I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success. The laser 3000 right there.
According clearing order inbound, let's just roll.
We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five. We are founder mode.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Fight.
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Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Multi clearing order inbound. 5. I see more journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
You're watching TVBN. Today is Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. We are live from the TV to be back. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening. His viral essay, 45 million views, completely broke containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. Uh, we also have Harley from Shopify coming back. Vlad from Robin Hood's coming on. Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson, Sam Blonde, who I worked with at Founders Fund, uh, is launching a new company. Monaco and John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC demo day and so we've only talked to him in person and he's coming to the Ultradome again. So, we will see him in person at two. Well, is something big happening? This is the big question. Um,
I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good. It's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into, you know, how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like COVID? I have trouble with that analogy in particular. Um,
so back in February of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's law. Uh, there's that funny quote, the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it. Uh, but uh, it's it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts, you know, everything is about exponentials. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that, uh just made people much more aware that uh if COVID got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid rapid ex uh explosion in the number of cases. And that of course held for most of COVID, but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before, um there are very few true exponentials in the real world because of course things cap out. Uh they turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they then they plateau. Now will AI plateau? We've there's been a series of plateaus. There's been a series of S-curves. That's the story of technology really. As you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment you see a number of of S-curves. You see the desktop, the mainframe, then then mobile, then the internet and cloud. You see these different these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning, agents, a whole bunch of different uh technologies that have grown have that have sort of if if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau, but then we get the next thing. And so the the the math around co the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while. Um but you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8 billion people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported COVID cases but you just can't 100x from there. Like it's impossible. There's not a h 100red billion people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. And of course, there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if if a bunch of people have had COVID, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things. There's a great
and just jumping in chat, we are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging.
Um, so, uh, back to AI. Um, if you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, uh, we have plenty of room for for exponential growth. We're we're we're truly very far away. Uh humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Cardartesev type two like full Dyson sphere capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Uh even just in terms of how much energy we're using uh on AI that we have the power that we generate on earth we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly and that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky and so I like the framing of you know it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI but it doesn't feel exactly like co because co affected people you know older people people who were not online reading biology Seruvasan's post about co studying the exponentials modeling the ars uh so it was very it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, hey, like you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going to get rough out there. And people didn't. It happened it happened extremely fast. Um, and a lot of people when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers, and they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Uh, or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses, something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models. Uh, knowledge cut offs like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can actually tell you the weather today. can go and look that up on the internet, no problem. Um, and so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So, this is good. I love that. Uh, at the same time, um, they're the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SAS apocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden an agent can just do it for you. Um, and you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry. If you even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go get go renegotiate your contract. But, um, when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of coded coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about like some of my real world friends like I'm friends with a surgeon like yes he has a SAS product that helps him book clients he should probably renegotiate that I don't I would not recommend him vibe coding his own payment system and his own you know customer relationship management system. Yeah, compliance just a headache. He should just maybe it's cheaper. Um there will be more pricing pressure. So find a better tool, find a faster, find a newer tool,
like the humanoid robot that can operate a patient in a surgical and has the trust of the patient. It's coming but is away and he's up to surgical tools and how surgeries are developing and that's like this month.
So compare him to Matt Schu Schumer. Yes. The the guy who wrote this. Yes. And Matt has been building what appears to be, we can talk to you about it, but like the thinnest possible wrapper over AI and other models, right? It is according to the definition your AI personal assistant writing and productivity tools. Yeah. So again, like this is I don't know. I can see him using ChachiBT. Yes. and Claude and Gemini and thinking, "What am I doing with my life?" Well, if he used the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65,000 likes like on the AI on the website. It's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations. Yeah. Which you can just get the models to do today. Yeah. when he started this, I'm I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so, he's been his business has been getting steamrolled by the labs. Yeah. And a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of Yeah. Sam Alman famously said, "Don't build a startup that assumes the models will plateau in capability." Yeah. And then he built Sora and if you and that was a little bit of a violation for that but sort of in line with what he was doing. Um but at the same time uh yeah if you were just building a rapper and saying I'm going to I'm going to you know do better citations that that that was always messaged as like hey you're going to have a rough time. Yeah.
Um, and so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just just yesterday Run posted something was like whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, "Look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved." It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible because that's clearly where the future role is going. Um, but in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I sit them down like I have a friend who's a teacher and I say, "Oh, like like coding agents are here. You need to understand that this is going to change everything. This is going to be like co." It's like well for the teacher like COVID was important because they could go there they could get sick and then they could not work and they could you know and the school could close but if the software gets better it's like yes in the far future like you might go to you might be like I want my kids to go to the school with the humanoid robots because it's cheaper or something like that but we're not there yet and so if the software gets better then I'm talking about like grade school like it's mostly like distracted kids they'll be distracted by like better AI slot feeds basically. Yeah. Um, but the actual pro process of like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and that have a have a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Like, yes, it will change over the next decade. Like I'm not I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying like I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that like surgeons change or or what do you
Sorry, I got to jump in. I know everyone I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. God terminal says, "Tax loss harvesting my audio right now." Is this the Someone else said, "Is this the seed dance cling sora version of TBPN?" I asked people if they had uh kind of closed the app and reopened it. And Trey says, "Already sold all my devices." Anyways, uh thank you for bearing with us. My boy Plunger says, "We're back." So, let us know. Let us know in the comments. Whoa. The chat's saying we're back. Chat says we're back. Hopefully. A agi as we're in the fast takeoff, but we can't get reliable. Wait, cut to John's screen for a second. I want to test something. We're so back. It still works. At least the At least the graphics package works. Ryan Surf says, "TBPN terrible buffering personal nightmare." Oh no, we're getting cooked. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, but crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Um, all right. Thank you for bearing with us back. Thank you. We'll talk Yeah, we we will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just I you know, I'm bullish on AI. I do think like there's the software only singularity is super real, the singularity broadly. I still believe in the Kerszsw Wild timelines, but it's just like I don't know that February is the year is the month. February 2026 is the month where like everyone is changed. Whether you're like a car mechanic or like I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations. Like one of the things he had to do was like kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like there's a crazy video of him like jumping over the counter. And like it's just like the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. we're we're we're still like in this like slow takeoff in my opinion. Uh it is remarkable and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of like talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say hey like look at this personal website let's build you this. Oh you have a wedding coming up like here vibe code your wedding website like what do you want to do? Like there's a whole bunch of different things you can do and you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses but uh for most people it won't be like co where 100% of people were like somehow somehow affected by it you know whether it was like oh the thing that I like is closed the coffee shop I like is closed or I I don't I'm afraid to go outside.
The question I have is like, even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake.
Yeah. And yeah, and even when people kind of like started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it, yeah, it didn't mean all the jobs went away. Yeah, some jobs have gone away, but again, headcounts at, you know, even a lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable. We had a good jobs report. Surprisingly, yeah, economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of...
But yeah, the question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain? And how fast?
Overall, overall, like I didn't, I was joking. I responded to the article and I said, TLDR, freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around. I thought Jeffrey said it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI-generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay, quote-unquote essay, implies. So really, really going hard. But again, it felt like something like, you know, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever, like kind of like high school.
Yeah, it was a little bit of like a throwback to the permanent underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?
Yeah, I think my main critique is like, I think with COVID it's like very destructive, right? Maybe you lose your job, but like at the very least, like you might get sick, things, everything is like bad. Yeah. With AI, it's like this article is like, yeah, people are like going to lose their jobs. That's like kind of what you should be aware, that like your job might get automated. But like AI is like fundamentally like it's like a productive tool, right? So I imagine like we're not, it's not going to cause a recession and that like GDP is not going to go down, it's going to go up. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally. Yep. Like now it's like, I mean, there's probably like hundreds of people on X. Their entire job, like their salary is just posting like basically fake AI news and they get paid by, it's not even like sponsored deals. It's like they're just getting paid by X directly. Like that's like completely fake job. Yeah. But like that's going to go up. There going to be more of those.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields. Correct. Isn't that the, I mean, that was the original Sam Altman formulation was like, if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the internet. It's like, it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business doing ads for 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. Should we keep touring the takes, the various takes on this article?
Stay Sassy says, 'I'm exhausted by the OMG, this changes everything AI posts on this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly non-trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it. Vendors, tokens, acquisition, and I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty, overly online dude's breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news and just be poor. Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into X then.' Apparently states as he works at the NASDAQ.
Apparently. U Roberts goal, I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple weeks and say is you're building ambient.
Nelson says, okay, but this one really changes everything, please. I promise. Please.
Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in, says feels like an honest tweet, just vibe coded Databricks with a screenshot and the SaaS market will follow 5%. Sephilopod. Yeah, I mean, if your job is building a wraparound ChatGPT like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that job.
Tricky. What did Joe Weisenthal have to say?
Joe with a funny post. He says, 'Seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone.' And it's like maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else does.
Such good bait. Incredible bait master. Incredible. Solid bait. If anyone falls for this, you really deserve it.
Yes. And software engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says, 'How hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do?'
That's so good. That's funny. Buco Capital said...
quoted it and said, 'A great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock. For the hype you read online, it's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough, propaganda to justify valuations, and LLM psychosis.' Yeah, Matt Shumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis.
I was thinking more about Claude with Ads, the vibecoded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down. We talked about it with Tyler and said like, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the Claude app interface. Same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff. Like coding that by hand feels like a week-long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but like it would be harder and it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about like if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like we could have paid a dev shop 10K to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all. Right.
Okay. What do you think? How would it play out?
I was doing kind of drops, stunts like that before coding agents were a thing. Yeah. And you could just work hard and do that. Just grind. Like Dylan and I, you know, we did one back in the day with Party Round called Helpful VCs. This was during, you know, kind of this was, I think, like May or June. Yeah. Of 2021, so it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started, but CryptoPunks were popular. And we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs and we just put them on a website and said if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT. Yeah. And so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with Ads where we just had the idea, we worked on it for a few days, shipped it and that was it. So this kind of thing was...
How long was it? A couple days.
It was definitely no more than five business days.
We got this done in like one day. It's Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping. Yeah. Like obviously like I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're like incredible, but it's still like I spent like almost all my Saturday like building out. It's not like it's like...
You took one for the team. You sacrificed your weekend.
No, like these tools are like employee of the month. Employee of the month. I still, you know, they're not so incredible that like it can't like literally one-shot it in 5 minutes. You can't just tell Claude Code build exact replica and it can't actually like do that yet.
Yeah. Without you it would not have happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different, I had a friend's birthday party and stuff and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like...
And I just like comparing it to the new... Yeah, comparing it to the Helpful VCs drop, like we had to create original artwork for 400 VCs that you would have actually, that would have been much easier with GenAI. Totally. So that was a factor too.
But you're talking about... Anyway. Yeah. I'm just wondering like, you know, there's the Jevons paradox. We go back to Jevons paradox here, is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter and then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus something that we would have done anyway and it's more just like a cost savings thing? I don't know. It goes back and forth but people are debating and people are enjoying the AGI. Megan Fritz says, 'Bro, you got to listen. AGI is here. It's smarter than me, smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson. Bro, there is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal, bro. Bro, listen. The only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription, bro. I swear I hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it.'
That was a funny thing. Call to action to what was the... What is the call to action? I actually missed that part. It's like buy a subscription to OpenAI or to his app because if this is content marketing, like genius, like...
No, he just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean anyone who's saying that like this is like astroturfing for the AI labs, like that's ridiculous. Like that's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. It's just how nuanced is it? So yeah, start using AI seriously. It's not just a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude, ChatGPT. Like you don't post that if you're for economic gain, so I don't know. Anyway, Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Delicious Tacos, favorite account, says, 'Moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long-winded articles on how scared they are of AI.' Very true, there's a lot. But I wonder, this didn't trigger my 'this is AI-written slop' vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this or should we move on to a different story because there's a lot going on in the news today?
Okay. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor, retail rival, retail revival vow, burned investors. The Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack-tier turnarounds. Now, the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof that the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get-rich-quick advice and self-help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like not that scammy. Like kind of a funny cool thing. I mean, the books were like very like...
He was automating book buying.
Basically. A lot of people are popping on to Amazon to buy books they don't read. He's like, 'Why don't we just set this up on a subscription? Save you the time.' Yeah. He had this whole thing about knowledge and how like the original pitch for 'here in my garage' was like, look at all my supercars, that grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around a bunch of airport non-fiction. It was like, you know, a bunch of these like books behind him and he was like, this book wall is more important than anything. Where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is. The Wall Street Journal. So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get-rich-quick advice and self-help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads, that when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up...
and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. Very broad, didn't need to be super hyper-targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap: RadioShack, Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell Sporting Goods, and Linens and Things, with a promise to turn them into e-commerce winners.
That was always a weird, weird, crazy pitch.
And it's crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Yeah. RadioShack, all right, I know that one. Pier 1 Imports, I know that one. Yeah. Dress Barn, do not know that one. Modell Sporting Goods, do not know that one. Linens and Things, do not know that one.
At least Linens and Things, I can guess what they sell. Uh, I don't know what Pier One sells. Pier One Imports.
And it's crazy because almost every single item that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and Walmart.com. Yep.
At extremely thin margins.
Yeah. I mean, it's really like a referendum on aggregation theory, and if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting...
Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch.
That was sort of it. Yeah. Yeah. One unified e-commerce front end, but a little late to be going after. I mean, there were some successful, you know, come-from-behind stories. Uh, what was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion dollars? That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called, but Walmart made an acquisition of an e-commerce infrastructure provider that did have an e-commerce front end, but it never reached escape velocity, but it was like the perfect plug-in add-on to Walmart's infrastructure. And now Walmart's a trillion-dollar company. I think it might be a little bit off today, but we'll see.
Uh, so Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return. Um, but I think...
And this is called, you know, first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea like buying old retailers and trying to revive them.
But general solicitation.
No. No. And we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered and the gap.
And you see some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on X that they're amazing.
Uh, but I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing this.
Totally. Totally. Really quickly, Phantom Cash: fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. So, he invested. Sean Murphy invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, E-commerce Ventures, Rev, and Related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors.
You know, we talk about these big funding rounds and we're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the layered SPVs and all the bringing retail into the private markets, but like he really did it like that. The power, you know, a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't have a ton of respect for him in the business community, but he really does have a serious audience of people that have, you know, money that they need to invest. So, one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret.
So, Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier 1 gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors.
Second mistake. These guys lied. He said they conspired. They led people on. Uh, poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. Um, the payments stopped abruptly in late 2022 and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors.
So he had the 230 million of equity and then he also left that.
Yeah. Uh, and so the creditors got, you know, control of the assets. Uh, last September the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors, and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened. According to people familiar, no charges have been filed yet, so innocent until proven guilty here, but the Wall Street Journal has some good data here.
Uh, Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Ready, didn't respond to requests for comments. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So, on his podcast, The Tai Lopez Show, and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X, 'Never doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological.' Was he talking to himself there? I don't know.
Yeah, I guess staying in character.
I just can't believe how much like the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Uh, apparent Nelson Rowe says, 'Lopez seemed credible.' An 82-year-old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands.
Yeah. Imagine, like you can imagine somebody like this like goes offline for 10 years and then just like logs onto the internet and it's like, wait, this guy has RadioShack, Pier 1 Imports, Linens and goods.
Linens, Linens and Things.
I mean, this seems like a winner. Uh, so yeah. Yeah. A quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. I mean, I feel like it's under-discussed how Tai Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to aspire to build like a personal brand.
Sure. And he... Tai Lopez's greatest contribution, which I would say is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products, which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a virus.
Because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel, the people get down their funnel, they realize like, hey, like this guy's actually making money off courses. I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and, you know, flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle. So, yeah.
Yeah. Anyways, there's so many layers. You know, the course that teaches you e-commerce or drop shipping, and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on e-commerce, and we need to do the final boss: a course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell e-commerce or something like that.
Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream: one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. So, uh, in podcasts, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was in prison for selling cocaine. Uh, after high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina. He said when, on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed in an insurance company where he cold-called clients.
Lopez has said that his breakthrough came when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company and later at a financial services company he founded. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled 'Here in My Garage' in the first...
So crazy that that was 2015. In my head, this was like 2005.
Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube.
I don't know. Uh, yeah, it is. It is retro. Uh, in the first, Lopez wearing a crew neck shirt, glasses, and a scruffy beard stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge. That was the famous line: knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, 'I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought.' That video spawned a slew of parodies.
Uh, around the same time, wait, around the same time, 2015, Tai Lopez launches 67 Steps. 67 Steps.
He did this in 2015. He created the 67 meme. Apparently, this is crazy.
67 Steps, an online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life by focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. Uh, 67 Steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this, how you know, '19 details you missed in the Super Bowl halftime show.' Like the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's like feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, 99 cents, that's different than a dollar, right? Uh,
I was gonna say, so in that video when he pans to the bookshelf, yeah, one of the books is called 'A Thousand and One Books.' So it really has, he has 30,001 books.
There we go. There we go. Books inside of books, layered.
I guess where Mosi took this to the next level, where his new info product is selling like tens of thousands of books at the same time.
There, I believe there was a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of that was that you could buy like a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. And I believe he didn't he set a world record for most books sold or something like that. Wild.
Uh, so, uh, you know, all sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. 'Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small,' he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer-fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In one 2015 video, billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house. The two shot hoops and talked life lessons. For those who want to be an entrepreneur, 'What's the best advice?' Lopez asked. 'Find something you love to do. Be great at it and sell it,' Cuban responded. Honestly, good advice. Um, icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that from very high.
I should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a paywall. He's like, 'This is such good advice. I can't just, I got to charge behind the table.' A lot of the courses, it is just like it's already been distilled into a 60-second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that 60 seconds repeated 25 times, right? It's rough. So, let's go into the shopping spree.
Did you ever buy a course?
That actually changed your life.
Yes. Yes. Yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini. On Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. Uh, if you've watched Game of Thrones and you see galloping.
Here's the thing. What was the course title? Was it like 'How to Get Rich Quick with Houdini'?
No, it was like, you know, like using Houdini and advanced VFX pipelines.
So you weren't deep, you didn't just, the course creator was not driving a Lamborghini.
No. No. The course creator was like, 'I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics?' And I'm like, 'Absolutely, I would love to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that.' That's really cool and I want to learn that tool. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation. Cinema 4D, After Effects, like any skit, even when you see me like edit something, you know, all of that is, I needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff, but none of them were about to learn how to...
You paid to learn how to fish. Yes.
And now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime.
Exactly. Because I mean courses are good if it's a narrow skill. Yeah. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19. Yep. And even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split.
Just learn from any Arnold video, any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah. And it was well worth the money. Yeah. Even though the information was like, there's something about if you pay for something,
You're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it.
Yeah. And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all information products are bad.
No, I completely agree. P90X, that was the workout course that was going viral when I was in college. The ones I do think are really, really, really bad are when they advertise like trading courses to younger audiences.
Because it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account. I'm sorry, like you're not going to change your life.
The crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course, which would be like buy ETFs, right? Like there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade, right? And it would be basically like don't trade, like buy and hold, right? Dollar cost average, invest a little bit every month.
Yeah. Or go pro and go work at Jane Street or Citadel if you have the chops.
Sure. The flip side is like a lot of the courses, they weren't even teaching you how to, okay, well there's this big AI trend, maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies like that would be maybe a little financial advicey but totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like forex courses.
So you were trading, but it was like essentially on top of a random number generator. Like it's like the most complex, like understanding the trade flows for proper forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend. Like that is a life's work as opposed to just being like, oh well, like I'm a kid, I'm using Uber all the time, maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing in my opinion than okay, well the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern so it's got to go up. Like chart, yeah, chartology or something, what's that called.
Anyway, live.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Lopez teamed up with Alex Mayer, mechanical engineer, who had co-founded an online dating app that sold for 255 million. Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami-based retail e-commerce ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and Mayer was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she had previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started. The spokesperson for Mayer said he believed in Rev's business models, put over 5 million of his own money into the company, and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit with so-called severe post-pandemic macroeconomic headwinds. Burken Road is represented by blah blah blah. Rev's first notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid five million for the e-commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn?
Crickets. Where's the crickets? We need it. Where's the crickets? That's a good one. Team crickets. Crickets sound effects. We got to add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree. In July 2020, it purchased home furnishing retailer Pier 1 Imports out of bankruptcy for about 31 million, followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains. Sporting goods retailer Modell's for 3.6 mill. Has anyone heard of Modell's?
No. Oh, no. And discounter Stein Mart. Has anyone heard of Stein Mart? 6 million? And we got another no. I feel like this is, we got people from all over the country. So I think this is somewhat representative of the average American. And of course Radio Shack, undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for. I have no idea. Okay. There's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Mayer. I had to hunt it down. I'm sorry. I was distracted. First I'm going to tell everyone about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. So tell me, so Alex Mayer is, you know, controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this potentially disastrous deal. Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews. It's basically a whole bunch of podcast-type interviews combined. So 37signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal, the interviews in here are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr, Max Levchin at PayPal. This Founders at Work template, if you see, it has this like, we should pull it up, but it's like this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it and then in orange, Founders at Work, and then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's Coders at Work about software engineers and there's Venture Capitalists at Work, and Venture Capitalists at Work is a different book not written by Jessica Livingston, but Alex Mayer's in it because he founded Zeus, which was a dating site, and it's just like a funny fun fact that he's in this book that is sort of tangentially extremely legit. Anyway, we can move on. Sorry. During weekly Zoom calls for investors, Lopez and Mayer pitched new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier Rev deals. According to former employees, at his self-help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in Rev brands.
Joseph Bertau, a 44-year-old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertau recalled the message: 'Give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off and we can't get them fast enough.' He invested about $350,000.
So much money. I don't know. I mean, maybe people are... at the same time, when I look back at like my first angel investments, which granted I was like 22, I thought that I was seeing good enough opportunities that I would happily invest half of my liquid net worth.
Which I mean it wasn't that much at the time. I was like building my first company. I was like very young. I was down to take a lot of risk. I was like, 'Hey, this is...' But it's got to be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement money.
Yeah. But part of it is like when you start seeing private deals for the first time, it feels special. You look at the chart.
Yeah. And you know, in hindsight, I'm like most of the worst, like there's certainly some people that have come on the show. Justin Mares is a good example. Like you look at the first three deals Justin did and they were all like, at least two were unicorns. Like he's insane. But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were like probably in the first five.
And so people just don't realize how many companies are out there, how many private companies are out there. Like you see this one deal, you talk to this one founder and you're like this is everything. And some of the early angel investments that I made that didn't go well were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting category. And what I just didn't realize was that they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead and there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead and Sequoia had already backed this one but they hadn't announced, and then Andreessen had backed that one. And so I was in the one that didn't have any of the backing and was just going to be third in the category, which was just going to create this power law difference. And if you don't have full coverage, you don't even know that those deals are happening. And so you wind up, even if you get the idea correct and the team is good, you can still wind up in a really rough spot.
The other thing here is in one tier 1 pitch deck, investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested 1 million, which again is a 20% return, which is insane.
If somebody tells you they're going to give you any sort of return, that is usually a huge red flag. Huge red flag.
Anyways, before we move on, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Anyways, I think we can move on. This story is still unfolding. It is very sad, and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible.
Indeed. Getting into the jobs report. Jobs report. Big beat, 130,000 jobs. Economists expected 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate. Bloomberg has a live blog here breaking it all down. There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July and revisions trimmed the US 2025 payroll gain to 181,000. From Bloomberg, it's interesting. I think everyone, there were kind of delays with the report, right? Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal. And now I think the reaction is, can we trust the data, right? There's just been so much FUD thrown around the data and the job market in general that it's hard to believe your own eyes.
I was debating with a friend about, he was sending me some economic data and he was saying like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and that's where the real economy... There's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets. That's very forward-looking. You're valuing things based on 2050 cash flow and being like, 'Yeah, I'll pay for that right now because this company's going to be around.' You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for a hundred years, right? And then there's the on-the-ground, like do people have jobs or not? And the question of do people have jobs or not is much more in the healthcare and services sector.
And so Bloomberg has been breaking down: US payrolls rose in January by the most in more than a year and the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continued to stabilize at the start of 2026. And now there's going to be some debate over how real is this? Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of commerce data and if people are even just worried about losing their jobs. Usually they're pulling back on spending, discretionary spending.
Revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, like we announce these big numbers and then we kind of move on and then revise them.
This is pretty big though. You'd be surprised if this flipped negative, like maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much, but it still seems like there is job growth broadly. This seems at least directionally correct. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3% according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year which showed marked slowdown in hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000 a month last year down from the initially reported 49,000 pace.
Just a bit off.
The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring. While economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 2026, more clarity around the impact of President Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve officials' inclination to keep interest rates on hold.
Now, yeah, I mean there is this interesting tension, right, between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these two things, like if you're pushing for, hey, let's count every possible job that could potentially fit in this category, well then it's going to be harder to make the case that you should cut rates.
In leaving rates unchanged last month, Chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026, this is welcome news, said Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union. I think Fed Chair Powell was right. The labor market appears to be stabilizing.
So Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday, said that the US should have the lowest interest rates globally, adding to previous calls for rate reductions. 'Great job numbers, far greater than expected,' he wrote in all caps.
With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarks payrolls to a more accurate but slightly less timely series called the Quarterly Census of Employment Wages. That data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most US jobs. That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March than initially reported. The figure roughly aligned with that of the BLS.
Overall, I think the team that had to revise last year down by almost a million now coming out and saying like, you know, everything's great and we crushed it. Yeah.
It doesn't give you... I don't have any confidence... a smart person might think like, okay, a year from now we're going to figure out that none of this was real.
Maybe. Yeah. I mean the market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S&P 500's up 0.1%. The Nasdaq's completely flat. I guess technically up 0.01%.
Comments on Joe's post says, 'And you take these numbers at face value. Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers, lol.' Almost every single person responding just like... um, anyways. Oh well.
What did Khi have to say? Jobs numbers. This is for February. This is for February. Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60k. The current forecast is 68,000 and it jumped in the last couple days on this.
Well, you know what is real? What? ByteDance, SeaDance. The model's very good according to Ethan Malik. I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about SeaDance yesterday and how he's thinking about competition from ByteDance. But we can next time.
Let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which if you ask me is worth the two trillion of capex. It's photoreal.
In the world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter.
That's cute. I like that. 12 seconds, longer than most 8 seconds. And someone in the replies shared a Grok version of this that it just has a little bit more, I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit more blurry maybe, this video. I don't know if you can see it up close, but it's close, but it's not as real. This is Grok. Okay. The audio is also much worse. I think I watched this.
In the skies above Alaska, a river otter pilots its plane. Its paws expertly handle the controls.
Yeah, you instantly clock the audio. Yeah, you don't see on SeaDance. It sounds for sure real.
Otter Maxing. Lucas is firing shots at actors. Okay. But we can pull this up. Let's see. Let's get some audio.
You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal. He was a good man. He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die. And now you die, too.
All right. Insane. Insane audio. But the video, look, I mean, I can't... you've watched a handful of movies more than me. Does this look like it could be in a film? It's close. It's pretty close. What are you missing?
I mean, just the length of the shot. It's not fully like modern in the sense of the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either like way more cuts and just way more detail shots, like cutting in and out, or they'll try and turn it into more of like a cinematic set piece and have like a drone shot or sweeping shot. Like it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of the most modern movies. But sitting there prompting and splicing it together from different angles, for sure you could.
For sure. What do you think? Yeah, I do wonder if there's like an interesting comparison to the Cloudbot stuff where like I think one of my main takeaways from the Cloudbot thing was that it's going to be hard for big labs to kind of replicate that just because of like you can't get the WhatsApp integration. Like stuff like this where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly like training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Like the otter flying, like that's David Attenborough's voice, right? Like you're not supposed to be able to do that.
Where like, can Sora, can OpenAI release Sora with that exact voice? Like probably not. Like maybe they can try to do it, but like they're clearly going to face some legal repercussions. Yeah. Where like China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those.
Yeah. A lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like, look, yes, like we know you can prompt Disney characters. We are happy to pull that out, but also, can you want to talk to our business development team?
Yeah, like with OpenAI, you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where China is not like, I'm pretty sure that you can go and see SeaDance and just prompt like Mickey Mouse, you know, doing a little dance or whatever.
Yeah, let's look at this. Let's look at this other SeaDance 2.0 post. Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster. Epic action film scene. Different cuts.
There you go, John. You wanted all you had to do is ask. This is pretty real. I like that Will Smith is just the benchmark forever.
And I have the old Will Smith spaghetti AI ready to go after this. Okay. All right. So, this is February 2026. Yeah, this is... Let's go back in time.
That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini. No longer. Yeah, this is good. This is very good.
All right, pull up this next one. We got going back to 2023. We can see the progress. China can one-shot AI crime. Wow.
This is the progression or was this... I remember people used to post this exact same thing and be like, this is going to change everything. And it did. And they were right. Yeah, they were right. But it's still funny.
And now it's just I'm sitting there enjoying spaghetti, I suppose. Yeah. Wow, that looks cinematic.
This is good for Will Smith, right? Like he'll license his likeness and it's just more attention. I mean, this is like Jake Paul's strategy. He really wanted to be all over Sora. Got a billion impressions or something like that.
Daniel in the chat says, 'China can one-shot AI crime.' Who do you think launches the next turn of the video model? Do you think we get V4, Sora 3, or the next Meta model first?
And while you're thinking about it, let me tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with ElevenLabs.
What do you think, Tyler? I'm hoping it's Meta. I really want to see their model. I'm expecting it to be like super, super good. I think it'll be this quality. It has to be. This is like the standard. You can't launch something that's behind the frontier.
Yeah. Also, shortage of content. No shortage of content for sure. Yeah. I'm curious what they'll do with Sora, if they'll actually like keep working on the app or if they're just going to kind of try to just keep like making the model better. And then yeah, they put it in the app, but it's not as big of a push this time. I don't know.
Well, um, yeah, another news. Which one? We got to talk about Mistral. They're cooking and they're investing 1.4 billion to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden. Wow. Let's head over to Bloomberg.
French AI startup Mistral is investing 1.4 billion US dollars to build AI infrastructure in Sweden as it pushes to become the go-to AI supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I cannot pronounce, Borlange, in partnership with Eco Data Center AB. Mistral said in a statement, 'The facility will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models and is scheduled to be operational from 2027.' So, at least a year out.
This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France, and the company is billing the buildout as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty. As political ties with Washington fray, governments in the region are increasingly wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which dominate AI infrastructure, data storage, and cloud computing. Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack with data processed and stored locally. 'This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI,' says Arthur Mensch.
Mensch. Yeah, their last round was led by ASML. 1.3 billion from the Dutch chip maker. That's a good deal. They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that Macron should be highlighting.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess it's old news. They need to launch a new project and you can't just fully focus on... and they're announcing in the Financial Times that their revenue is now similar to Grok.
Mistral's revenue soars over 400 million. Interesting. That's pretty high. 400 million as Europe seeks AI independence. Well, they've certainly carved out a nice niche.
Let's go over to the Grok team and the xAI departures. First, I'll tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai.
John in the chat says Jordi discussing dissing Macron caused domino effect. Mr. Rolling, you manifested it. I did it. I inspired them to grind harder. Now of course I was one of many who was having a little bit of fun last Friday.
So Jimmy Ba said bye-bye yesterday. He said last day at xAI. And Tanish says with Jimmy Ba's departure, half of the xAI founding team has left. Mhm.
A lot of people have been trying to figure out like why is this happening? Yes. And my current belief is that, and this is based on some news that last week, xAI executives were given the option to take cash. Yep. As part of the SpaceX merger. Take cash today and you can just move on. Yep. Or you can take equity in SpaceX and stay with us for the next leg.
And so I think a lot of the executives, which are just the founding team, some of the co-founders are just saying like, 'Hey, I'm going to go work on something else.' And so we saw some other posts, some of these people are teaming up to work on something new together.
I'm sure some of them, you know, will just join other labs. But yeah, the big question is like what is xAI's strategy going to change at all with the merger? Or is it going to be more of the same? I keep kind of wondering, you know, will they get into, you know, actually get into the neocloud business? I could see it. I could see it happening. But for now, I think this is maybe like people want it to be more dramatic than it actually is, I think.
But yeah, it is. It isn't. I mean, when the SpaceX merger happened with xAI, a lot of people were like, you got pre-IPO shares in SpaceX, like you should ride it out and then sell post-IPO because the stock will probably pop, etc. And yeah, this feels like a quick exodus of people which is aggressive and it feels like sure you're behind the frontier on a few different vectors, but it is a place where you're sort of GPU rich, very intense environment though. So if you want something that's a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more research-oriented, you know, having the CEO say we're not doing research, we're doing engineering, that's not exactly a rallying cry if you're like, 'But I want to do research. I don't want to do engineering.' It's like, 'But I'm a researcher, sir. But I'm a researcher.' You're an engineer. You're an engineer now.
And so, yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all the departures from xAI?
Yeah. I mean, it probably just seems like more evidence that xAI is going to be some sort of like GPU reseller or neocloud market. Like maybe it's like, okay, Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put like so much, you know, terawatts of compute in space.
It's like, okay, that if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just like so scaling-pilled that you don't actually need to do that much research. You can just build up massive data center and then you just use the same paradigm of models. You just train the biggest model. It's 10x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best model. So you don't actually need like the insane moonshot research projects. Yeah, maybe there's something like that going on.
Yeah, a lot of the researchers they said they're leaving. That's all folks. They said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recursive self-improvement learning type cycle. It's like a very moonshot research project. That feels like something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting.
Yeah, but if xAI's whole path is now just we're going to scale up the data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things. Okay. Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane.
Yeah. What was the original Elon Musk prediction about xAI's progress around like solving something fundamental in physics or one of those major math challenges? Yeah. I think he said that at the Grok 4 launch. Yeah. Was that Navier-Stokes? Yeah, it was something like that. It was going to develop some novel physics theory.
The most impressive product that I've seen from xAI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla. It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people. And I've been seeing posts this week that have like 200,000 likes, meaning that it's incredibly mainstream on Instagram.
And testing out the product, it's very quick, very low latency. It feels like pretty much as close to talking to somebody like in a Google Hangout or Zoom as you can get. Yep. And so I think maybe their voice mode is underrated.
I think so. I have a friend who has a Tesla with a long commute. The question is, is there value beyond comedy? Not saying there needs to be right now, but if Grok can actually get good at doing things for you and you're driving in your Tesla and you can say, 'Hey, book me a haircut for next week,' and you can like do that, or 'Hey, I need to get some groceries. Can you order some groceries to the house?' And you're actually just getting that kind of ambient assistant experience.
I think that they could get some traction there. They do have an insane amount of cars on the road. That's a big user base.
Yeah, I have a friend who has a Tesla with a long commute and he talks to Grok voice mode, not the crazy mode, just the normal mode, about, you know, putting together to-do lists, planning out the day, researching things, answering questions, getting up to speed while he's commuting. I've done that a few times where I've just kind of opened up not the voice mode specifically, but the record my voice and transcribe it, and I'll sort of talk about what's on the agenda for today and then try and put it into just a sort of annotated note format that I can work with.
We have breaking news from Elon. What's that? He shared xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution as a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI. The structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people and we wish them well in future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you.
That's funny. I like that. Yeah, but like mass drivers is like not an AI thing, right? So it's very clear that like if you want to work on these crazy moonshot AI, like this weird machine learning concept, like maybe it's not actually that aligned with xAI anymore.
Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, it's like what type of moonshot do you want to work on? ASI that lives in a data center or the infrastructure that will power humanoids and the mass driver on the moon that's making endless satellites that, you know, build the Dyson sphere. It's like it's a different direction, maybe even longer term moonshot, but it is a different one.
Yeah. I mean, they still have like the Macrohard project, right? Which is like still, I'm very excited to see what comes out of that, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, do they have a CLI tool yet for Grok? I want to say there is a Grok Code. Okay. Yeah.
Anyways, xAI posted a 45-minute all-hands outlining their accomplishments and a bunch of other stuff. So today we will watch that right now in silence. Yes. No, we're not going to watch it. But no, we'll tell you about Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
So, let's see. A lot of people, like a number of researchers have just been doom posting on the timeline. Hugh Fan says, 'Today I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do?' Yeah. And it's when, not if. So this is somebody who's actively at OpenAI.
Yeah. And so it's significant, but it's also great marketing for investing in OpenAI. I think people are more skeptical when it comes from the CEOs who are actually out on the fundraising trail than from staff engineers who have less of an incentive. I don't know.
Yeah, but this post has been up for 19 hours and it has 384,000 views. So you can assure you can, I would say OpenAI comms has seen this post and has not asked them to take it down.
Yeah. Well, they probably genuinely feel that way. The question is just like how real is it and how diffuse will this be and how fast will it be? Is it February of 2020 or is it, I don't know, some other time, 1995.
There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already had them muted. But the formula is as such, Trunk Fan laid it out: Find a viral post. AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10-plus quotes in a row and hope a few hit. Between 10:30 and 10 p.m. yesterday, cranked out 13 of them, 10,000 words total, all AI slop every day. Unreal.
And so Trunk fact-checked or spot-checked them with Pangram and you'd see that it's fully AI generated. But apparently he blocked Pangram Labs. I was laughing because there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes and some of them will just sit there with like one like, two likes, no likes.
And so it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, something like almost 200,000 followers on X. Like it's working, but there's no real audience because if you post something that only gets one like, it feels like there's no real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering like how this monetizes. Is this a real business? Where is this going? But certainly frustrating some people at the trough.
Ackman makes $2 billion bet on Meta. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in Meta, making up 10% of its portfolio or about 2 billion. The firm sees Meta as a top beneficiary of AI, boosting ads, content, and future products like wearables and digital assistants. I saw somebody had wired up, I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up OpenClaw with their Meta headset.
Okay. And which one? VR, AR, or the AR one, the display, but effectively saying like, 'Hey, buy this product.' And it would go to Amazon and buy the product. Wow. And that is the vision we've been talking about. That is the opportunity. Zuck wants you to be able to just be in the world shopping.
Yep. And for a lot of people that don't want to wire up an open source project, he will slowly do all the BD deals to, you know, drive traffic. Although Meta has tried to get into commerce so many times, and we can talk to Harley about this as well. There's been a lot of back and forth about, you know, should you be able to just click and check out directly on Meta properties. It's never fully developed and you have to imagine that they have all the BD horsepower in the world to try and go and do that, but for some reason that has continued to live in the domain of brands and Amazon and Shopify sites, etc.
Quickly, Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And Scott Wu is sharing some news from Cognition. Your PR should fix themselves with autofix. Devin now closes the loop on its own PRs. If Devin review or GitHub bot flags bugs, Devin automatically fixes the PR. Devin also tackles CI lint issues until all checks pass. And so there's autofix and Scott just says one step closer to the recursive ever-improving AI coding system.
JB on X says, 'Cool. So now Meta is Enron,' being a little dramatic. But Meta Platforms auditor Ernst & Young raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data center project off its balance sheet. Meta moved the data center project into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and said it isn't the primary beneficiary of this entity so it didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.
Four Democratic senators asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council to investigate the risk that AI-related debt posed to the financial system, citing Meta's joint venture with Blue Owl as an example of convoluted and opaque financing.
This is sort of old news. We talked about the Blue Owl deal and how it was structured as its own entity. It's its own business. It just has Meta as a tenant. Yeah. But I think for me, I would probably need to see them doing like copy and pasting this like 10 more times to the point where I'd be like, you know, maybe Meta is not good for it, right? But I mean, it still shows up in the cash flow if they're paying for the data center. They need to monetize it properly. So.
Nas on a roll says, 'Apparently, Walter Bloomberg has no vocal cords left because of all the uppercase shouting on X constantly.' Walter, I bet a lot of people out there think he just works for Bloomberg. They probably do. Oh, yeah. Walter Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, Joe Weisenthal's boss. Definitely.
We got Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV. Harley, how you doing, gentlemen? Great to be here as always. Love being here on earnings day. Yeah, always good to have you. Great to have you back. Yeah, give us the update on earnings and then I want to dig into, you know, what you can tell us about the economy broadly, 2025, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world, help us understand it.
All right, let's go. All right, let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It was, I think I came to you live from the middle of the National Retail, or maybe it was January actually, National Retail Federation, and I told you that you asked about how things are with Shopify, I said wait for the earnings. So here are the earnings we announced earlier this morning. GMV was up 29% to $370 billion, which is incredible. Revenue was up 30% to 11.5 billion, which is a decade of growth of over 20%.
The number that actually is, I've been in Shopify for almost half my life. And this number is, I know it hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14% of the entire US e-commerce market, which is...
You guys did the 1% of the TAM meme and then you 14x'd it.
That's exactly right. And actually, you know, one of the cool parts is that we also did it with, I think, with incredible discipline. Cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rails for AI shopping. And we did things like announce the Universal Commerce Protocol that we co-developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our agentic storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot.
And so I think if you kind of think about 2025 as the year that we kind of laid the rails for agentic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And so that I think is really incredible.
Back to what we were talking about at NRF, we were talking about some of the brands and the velocity of growth. We can talk about consumer as well, but just in terms of the merchants, entrepreneurs we see, I'm beginning to think that 2026 is really going to be kind of year one for this next generation of these billion-dollar brands. I think there's going to be more billion-dollar brands created in the next 10 years than the last 100 years.
And in terms of, you know, if you're looking for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean, we talked, you know, we talked during BFCM, of course, we did that, you know, I sort of became a couple of hours exactly. But look, GMV for the quarter was 124 billion. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400 billion. And so if you think about that as a proxy for, you know, how consumers are doing, consumers are buying. They're buying from brands they love. They're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars. But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them.
Talk about agentic commerce. Is there any activity that's happening yet? Is the ads launch from ChatGPT going to be an important moment in driving that? What are you looking forward to this quarter in terms of agentic?
So we do have some merchants live already, merchants like Glossier, Spanx, Viori, Stanley, Steve Madden...
Already live. Actually, if you just look from Jan 2025 to Jan 2026, we actually have seen approximately AI searches. So if you look at your Shopify admin in terms of sources, it's up like 15x. It's still very early, but it's certainly beginning to evolve. And one of the things that we're trying to do for the merchants on Shopify is that if you're with us, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening, whether that's online or offline or certainly on agentic. And I think, you know, you guys have discussed this many times, but I think there's going to be a bunch of different permutations of exactly how agentic commerce evolves. What we're doing is we're preparing for whichever path wins. Shopify is going to be well set up there.
In terms of ads, I mean, that's not, you know, ads are not a new thing. I think ads have always been part of the commerce experience in some form, sort of natural evolution. I think consumers expect this. I think the key though is going to be there has to be a clear distinction between kind of ads and organic content. And so far that's what we're seeing as well. But generally, and you know, I think, you know, we're in the early stage of 2026, but it does certainly feel like there is a massive... I know you were talking earlier about, you know, how a bunch of young people became kind of drop shippers based on certain influence.
In many ways it does feel like there are more people starting businesses, but the velocity of those businesses is just insane right now. And because they can access global markets right away, they have incredible resources. Yeah, it feels like a really, really important time to be an entrepreneur right now and a very exciting time.
Yeah. What's the moat for DTC entrepreneurs? Is it changing? Is it brand? Is it distribution? Marketing chops?
I mean, look, I think let me, I'll give you a quick example. We launched Shopify Sidekick about a year ago or so, which is our, we sort of call it your co-founder. It lives inside of Shopify. It knows everything about your business and everything about commerce and Shopify. We added to this thing called Shopify Pulse recently, which is this new feature that effectively it proactively helps merchants grow their business. It works in the background. It surfaces like these tailored recommendations for things you can do to grow your business, and then if you agree to them, it actually goes and executes. I heard this story last week of a jewelry merchant who got a recommendation from Pulse to rather than having four separate SKUs to actually bundle them into a stack and create a bundle. And immediately that particular merchant immediately saw more sales happen.
If you are meeting these great merchants with great ambition and great products and adding this like personalized data analysis with great intelligence, I don't know, it's bespoke, it's intuitive, but it really will allow more of these direct to consumer brands to access, I think, more customers. And this idea of, you know, like initially it was like online only for DTC, then it was like let's try offline as well, have online and offline working simultaneously. It feels like we've evolved well past that, and this is kind of what we're doing at Shopify, which is that regardless of where consumers are spending their time, make it really easy for merchants and entrepreneurs to access those markets. And something as simple as like the agentic storefronts, where with a couple clicks you can push products to ChatGPT and to Gemini, that's only going to increase the velocity even further.
SaaS Apocalypse. How are you guys? I'm just going to say the word that's been on everybody's mind the last like, you know, 10 days or so, or 10 months for kind of our corner of the internet. I look at Shopify, it's a system of record, it's payments, it's a consumer buying network. It's battle-tested infrastructure that needs to have insane uptime. Like I don't see the vibe coding risk at all, but how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts?
Yeah, it's look, we did our call this morning at 8:30, and we basically have been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of all, let me just say this: people have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one. We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong, which is kind of fun. I think a couple things. I think AI on the agentic side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially even how they buy. That's what we're building for. We are building for these agentic storefront experiences and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on Shopify, you're just better positioned.
But, you know, the truth is like AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It will not rewrite the transaction contract. And one of the things that we've been building on Shopify, you know, everyone talks about the online store, like your, you know, the e-commerce component of Shopify. The killer feature of Shopify for a very long time has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory and you do taxes and you do analytics and reporting. You launch marketing campaigns and you create loyalty and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue to do really well, notwithstanding some of this vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are systems of record, the ones that are actually operating like operating systems. And, you know, that's Shopify. Yeah. And some other companies. Yeah.
Yeah. But just jumping in, like I do think that there, when throughout my history, you know, being a Shopify customer and user over the years, I would be, if I was operating like a tiny Shopify plugin that one engineer had built and they were charging $30 a month, I would be a little bit worried about vibe coding because I do remember throughout history using a plugin where I was like, 'Okay, this is a nice little feature that I can bolt on and I'm happy to pay for this because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom, you know, whatever that is.' So I think...
But again, that is a tailwind for Shopify as a platform because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of like Lego blocks on top of it. So...
Yeah, you know, one of the things we're noticing, actually one of the questions I got on the earnings call this morning was the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're seeing, app developers, but also merchants themselves who historically would hire a third party to build a tool, do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and these new tools to build on top of is because we actually think having more people build on top of Shopify benefits merchants. But back to that whole like, if you were just a feature, I mean, you know, you guys, if I had to word cloud, you know, your show, the word 'wrapper' probably comes up as much as anything. I think you actually have to create something of real value, and if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're going to struggle. But companies, and if you look at the apps on, I mean, you know, take some of the larger apps on Shopify like the Klaviyos of the world, you know, who built this incredible, in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing that is very, very difficult to disrupt. So I think the idea of like we want to invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that, you know, AI will rewrite interfaces, will never rewrite like real infrastructure.
Yeah, Klaviyo is a great example because somebody could build something that can send an email, but then if your delivery is just terrible, it's just going to be, you might save a little bit using the vibe-coded solution, but then you're losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not actually getting through to your customers. So there's any like e-commerce operator, like getting, you guys know this too, like you've spent, like you guys have had a better solution in the market for how many years, and you're still, you know, how hard it is to convert a legacy brand to even trust a new platform because they're like, our current system is not great, but we know how critical this infrastructure is and what a big step it is. So I...
It is interesting, you know, even on the enterprise side, one of the things that I've noticed coming out of NRF, which effectively is like all the major, the largest retailers are all there, is that even the largest retailers who feel like they have something that's good enough, they're getting pushed by their exec team or their board to think about like unified commerce. This idea that, you know, think about the metaphor of like a browser with 12 tabs open, online, offline, agentic, cross-sell on social media platforms, B2B. Even the most traditional of retailers and businesses we are finding now are coming to Shopify for simplicity, that they don't want to run this like, you know, this Rube Goldberg machine in commerce. They actually want to create this centralized back office that runs all of it. That's been amazing for us. In fact, one of the biggest areas of growth for us has been the enterprise, and companies that traditionally did not come to Shopify, like General Motors for example or Estée Lauder for example, are now migrating to us as well. So I think, you know, it's an exciting time to be a new entrepreneur getting started because the resources and the tools are insane. But even some of the largest retailers, the next few years are going to be incredible for them because they're going to access these tools and be able to operate at a pace that frankly some of them have never been able to operate at.
Do you have a hard stop at 12:30?
I can keep going for a bit.
Okay. I want to talk about evolution of UI, sort of tactical. Like when I had an e-commerce site that was not on Shopify, regrettably, launching a new product was like, how are we going to literally Django, go in the back end, what's the database schema, is it a boolean, right? Like all these different things, right? Then you go to Shopify and it's very easy.
Yahoo Stores or something like that, what was it?
No, it was literally Django, like Python, like it was hosted on Heroku. And so, yeah, homegrown disaster. Huge, huge waste of resources. You go to Shopify, you get an HTML page with a bunch of fields that you can fill in when you have a new product, and it fills into the templates, right? Is the future I talk to Shopify in natural language? Is that actually better than defining my product variants in HTML UI? Like, do you think that like Shopify will have an agent where I'm making changes within the Shopify ecosystem but in natural language, or is HTML dropdowns, are there sort of like more Lindy than we'd think?
So I think the good news is you can do both, right? Like the idea is, can we make the important things really easy and everything else possible. There are merchants right now that we have a product we just announced in December at our edition called SimJim. SimJim effectively simulates what any task might be. So you can say, if I change this particular design or I try this particular campaign, what does SimJim simulate will be the results of that. And we're seeing a lot of our merchants begin to adopt it now and try it out. I think the idea should be you can do both. If ultimately what you do best is you are an artisan, you make beautiful products, you make some sort of like children's toys and they're amazing, and you actually do not know anything about digital commerce or digital marketing, I think you can use Sidekick as really your CMO and your co-founder that helps you become a lot more internet native when it comes to commerce and retail.
In other cases, the idea that, you know, some of our brands like Skims for example or Alo Yoga for example, I mean, they want to do some really customizable stuff. They're very technical. They have an amazing engineering team. They want to go into the code and really make it so their particular store is exactly what they want. That ability where, you know, at some point you had to either build your own stack if you wanted massive customization, or if you didn't know how to use anything when it came to e-commerce, you had to go and hire some sort of like company to go build everything on your behalf. I think all that's gone. I think the net result of that's going to be you're going to have way more people starting businesses and way more companies getting larger at a much faster clip. And Sidekick is a really good example of that, and so is SimJim. I think beyond that, the other thing is like this idea that you start with one particular channel, I think will very quickly go away. We're already starting to see that where immediately, you know, you may start with your online store as your online hub, but very quickly you're going to activate an Instagram channel or a TikTok channel, or you may decide, hey, I want to try this agentic thing. I think this idea that I am an ex kind of merchant, I'm an online merchant, offline merchant, I think that's going to be something that like it's going to be like talking about the color TV. It makes no sense in the future. But all that coming together is what we've been building in Shopify for two decades. And the end result of it is that, you know, we're seeing way more entrepreneurship than ever before.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. But Jordi, anything else? How are you talking to, last question, how are you talking to friends, family outside of the tech bubble about AI on X? You were busy with earnings, but on X there's an essay with like 50 million views basically telling everyone to freak out. I'm curious how your...
I saw the essay before I started my day. I actually sent the essay to my wife just because I wanted to substantiate that I'm not an insane person talking about this stuff every single day. Yeah.
I think that essay, I think you guys said or someone said, like that essay feels like it crossed the chasm.
Exactly. It went kind of well beyond just like our kind of little, you know, world circle of the internet.
I think ultimately the idea of being reflexive with AI, you know, Tobi wrote this letter a couple months ago, you guys probably remember it that got leaked. And it really, you know, the reason it got leaked was it talked about that if you want to hire someone at Shopify for your team, first you have to substantiate why AI can do it better. But if you actually looked at the meta message in the email, right?
Definitely cannot do it better. Exactly. That AI cannot do it better. So if you can't do it better, then you can hire, but if AI can do it better, you know, we're not, you know, the headcount doesn't get allocated, which...
What it really suggested was this idea of like AI reflex, that rather than sort of use it as a tool, how do you kind of use it as part of your day-to-day life? You know, when I'm preparing for an earnings call with Jeff, our CFO, we used to go around and meet a ton of different product leaders around the company to kind of glean and figure out and summarize like what are the most exciting things happening at Shopify. It was part of the process for I don't know like 10 quarters. Now effectively we go to Shopify's vault. We have like a dozen MCPs running. We're able to pull way more information than we can. So when we do meet with those product leaders, the conversations are way richer. They're not spending a bunch of time explaining to us at a very abstract level or at a macro level what they're working on. We can ask specific questions. I think companies that become more reflexive and individuals that become more reflexive, especially entrepreneurs, there's no doubt it's going to make you more effective and more efficient. But I think articles like this, it invites the non-tech community into what we're seeing in a way that I think is important. I think the reason it's getting so much traction is because it felt like it was written for my wife as opposed to for me.
But that's different. Then I think a lot of people are sharing it saying you should take this seriously, it's really cool. I think a lot of people have been processing this as like you should take this seriously and it's like get your financial house in order, like, you know, this is like a, you're going to get steamrolled.
Yeah, look, I don't believe in the doom. I'm an eternal optimist. I think what it's done for Shopify, for our merchants, for our business has been incredible. I think what it's doing for individual entrepreneurs is incredible. My daughter, you know, we recently moved to Montreal, which is a French city. My kids, we moved from an English city. My kids are learning French right now. There's homework that comes that I just cannot help them with. I would have had to hire a tutor. I still may have to at some point, but the fact that I'm able to do so much more on my own, even in my own dad role, makes my life better.
Totally. So, yeah. And what's so cool about that is for you, you can go hire a tutor. You could hire 10 tutors, but there's a lot of families that just never would have been able to do that. The kids would have been struggling.
Optimistic. That's what I'm saying. I mean, sometimes like my four-year-old will ask me just why, why, why, you know, the 10 whys of like why is the sky blue? And I'll be like, I think I know why, but even with the money, I can't hire a tutor to come by the house at 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday in 2 seconds, but I can go and look it up and then relay a story and I can tell that story.
How can you not be optimistic when you have those tools available to you? The key though is looking at them as these incredible tools, looking at them as a way for you to create like some sort of exoskeleton for all of our lives. And there's going to be some laggards. I mean, it's going to be like, I think it was Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm, like we will cross the chasm where in the mainstream we'll use it.
My mom's using AI right now mostly for like things like recipes, but that's sort of like a gateway drug I think for her using it for things like questions about, I don't know, banking or whatever my mom does daily. So it's tough not to be optimistic, and certainly from a Shopify perspective it's been incredibly valuable for us. Agentic shopping hasn't even started yet, but like we're prepared for it. And I think, I don't know, this sounds like, yeah, even for entrepreneurship.
I think we're still underselling the opportunity with AI.
Yeah. When I look back in my early days of entrepreneurship, luckily I had people around that I could call and say, 'Hey, how do you do this?' Or what kind of contract do I need for this? How do I set this thing up? Should I use a SAFE note? Should I use this or that? And now it's, you know, hopefully entrepreneurs can build a network quickly, but you don't need a network to get like customized advice on pretty much any situation. And yes, it could still be wrong sometimes, but it's usually directionally correct and helps you be more informed. And it's amazing.
It feels also like we as humans, we don't often want to ask someone else the question that we deem as being like a silly question or a stupid question.
That's one of my favorite parts of AI, right? Just like ask a dumb question.
Totally, totally agree. I remember when we raised our first, our Series A, this is I don't know, literally almost 20 years ago. I had to look up what a liquidation preference was and I called around.
And I felt like, you know, we were raising a Series A and it was a $25 million round. And I remember thinking like, I was already a lawyer, like I wasn't a very good lawyer, but I finished law school. I didn't go to business school and I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I just sort of think back now, the amount of information I could have taken, I could have got all these case studies, I could have understood it in a much deeper way. That is where I think so it's not surprising that this...
You could have dropped the term sheet into any LLM and instantly gotten like pretty deep. Tell me what's wrong with it, pull out all the main terms. Here's what's market. Here's what you can push back on.
Anyway, it's amazing. No more doom.
No more doom, guys. Come on. Appreciate you taking the extra time. This is going to be great. We kept a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye, Harley.
Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with small, modern small and medium-sized businesses. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Nikita Bier has a prediction. I want your take on Nikita Bier's prediction. And he says, 'In less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. iMessage, phone calls, Gmail, and we will have no way to stop it.' What do you think?
Yeah, I don't... Yeah, I mean, he must be seeing something. I would assume he's seeing something at X. He's been fighting this for a long time. In the trenches, for sure. Fighting the bots.
Yes. I got a pretty good AI phone call yesterday that was somebody leaving me a voicemail that was just like, 'Hey, just have a few questions. Give me a call back.' And I was, yeah, it was a good...
Yeah. No, no, sometimes like the text messages like...
But I listened to the voicemail. And I could clock it as AI, but when I just got the like kind of like summary of it...
But if it's David Attenborough, you're going to be like, 'David, I would love to do a documentary about a flying beaver with you. Sign me up.'
So, a hack that sort of solves this. On X, you go into the settings and you turn off notifications from anyone that you're not mutuals with, that's not verified, that doesn't have a phone number. You just make it really, you will miss some stuff, but you will see way less spam. On iMessage and the iPhone, I just don't accept calls from unknown numbers. And so, like, you have to be in my contacts book. And so, how do I actually meet people? Well, I get mutually introduced. I add their contact. We get into a group chat and it's just a game of chain linking one chain to the next. So if you...
For me, there's already a small number of people who are free to call me out of the blue whenever and I will pick up if I'm available. And then there's another big group of people that I'd be happy to have a phone call with, but I'm not just going to pick up out of nowhere because, you know, whatever, you talked about it before. The typical spam functionality for a long time has been deny lists or blacklists where you have a list of spam accounts and you deny those. You block those numbers. I think everything is shifting to allow lists or whitelists where you have an approved list of people that can get through to your messaging apps and basically cold messages, cold DMs are going to be a lot harder to break through. So the era of the reply guy who gets retweeted and ratios and, you know, gets surfaced, maybe that's the alpha these days.
Or you just have to grind harder. I have a post that I want to read about Turbopuffer. Serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Shopify alumni, I have a post I want your reaction. From Delicious Tacos. I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years and I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So, what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.
I think it's a little different, but it is funny. It is very funny.
I mean, who knows? Hot dogs might change everything. Okay. Well, you got quote tweeted here. You said, 'Just in: horses say we may be in a car bubble,' which is funny because that's a pro-AI take, right?
Yeah, I was confused by this and then AI Not Kill Everyone Is A Meme responded kind of saying horses say the real risk is what happens to the economy when the car bubble pops. So it's kind of, this is a technoptimist account now.
No, I think it's a doomer account, right?
No, no, I don't think so.
They say technoptimist in their bio.
Okay. Huh. I thought they were always like pause AI, pause the progress. But maybe the bubble is a bigger issue as well. Well, we can continue to dig into that. Quickly, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
We got the Bugatti Turbion post here. The Bugatti's mogging. So, the post says, 'The Ferrari Luce makes the interior of the Bugatti Turbion look like an absolute masterclass. Bravo Ferrari, it's pure genius to be this bad.'
People are still going back and forth on this. The Turbion, this is a driving machine. My takeaway from all the reactions this week in my personal view is I think the Jonny Ive Ferrari will be popular in specific bubbles on the West Coast and generally not be very loved.
The only thing that really jumps out to me about the design is the rounded rectangle display in the center. It just does feel iPad-ish. It feels like there's the tactile buttons, but just that block of like there's a screen.
There's also like a leather kind of lunchbox-looking thing that you can pull out.
Take it on the go, I suppose. Rat Limit on X says, 'People who back into parking spots cannot be truly present. You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived.' Envisioned isn't even a word for it, is it? Envisioned.
Still doing numbers. 50k likes. I love it. You envisioned your departure. The moment you arrive, you're not truly present. Do you back in ever?
I back in every once in a while, but mostly I'm angling for the room for the doors. So if there's a pillar in the parking garage that will block the passenger door and I have a passenger.
It's strategic. It's not default.
Exactly. So I am extra present. I'm extremely present. I'm locked in trying to give my passenger the best possible vehicle exiting experience there could possibly be.
Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create codeback prototypes and apps fast. Toma Bravo executives fielded queries and held conversations with investors to discuss the impact of AI on their software portfolios. Vista Equity Partners' chief executive sent an email to clients and plans to follow up with a webinar. Don't worry, I'm following up with a webinar to discuss the state of the firm's portfolio, saying that we believe that AI will enhance software, not replace it. Leaders of several firms including KKR, Blackstone, and Ares reported that their exposure to the sector are limited and that the sell-off is overblown, with some saying that AI will not significantly impact their well-established portfolio companies. It's hard to say that it won't impact it at all. You kind of got to pick a side in most cases. But yeah, it's interesting. You've got like, you know, PE firms that only own software and they're like, 'No big deal. We're excited about this. We're not worried at all.' But they're having to do kind of like, you know, it's the 'what kind of American are you' meme. It's 'what kind of software did you build?' But then on the other side you have firms that have some exposure saying, 'Well, we don't have very much exposure.' Yes. Yes. Yes. And so these are, you know, the messaging is...
And so this is what we were talking about this morning. I think there will need to be, in many ways, a reclassification of who the AI winners and who the AI losers are in the software world because there truly are platforms where yes, you could vibe code it, but the value in the asset is the liquidity on that platform. Like you can vibe code an Airbnb marketplace competitor, but if there's no houses on there and they're all AI generated, you can't actually go to the beach house, like you don't actually compete with Airbnb. And so there's a lot of software companies that fit in that world where there's liquidity or some other network effect or some scale economy, but purely just having, okay, we spent a bunch of money on R&D, we have a bunch of lines of code written, and it would cost you a billion dollars to write the same amount of code and compete with us. So you're not going to do that because you're going to take a billion dollars to raise all the money and then you're just going to be competing with us. Well, now that billion dollars is shrinking down. Maybe it's $100 million, maybe it's $10 million, maybe it's less and less and less. And so there will need, in many ways, it's just a return to form of like where are the true moats.
And then, you know, intellectual property obviously, network effects, scale economies, there's a few...
Regulatory, regulatory. So yeah, there will be some software companies, some SaaS companies where you find out that it's like Duolingo with like, oh, it's actually a game and people love the brand and so that's been much more resilient relative to a company that was basically just data that was scraped and put into ChatGPT and the stock's down 90%.
Pythia Cap responded to the comments from Toma Bravo and Vista Equity Partners saying, 'Breaking: 6x levered long software investors who can't exit think software is okay actually.'
So let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also, Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital has quote tweeted my article and he chimes in, sort of agrees. He says, AI... The title of my article was 'AI is not COVID.' And he says AI is not COVID in three key ways. And I wish I put this in the article because it's pretty good analysis. He says it's bigger, much bigger. And I agree with that. COVID, you look at the numbers and it goes up. It was crazy, world-changing. But then now we've moved on and there's a whole different set of stories. It's durable. COVID was a wave. It came and went. AI will compound. And so you never go back to not using the internet. You never go back to not using a mobile device. You never go back to not having AI in the world. You do go back to a world where you can walk around and not feel sick if you don't wear a mask. That happened. And then third, he says, 'We have a choice.' This is important and the main reason to read the article. With COVID, everyone played defense. With AI, we can choose to play offense. Don't let AI wash over you. Put it to work. And this is what Harley was saying as well. There's an opportunity. And Pat Grady says, 'The best time to make that choice is right now.' And I agree. It's an optimistic message. Alex Su says, 'At this point, I can't tell if Harvey is in the business of selling technology to lawyers or equity to VCs.'
He works for a company called Atticus, who specialize in providing high and flexible legal talent to corporate legal departments. So he's in a lawyer staffing firm.
Oh, okay. So hard to take this post. Two.
Guess what? News flash. If you're the CEO of a startup, you're in both businesses, buddy. Always. No matter what. You got to raise. You got to outraise your competitors. If you're in a competitive space, if you're in a high-growth industry, you have to be selling equity to VCs. And you also got to be selling your product to customers. Get used to it. It's the game on the field and you're going to be playing it. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.
Jared Ticket says, 'Knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket and they blew his head smooth off.' I can't believe how mainstream this is. 5 million views, 167,000 likes. Andrea Console says, 'Should I use Console?' It does solve that exact issue. Sofh over on X says, 'Going to name my son Garrett, short for cigarette.' I never put that together.
Garrett would be a beautiful name.
I used to have this joke with Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures because his first initial is C. So if it's C. Garrett, it's Cigarette. It's like he has the name. Anyway, BlackRock's getting into DeFi. Totally unimaginable five years ago, but they're doing it. We should talk.
This will be interesting. Yes, they're buying Uniswap tokens. So Fortune has a story here. In the latest sign of the rapid convergence of Wall Street and crypto, the world's biggest asset manager is moving into decentralized finance or DeFi. BlackRock on Wednesday revealed it will be bringing its treasury-backed digital token called BUIDL, misspelled, that's very online for BlackRock, onto Uniswap, a leading DeFi platform where it will be bought and sold by institutional traders. As part of the tie-up, BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's own token, UNI. The new arrangement, which is being undertaken with tokenization firm Securitize, is a significant milestone for the DeFi sector, which many view as one of the most useful applications in crypto. Unlike traditional trading which relies on centralized intermediaries to record and settle trades, platforms like Uniswap rely on smart contracts to match buyers and sellers via liquidity pools and automated market makers. Currently there are around $100 billion worth of capital sitting on DeFi platforms. I remember DeFi summer. Were you deep in the trenches during DeFi summer? It was a big... what was that, 2022, right? 2021. It was before the crash.
It was the era of like Thorchain and like...
But I think 2021 was the Solana summer.
Major FOMO basically for anyone who didn't participate and major heartache for many people that did. It was a wild time. A lot of people having fun. And interesting from a, you know, it had some of the same feelings as the OpenClaw thing. It was like you had to set up, you had to know the terminal a little bit. You had to be comfortable sort of, you know, installing these tools, understanding, oh, don't send your money to the wrong address. The address itself looks like a hash and so it's like a little bit lightly technical. You didn't have to write any software, but you had to be able to use different wallets that were very...
It does feel like there was a little bit of nerd sniping. There was also a lot of real businesses built and, you know, obviously there's still $100 billion sitting in DeFi and DeFi survived the DeFi winter that followed DeFi summer, of course, sort of bad nominative determinism. The DeFi summer sort of implied that a winter was around the corner and it was. But BlackRock's now going into DeFi. So they're listing their BUIDL token which launched in 2024 and boasts a total market value of around $1.8 billion and it reflects a major vote of confidence in DeFi from one of the finance industry's most influential firms. The practical impact of Uniswap adding BUIDL to its platform is likely to be minor at first though, since the arrangement involves Securitize creating a whitelist of eligible institutions that can participate in the DeFi trading. The firm is also whitelisting a handful of market makers, including longtime crypto liquidity provider Wintermute, to facilitate trading. Meanwhile, access to BUIDL is restricted to qualified purchasers, a legal designation for those with assets of more than $5 million or more. So they're getting into DeFi, but they're just dipping their toes in the water. 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.
So there are lots of essays that everyone... it's like essay week in AI. People are writing essays about is AI like COVID, is you need to talk to your family. Zoe resigned from OpenAI on Monday. The same day they started testing ads in ChatGPT. She quit in protest.
And she dropped a guest essay in the New York Times.
In the New York Times. That is a crazy thing to do. I feel like a company hasn't fully arrived until an employee quits and they have the opportunity just to go immediately write an opinion essay on said business.
Pretty soon you're going to quit and drop a whole MrBeast video. That's the future. You drop a 10-part hour-long miniseries. Just raise the stakes. Go with the biggest splash you can possibly make.
So first, makes the bull case for ChatGPT as a business. OpenAI is the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the tidal forces pushing them to abuse it again? So far the ads will effectively be display ads. Yeah. Not integrated into the content and not influencing the content. But again she's arguing that, you know, you can sort of start by doing that and then there's an incentive, there's a business incentive to up the ante a little bit. Hopes Revenge says, 'I don't mean to be rude but I feel like this article says very little. I think everyone will agree data privacy is good. Two tech companies have a bad track record of resisting their incentives to misuse this data. You kind of vaguely gesture towards certain kinds of oversight, mostly niche and European, but I think we both suspect that's probably not going to happen in this case. There really isn't a model here. I'm a lot more interested in why you joined OpenAI and stayed for two years and what you would slash wouldn't do in the AI space. I do think you're right to draw attention to what is special about the intersection of AI and advertising, which is that the data set being created and the product itself has a much higher potential for abuse than other familiar tech models of monetized platforms. This feels like a fairly obvious point that I don't see enough of. You're also right to draw attention to the fact that people don't necessarily have a problem with the fact that ChatGPT is doing ads now like this, but that they likely don't think it will actually stop their slippery slope. Thanks.'
There's a very funny paragraph in Ben Thompson's piece on Google earnings that is basically the flip side of this that I thought was very funny. Now he says this is probably the least important of the three benefits of LLMs for Google's search business. He's covering Google earnings and what ads are doing for Google. Everything's going very well. And he says, 'What's notable about that ranking, however, is that this is basically OpenAI's entire proposed advertising business. Google has the luxury of not putting ads in Gemini. But that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting with ads in conversational AI. They're just doing it in AI mode.' And their initial offering sounds a lot like what OpenAI is going to do in ChatGPT. Put ads in based on the content of the current conversation. Meh. It's the meh that is scary. Google's upside revenue potential from LLMs is so large that its side project, which is OpenAI's entire proposed business, hardly merits a mention in terms of justifying capex. So Google's saying, 'Hey, we're going to spend so much money on capex, but analysts, shareholders, don't worry because we have really great applications.' And the great applications, like they put ads in LLM responses, really, really low. And so Ben Thompson's like, this thing is happening and everyone's very focused in this ChatGPT ads thing, but Google's doing it and it's like meh, like not even a big deal for them. And they're like, 'Of course, yeah, we just stuffed some ads in the thing because we're doing AI search and we'll keep them out of Gemini, but we're, you know, display and search ads and YouTube ads are going to be way better and we're making so much money over here that this thing that's like causing so much drama and people are doing Super Bowl ads about, like, yeah, we just did it and it's minor to the financials and, you know, if you're an analyst or shareholder, like, don't even stress about it and also no one's paying attention.'
So it was just very funny that there are plenty of justifications elsewhere while everyone else is going to have to spend to keep up without nearly the obvious high-margin benefit. So Google has a bunch of different places to put ads and so much surface area, so many users, and so little pushback. You know, I don't think anyone at Google is going to be quitting over ads in AI mode because it's an advertising company and everyone's used to it. We have our next guest in the Riverside waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike first. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Matt Shumer in the Riverside waiting room. Welcome to the show, Matt.
The Shuminator, the man of the hour. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.
The most viral essay ever, maybe. Has there ever been a more viral one?
Would you have won the million dollars if you posted this a week ago?
I think so.
I don't know, but I do wish I posted this a week ago.
Well, fantastic response. What has the response been like to the essay from non-tech people? I imagine that you have friends, family friends that have been texting you screenshots or something like that. Walk me through the experience of this.
It's been crazy. I wrote this with that in mind, but still I didn't expect it to actually happen. You know what I mean, right? I originally wrote this for my parents. I was trying to explain to them what was going on while I was actually home for Super Bowl Sunday with them, some family, friends. And frankly, I couldn't find anything that was both clear and accurate, but also understandable for them.
I was looking at Dario Amodei's essays, and when you read them, they're perfect. They're amazing. But you have to be in tech to understand them. And I just wanted to find a way to communicate this in a way that allowed them to actually understand it without having to know all the jargon, the industry dynamics, everything. Because I think it's important for people to know this, but there's just not much out there for the person that's not in tech. So yeah, it did take off. It's been surprising and exciting. Frankly, I've been getting texts from friends who I haven't heard from in years, and they're like, 'My boss is sending this around the office.' It's surreal. I thought it would go a little viral. I didn't think it would go mega viral, and certainly not to this level. So I'm kind of taking it all in. I've slept like two whole hours since I posted this. I'm exhausted, but it's been crazy and I'm glad that the message was received. I think that's the most important part, right? People did not react the way I was expecting, but it's good that people know that there's a chance.
And the message is just something big is happening. You just want people to pay attention because I think people are going to debate how you presented different things. Is the COVID comparison really that accurate? But is that specifically you're just trying to wake people up?
Exactly right. If I knew how viral this was going to go, I think I would have spent more time thinking through some of the parts and how I presented them. But...
Is part of why you're maybe sort of worried or you want people to pay attention your experience as an entrepreneur here? Because it feels like in many ways HyperWrite probably made more sense as a product two years ago, and as all the different LLMs have gotten better and the products have gotten better, I imagine it has been great, and sounds like maybe you're moving on to focus on investing. But is part of this a very personal experience of just kind of waking up to the power of the base models and the labs in general?
It has, and I'll share more on the company side soon. But I've been in this industry since 2019. I got in when I was in college working on a VR startup, and I realized that if I didn't drop everything to jump into AI, I'd regret it for the rest of my life. And I'm glad I did. But seeing the progression is kind of freaky. I mean, you know, it couldn't write a sentence accurately in 2019, much less a line of code.
Now we're looking at models that can build autonomously for many hours. I had early access to GPT-5.3 Codex, and that was a very eye-opening experience getting used to that. At first, I was prompting and using it like I use any other model, little things at a time, iterating back and forth until I realized, wait, this isn't screwing up. I started pushing it forward and pushing it further and just saying, 'Hey, here's the big spec I want. Don't come back to me until it's perfect and get it deployed on a server.' And it did.
And I'm not saying every industry is going to go just like that. I don't think it's going to look like that in every industry. But if that's a sign of things to come, I think people should be paying attention.
Yeah. I mean, the VR example is so interesting because I completely agree with you on just the power of the models. It's so real. It's so legitimate. And truly a lot of people are like, 'Oh, it still hallucinates or six fingers in the images.' It's like that is antiquated, you need to get up to speed. But at the same time, we see Mark Zuckerberg cutting back on virtual reality spending and plans there, and it feels like if AI is going to advance everything, you'd be like, 'Great, I can invest 10 times less in Reality Labs and the headsets are going to get 10 times better.' But there's a lot of these things, it's not even the physical world. I'm not even talking about doctors, I'm talking about VR headsets. But even that doesn't feel like AI really pulls that forward. And I'm just wondering, when I go to my friends and family, how many of them will actually be like, 'Yes, this is going to change my life in whatever I do,' versus like, 'Yeah, software will get better, but software is a small piece of what I do.' But how are you thinking about people where software is like a more minor piece of their world?
Yeah, this is something that again, hindsight is 20/20. I wish I had spent more time on knowing what was to come. I try to address it a little bit in the article and I'll hopefully provide more color here.
My dad's a lawyer, as an example.
Like it's not going to stand in court anytime soon.
It can help with writing. It can help with reviewing things that he's working on. It's essentially an associate, and it's getting better every year.
But it's not going to stand in court. I think the ideal thing here is people read this and they kind of take it in their own unique way for their own unique needs for what they're doing. Right, if you're somebody who's very, very exposed, and I think there are a lot of people who kind of are denying it, I think it's worth paying attention and saying, okay, what is the world going to look like in two, three years? How do I prepare myself? Because it's worth it just in case. There are industries where I think it will take longer, though. Even in those industries, for example, let's say legal, those that are just getting started today might have a bit of a rough time, whereas a partner might do quite well, actually.
So I think it's very contextual for each person, and that's what I wish I kind of got across a bit better. Maybe I'll do a follow-up or something like that. But yeah, I think it's really tricky to give sort of like a silver bullet, one-size-fits-all answer for everybody.
The goal is to just say, hey, look, this is happening. Can you try to think about it a little bit for your industry? Because even if it's going to change an industry and there's the ability for it to happen, it's not going to happen overnight even if the technology is there. Though I do think for a lot of these industries the technology will be there relatively soon. It's just a matter of how long it takes to proliferate through society.
Lawyers don't tend to post as much as software engineers.
True. But you can imagine lawyers out there thinking, 'I don't even write contracts anymore. I just review.' Which is like kind of what you're seeing.
Yeah. Most engineers saying...
But at the same time, I'll be interested to see what happens with like the general legal job market, but we've just been hearing examples from companies being like, 'I need to hire hundreds of interns that are just going to come and work in a new way and use the tools sort of natively.' And you can imagine that happening, but again, there's just... I don't know.
Yeah. What advice or what recommendation would you make to a new grad right now?
It's really tough and it's one of those areas in the article that I don't think I had a clear answer on, but that's because there is no clear answer. I have a lot of people in my life that have asked me this and part of my thinking on this article was like, can I answer some of these questions? And there are parts of this that got clear, parts that didn't. This is one of the parts I don't think I have full clarity on. I think knowing the tools is better than not knowing the tools.
Focusing on industries that maybe will take a little bit longer to be disrupted so you can entrench yourself a bit first is valuable, and there are people better than I at knowing which ones those might be. But really I think it's just getting used to using this because this is the new world. It's like, you know, if a calculator is available you should probably be learning how to use it. This is that times a thousand.
So I think it's just learning to be adaptable. I think there probably is. We'll look back in 10 years and there will be clearly like, this is what you should have done. I don't think anybody knows today.
But it's also been very contextual. It's going to depend on what your goals are as a person.
