Then there's some AI voices you can just do like Will, Jessica, Eric, Bella. And there's community voices as well. I wonder if they should do more promotion around Michael Caine. Like that's clearly a licensing deal, but I haven't... the reason this breaks through is because there's a video of Soulja Boy. It's a real video and it's funny and he's like good on camera, right?
The entire premise is you can have Soulja Boy answer your business phone calls, which is like pretty... which is pretty differentiated, which is extremely differentiated. And if you're, let's say you're a kind of business, let's say you have a smoothie shop.
Like adding this will certainly get people talking about it. I called... I called the acai bowl place and Soulja Boy picked up.
Like this will... this will... I'm not going to pile on. I think it's fun.
Yeah. I think that also just as a top-of-funnel activation, like you hear about this, you go and you're like, okay, realistically my business doesn't need Soulja Boy, but my business does need like just a normal voice anyway.
Kind of missed an opportunity to say like I'm the first AI rapper with no W, no W.
Which they didn't do from what I'm seeing.
Well, if you want intelligent real-time conversational agents, head over to ElevenLabs. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs.
Ice-T, according to Justine Moore, is an AI accelerationist.
He is hitting the timeline. Somebody said, 'I wish more older rappers realized that AI shouldn't touch the music industry in the way that impacts the creative work, including music videos.' When I say AI, some people group in stem separation or restoration into that, and that's not what I'm talking about. Anyways,
So basically stem separation is when you have a full song and you want to separate out like the guitar from the drums from the bass, like the stems.
You know stems because you're a guitarist, right? Is that the word? Guitar player.
But Ice-T says, 'I disagree. Fans want us to make and produce the music, then shoot an expensive video, then they get it for free if they have an Apple subscription or Spotify pay us 0.007 cents a stream.'
The days of expensive videos are over. There isn't even MTV. AI is the only sensible way to add visuals to a song. You can hate it all you want. It's the future.
It's the future. Is Ice-T still going to... is he dropping music videos recently? Like has he actually... is he just predicting this or is he living this and actually putting out AI videos? It certainly does make sense to just bring down the cost of music video production. I mean, that's what a lot of CGI did. A lot of music videos are just the artist on a green screen with cool graphics in the background and that's often enough. Or I mean there used to be the age of like the expensive music video, wasn't it? Thriller was like multiple millions of dollars and you cannot spend that much anymore. No way. And so a lot of music videos have come down in cost, done more in CGI. It feels like AI will get there, but you have to be the right artist and you have to message it correctly because there's going to be crazy backlash.
Matthew McConaughey hit Variety this morning. What did you say?
And commenting on AI, Brandon just shared it. He said, 'It's coming. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made and it's too productive.'
So, I say own yourself, voice, likeness, etc. Trademark it, whatever you got to do so when it comes, no one can steal you.
Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. The Ice-T voice, I mean, that's an iconic voice. I think there's definitely a huge deal to be done. And the AI voices, although we're in a boom right now, I remember being able to go on Waze and pick... I think Snoop Dogg had a deal, but there were a number of celebrities that had... you can imagine like an Arnold Schwarzenegger 'get to the chopper' but then also like 'take a left' and it's like fun and they would just pre-record all of the different lines like 'keep going straight', 'bear left', 'take a hard left' and you record like 20 different lines and then the program just picks the audio file for the correct moment because there's only like 20 different things you could possibly say in a navigation app. And so a whole bunch of celebrities did deals, at least temporarily. I don't know how many of them are still around. But those types of things, like there's clearly a framework for that. And all the agencies and all the unions understand this. So I feel like we're in this weird bizarro world where people think that like, oh, like IP law doesn't exist and we aren't going to be able to deal with this. It's like no, like there's decades of lawyers who are foaming at the mouth being like, I can't wait to sue ByteDance. This is going to be awesome. We're going to get...
The only thing is that it's going to require real cooperation from platforms.
The platforms are ready to cooperate.
I disagree. I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never ever ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not good for their brand, but it's incredibly entertaining. And so the platforms leave the content up. And yes, you can do takedown requests and things like that, but by the time you do a takedown request, it's got 200,000 likes or...
You don't need to do a takedown request. You just need to do 'pay me, pay me.' That's what people want. They want to be paid. I think the message in that Matthew McConaughey post is not like it's super critical that no one ever uses an image of me or my voice ever. It's that look, if somebody's profiting off it, that's my IP. That's my...
I mean, I read his comment more around making movies saying don't use AI to make this scene that would normally take four weeks in some exotic location and a thousand people.
Obviously AI is going to be used for that. I think there's a separate issue of people generating Matthew McConaughey doing and saying things that he would never agree to that are sort of compromising or again putting him in situations or having him say things that he wouldn't ever agree to even if he was getting paid.
Yeah. I just think like the answer is like more AI. Like you look at the Sora cameo functionality and like it was pretty easy for me to say like 'always depict me as a bodybuilder' and as silly as that is like it worked. Like when we did that collab post with the OpenAI team they were like 'we don't know how to get around this, like you should be able to go in and change this' but they didn't because like it is actually enforced at like a pretty low level. Alex from Outtake, who we've had on the show. He does this for a bunch of... Outtake does this for a bunch of different celebrities where you basically sign up for Outtake and they're constantly monitoring the entire internet like filing takedown requests on your behalf. And so I think again I think it'll end up... I think the platforms will do something, but it will also be somewhat of a tax.
Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Let's actually watch the full video of the AI Impact Summit in India. Narendra Modi is there. Insane lineup. Insane lineup. They pulled everyone. They got Sundar there. They got Alex Wang there. They got Dario. They got Sam. And here we go. And they're zooming out. And what do we see? Two fists raised in opposition. Iconic. Throwing up the axe. Throwing up the axe.
Someone on X was saying that haters would say this is AI.
Yeah. That it was a little shout out to Elon saying you're not here but you're here with us.
And if you scroll down, someone used AI to show them hugging, which is very nice.
Yeah. Like we said, missed opportunity for one of them to handshake.
But they'll be back next year.
Yes, I think this is an annual thing.
Yeah, it seems like a banger lineup. I wonder if there'll be talks that will come out of this. Any more comments or just was it off the record or will there just be reporting out of this or maybe it was just talking points so there was no real news dropped. But when if you get those folks together it should feel like Davos, there should be interesting sort of new positions that are coming out.
Yeah. The Mistral founder was apparently speaking there and the room was like almost empty.
And so, and yeah, somebody was saying like, 'Hey, this guy is actually like crushing it in Europe. Like, show them some respect.'
Yeah. Sit down and study it. Don't just listen. Don't just listen.
Let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
JC Foster says, 'Three months ago, I quit my job to chase a dream to build an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffee maker. Grateful for everyone who has reserved company Pure Steel.' Pure Steel.
This is a correct ratio. 7 million views, 34,000 likes. This is what you were getting at. Huge. What is up with the laptop?
So, I guess he was at SpaceX.
And one of the... when I immediately saw, I mean, can we talk about this laptop? Look what is going on. Zoom in on this laptop.
I think this is... he took the... it's like an optical illusion I think right? It's using the fisheye lens.
Because if you fold... if based on this angle if you folded the screen, the screen would just cover the keyboard. Like the trackpad would just be hanging out like an untucked t-shirt under a sweater.
Makes no sense. Sorry, Jordi. I got distracted by the extremely long laptop. Tell me more about the Pure Steel Company of America.
The Pure Steel Company of America. So, yeah. So anyway, started going viral.
Very, very cool product. If you've tried to make coffee without having plastic be a part of the process, it's incredibly hard and you're pouring hot liquid over plastic, some of that plastic will disintegrate and end up in your cup of Joe.
Yep. So, the product makes a lot of sense. One of the issues is this post went extremely viral and somebody said... somebody posted 'this thing's only 80 bucks. Go reserve this right now.'
And so that post started going really viral.
'This thing is $80 and made of American glass and steel. Go reserve one right now.' That got $18,000.
And so this is of course not going to cost $80. There's literally no chance. Okay. But I think people were thinking, 'Hey, I can buy this for 80 bucks. It seems like the steal of a lifetime.' I think something like this once you actually build it will probably need to cost somewhere like $600, $700, something in that range.
So really rough. The other thing is pull up the website. I think this guy may have knocked off the Aurora website.
I'm just realizing this in real time. So, Aurora is of course the...
Oh, it does kind of look similar. It's kind of...
This is Pure Steel. Look at the header. Look at the header system with which EMTT Shine designed for us. And even look at the imagery. Their imagery is AI.
And now pull up the Aurora website.
Oh, it has the same rounded corners. Yeah, it is very similar.
I think he got a little inspired.
So if you see the header and everything and the way the buttons work, go scroll down even more.
If you go down to some of the more lifestyle imagery, like it's the same style, you know?
The kitchen, the photography.
Close. Yeah, a little close.
It's a little... but he's bootstrapped. He's got a bunch of sales now. I'm sure he'll figure out... I'm sure he'll figure out.
Okay. Well, I mean the SpaceX lore here is that they should be able to deliver this at $80. Like it says transparent pricing. It's time to know what you're paying for. Traditional coffee makers cost $200. Pure Steel is the same amount of materials but less markup. And so they want to deliver this to you, I think, for $80. Will be very interesting to see how they do it, where they change prices. If they change prices, they might be able to deliver. I don't know. Maybe it'll be VC subsidies. Maybe it's $80 a month and you have to pay for some subscription to turn it off.
It's like seat-based pricing.
Seat-based pricing. Yes. How many cups a... how many coffee drinkers?
Well, no, it should in the age of AI, it should be consumption-based. So, you should pay per coffee cup.
How many tokens each cup?
Yes. No, but I don't know. This doesn't seem impossible to get stamped steel and assemble it and have it... I mean it's a pretty basic device, right? It just needs to warm up a pot of coffee. Like it needs to boil water. That's not crazy to me that that could be $80. I don't know.
No, I mean I know through Aurora. Yeah.
Like dealing with these materials.
It depends. Like looking at some of this design here, the way it's all bolted together.
Yeah, it's like... seems pretty basic.
Even the labor cost of doing something like this, I think the robots... I don't know.
Amazon does have an all-steel coffee maker. They have some results for all-steel coffee makers in the $60 range. They got a Black & Decker here. It looks like it's covered in plastic, but you know, it's at least advertised as stainless steel. There's some stainless steel options on here, but yeah, a lot of them are in the several hundred range. So, I don't know. We'll have to keep an eye on it.
Yeah, I'm excited about this. I would happily buy one of these.
Yeah, it looks great. And I mean, a lot of these companies will underprice the first run. So they'll say, 'Yeah, okay. We're just going to take a loss on the first thousand units that we ship and then we will raise prices over time and then when we go into retail, we'll raise prices more and you know there will just be a process for that.' If you go this viral, if you have a lot of demand, you might be able to raise money to offset that your suppliers or you might just make no margin for a long time. There's a way this gets built for $80.
Yeah. And he was at SpaceX for two years. SpaceX is a good organization. We talked to a space...
Except the issue is he was a finance analyst at SpaceX. So he might need to poach some of the engineers.
Well, I mean, yeah, analyzing the finances of SpaceX being like, 'Wow, they make rockets.'
Wow. We could be making plastic-free coffee.
Just do it. Think from first principles. I don't know. Let's see. Van Man says, 'The response to this insanely simple yet non-plastic coffee maker should usher in the era of dumb, simple appliances that work and don't poison you or connect to your Wi-Fi.' I think that there is huge demand for this. People want simpler devices. Did I tell you about...
My coffee machine connects to my Wi-Fi? I'm like... it actually... I don't think I did, but it always wants it.
Is this not a joke? Wow. Okay. Yeah.
And it's like it's a lot of steel.
Pour over. So, no, but I'm like, you don't need access to the network, bro. Just focus... just put the beans in the... just put the coffee in the cup.
Yeah. I have another story, but first let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So, you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. So I had a little tiny bit of IoT in my house just to turn off and turn on the lights as my dishwasher emails me.
Fantastic. Peak performance.
I had a tiny bit of IoT just for lights that are hard to reach, lamps that are plugged into basically a wall socket that has a little box that connects to the Wi-Fi. There's an app that turns on and turns off the light. I think the company just went out of business because the server just doesn't work and the app doesn't load anymore. And so all of the stuff that I bought is just worthless and I just need to rip it out. It's extremely dumb. In fact, very, very silly.
And is dropping alpha. He says recommend the Oti Faber plastic-free electric kettles. That's smart. And then he says they should put ads on the Pure Steel coffee maker to keep it around.
See, think outside of the box. I'm calling it $80 shipped. That's what it's going to cost. Now, there'll probably be a shipping fee on top of it. Shipping to Alaska, that is dangerous territory. Do not give free shipping nationwide because Alaska is technically part of the nation and you will be paying $50 to get stuff up there. It is not on Amazon Prime necessarily for your default upstart e-commerce business. So I got completely cooked by my Wi-Fi light system, and I was thinking like, okay, certainly I can vibe code this. Definitely not. Definitely just going back to switches. Definitely going back to the stone age. I'm just going to be lighting candles in my house because that's the future that I'm going to be living.
Yeah, I had a funny moment this morning. John and I went to breakfast with Brandon and I parked in a garage. John was on the street and as I was leaving I went and put the ticket into the machine. Then I put the validation in right after it, just like it was working for a while. Then it failed.
Then I was like, 'Okay, the validation's maybe not working.' So I paid with a card. It failed. And so then I start calling around and I'm stuck. I'm stuck for 15 minutes. John is long gone. He's at the Ultradome already. I'm sitting there on support with somebody who's not even in LA trying to get somebody in LA to just let me out of this parking garage. Then somebody finally comes after 15 minutes and I was like, 'Hey, can you escalate this? Your software is like bugging out. It doesn't work a lot.' And they're like, 'Oh, well, actually all the systems in this area have been failing a lot.' And so I was like, 'Okay, maybe it's a bigger issue than I even thought.' So I was not feeling the software singularity in the parking garage this morning.
I texted Jordi, you couldn't just vibe code and improve a software system to run on the ticket taker machine that would process payment more quickly and reliably. No, because there's a gatekeeper, of course, and it is impossible. There's one parking garage in Pasadena that doesn't take cash or Apple Pay, so you have to have a physical card. And I get caught lacking every once in a while and I'll have to push the button and then talk to the guy and be like, 'I'm sorry. Like, can you just let me out?'
You're like, 'Really? You're the guy that always wants a free parking spot.'
Yes. But last time I was there, I saw someone else get caught lacking and I paid it forward and I paid for his parking. Let him out. Heartwarming.
I don't even care what it is.
You should have thrown up a card for that.
So karma... I'm like buying karma very strategically, not altruistically. Yeah. Not effective.
Yeah. Brian says that's hardware. They got the hardware footprint. Yeah. They got us locked in their hardware.
Their foot is firmly printed on your chest as you try and leave.
It's brutal. Really quickly, the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses and just do it. Please.
Michael Burry is going off on...
Okay. Financial Times Form 10.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has his head in the cloud saying he's a frequent flyer and they get into some of his business and personal travel expenses during the years ended December 31st, 2025 and 2024. The company incurred expenses related to the use of the executive aircraft of 17.2 million and 7.7 million respectively.
Mhm. It's quite the feat to spend 17 million in a year on business and personal travel, particularly when the...
Jet's not even a rental. Jeffrey's analyst, Brent Thone, runs the numbers. Assuming use of a midsize jet with an estimated operating cost of $7,000 per hour, this implies roughly 2,400 flight hours, or about 28% of the year in the air. Even under a more conservative assumption of a high-end jet such as a G650 at an estimated $15,000 per hour, the $17 million still equates to approximately 1,147 flight hours, or 13% of the year. Notably, this $17.2 figure is more than double Karp's executive aircraft expense in 2024 and appears elevated relative to peers, with Meta's CEO spending $1.8 million and Palo Alto Networks' CEO spending $2.4 million. Terrible comps.
Why? Like, Karp is obviously constantly traveling all over the world. He's an international businessman. Yeah.
I know podcasters that do like 250 hours a year.
And then... Oh yeah. Like, you're talking about going from somebody who travels a good amount at, let's say, 200 hours a year. Like to me, yeah, I might catch some flak for defending private aviation, but it just doesn't seem that crazy. The entire reason that Palantir is growing the way it is is they're doing deals in Japan, they're doing deals in the Middle East. It's just like this guy is a global deal maker. And I think if you really wanted to do an analysis on this, you should look at all the international deals that they've done, maybe ignore the US, look at all the international deals and see if Karp is actually delivering. Because when we hear that they're signing some new contract for hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, I think it makes sense for the CEO to fly out there and shake some hands. Yeah. And do some real business. Yeah. So of course he's not flying on a midsize jet around the entire world. Of course he's in... That's the funny thing. They don't know. Yeah. So they're saying maybe it's a G650, which would be 1,000 flight hours. Maybe it's a midsize jet that would be more like 2,000 hours. It could be a King Air and he's spending 8,000 hours in the air. No one considered that. It could also be a 747 and he's only spending like 500 hours in the air. There's a wide range here, but I like to imagine that he's in a single-engine plane, he's flying the prop himself, and the cost per hour is only like a couple hundred bucks because he's just paying for gas, but he's taking every meeting in the air. Literally one-on-ones, hop in. We're going, we're doing laps. We're going back. We're flying around. Yeah. I like to imagine him putting up 8,000 hours in the air, just every waking hour flying around in a King Air or Cessna Citation or something. Very funny.
Well, whether you're long Palantir or short Palantir, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Max Farren's probably the most underrated poster in the world. I can't believe he has 3,000 followers. It's so lovely. He's the best. He's the general manager at Dorash podcast in the world.
To be honest, the best part of making our wedding registry is that it has forced us to really think about what we need to make our place feel like a home. And I don't know. And he went on Zola. Is this real? I don't think so. I think he might do this, might be inspect element or some Photoshop or a little bit of both. Maybe it's GenAI, but in his wedding registry, he put the Nvidia B200 Tensor Core GPU. It's $30,000. He put the Nvidia H100 NVL GPU. $15,000 is still needed there. He put the Nvidia A100 80 gig GPU. $15,000 still needed. This is how you turn a house... Help Max make his place feel like a home. Head over to his Zola. And it does feel... You don't have to be going to the wedding to contribute. Get him a GPU. You don't. And I do feel like this is probably inspired by actually putting together a turbine... wedding registry. That's a good one. That's a great gift. Or a plot of land. Yes. In Abilene. Yeah. Somewhere data center friendly. Yeah. But if he is getting married soon, congratulations, and I hope you have a wonderful wedding with a registry full of whatever you actually need.
Get the man a Cessna. Talking about cars. Cessna 172 just flying over the Atlantic. There we go. With Starlink. Yes. Making 10 stops on every island like Amelia Earhart.
So, Jirro Ticket says, 'Do you think he has monetization on?' Who's he talking about? Kam Kani. Kani's been putting up insane numbers on X. Obviously, quite the tense geopolitical situation. I hope that we're not starting a new war in the Middle East, but if Kani does have monetization on, it certainly is going to be a real revenue line item on the... I have to imagine. Does X sanction accounts? Like you would think they would. I think creator payouts are probably geographically limited to certain countries where the payment rails work. If a country is sanctioned, I actually get my X creator payouts just straight up through Stripe. Yeah, it just comes through Stripe. In fact, I think I had to set up a Stripe account to receive it and then link that. So, you know, it's only valid where Stripe is functioning. 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. Will Brown is chiming in on whether or not Prime Intellect is a Neolab. We put him on the Neol market map yesterday, but he's firing. I also said I think I said Prime Intellect was like the prototypical Neolab. Okay, so he's really putting... a funny camera angle. What's going on here? Okay, I like that. Different. Switching. Mixing it up. Over the shoulder. I'm interviewing you. I'm getting to the bottom of it. You answer me. You answer me, Tyler. Well, okay. Okay, we get it. Production team got some new PTZ cameras. We get it, guys. Anyway, why does Prime Intellect fail the Neol test? Will Brown says, 'A true Neolab is either pre-model, pre-product, or pre-revenue.' And we're none of these. Oh, we flipped it around on you. You had me in the first half. But congratulations on being post-model, post-product, post-revenue. Prime Intellect on a generational run and happy to have Will Brown over there. We have news on the Warner Brothers, Netflix, Paramount front. Netflix is open to raising their bid for Warner Brothers. There's a 35% chance that Netflix... like a stone. They were at like 70%. Dang. Can we pull up the actual culture? I want to know where it's at today. It's still up there. I guess Netflix is at 35%, but at one point Netflix was at 72%. Yeah. 72% in July or December. December. And I'm going to eat my words. I mean, I don't know really anything about media deal making here and the ins and outs of this deal. We've had some folks on the show to break it down for us, but it does seem like there's an unexpected flipping and so it's been fun to... Yeah, I can read a little bit here. Pull that up and let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. Yes. Pulling it up. Netflix apparently has ample room to increase their offer. They are... yeah, obviously... a $325 billion company. Netflix, I think everyone believes that they're good for it. Yeah. I'm trying to get the right article. The Reuters article is not complete. I have the Reuters article here. Yeah, you can read that. Netflix has ample cash and could bump up its offer for HBO Max owner Warner Brothers Discovery if competing bidder Paramount Skydance increases its own offer. Two people with knowledge of the matter said the two media giants have been locked in a heated rivalry. Oh, you see what they did there? That's the new popular show, Heated Rivalry. It's about hockey. Over Warner Brothers and its storied catalog, which includes iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and Superman. Though Warner Brothers is moving forward with a March 20th shareholder vote on Netflix's offer, it has given Paramount a week to come up with a more compelling bid. Netflix has bid $27.75 a share, or $82.7 billion, for Warner Brothers' studio and streaming businesses, while Paramount has offered $30 a share, or $108 billion, for the whole company, which includes Discovery Global that houses CNN, HGTV, and other TV assets. The creator of Stranger Things is sitting on a lot of dry powder. That gives it some flexibility to up the ante, people said, holding about $9 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet as of December 31st. Warner Brothers rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday, but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a best and final offer. We're going into the final rounds now. Price will likely be the deciding factor. Warner Brothers' concerns around funding and regulatory risk are real, but at a high enough number, they become secondary. Got it.
Dude, David Zaslav must just be over the moon right now. Bidding war. He's been working... the bidding war of his dreams. Yeah, it's great. Every CEO that is flipping an asset dreams of a bidding war like this. It's great.
Britzman expects Netflix will counter with any improved offer from Paramount. But the real twist is that these deals were never apples to apples, and it may ultimately come down to how much value the board and shareholders assign to the network business that Netflix would leave behind. So you need to do a sum of the parts. What's the value of just CNN, HGTV, the linear TV channels? Put that in because Netflix doesn't want that stuff. They just want the IP and HBO Now, HBO Go, HBO Max. I can never keep it straight. Anyway, Paramount said it would continue to push the tender offer it has launched for the studio, opposing the inferior Netflix merger, and still plans to nominate directors for the upcoming Warner Brothers annual meeting. All eyes are now on whether the CBS parent improves its offer, which Netflix is allowed to match under the terms of the merger agreement. Warner Brothers' chairman said, and David Zaslav said in a letter sent to Paramount's board on Tuesday, 'We continue to recommend and remain fully committed to our transaction with Netflix.'
Yeah. I don't see how Netflix actually gets approved on this one. You think they're cooked? I think if Trump is souring on it, it's over. Yeah, it's over. I was so pilled on the whole YouTube is the real competitor here. Watch time matters more. Think about screen time. Roblox is a competitor to Netflix. TikTok's a competitor to Netflix. Fortnite's a competitor to Netflix. But I don't think like that. It's a very... You have to think about the entertainment industry, the core industry, people that make television shows and movies, things that you have watched, movies that I have watched. We got Sean Frank in the chat. Oh, we do. What's up, Sean? How you doing? With a crazy... I can't tell what his profile picture is doing. Let's do an ad read for him. I'm sure he'd appreciate that. Let's tell him about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. You know, one was for you, Sean. Yes. Honorary. That one is dedicated to Sean Frank. Let's pull up another video dedicated to Sean Frank. Okay. Yes. I like this. Ye old fitted great helm. Wait, start it over. What is... Is this AI or not? Do we know? I don't even know. But I like it. This is so funny. You need one of these. The steel man. The fel. This is the final steel man. This is the final steelman helmet. The TVPN hat with the great helm on it would be really, really good with all the logos. We should actually just make a branded knight's helmet for you when you're steelmaning with logos on it. For sure. For sure. Actually goes kind of hard. Look at this scene. What's going on here? This guy's just hanging out. And then look for a duel. Oh, everyone's doing the... what's that called? LARP. Live action role playing. That's the real... They don't even look like they're role playing. They're really going into it. You don't see that much anymore. I like Ye. I still remember being a child and just going to the park and seeing a bunch of adults doing that. I actually saw it, but... and having to get explained what was going on. Yeah. It's one of those things that feels like when you're looking from the outside, you're like, that probably is awesome. And then you're actually doing it, like, this is really uncomfortable and miserable. Like, I don't know that I actually want to do the sport. I'd rather do it in a video game. Anyway, meetup. We should organize a community meetup. A jousting. Yeah. Bring jousting. Jousting is cool though because it involves horses. You know what we should do? We should get all the freelancers to lance each other for free. They won't be paid. I think that's where the name comes from. No, I think they will want to be paid on a per-project basis. On a per-lance basis. Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe. Maybe. Meta has obtained a patent for an AI system that could simulate deceased users by analyzing their historical data, allowing the account to keep posting, messaging, and even making video calls in their behavioral style.
You thought I would stop posting after you killed me. Nice try.
You just created a billion John Coogan posts, both satirical and 500 words daily.
A family member sent me this this morning, disturbed, saying, 'Is this real?'
We got to get Saagar Enjeti's take on this. I know this is right up his alley. He's going to love it. He's going to love it. That guy loves AI, he loves tech, loves business, and that's it on the show.
I'm surprised. I'm surprised you can patent this. It's just like a thing.
Is this Meta thinking out? You got population collapse.
And obviously it's pretty hard to monetize a bot, but if you're driving in an AI doom scenario where all humans are dead, you want to still keep your services up. You got to simulate all the dead people maybe. I don't know. Is this doom pill keep posting after death?
Yes, we will, Jeremy. We will definitely be getting the update from Saagar Enjeti for sure. Yeah, there was a 4chan post apparently from a few years ago where somebody was like, 'I'm an engineer at Meta,' and they basically fully... I only saw a screenshot. It may or may not have been real, but it appeared to be from a few years ago. And they were saying like, 'I'm working on this feature. It seems bad.' Interesting timing. Obviously, Mark has been in LA this week. He was getting grilled for us, I think.
Wait, that was in LA? I thought that was in DC. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. Kind of rude not to stop by the ultra before you get deposed.
Let me try to pull up a little warm up on TBPN before you go in front of the big guy.
Yeah, so he spent six hours yesterday. The... Corey Weingarten has a quote: 'We call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand.' Thus began Wednesday's nearly six hours of testimony from the Meta Platforms CEO in a trial of a lawsuit brought by a young woman against several...
And this was about benchmark hacking in Llama 3.
Is that what he's on trial for?
Not as bad as that. Contending that social media...
Potential weakness in the ad model.
Is that what it's about? No.
Overspending on the metaverse.
Concerns about distillation. I think...
Oh, distillation. Yeah, that's why he'd be on trial for that. Yeah, that makes sense. Well,
pretending that social media causes depression.
Corey actually went to the courtroom, was hanging out for those six hours.
And it's a guy, Mark Lanier, the plaintiff's attorney in a landmark case, who spoke with a faint Texas twang.
Showed the courtroom dozens of internal emails and chats from Meta employees and executives over the years debating decisions like whether to ban the beauty filters teens used on Instagram to mimic the results of plastic surgery. And so anyways, there's a bunch of features like that that are kind of the focus of the case.
There's also a cover story on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today: 'Social media bans for youth gain momentum worldwide.' And it does feel like a parenting skill issue a little bit. Like, you know, it is possible to keep kids away from social media if you are an active parent, but at the same time...
I don't... the only thing I would say, we don't have ban it... we don't have children with phones yet.
Yeah, but that's deliberate.
Yeah, that's deliberate, but at a certain point, like what...
Sure. Sure. They just will not be having them.
Yeah. But at what... when the time comes to give them a phone so they can communicate with you.
I mean, I know my plan. I will give my son a disassembled iPhone 1, and when he can assemble it and piece it together and manufacture it himself here in America, then he can use it. And we already ran this on Tyler 20 years later.
And then we did get Tyler a phone. This was a good benchmark. We got Tyler... didn't we get you a real phone because of that? We did, right?
Yeah. That was the reward. Yeah.
Well, that was also because I installed the new iOS when it was still in beta, and then I like totally destroyed my old.
We got to do another prank on Tyler soon. They're so good.
Yeah. Chat, if you have any good prank ideas, let me know.
Yeah. He's like, 'No, no, no, definitely not.' Anyway, 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. We got some birthday news. Brenton, friend of the show, his birthday is this weekend, and all he wants is a TBPN shout out. Well, here you go, Brenton.
Thank you for coming on the show very early. One of our first in-person guests at YC Demo Day, the first one we ever did. And we got to hang out with him at GitHub Connect and seen all the stuff. He's really fantastic.
He's been on a generational ride.
Works on startups at Microsoft. He's also an angel investor. So for his birthday, go ask him for some cloud credits. Yes.
Go ask him for some angel money.
That's all he really wants.
Yeah. Deal flow. Bring him deal flow for his birthday. That makes sense. Yeah. And new business. If you're a startup, go over there and let him give you some cloud credits in exchange for your business. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock... did that go? Yeah, there we go. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. eBay is buying Depop secondhand. Thanks, Andrew. That's a good one.
Andrew is the king of VC dad jokes.
So eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion. And this is in the Wall Street Journal. Jamie Iannone, chief executive officer of eBay, said Wednesday that the addition of Depop to its portfolio would boost its footprint while also expanding its presence in the fashion market. 'We are confident that as a part of eBay, Depop will be even more well positioned for long-term growth, benefiting from our scale, complementary offerings, and operational capabilities.' Etsy acquired it for $1.63 billion in 2021. So a little bit of a write-off, but not terrible. Still cooking.
And the market likes it. Etsy is up 9%.
Oh, wait. Etsy is up too. Oh, both of them. eBay's up 3.5%, but I don't know if the market's just broadly doing well today. I'm seeing a lot of red on the ticker, so I don't think so.
Sad apocalypse canceled tomorrow. Nobody's watched TBPN yet in the public markets.
I expect things will turn around before end of day.
eBay plans to cross-list products on its platform and expects the acquisition will expand its market share. Depop's seller and buyer cohorts will gain access to eBay's financial services, shipping, and cross-border trade solutions as well as its authenticity guarantee. Young consumers are a key demographic for eBay as Gen Z and millennial shoppers are driving secondhand commerce. Depop is also more popular as an app than a website, unlike eBay, which might bring in a new user base. So yeah, good luck to...
Yeah, eBay is still such a force.
but it is certainly not cool.
eBay, great business. Not cool.
But do you know why they call it eBay?
Because it was founded in East Bay.
Oh, by some East Bay rationalists.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was sort of a LessWrong project. It's right up there with Anthropic. Anyway, Altimeter is making moves. Brad Gerstner, an absolute dog, is on a tear. He bought new positions in CoreWeave, Shopify, he sold ARM, he sold Alibaba, and he added to his Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and TSMC positions as well as Google. He's making a lot of moves. This is a great pick of Brad, too.
It is a great pick. He's looking good there. Diced, if I might say so myself.
That's a man who's not afraid to shake hands. Got it locked in. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
It's been some darker stories today.
Finally, a white pill. Some good news. Mets owner Steve Cohen got a $3.4 billion payday from his hedge fund last year. We needed this. We needed this.
Slightly higher than, slightly higher than David Tepper.
I was worried about Steve. Have you seen him in any Chrome Hearts?
I haven't seen him in any Balenciaga.
No Rick Owens. And we were starting to ask some questions.
Yeah, we're starting to ask some questions.
The question mainly, was he down to his last 20k? It was completely possible. I haven't seen him do a money spread. I've seen him do some podcasts. Haven't seen him do a money spread.
Tyler's getting better at the money spread.
That is still like not even a level one money spread. You need to lock in and watch the money spread. Don't even try that one. You're, you're five levels beyond ready for that level of money spreading. Okay, that one kind of works. That one kind of works. But when you actually understand the money spread community and what's possible, you will, you will understand how much farther you have to go. Oh, so, so, so bad. So bad. Awful.
Um, here are the top earners in 2025 from hedge funds. Steve Cohen with 3.4 billion. David Tepper at Appaloosa got 3.2 billion. Uh, Izzy Englander at Millennium got 3.1 billion. Chris Hohn got three. Ken Griffin 2.4. Dan Sundheim at D1 2.3. David Shaw from D.E. Shaw 1.6. Uh, Element 1.1. Bill Ackman got 1 billion. And Chris Rokos got 930 million. So close to the 1B club. I'm sure he's punching the air.
Yeah. So, this is gains on personal investment. That means they actually closed out positions or this is just marks?
Who knows? It's just big, big numbers. I'm not digging it any further.
Uh, Dave Portnoy quoted this and said, 'I think I have a solution for MMT. Tax Wall Street people like Steve Cohen who built their fortunes just on Wall Street 90%. That's not real work to begin with.'
High Yield Harian says, says little, 'Lol, don't you know how much of the tax base is already wealthy finance professionals?' Uh, yeah, it is funny. He, uh, you know, Portnoy, uh, did build a real business, a media business, a podcasting business, arguably the only business that's actually valuable to the economy. It's the only one that deserves, like, to truly, to be, like, respected. Like, in terms of, like, respect, I would put podcaster. And then a couple levels down you do, like, doctor, maybe, like, cancer researcher, and then, like, hedge fund is still, like, a little bit above, like, doctor, but it's still way below podcast.
Someone's going to clip this way below podcast.
Um, but, uh, but yeah, it is, it is funny because now a lot of his content is trading focused. It would be kind of like put into this...
Yeah, day trading is kind of like, that's been like, every time I see him it's because of like trading content. So maybe he wants to be taxed at 90%. Also, I mean, kindred spirits, right? Steve Cohen has that casino in New York. He's attaching a casino to the Mets, uh, like ballpark, and the list is ranked by who tweets the least.
Honestly, sick. Sick. I have a solution to the billionaire tax. Have you ever seen Brewster's Millions, Jordi? No. 1980s? No. Anyway, in Brewster's Millions, a man inherits something like $30 million and it's conditional. He needs to spend, I think he, he inherits like 300 million and he needs to spend 30 million in 30 days without acquiring assets or telling anyone what he's doing or else he doesn't get the inheritance. And it's this hilarious comedy. There's a whole bunch of things that happen, but it's all based on this idea of like, uh, this, uh, this kid was caught smoking cigars, smoking a cigarette or cigar, and the, and the father punished him by saying, 'You have to smoke the entire box.' This is like a famous thing, like smoke the entire box of cigars. And you'll be like, 'Oh, so sick. That's a terrible experience. I'm never smoking again.' Right? Um, and the same thing with money. So this is the, this is the solution to the billionaire tax. You got to spend 5% of your net worth in 30 days. And you can't...
Rick Owens on you, you can't acquire any assets that you can sell. So it's all just, it's all just hanging out at the French Laundry, I guess. Um, would be entertaining, would stimulate the economy.
I like that too. It's good.
Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Ara says, 'We have a definitive answer now. AI will affect the labor market, starting with freelancers. The first paper to use business-level data to track AI versus labor. New paper from Ramp finds businesses are shifting spend from freelancers to AI. More than half of the businesses using freelancers in 2022 have stopped entirely. The companies that used to spend the most on freelancers shifted to AI the fastest. 97% savings for the businesses that spent the most on freelance.' That is, uh, wild.
And, and, and generally makes sense. I mean, the whole premise of freelance is like you probably get paid a lot better on an hourly basis. Maybe you can, uh, uh, capture more value on a, on a dollar basis by working, you know, spreading your talents across multiple companies. But obviously the flexibility comes with, uh, little to no lock-in and so businesses can much more easily shift spend around. So not, uh, not super surprising the Fiverr, uh, stock...
That's certainly interesting.
Revenue is not wildly down. Revenue is actually up for Fiverr as of 2024. So it went from, uh, 190 in revenue to, to 300 in revenue to 340, 360, 390. So definitely decelerating. Uh, but in terms of market cap, Fiverr is now worth $419 million, down 96% over the last five years and over just the past six months, it's sold off another 50%. So, uh, certainly a lot of downward pressure on Fiverr. There were some folks...
And same with Upwork. Yeah, Upwork is down 30% year-to-date, down 76% over the last five years.
Yeah, someone was saying, here's, uh, Todd, actually, Todd Saunders saying, 'Billion-dollar business idea, uh, take Fiverr private and pivot them into a data labeling company like Handshake.' Uh, because Fiverr is now trading at $480 million market cap. Um, and Ara chimed in and said, 'Yes, there's a quantifiable impact on business spend. Businesses are spending on AI, not Fiverr, uh, uh, uh, you know, freelancers.' Um, the pushback on this is that Fiverr doesn't have people internally or something. I'm not exactly sure. I mean, uh, it does feel like you could potentially actually do this and, and, and focus on data labeling, but you imagine that a lot of data labeling tasks are already going through Fiverr because that's, if, if a task is suitable for...
Yeah, it's interesting. I would, I wonder, I wonder if, if a lot of revenue from Fiverr and Upwork is just data labeling companies that are just saying, 'We need access to talent. We're going to post a bunch of jobs on here and then take these people off the platform quickly or, or leave them on.'
Disintermediation is always a risk for the marketplace.
Yeah. When I, when I, when I look back at, uh, I've, I've worked with hundreds of freelancers over the last 10 years and, and certainly a high number on Fiverr and Upwork, but always for one-off tasks like, 'Hey, I need like 10 versions of this logo' or 'Hey, can you just spin up this like super simple web page? I need this thing that's like slightly customized and I don't want to spend the however much time it would have taken pre-AI to do something like that.' All of those tasks can now be done. Even, even creating like, create a song for this, for this thing. All of that can be done now.
So even like Canva templates, I feel like a lot of Fiverr work was like they clearly had a template for like a motion graphic intro or a sign and they would just sort of like put your logo in there and send you the final thing. Um, do you know why Fiverr is called Fiverr?
Because every task initially was five bucks.
Yes. Every task was $5 and very quickly you could add all these upsells. So you could be like, 'Okay, it's a $5 task, but if you want the extra money that you got, you spend 100 bucks on it.'
I mean, I for sure did. I was probably a kid at the time doing my like first Fiverr project being like, 'Oh, five bucks.' And then all the upsells, it's like, 'Well, if you actually want to own the...'
Yeah. If you actually want to own the, you want something usable, you're going to pay a hundred. Uh, 99designs also.
Here's the thing though. So for, for the, uh, high-ticket freelancers, I would be surprised if we're seeing too much impact yet because actually the most elite freelancers typically have then a team of other freelancers that they're contracting out to, but they're charging based on like what business value can I deliver? And sometimes that's like expertise. Yeah. Like I'm really good at getting brands into Target. Yeah. And like AI is not disrupting that yet.
No. But if it's like a very simple...
workflow, take a logo, put it in a motion graphic template, send you the file or the MP4 file, like that is just going to face pressure from all over the place. Anyway, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Um, let's see. Jack Ficks says, 'Anthropic was my favorite AI company two weeks ago, and now I still love Claude, but man, yes, the vibe, the vibes are shifting.' And a big part of it is Dario doesn't follow back.
Barack Obama followed back. He followed like 400,000 people, but Dario does not. He follows zero people. And Wes Wender is taking notice, says the fact that Dario follows zero people says a lot about him as a person. Does it? It really just says he doesn't use X.
What was your theory, Tyler? That he just...
Well, maybe. Yeah. He's just...
He's a For You page. He doesn't want any.
He's like, he trusts the algorithm. He's like, I don't, I don't need to, I don't need...
He loves... He thinks Grok does a great job.
Yeah. AI pill. He's like, wait, another 10 Elon tweets. Exactly what I wanted. This is amazing. I refreshed, crypto spam. Awesome.
Yeah, the vibe, the vibes have really, have really shifted.
A terminally online engineer posted Dario's speech at the AI Impact Summit in India. Let's pull it up.
Energy and ambition in this room and across India are incredible. I've been spending the last few days meeting with Indian builders and enterprises, and the energy to build together here is palpable, unlike anywhere else. Um, this is the fourth AI summit we've held since the tradition was initiated at Bletchley Park back in 2023, which I still remember. And in those 2.5 years, the advances in the technology have been absolutely staggering. Along with those, the advances in the commercial applications and the societal and ethical questions around the technology have only grown more urgent. My fundamental view is that AI has been on an exponential for the last 10 years, and as part of a sort of Moore's law for intelligence, and that we are now well advanced on that curve, and there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things. We're increasingly close to what I call the country of geniuses in a data center, a set of AI agents that are more capable than most humans at most things and can coordinate at superhuman speed. That level of capability is something the world has never seen before and brings a very wide range of both opportunities.
My boy, your boy, my boy, Macron, come on the show. Okay. So, I mean, the words that were said there sounded normal and fine and just normal Dario talking points. It's the reading from the phone that feels like you're a best man at a wedding who didn't really prepare, right? Uh, I know a lot of weddings where the, the, the bride and groom will say like, 'You got to print it out.' Like, I just don't want the aesthetics of reading off of phones. And I don't know, that seems reasonable. It does have like, I think like printing something on nice paper just has a different aesthetic to it and that's valuable. Um, but the words, it's nothing new. It's important to deliver that stuff. It feels like Davos where you're seeing the talking points that we've heard for years or months on podcasts and on X delivered to... Could he not have just... he's an incredibly busy guy, but he's also the most knowledgeable on this topic, talking about his experience at the AI Impact Summit, how he's thinking about AI progress. He should be able to just kind of riff that out. Maybe have a couple like bulleted notes of like, what do I want to actually get to?
I don't know how long the, uh, truly getting a printer working might be AGI resistant. It might be AGI complete. Like, you might even, even Opus 4.6 might not be able to configure a printer properly. We've certainly had trouble with printers. It's very difficult to get them running. So maybe he just couldn't get it working before he, uh, before he hopped on stage. Uh, anyway, uh, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult context concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, and bringing creative projects to life. Uh, we have some good news. Finally, finally, some good news. Top lawyers' fees have skyrocketed. Be prepared to pay $3,400 an hour. I know a lot of you were worried that lawyers were going to get automated, that they weren't going to be making money. They're making more money.
Don't the firms just like actually adjust rates for inflation every single year?
I'm pretty sure, uh, the chat, the chat can correct me, but I think they just, I think it's just an automatic, automatic, uh, I think it's like an automatic three or 4% a year forever.
Did you see Ryan in the chat? Bro needed Cluey so bad.
Yeah. Total royale victory.
Big, big printers is a mafia. It's true. Uh, the Wall Street Journal says expertise and ego are pushing up hourly rates to once unthinkable levels in an escalating race among firms. When Christopher Clark, a litigator at a boutique law firm, raised his hourly rate to once unthinkable level 3K, he said he didn't receive pushback from clients, but he did get one notable comment. 'Congratulations,' said the client. 'That's the highest rate we've seen.' Just over a year ago, the...
Congratulations for saying, on saying the biggest number.
Congratulations. If you're, if you get a legal bill and it's huge and you're, and you're worried, the correct response is congratulations. I completely agree. Uh, over a year ago, the going rate for the top lawyer was in the $2,500 an hour range. Now that looks downright quaint as premium partners are raking in as much as Clark and more, and far more in some cases. Legal fees have risen much faster than inflation for years now, and corporations are trying to rein in spending by pressuring law firms to use artificial intelligence for routine tasks and keep associate fees in check. The same isn't true at the top end, where star trial lawyers, rainmaking corporate dealmakers, and veterans of Supreme Court oral arguments are driving more aggressively on pay than ever and meeting little resistance. 'The question is always, are they worth it? You know, some of these guys are worth it,' said Carrie McClean, Intuit's general counsel, who in her roles hires law firms to do the company's outside legal work. 'They understand the industry. They're connected and they have lots of experience.' Clark has pushed his own fees by about 30% since he left his position at a large firm four years ago. As the lawyer for clients including Hunter Biden, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk, he still views his rate as a bargain. 'There's a small world of lawyers who can hop on the phone and solve a crisis, and I'm one of them, so you're going to pay me for it.' Some senior partners now charge as much as $3,400 an hour at the country's largest law firms. Uh, um, among the top 50 law firms, uh, rates for partners increased 16% on average last year. In bankruptcy court filings, Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis, two of the world's largest firms, report some partners' hourly rates will rise to more than $3,000 an hour this year. Interesting. So, you dig into the bankruptcy filings and you figure out how much the law firm is getting paid. You work backwards from it. That's funny. I never thought about that. Good investigative journalism from the Wall Street Journal. Um, a decade ago, elite partners raised eyebrows when they raised rates to $1,500 an hour. Since then, rates have rapidly escalated for several reasons, including a more competitive market for talent that has increased law firm expenses, the high stakes of litigation and corporate dealmaking, and perhaps most of all, because of ego. Some lawyers with specialized skills are even more aggressively pushing the upper limit. Eric Toutman, a partner at a Southern California law firm, has already told his clients he'll be upping his rates to 6Gs for consulting on compliance issues in his niche specialty of telecom regulation. Last year he was charging a measly $4,200 an hour.
Uh, yeah. So firms like Skadden, Latham & Watkins, Kirkland & Ellis typically, uh, raise rates 3 to 10% annually.
They justify the increases, uh, for cost of living reasons, uh, which is, uh, real but, but funny in the, in the context for any entrepreneur who maybe at times has been running an unprofitable startup and, you know, getting some of these bills and, you know how it goes. They justify increases based on inflation, market demand, associate salary increases, and then competitive positioning. Veteran trial lawyer David Boies, who you might know from the Theranos story, but he's been involved in a ton of different cases, said clients are willing to pay the hourly rates at the high end because the stakes for certain litigation and corporate work are so high. I mean, truly, you, you see these like billion dollar settlements for all sorts of different things. And, and the stakes can be even higher. You think about like you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court whether or not your trillion dollar company will be broken up. Like, the stakes are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's worth it. And so the lawyers have figured out how to extract their pound of flesh.
Uh, the current rates though, he says, by any standard in a sensible world, are out...
of sight. Boy, chairman emeritus of Boy Schiller said his firm has never wanted to be at the top of the market. We wanted to say with a straight face that we are a bargain, not in a reasonable world, but in the actual world. Guess how much he charges? Over $2,700 an hour. So, if you're looking for a new job, maybe become a veteran trial lawyer who's argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. Uh, maybe Mark Zuckerberg's lawyer is making a bunch of money.
Always, always coming in with the best career tips.
Anyway, more good news. If you're over 65, congratulations. You own the economy.
The Wall Street Journal is just blackmailing the elderly. Perfect day to...
physically and financially healthier than ever. So why do their needs keep taking priority over younger generations? People over 70 are 12% of the population, but they got 32% of the dollars. They've been stacking paper for seven decades and it's paying off. Demographics, rising profits, and soaring asset values have together wrought a quiet transformation in the American economy. Much of it is now in the president is launching the million dollar...
I think Tyler's on the phone with like a word.
He sees all. No 70-year-old is going to cash mog me. I will flex on them.
Just go get it. As a C, as a third quart, as the, as of the third quarter last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households compared with 22% in 2007. You know, I've been, I've been following this on YouTube for a long time because folks like Graham Stephan and some of the viral, uh, financial influencers have been, they had this really, really great title thumbnail strategy for a long time where they said the greatest wealth transfer in history is about to happen.
Oh, is that what they call it? I've never...
Well, that's, that's in the small business acquisition community. They talk about like a bunch of, most of the small businesses in America are owned by people that are near retirement age. They need it. They're gonna have to turn over, pass the torch at some point. Yeah.
And so there is an opportunity if you want to get into those types of businesses. Think car dealerships. Yeah.
Plumbing businesses, etc.
Uh, but I don't know if it will actually feel like a tsunami.
