I see a large IP on the horizon. You're surrounded by journals. Hold your position.
Overnight success. The place 3000 double.
Right. That's misinformation. Morty clearing order inbound. Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five totally. We are expert. Founder Mel 5.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Cop is waste. Team Deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right. Clearing order inbound.
Get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark clearing order inbound. Five good. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder and.
You're watching TVN. Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026. We are live from TVPN Ultradome Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's a white suit day. The market's out for the rally. Don't check what the market did yesterday. Check what it's doing. You never doubt it, did you? Doubt it, you bought. When the fear and greed index was on full and nowhere post scared for it, life it happens. Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.
We have a great show for you today, folks. We have Doug O'Laughlin from Semi Analysis joining to break down Claude Code. TJ Parker's hopping on. We got Max Levchin, part of the PayPal mafia, co-founder and CEO of Affirm, and we're going into Databricks territory. It's going to be fantastic. We also might have a surprise guest for you, folks. Anyway, Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are used agents. Get on there, folks.
Big week. Bottlenecks. Bottlenecks. I mean, we're going to talk about the Claude Code moment, the Claude Code psychosis, sort of the software singularity. Doug O'Laughlin's coming on to talk about his experience, why he thinks this is a key inflection point. Tyler Cowen was talking about this with the 5.3 launch, Opus 4.6 launch. Like, there's clearly signs of a takeoff. It feels like a slow takeoff, but there's a whole bunch of sort of recursive compounding elements that are starting to form.
Yeah, recursive. Literally recursive. Like the models feed back into themselves, give them more tasks. We saw this with Gas Town. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on at orchestration that's interesting. And so I wanted to sort of reflect on if there's going to be a break, if there's going to be a damper on the party, if someone's going to pull away the punch bowl, who's it going to be, the semiconductor industry or the energy industry? At the start of this year, I said it was going to be the year of energy. I still think it's important to think about energy because that will be a bottleneck, but this year.
And not even just because of AI, just for overall human flourishing.
Totally. Totally. Yeah. And yeah, so we had some great conversations this week. Sam Altman, we talked to Dylan Patel. We talked to Schulte. We reviewed what Ben Thompson was saying. Dwaresh interviewed Elon. So there's a lot of new data points about how people are thinking about the trade-offs between semiconductor fabrication capacity and energy production capacity. So I wanted to sort of crystallize where I think the debate and consensus is right now. So first I'll tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. So there's been this tick-tock going back and forth in the AI supply chain. What's the key bottleneck to growth? It does feel like you have to work at an AI lab to really feel the bottleneck. For most people, they're just like, I open the chat app, probably ChatGPT, I ask it a question, it gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not really hitting rate limits. The rate limits come when there's big moments, the studio moment.
I've always felt the rate limiting is very real with using Anthropic products.
Yes. If you're, if you're.
Which is why I asked Schulte yesterday.
How, what are, what are free limits going?
Well, that's why you asked him that.
Just, it was just random that you asked. I also was interested completely in the context of.
Yes, it was completely in the context of compute.
No, but they've consistently been compute constrained. At least they've talked about it more than most, and users have talked about it quite a lot. So I'm just quite curious what the free experience going to be like Sunday if somebody downloads the app, sees the ads, they're like, I want LLMs without ads, even though no other popular LLM actually has ads yet.
Yeah, I do wonder about the Claude app experience. They're pretty upfront with you about the fact that if you're on the Opus model, like you'll hit your rate limits faster. And even just a couple prompts deep, it will take a second and kind of compact the conversation so it can keep talking to you. Like I know they're increasing the token context window, but it feels like it works fine, but it is a smaller user base. Although I'm very interested to see where it goes in the app store. ChatGPT is still at number one. Grok is oddly doing incredible in the app store, way higher than X, the social networking app.
Yeah. For no obvious reason.
I mean, like there's just not a lot of hype about Grok. Like they're doing okay on benchmarks. Obviously, Elon has a very solid playbook for scaling and.
To me, I don't care as much about hype.
When it comes to the app store, there's plenty of apps on the app store that have no hype. One of the top is, it's called Free Cash.
I understand why that one is Free Cash. Get paid real money.
Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build codeback prototypes.
As part of, we have the OpenAI Elon lawsuit as part of that. What if part of the settlement agreement is OpenAI has to give 4o to Grok? Let them.
I mean, they might just wind up.
Yesterday was seriously one of the craziest experiences if you weren't watching our Sam interview live, and honestly the entire show.
There was thousands of messages from people from 4o soldiers saying keep 4o.
Keep 4o, throwing hashtags. You don't see hashtags that much anymore, but they were throwing hashtags around keep 4o.
So I think maybe if Elon can negotiate for that.
So thank you to the TVPN army, the day ones. We will never switch up on you. We'll never let the money change us. We'll never forget where we came from.
Yeah, Bobby was going to, you guys in the chat were doing overtime work keeping things somewhat sane. There's not much you can do in that situation. Interestingly, a lot of people were saying, oh, is it bots? Because there is this world where, okay, if you're playing really, really dirty, you could be a different lab and you could say, okay, this 4o thing, maybe it's a little bit of a deal, but I could amplify it with some fake bots that post more, generate extra content. It's very easy to generate a post that sounds like a deranged person and then you could just amplify it and it would all of a sudden look like, oh wow, there's millions of people that are affected by this. But I don't think they were bots in the chat. Like the messages looked human to me. They weren't copy-paste. We get spam in the chat every once in a while. We get this spam for a company that wants to route us to a specific URL to like buy stream viewers, basically fake our account. And so that bot knows, go around and find live streams all over Twitch and pitch the Twitch streamers fake bots that will watch the stream to help them climb the charts, right? So that business model makes sense for those people. You have to do like seven other steps to get to the point where like, okay, you're a rival lab and you don't like OpenAI and you're trying to create a headache for them. So you create all these bots and then you have to have the bots ready to rock on a YouTube chat that you had an hour notice for. Like that's pretty hard to set up all these YouTube accounts and it's not like the 4o.
Say you're not, say you're not Open Claw pill.
Okay. Okay. Maybe it's possible, but it didn't feel like they were bots and I think the chat agrees.
For telling these people, save me.
Yeah. So there was a Reddit group that shared the stream link so they all came here. There were some bots, but it felt pretty crazy. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see 4o is fully going offline. It's already very hard to reach. You have to go in to turn on legacy models and.
It's going offline right around Valentine's Day.
I think February 13th. And I don't know how they'll respond. In truth, it feels odd to me because it does seem like you can get the 4o experience elsewhere with a fine-tuned open-source model or, you know, prompt engineering. But the 4o fans really care about that specifically. I think there's some sort of parasocial relationship with, even with the UI, with the app, with everything that's going on. They feel like it's not something that's perfectly replicable elsewhere, which is just like, it's just a fascinating weird time that I don't think we've ever seen because people were upset when Facebook launched the feed and they were like, we want to go back and they made these groups and the groups got a lot of amplification. Ironically,
Some people were upset when Microsoft stopped investing as heavily into Clippy.
That's true. That's true. But.
I was never logging on to a Twitch stream and saying I got to bring back Clippy. And.
Yeah, the notable thing is they didn't seem to be able to process.
That it wasn't just a show about Sam.
Because even after Sam had left, they just kept going.
Which is very, very strange.
Anyways, I hope all of those people are able to find peace and hopefully help in real life.
Yeah. Yeah. Very odd. Anyway, back to the bottleneck. Back to someone that's helping unblock the bottleneck. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and.
I got an issue, a slight correction.
Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
I think Railway is actually contributing to the, potentially to the demand.
Potentially, but that's, you know, it's important work. Anyway, so right now it feels like chips are the more important piece of the bottleneck to talk about. Sam Altman put it this way. I asked him like chips versus energy, what's the bigger bottleneck right now? He says it goes back and forth, but right now it's chips. It's different at different times. It may get solved on its own. Normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding as a society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world and we're going to fund that and we're going to get the whole supply chain and the talented people who make that happen would be a very good thing to do. And so why do we have a chip bottleneck to begin with? Semiconductors have been doubling and, you know, we've been on this Moore's law curve. What's interesting is that the semiconductor industry should be better equipped to avoid a bottleneck because it's already been on an exponential whereas energy production has just been like flat, sort of like a malaise for a long time. Getting that unstuck is hard, but I think that's a problem for 2027 potentially. So the chip bottleneck comes down to consolidation. Power plants, data centers, cooling technology. There's a bunch of suppliers in each of these industries and you can parallelize them and you can steer resources from adjacent areas to focus on AI projects specifically. Even a company like Boom Supersonic can turn into a turbine manufacturer and there's a lot of other industries that are able to move over. And Dylan Patel gave us some extra context there. So he said the semiconductor industry is used to doubling the amount of transistors made every year or two. Part of that is more advanced nodes. Part of that's more capacity whereas the energy industry in America wasn't built for that kind of growth. So initially people weren't creative, they were like, let's build these combined cycle gas plants. But now we've realized, yes, there are three main manufacturers of turbines. And for dual combined cycle, you've got IGTs, but you've also got medium-speed reciprocating engines. Turns out Cummins can make about a million diesel engines a year, and those can generate electricity. I don't care about aesthetics and I put them in West Texas, easy. And so there's all these different areas where you can reallocate. You can't just take an Intel CPU and do anything useful in AI with it. It's just.
Elon also on Cheeky Pint with Dwaresh and John talked about the Tesla team adapting. He thinks they'll have to actually make turbine blades because they can get a lot of the other components, but they may have to actually make those.
So back to the leading edge fabs. It's a completely different beast. These fabs cost tens of billions. 30, 50, 75, 80 billion I've seen to build and it takes three, four, sometimes five years to go from breaking ground to actually getting up to producing volume. And we have like the perfect example of this because TSMC announced a plant in Arizona in 2020 and in 2025 it's still not producing at volume. It's doing really well. It's great, but that's five years and it's not just like, oh yeah, it's as effective as what's in Taiwan. And so ASML is the only viable producer of EUV lithography machines. And so there's this bottleneck within the chip bottleneck, which is the TSMC supplier, ASML, and they ship around 50 EUV machines per year, maybe 50, 60. Each one costs $350 million. And leading edge fabs need dozens. So if you want to build a bunch more fabs, you need a bunch more tool makers. And ASML has its own supply chain for different lenses and glass and all sorts of stuff. They work with Zeiss, Trumpf, a whole bunch of different companies and that supply chain is not very diversified. So you have another bottleneck even deeper in the supply chain. And so all these vendors are highly specialized. And then even after you get the fab built, there's still at least a year of processing engineering, maybe 12 to 18 months where you actually work to get to high yield production. We're seeing that in TSMC Arizona. And TSMC just has decades of intellectual capital locked in the heads of engineers that they can't easily transfer or parallelize. And so this has made TSMC the real bottleneck. Hyperscalers are pushing capex numbers into the hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll talk about this more in the show. But the supply curve for leading edge wafers is relatively inelastic. There's also this bullwhip effect when during COVID we weren't shipping cars, so a bunch of people cut back on demand and so that pulled things back and it takes years for these to work through. Then you get overcapacity. Everyone demands way more and then you overexpand and then you collapse and it's this constant and the further out you are in the supply chain the more the bullwhip affects you. So TSMC controls 90% of the advanced node market with Samsung and Intel far behind and this is why Ben Thompson, aside from the geopolitical concerns about TSMC, is really urging tech companies to wake up. And so he says the reality that hyperscalers and fab-ish chip companies need to wake up to however is that avoiding the risk of working with someone other than TSMC incurs new risks that are both harder to see and also more substantial. So there's a huge risk if you say, you know what, I'm going to go and place a huge order with Samsung or Intel or I'm going to take a huge risk and be the anchor customer of their new cutting edge leading edge fab. But Ben Thompson saying there's a risk to not doing that and he says except again we can see the harms already foregone revenue today as demand outstrips supply today's shortages however may prove to be peanuts if AI has the potential these companies claim it does future foregone revenue at the end of the decade is going to cost exponentially more surely a lot more than whatever is necessary expense-wise to make Samsung or Intel into viable competitors for TSMC. You really got to wonder what conversations are like between Jensen and TSMC right now.
Given that it just doesn't feel, I mean Taiwan is, TSMC is not, they're certainly not going out and making kind of going risk on, right? They're staying relatively probably more conservative than some of their downstream customers would like.
Pop quiz. Do you know where TSMC is listed? The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Just be like TSMC. Just build a $1.5 trillion semiconductor company. That would be nice. We need more of these.
Anyway, let's move on to the hyperscalers. Compound 248 says, poor Jassy, Andy Jassy. He's going to learn something about Amazon today. When Google announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing offense. But when Amazon announces a crazy number, it's because it's playing defense. Ipso facto. So Amazon said it will spend $200 billion this year on AI buildout. This is from Bloomberg. But this is worrying investors that the company's colossal bet on artificial intelligence will pinch profits while it waits for the investments to pay off. The shares fell in extended trading. The company reported spending $130 billion on property and equipment in 2025. Analysts expect those expenses would reach $150 billion this year, but Amazon's saying we're going to $200. We're going all in. So the stock's down maybe 8% in after-hours trading. Likely back up today because things are going better, but we'll see. How is Amazon doing today?
Not as down, but not as violently as it was after hours last night after earnings.
So over the last month it's sold off 15%.
Yeah. And a lot of frustration from Amazon.
Shareholders obviously they had the fastest growth in 13 quarters and the stock is still down 10%. Amazon looking back over the last five years to early 2021 only up 23% over five years. So, of course, you did quite a lot better if you bought after the overall ZIRP sell-off.
Yeah. Yeah. Just not as sexy a narrative as the rest of the hyperscalers. Zuck obviously is a huge beneficiary of advancements in AI. We see that with the accelerating ads market. Microsoft, even though yeah, it's getting beat up a little bit now, they have like that massive position in OpenAI that feels like fully in solid place. They got the IP, they got, you know, a real hold on the AI question. Google's obviously in a fantastic place. Nvidia clearly, but Amazon's had a little bit rougher.
Yeah, yesterday was just such a strange day. Reform Trader says software stocks are cooked for not investing in AI. Mag 7 stocks are cooked for investing heavily in AI. Hope that helps.
It is. It is crazy. You need to do both. Invest and don't invest. Oh, this is the image. I love this image. Wait, what's this from? Matt Damon in.
I don't know. In Rounders, I watched last night. We were just talking about this.
That's Rounders. I thought Good Will Hunting for some reason, but same era. So this is a summary of the 2026 capex numbers from the hyperscalers. Google is going to do 175 to 185 billion versus 120 estimated. Meta is doing 115 to 135 relative against 110 estimated. Tesla's going to 20 billion from 11 billion estimated. And Amazon, they were estimating 145, but they're going to do 200. And so they're going all in.
One of the top comments here is very funny. It says, what exactly is Meta buying? They don't do anything with AI.
That's not true. They open up Reels. It's AI, like they are recommending all sorts of stuff and.
Yeah, so much inference. LA Purchaser says he could, talking about somebody says is English Jassy's first language ripping off the headphones. And they say he could just say this is a generational investing opportunity that TAM is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating. We are the market leader. We are investing to be the cost leader. What we did in retail we are doing here. The more money we spend, the more excited we get about the opportunity. There is a very tangible ROI. We see it. You're going to see it in the numbers. You are seeing AWS accelerate. It will keep accelerating. He says instead we got a word salad where you can pick your own conclusion. Yeah, it wasn't, nothing about the earnings, like people can feel the emotion and the energy right there wasn't.
There wasn't anything to like, obviously the business is doing great, but there wasn't anything to like rally around and get really excited by, right? There's zero vision and yeah, even in the Cheeky Pint Elon episode, you know, Dwaresh and John are pushing Elon on the data centers in space thing and I thought that Elon could have done more to really get people basically the same thing that TAM is an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is contemplating and we are investing for that future. Right. It was a lot of like trying to justify.
Putting it up there. Yeah.
Yeah. When they were saying like, hey, there's a lot of land in the US. We can blanket the US with solar panels. We do a lot here.
And so again, I think people are getting kind of caught up in.
When if you're going to spend, you know, you would hope.
AWS making this kind of investment.
That they have more conviction than Tyler does on the opportunity, right? I don't know if that's possible.
Tyler's in the white suit. He's looking good.
Yeah. Looking good, Tyler.
Round of applause for Tyler.
Round of applause for Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. This is a classic Elon thing where, you know, he will lay out a vision that takes 10, 20, 30 years, but he says it's going to take 10, 20, 30 months. And so you have to sort of grapple with the short term, but still you can't lose sight of the long term because we did get rockets that land and we did get space internet and whatnot.
Yeah, I think he said like 36 months is his estimate for when we start getting compute in space, like probably 30 months I think. But then so there's like kind of the, that's like the shorter term thing. But then he did talk about terawatts in space, right? So like the US is currently like half a terawatt, but we're going to be putting terawatts in space of compute.
He's sort of like falling back to first principles and just talking about.
Yeah. He keeps repeating like, oh, if you just look at physics.
But it's kind of this catch-all term he uses when he doesn't really know what to say. It seems like.
Yeah. Well, yeah. It just seems like the physics, it all checks out from the physics calculations, but when you map that to the economic realities, the human capital and financial capital realities, you're just looking at a very long timeline. And he doesn't like talking about thinking in decades. Even though it's very clear that he does think in decades, he just doesn't articulate things in decades because.
It seems like the short-term bull case for space data centers is basically just like, you know, regulatory, right? It's just going to be way too hard to find the actual land.
Yeah. Didn't Wellmanitis post something about that? He said that it's going to become really, really difficult to build any data centers in the United States. Although you can certainly go to other countries with that. I'm sure there's plenty of countries that would love the jobs and the taxes. You know, you see India already saying, hey, we'll just take a slice in 20 years. That's how AGI-pilled they are. They're like, come build a data center here. You can be tax-free for 20 years, but then we're going to be making money in what, 2046. They're ready to rock quickly. Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You wanted to talk about.
None of you know physics. They were feeding him drinks. Chill out.
It is actually crazy. I mean, we've never seen a Cheeky Pint episode where they actually drank.
They did drink on this one.
That was the main feedback from last year.
Everyone's like, hey, great show, cool concept, great guest.
Well, they were filming a lot of them like during the workday with people in San Francisco. So it was somebody who would like pop over, film an episode, and then you got to go back to work. So you don't necessarily want to be chugging pints, but.
It is funny that yeah, it feels like Elon took down three pints or four pints or something. You did the math.
So we'll talk about this later. There's some posts, but I, you know, they seemed a bit smaller than normal pints maybe. But I counted three like full glasses.
By the other thing, so Sam was obviously quite bearish on space data centers in the near term. It is worth calling out that there was a rumor last year that he was kicking the tires on Rocket Lab. You remember that? So I think like long-term I'm sure he'll want to have his own.
But I think he would rather, like if there's a hype cycle, he doesn't need it to be about him. He can let this one pass by and focus on the other things that are going on with the business because there's so much going on with the business. Like if you add too many narratives, it can actually confuse things. The X, xAI, SpaceX combination is crazy, but the space data center thing actually does sort of streamline the narrative in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean I think Elon, Dwaresh asked a question about this, which is like, oh, it's so crazy that SpaceX, they have this super ambitious mission, but they keep seeming to find these like good businesses on the way, right? So first it's like Starlink with Falcon and then with Starship it's like, I mean, do we really need that many Starlinks? But if you can get space data centers, yep. If you're putting up terawatts of compute then like yeah you need like massive, you know.
OTP in the chat says dude just turned 21 and he can already eye a.
He's been studying the last week.
What did Bubble Boy say? $660 billion of capex this year on AI data centers. To put a number like that in perspective, this is more than what we spent on the US interstate highway system, $630 billion. More than what we spent on the Apollo moon program, $257 billion. More than what we spent on the International Space Station, $150 billion. It's more money than Walmart's revenue last year, $650 billion. It's about 25% of all military spending globally. It's equivalent to buying 50 Gerald R. Ford aircraft carriers. It's the equivalent of spending $1.8 billion a day, $750 million an hour or $1.2 million a minute. This year alone is without a doubt the biggest project in the history of capitalism and we are spending it all. We're spending all of it in one year. God's sake.
He did, Bubble Boy did do the inflation adjustment here. The Apollo program cost something like $25 billion back then. Yeah, putting it into perspective, France announced an initiative earlier this week. They want to lead in AI research. So through their France 2030 program they have invested more than 30 million euros in this initiative. Macron says, science has found its home. And Sean Frank says, France is investing 30 million in this new AI initiative. That's how much Google will spend in 90 minutes. No joke. Every 90 minutes, Google will spend 30 million on capex this year. One company.
Yeah. They can hire Ilya for like an hour.
I know. One hour consulting call.
He's got to get on. Get in.
Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Take him is breaking down the Nvidia news. The stock is up 6.22%. Nvidia shares barely moved in after-hours trading last night.
Yeah, this is what I said. I was like, Amazon just announced that, hey, we're going to spend, you know, what are they going to buy with those? I mean, they will buy Trainium and Inferentia, but they're going to buy a lot of Nvidia. You know it.
Take him said, you all know I was already insanely bullish on Nvidia's NVL72 super cycle this year. These capex numbers from Google and Amazon blow away even my most optimistic expectations for Nvidia's main end consumer market. And we also saw from Greg Brockman that GB200 is off to the races. The Blackwell chips are now in full force over at OpenAI powering 5.3. There's a little bit of debate over whether that was involved in training or inference, but it doesn't really matter. Blackwell's here and it's going to improve things. So, and that's probably good for chip designers, which Nvidia is obviously one of. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Stephen over at Lambda was the one who sent me that post from France originally.
You were not kind. You were making fun of him. But it's a good post going all in on AI with $30 million. It's really like the, it has the, what's it called, $1 million because you're not aware of inflation because you've been frozen for 50 years or something like that. Let's go over to the Wall Street Journal.
Behind Disney's search for a lasting successor to Bob Iger.
Company's succession committee reviewed information on over a hundred candidates before the race was narrowed to two.
100. This seems crazy. Update your LinkedIn. If you were reviewed, you got to put it here. So the trio, which is Bob Iger, Josh D'Amaro and Dana Walden, they were meeting in Disney's executive dining room. Trio sat in a private room with panoramic views of Disney studio lot and surrounding San Fernando Valley where Iger discussed scenarios the board of directors was considering. Could tomorrow we got to, is it D'Amaro or D'Amaro, D'Amaro, Doug D'Amaro, is he related to Doug D'Amaro? D'Amaro, chair of Disney's experience business including theme parks and consumer products. Walden, co-chairman of the entertainment business, lead the company together. What about with one in charge and the other as deputy? D'Amaro and Walden, who by that point were the finalists to succeed, said they were open to all the scenarios. Disney's board of directors was scheduled to meet in the same building and hold its final vote on who the next CEO would be the following Thursday. People close to the company predicted D'Amaro would be given the top job with Walden elevated role to ensure she stayed. The only surprise it turned out was the timing. Keenly aware of the intense public anticipation, Disney's 10 directors, including Iger, voted unanimously Monday to make D'Amaro CEO and Walden president and chief creative officer. We were ready to go and I didn't like sitting there with the news. Board chairman James Gorman who led the succession process said in an interview.
And yeah, that was really fast. Rumors hit the various outlets and then it was like.
Confirmed immediately live. That was smart.
At an employee town hall, D'Amaro described the moment as surreal and said he was initially embarrassed by his reaction. I got a little choked up when they let me know because it's a big responsibility. It is a big responsibility. His ascension will, say for any unexpected snafus, mark the end of a decade-plus search for a lasting successor to Bob Iger that has been marked by delays, missteps, and reversals. Employees said they are happy to have the biggest question about the company's future finally resolved and anxious about what a former parks leader running the company with a veteran television executive as his top deputy will mean for Disney's.
Let's give it up for veteran television. So Gorman had previously run a leadership succession project at Morgan Stanley. He took over Disney's process in 2024 after joining the board. He said the succession committee reviewed information on more than a hundred candidates and homed in on several outsiders along with four Disney executives: D'Amaro, Walden, entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman, and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro. Gorman said the board interviewed the candidates formally and in intimate lunches. They conducted 360 interviews with Disney executives talking to subordinates and colleagues as well as bosses. By last summer, the race had narrowed to two candidates. D'Amaro and Walden traveled to Orlando in August to present their visions for Disney's future at a board meeting. The Wall Street Journal previously reported this. In ensuing months, they met with board members in a less formal setting. Both executives talked to Iger frequently about what it took to run a company like Disney. Employees noticed and gossip was rampant. Staffers speculated about whether D'Amaro's background in parks would hurt him given that Bob Chapek had also run the company's theme park before his short-lived tenure as CEO.
Yeah, that'd be wild. Hey, we had a misstep with a parks guy. No more parks guys.
Yeah, Disney's leaders wanted the succession process to be as clean as possible without runners-up leaving the company given the Chapek fiasco. We wanted to get this right, said Gorman. As a result, few were surprised that Walden was named president, a position no one has held at Disney in 20 years. With a recommended retention bonus worth $5.3 million, Walden's chief creative officer position is a new one for Disney. Some in the company's movies division are nervous about what Walden's rise will mean for their business which she hasn't worked in before and now she oversees it. But there she is with the Founders Award at the International Emmys in New York getting an award. A few company leaders.
I don't know what the Founders Award at the International Emmys is for. Like it's not for a founder because executive. It's a prestigious honor bestowed by the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to individuals or organizations making a significant impact on global television. Okay. Founders. Let's go.
Anyways, let's move on to.
Dirty Soda. We got to talk about the Utah.
Have you heard of the world before?
I've never heard of Dirty Soda before. Have you heard of this?
Yeah. Yeah. This is big in Utah.
How do you know that it's big in Utah then?
It's like my friends sent it to me on Instagram. They're like, look at this.
You have friends who live in Utah?
It's like soda and they put like cream in it and stuff, right?
Okay. Well, we'll dig in. I think we'll let the Wall Street Journal get the facts straight. But first, I'll tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. A mom with five children ages 6 to 16 in St. George, Utah, Nicole Tanner didn't realize she was on to something with dirty soda. That's what the creator of the chain Swig calls spiking Coke, Mountain Dew, or Dr. Pepper with fruit purees and flavored cream served in plastic cups stuffed with pebble ice. Microplastic.
Really? I didn't know pebble ice was at risk.
No, no, no. I'm talking about, I'm just saying plastic cup.
Her business took off a few years ago when pop star Olivia Rodrigo was in Utah filming that TV series High School Musical and posted an Instagram photo holding a cup from Swig. Now #dirtysoda is the hashtag. Big chains want in. McDonald's recently tested Sprite with lemon vanilla syrup and dragon fruit. Taco Bell swirls.
It's teal-colored Baja Dream freezes with vanilla cream and calls it a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Dirty Freeze.
Oh, we forgot to ask Sam Altman if he's going to issue a Baja Blast because he did the Code Red.
It's time for a Baja Blast.
It's time to Baja Blast. He's back to the top.
Maybe that's what the Super Bowl ad, Codex.
Oh, that would be Baja Blast. Codex collab campaign for the builders.
Yes, TGI Fridays last year started offering a line of dirty sodas that can be amped up with shots of Jack Daniels or Hennessy.
That sounds... When I hear dirty soda, I feel like it's spiked with alcohol, but apparently it's just...
Dirty Sprite. That's like...
Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's the future. Yeah, that's...
And drive-in chain Sonic has encouraged customers to make it dirty by ordering creamer and mix-ins with their sodas. While the heart of dirty sodas may still be Utah and the Mountain West states, Swig has expanded to around 140 locations across 16 states. That's fast.
This is insane. To me, this feels like a really tough business to be in long term because if the product becomes popular...
Everyone has it immediately. You have no real IP. Yeah.
Right, because you're just using sodas off the shelf.
So yeah, I'd be interested to see what happens to these 140 locations even though the product is a hit. Tanner's main investor, family investment office, Larry H. Miller Co, brought in a professional chief executive who has taken other companies public, and he is talking of an eventual initial public offering for the chain which had around 100 million in sales last year.
Tanner, I mean, these must be incredibly simple to run. It's literally a box. You have soda and creamer. So I could see even... they don't sell food or anything here. This is like such a simple...
"We're doing what Starbucks did for coffee, but for soda," said Swig CEO Alex Dunn. So Alex Dunn says, pull up here.
Yes. 6:00 a.m. on the way to the gym, grab a big soda.
I feel like you'd need more caffeine if you really wanted to displace Starbucks. People will really just stop at a dedicated place just to get a tasty soda. That's a crazy...
Gabe is sharing a quote from Future: 'Dirty soda and a styrofoam. Spend a day to get my mind blown.'
Oh, LH Miller was the owner of the Utah Jazz. Interesting. Tyler, did you have more context here?
Well, I was just going to say on the caffeine thing, isn't the whole point that it doesn't have... it's like not caffeinated, right? Because they're Mormon.
Oh, okay. So it's a Utah thing, I think. So, yeah.
Or there's like a little caffeine, but you can probably do caffeine-free Coca-Cola or something.
I did something recently that felt really wrong, but the result was good. I mixed a yerba with a Mexican Coke.
Mexican Coke. Yeah, it's fun.
Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. Tanner grew up on an Idaho dairy farm, the fifth of eight children. She got her associate degree in office education. That is a sweet degree.
Wow. Who runs office education here? Office education. We need some... Maybe we do.
Here's how you use cloud code. Here's how. And started working in marketing for a library system software company. Let's give it up for library system software company. I bet you this is a more durable business than some of the other SaaS out there. She got married and by 23 started a family. Tanner started working for Mary Kay selling makeup and skin care products and eventually building a team of 18 consultants. Let's give it up for MLMs.
Yeah, I think they would dispute that, right? Yeah. Anytime you... they don't like the pyramid scheme term, but I don't know. Maybe all...
Multi-level marketing, I think, is just a strategy, right? In 2007, the Tanners moved with their five children to St. George from Colorado. She was a 38-year-old mother of five, craving caffeine and tired of watered-down fountain soda when she decided to turn her cravings into a business in 2010.
Oh, wait. Overnight success.
So coffee wasn't a choice. Tanner is Mormon and adherents typically traditionally abstain from coffee, but you could have caffeine in soda.
I didn't realize that. That seems like a loophole. Interesting.
This is... I love this. Tanner and her husband used savings to avoid taking out a business loan to buy a 700-square-foot commercial building in St. George with a big parking lot. It's like people are like, 'Oh, I moved to San Francisco and I had a mattress on the floor. I have so much conviction.' Okay. Buy a building for your untested soda company with all your savings. That's real conviction.
Lever up. Get the mortgage.
Her idea was to serve super cold soda with a twist like lime, fruit, or purees. Tanner initially leased a fountain machine from Coca-Cola. When she asked PepsiCo for the same, Tanner said the company took a pass. Soda rivals typically push restaurant chains to stock their products exclusively. So Tanner bought 2-liter bottles of Pepsi and Mountain Dew from grocery stores. I love seeing your face when you ask for a Diet Coke on a plane and they say, 'Is Pepsi okay?' And you just say, 'Absolutely not.' After about a month, Pepsi relented. She said now she has... she started with limes, lemons, and six flavor shots. She recruited her eldest daughter and niece to work in the store. Her 15-year-old son held up signs outside advertising that job. Not going away sign.
I've been getting so many sign-spinning reels with the 'you broke my heart'... you know that one guy? But I see all of his reels and it's just like him being like, 'I don't have a job.' And then this is crazy. He can actually spin that into an interesting digital ad business because he could just do the sign online because the video...
I honestly never see what's on the sign though because it's spinning so fast.
No, I know. But use that as a lead-in to promote Ramp.
Yeah. Good.
Tanner, in the beginning, priced drinks at a dollar for any size. That's crazy. I didn't know you could get anything for a dollar in this country anymore. Helping draw students from nearby Utah Tech University, a local news broadcast found customers waiting to get a mango puree Mountain Dew or Big Al soda.
That's interesting. I saw the... I don't know if this is a Big Al soda or Big AI soda.
So they said a few years ago Olivia Rodrigo promoted it and it went viral. I thought this business was only a few years old. I guess...
No, it's an overnight success. They started overnight success.
That's pretty remarkable. Yeah.
After customers started referring to Swig's Dr Pepper and cream combination as dirty soda, Tanner latched onto the phrase, encouraging customers. They got to pay Future a royalty here. I won't stand by that.
They should get Future as an influencer. That'd be good.
Yeah. He's like, when I said dirty soda, I meant...
By 2017, Swig had grown to more than a dozen stores. The staff was spread thin and Tanner realized she lacked the expertise to grow further. She and her husband separated in 2020. RIP, and he is no longer involved in Swig. And I hate when I'm just like reading this incredible story of entrepreneurship and then they kind of interrupt the flow there. In 2025, she married Greg Robinson and they continue to live in Utah. Good guy.
'It was held together with some duct tape and hair pins,' said Andrew Smith, a Utah-based investor whose Savory Fund invests.
Oh, they took a majority stake. Interesting. They bought that.
In recent years, Swig has gotten a boost from the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a reality TV show chronicling a group of Utah-based TikTok influencers.
'We're at Swig, so I can tell you exactly what my Swig order is. It's sparkling water, sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach, sugar-free vanilla, raspberry puree with a fresh lime.'
That's crazy. So over the top.
Anyways, what a cool story. Yeah, Tanner says, 'We're in extreme high growth mode right now.' The company estimates it serves over 2,000 drinks at a single conference.
The White House has posted 'biggest.bull.run.ever.starting.period.'
Did they post this? Scroll down.
Yeah. No. So they're sharing a fake screenshot from Truth Social where Donald Trump says, 'Let the gains begin.'
I mean, he really did call the bottom... at least a local bottom of a veracity in truth.
No, I'm just saying like if you bought Nvidia when this fake post was shared by the real account...
The White House post is not even the real account, right? That's just a fake 14,000-follower account. So everything about this is fake.
Everything about it. And then they follow up, 'I highly recommend you follow White House Grandpa.' It's like, what are we doing here?
Very strange. Absolutely. Well, do your own research and get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, not from fake news on a podcast. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service that isn't fake news.
Goldman Sachs is tapping Anthropic's AI model to automate accounting and compliance roles. Embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back-office work. It was one of my first jobs...
Bull market and forward-deployed engineers for Anthropic.
Like it will be funny if true diffusion requires two decades of just millions of consultants working with businesses of all sizes to implement AI systems.
Yeah, probably. I mean, the task horizon every time I see it, six hours, that's amazing. And you were making the comment of like, how many times do you really sit there and spend six hours working autonomously? But there's a different frame which is like a consultant can come in with a goal and work pretty much autonomously for like months. And so there is a world where to not have a forward-deployed engineer in the loop, you need the task horizon to be like years basically.
Yeah. Yeah. And building a company takes your whole life.
Exactly. Yeah. So you keep the doubling going, which I think puts us back... I think it puts us at like 2035. It's about a decade until you get to like the task horizon is a lifetime, is like the average life expectancy of a human.
Pull up this article from The Wall Street Journal.
Okay. What are we looking at? Which one?
Anthropic orafarmed the journal this week. This is one of the most insane headlines. It's the week Anthropic tanked the market and pulled ahead of its rivals. Once a distant second or third in the AI race, the company is moving to the front with a focus on caution, coding, and business clients.
Well, they didn't fully orafarm because the journal sort of takes a shot here. It says, 'Anthropic once appeared as an also-ran in the chaotic race for AI supremacy. This week, the sophistication of the startup's products upended the stock market. A simple set of industry-specific add-ons to its Claude product, including one that performed legal services, triggered a days-long global stock selloff from software to legal services, financial data, and real estate. Then, Anthropic unveiled Super Bowl ads that taunt rival OpenAI. On Thursday, Anthropic unleashed its most advanced model yet, capable of synthesizing data and analysis, running teams of coding assistants, and functions akin to product management. Shares of software companies including Salesforce, Intuit, and others fell again Thursday, although less precipitously than earlier in the week. The viral moment for Anthropic's models is, quote, the most important thing happening in AI since ChatGPT's launch,' said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, who I know. Ball...
Everyone knows Ball on this show, who writes an artificial intelligence newsletter. Quote, 'It's infinitely interesting.' Industry prognosticators and AI evangelists have spent months foretelling the toll Anthropic and other sophisticated AI tools would take on software-as-a-service companies that were darlings of the previous internet era. Tools made by companies such as Workday, Monday.com, and Adobe have become the digital backbone for American corporations. Anthropic's tools, however, which include agents that can act autonomously to carry out increasingly complex user requests for hours, have offered a preview of the threat sophisticated AI models pose to entire companies. It's a good article. I mean, obviously, we'll see how fast the diffusion happens. Some of these systems have things that you cannot simply vibe code. We'll talk to Max Levchin about is it possible to vibe code a financial software product, a global payments network. Can you vibe code a bank charter or money transfer license? And I think more and more companies will emerge and there might be a divergence between companies that have moats that are resistant to software-based disruption, but then maybe they should trade at a different multiple. So there's sort of a re-evaluation of the market broadly.
Yeah. You also can with the payment stuff. I'm again, I'm super excited for us to talk with Max, especially on this week when PayPal is obviously in the news. But you can imagine a world where it does become possible to technically vibe code a global payments network.
But various regulators just say like, hey, we're going to start having requirements. You need to at least have 100 people on your team, right? Things like that.
That's interesting. You know, basically if you're getting inundated with a bunch of requests of somebody that's like, 'Hey, I started this company a week ago and now I want to be able to process payments state by state, globally, etc.,' people are just going to be like, 'Hey, this is probably not responsible.'
Yeah. I tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. I want to vibe code a payments platform where when it's payday, a humanoid robot comes around and just does a money spread in your face and just says, 'Here's your cash.' That's the future. You don't need none of this money transmitter license. None of these recordings...
Yeah. Oh, Tyler's got the money spread.
You're actually quite amateurish at your money spreads. From what I've seen on Instagram, there are levels and you are on level one.
You need to learn all the different ones. The money counter spread. That's not bad. That's not bad for anyone watching.
But I want to see it go all the way down your arm in an S. Okay.
Exposed first-time money spread.
Future would be mocking you.
Rookie money spread. Rookie.
Claims to love. Claims to know all about dirty soda. Never been to Utah.
Claims to be able to money spread. Can't do a money spread.
Can't do a money spread. Bro, wait. Do you have like 20 bucks on you?
You're supposed to say, 'That's what I thought.'
That's what I thought. That's what I thought.
He can't even hold his mic now.
He can't hold the mic button.
Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Take him in a funny take. He said, 'Y'all are clowns.' Clowns. The Anthropic legal plugin uses software. It doesn't replace it. In fact, the co-work legal plugin uses Microsoft 365, Jira, Slack, and Box software to accomplish its tasks. No one in Anthropic has replicated any of these applications with ones coded by the company's Claude Code agent.
What is this X that you can put up there?
Yeah. Yes. There are plenty of situations where the token cost of regenerating the software is much lower than just using the software. And so people will use the software. Jim Cramer said, 'Anthropic's power is so daunting that all they have to do is say they are going into cybersecurity and that's the end of the group. I don't want to be against them, but they are not the all-powerful firm that they think they are.' Well, we'll talk to Doug O'Laughlin about exactly how powerful Anthropic is and whether he has vibe-coded everything in his life or if he is still using an operating system at this point. Who knows? 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.
Joe Weisenthal shared yesterday, 'Silver down 19%. Anthropic must have launched a silver extension.'
Yes, it's just chaos in the markets. It's just absolute chaos everywhere.
One of the most chaotic weeks of my adult life.
Yeah. But it's been, I mean, lots of green shoots, lots of interesting projects, lots of interesting applications and progress all over the place. Derek Thompson said, 'For me, the odds that AI is a bubble declined significantly in the last three weeks and the odds that we are actually quite underbuilt for the necessary levels of inference usage went up significantly in that period.' Basically, his AGI pill.
I think AI is going to become the home screen of a ludicrously high percentage of white-collar workers in the next two years, and parallel agents will be deployed in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels. And Kevin Roose over at The New York Times, host of the Hard Fork podcast, says, 'This is why everyone was freaking out about Claude Code over winter break. Once you see an agent autonomously doing stuff for you, it's so instantly clear that all computer-based work will be done this way. This is why my serious AI policy proposal is to sit every member of Congress down in a room with laptops for 30 minutes and have them all build websites.'
So we were joking about this yesterday with Scholto, like we maybe need more long weekends for AI adoption, but I wouldn't be surprised for a big company to actually do something like this, which is like, hey, we're going to have the next Thursday, Friday off...
Hackathon. Yeah, basically congressional hackathon.
I mean, Congress is a whole other thing.
You got to go to Congress, sit all the Congress people down and get them vibe coding. What would they build? I feel like they don't use a lot of software. So there's not that much to build. Like they're so abstracted away from it. It's all lunches and phone calls and dinners and meetings. Like there's not that much that actually... This is the thing with like OpenClaw. There's some people asking like, 'What are you actually using it for?' And people are realizing like a lot of my day is not interacting.
You know the thing that I wish I could automate...
Okay, you can do that. Have you seen Earth Class Mail? There are a few of these virtual mail...
It sends it. It sends it.
So basically you forget your home address. You don't share it anywhere on the internet. You never put it anywhere. You only use this other address. Mine was like 830 Market Street in San Francisco. All of the mail would go there if it's addressed to me. It gets opened by a robot, scanned, and then you have a web dashboard, but also it just goes to your email and then you can actually say...
So they've been a pill for decades.
Decades. No, it was really important when you set up a business, you use a fake address or one of these virtual mailboxes and then you can actually click a button, send this to me physically. If it's like a magazine or gift or something, you can say keep this or you can say shred it. And then you have a virtual representation of it forever and you could run an agent over it. So maybe that's the next thing you pick up is a virtual mailbox. That would be good.
How does that work though? There are certain situations where you need your ID to match like your utility bill.
Yeah. So you just still, I guess, you just use your home address for utilities but use... or passport. Like there's usually other ways to prove residency besides the bills. Also, I don't know if you can actually get the utility bill to not go where the utilities are, but hopefully the utilities don't leak it. I'm talking about like the broad, like, you know, your address gets on the internet and then it's just like spam and like credit card offers and stuff like that.
I'm just saying I never want to open up a physical piece of mail again. I want it to come someplace, have an AI agent like, you know, you go on a toll road, just pays it automatically, right? Stuff like that.
Optimus opens it for you, takes a picture...
Does a money spread, walks to the post office, mails the next letter, mails the track. This is the future.
Powered by MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. Built with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.
It does. Michelangelo drawing just sold for 27.2 million. Let's hit the gong for that. Over 13 times its asking price.
We're bringing down the gong.
The Renaissance master earned a record sum with this sketch of a foot.
Let's bring down the chapel.
Let's hit the gong for the Michelangelo painting and then...
Team is... Let's give it up for the team for really dialing in the special effects.
Congrats to Michelangelo. Overnight success, Angelo.
What do you think, Tyler? Overvalued, undervalued? 27.2 million.
I think I'm going to have to go with Tyler Cowen. I'm pretty sure on Marginal Revolution I saw this earlier this week. He said way overvalued.
I'll give you the bear thesis. Look at the picture.
It's just like a... Yeah, it's a foot.
It's a foot. It's not even like a painting. It's just like a sketch. I think we know what's going on. There's people that are into this stuff. I'm not going to judge, but it's not me.
Newly rediscovered Michelangelo drawing of a foot sold for 27.2 million at Christie's on Thursday, a record for any work created by the Renaissance master, in a sale likely to kick the art market into high gear. Previously unknown red chalk sketch is one of only a handful of Michelangelo's surviving studies still left in private hands. My AI diffusion model could do this. That's the new phrase. My kid couldn't do this, but my AI diffusion model certainly could. This is not that impressive. Not a 27. Maybe at five. Give me a break. The five-inch drawing depicts the right foot of the Libyan sibyl, a blonde prophetess wearing a creamsicle gown painted onto the ceiling of the eastern end.
Let's get the feet off of the screen.
Moving on. Back to business. Catrini says in response to Opus 4.6, 'I have not shied away from buying scary dips. Neither has Ben on our team. Producer Ben always buys the dip. Buying tech in 2022 is scary.'
It's really good that buy the dip is like so... like people have really... it's really the backbone because freak out and sell everything would really be bad for our capital market.
Okay. So buying tech in 2022 was scary, as were banks after SVB. I bought plenty of stocks when COVID seemed like potentially the end of the world. But this doesn't really seem like an overreaction in software. If anything, it's delayed. It's a rational response that isn't even trying to front-run the capability improvement. The capability is here. I respect anyone who is actually smart enough to know who survives and thrives. I just don't think I can foresee that far ahead right now.
And Gary Tan has a devil's advocate. 'I think the bottleneck will still be knowing the details of what to build, which depend on what your customers need, not even necessarily what they say they want. I use these tools daily to close to their full power and they're amazing, but the flashy demos are all examples of extremely precisely specified tasks in example-rich domains. Build a compiler, build a web browser, etc. These have very specific rules on what success entails.' And I've seen like the GASTown, so one of the big demo projects was like replatforming some open-source software to Rust. And it's like that's pretty verifiable from start to finish. If you're looking at like build a new social network, it's like, okay, how do you get distribution? Distribution is still really, really important. Like you can vibe code stuff, but driving traffic is harder than ever. What are you thinking, Tyler?
I just need to clear something. So before I said Tyler Cowen was talking about...
Yeah, Michelangelo. That was incorrect. He was actually talking about a Rembrandt. It was also a sketch. Okay. It was 20 million.
20 million. But that one... Okay. Okay. Thank you for the fact check. Really quickly, Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. Wall Street Logic right now, says Chris Camillo: 'Punish big tech for wasting capex on AI. Punish SaaS because AI will replace them and punish GPU manufacturers for selling the chips that power the waste. Sell everything. Sell your dollars.' Remember to lock up your capital in late-stage private companies at the top, says Balaji16Z, that I think has been deleted. I can't see it, but I can see the screen.
Really good post. So anyway, the fear-greed index is at five out of a hundred. Extreme fear. Extreme fear.
Yeah. I mean, good timing. Freak out and sell everything. This is Lindy.
I mean, he posted this last night.
Yeah. And then 4,000. I think this might have turned the tide. This might have turned it.
Anyway, Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless and real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Thoma Bravo managing partner Holden Spaht says, 'I just finished a week of board meetings with several of our portfolio companies and their strong results in growth and profitability seem to be, in my view, another piece of evidence against the overwrought headlines that AI is eating software. Anaplan, Bottomline, Coupa, Dayforce, and Q2 Inc. are navigating the AI transition quite well with Q4 bookings growth of 22% on average and high margins.'
Let's go. These are large companies operating at billion-dollar revenue scale, not small startups. And the growth numbers look to be accelerating, not decelerating. That kind of growth doesn't square with the notion that enterprise customers are cutting software spend so they have more money for new AI applications. We don't view our portfolio companies as being caught in an either-or, zero-sum competition like that. They're building and integrating AI functionality into their products and customers are voting with their dollars. Systems of record transitioning is the voice... systems of record with powerful AI and agent capabilities built to enterprise requirements and workflows have shown themselves to be quite capable of profitable growth and I believe the value of profitable growth will endure in the face of technological change.
Let's go. Not biased at all, but I think this is what we want to see, right? Six months ago Google was considered disrupted, now it's accelerating. Today SaaS is considered disrupted, now SaaS is accelerating. Let's see. Certainly not time to take your foot off the gas if you're building a SaaS company. You got to figure out how to survive, how to thrive in the age of AI. Can't be asleep at the wheel. You got to be building, you got to be innovating, you got to know your value, you want to know what really makes your company valuable.
Tom Dale says, 'I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.' I saw another post in the same vein from somebody saying, 'Well, at least we're getting it over with before everyone else, right?'
Software engineers might be prepared for a new reality just because they're probably closer to the beginning of the wave.
Justine Moore has the other side of it. She says, 'I love how everyone is saying SaaS is dead. Like you're going to get the Fortune 500 to ditch Salesforce for a CRM vibe coded by a 13-year-old.' And Matt Levine says, 'What's kind of funny is that people on this website have internalized, quote, you hire McKinsey for air cover and a throat to choke if things go wrong, but they haven't internalized, you hire Salesforce, Workday, and Atlassian for very similar, albeit not identical, reasons.' And there's some disagreement. Montag says that's not even remotely true. And Matt Levine says wrong. This is the other Matt Levine, by the way. This is not the Bloomberg writer. This is a software guy with some finance thrown in. He's been at A16Z and JP Morgan. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
That is right. Good. Alexander says, 'Just to be clear, people are shorting the economy of bits just as software EBITDA margins are about to run to 70% and rotating into the economy of atoms into mass unemployment.'
Rotating into the economy of atoms into mass unemployment. I don't understand.
I'm saying like if you're buying Disney right now saying like, 'Okay, they have the parks business, they have it, it's not as immune to AI disruption, but then if a bunch of people are unemployed...'
They're not going to go to Disneyland.
Yeah. In theory. Well, we'll see. Theoretically.
Theoretically, they might go more. Who knows? The fact that crypto and silver are getting clobbered at the same time as SaaS stocks makes me think that the AI disruption story is a little bit too pat of an explanation for what's going on. There might be something else going on in the global economy.
Yeah. This is why giving Anthropic full credit for the correction in the journal, it really amps up the aura and the power. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean it's great for... and people are running the numbers on like, okay, so you know, yeah, the valuation of Anthropic probably doubled, an extra 300 billion, but we're seeing like a trillion-dollar selloff. It's like, is that really the exchange rate that we're talking about here? We will see. Jensen is pushing back on the AI will kill all software just like he pushed back last year on the DeepSeek panic. Let's play this video of Jensen.
What software is... software is a tool. There's this notion that the software industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI. You could tell because there's a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them. It is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself. Let's just give ourselves the ultimate thought experiment. Suppose we are the ultimate AI. Artificial general robotics. The ultimate AI, the physical version of us. You could of course solve any problem because you know you're humanoid. You could do things. If you were a human or robot, would you use a screwdriver or invent a new screwdriver? Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer? Would you use a chainsaw or invent a new chainsaw? It just don't... First of all, ideally, they don't use it at all. But do you understand what I'm saying? If you were a human or robot, artificial general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools? The answer obviously is to use tools. And so now do the digital version of that. If you were an artificial general intelligence, would you use the tools like ServiceNow and SAP and Cadence and Synopsys or would you reinvent a calculator? Of course, you would just use a calculator.
Okay, I completely disagree. So like if you're a robot, you'll use the calculator, right? Like you'll just build the calculator if it costs you a lot of money to use the calculator. Yes. So like I think like you know digital... that like agents will use Salesforce, right? But if Salesforce becomes like very expensive, if it's already fairly expensive, at some point it becomes even cheaper to just build it themselves and then you run...
Yeah. Especially when they're like, 'I can work the equivalent of 2,000 lifetimes today.'
Yeah. Yeah. Like obviously there's use for tools, right? Like OpenAI doesn't... or ChatGPT like will write out a Python script to run some like big math problem, right?
It's not going to use tokens to...
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. At some point if a single prompt can say like, 'Build me a clone of this software and replatform me and onboard all my customers and employees to the new vibe-coded version of the software and maintain it for free,' yeah, you have a problem. But as long as the cost to reimplement the software and replatform and transition over...
John Palmer in the X chat and Deepo in the YouTube chat say, would you watch TBPN or reinvent it? Would you invent a new podcast or listen to a podcast?
Yeah, Caner in the chat was talking about trains, the indomitable will of trains or the unstoppable force of trains. I'm just being extremely bullish on trains. I don't know. Just trains. It was just like a very, very random train anecdote.
Yeah. I just like that there was a hype train for trains in the chat.
Schmosby says, 'You met me at a rather illiquid period of my life. It's rough out there.'
Yeah. I mean, going back to Jensen, like it's in Jensen's interest for the markets not to collapse, even if he doesn't necessarily believe this. Even if Tyler's take is right.
Yeah, it's all a matter of timelines. I think like the models are expensive to actually go and reimplement something very, very large and replatform when the current thing is working.
Did you see this screenshot of some mapping software suggesting you could go straight or you could go in a loop?
This is car guy software.
Who's car guy software? Like this map is probably made by somebody who just appreciates a nice drive.
This is actually Google Maps, but basically it's like you could go in a straight line or you could take a right and go in a massive loop and it's eight minutes slower and it's like, 'Would you like to go the slower route?' But yeah, if you want to do a hot lap, like go for it. I guess that's a good take.
We got to actually pull up the post from Amtrak. Amtrak hired a poster.
Oh, this is where the train...
This was one of the posts of the week. Amtrak says, 'The unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.'
Yes, that's... Yes. Yes. Yes. This is what he was quoting. I thought it was so funny. 'The unbridled greatness of trains will endure for a million years.' How many likes does that have? That's a banger.
54,000. That's great. Let's go over to the Guinness tally. Tyler has it. He counted it up. He sat down. He studied the Doordash, Cash Patel, Cheeky Pint crossover episode with Elon Musk. And he counted three pints for Elon, four pints for John, and three-quarters of a pint for Dhar. But there's a suspicious refill.
Yeah. So I mean, it's a bit hard to really tell because if you're tracking Dhar's volume, right, throughout the episode, it kind of goes down and he's at maybe like 80% full and then it goes back up.
That sounds like a refill.
But it's like a direct... So it's after a... there's like an ad read and then it goes back up.
So the question is like during the, you know, whatever happened during the ad read, right? Did he just like slam it?
He filled back up all the way or is it just kind of a, you know, partial fill?
I think you got to give him 1.75.
Okay. Can we pull up the screenshot?
Because the other debate was just around the actual size of the pints?
Is there some of them? They look like full pint glasses.
So yeah, if they look like full-size pint glasses. Another photo of Elon holding the pint.
You got to pull that up, Tyler. Put it in the production.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. It's here. It's...
This is really important. Yeah. You see this? And it's like, okay, that looks pretty small in his hand.
Little small. And then let's click over to Timothée Chalamet. Timothée Chalamet. I mean, he's a smaller person, but it looks the same size to me. I think these are fair pint glasses. I think these are accurate. I'm not seeing anything that's...
So Timothée is 5'10", Elon is 6'2".
So, slight height difference, but I mean, I feel like...
Yeah, maybe he's really mauling that.
Yeah, I think they're just potentially wider.
And this is the kind of hard-hitting analysis that you could really only get on this show.
No other technology media is really breaking down.
I'm going pint analysis. I'm going normal-sized pints on this, but it is an interesting optical... Yeah, this one looks incredible.
It's a little bit of an optical illusion.
It's close. It's close. I mean, either way, even if it's a half pint, John drank four. So, that's two full pints. Even if it's a half pint, you know, I think these are full pint glasses. I'm going full pint.
Okay. You know who else is going full pint, John?
The founder of Crypto.com, who just bought AI.com for 70 million.
Big, big, big... $70 million.
He is running an ad for AI.com. We don't know what AI.com is yet, but I'm assuming you're going to be able to get some artificial intelligence there, much like you get crypto.
It's a response. Haven't people been saying if you're in crypto, pivot to AI? He took it literally, right?
I'll read through this. Chris, founder says, 'Plans to launch a new site with a Super Bowl ad this weekend. The founder of trading site Crypto.com just bought AI.com for 70 million.' He actually bought it last year in April. Highest price ever disclosed for a domain sale to launch a new entrant into the AI race.
The site will offer a personal AI agent that consumers can use to send messages, use apps, and trade stocks.
It's very, very American.
Send messages, send memes, order DoorDash, and trade stocks with your new AI agent. 'Last year, an opportunity came up for me to acquire this domain. And I thought if you take a long-term view, 10 to 20 years, that AI is going to be one of the greatest technological waves of our lifetime, and so it would be a good investment.'
Mars did not comment on the purchase price, which was confirmed by the deal's broker, Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com. Huge win for Larry.
Larry, shout out to domainers.
'With assets like AI.com, there are no substitutes,' said Fischer. 'When one becomes available, the opportunity may never present itself again.' Of course, AI.com was pitching itself aggressively to all of the different labs. Everyone was like, you know, Anthropic's like, well, we may not have anthropic on X, but we do have anthropic.com. We do have claude.com.
Who owns AI.ai? That's a good domain because Anthropic owns claude.com, but they also own claude.ai and they reroute claude.com to claude.ai, which is normally the opposite of the flow that you'd go. You'd start with the .ai or the other TLD and then as soon as you get the .com you would reroute everything to it. So Anthropic is using the .ai as their main domain. They're rerouting. Maybe they're guilty. Oh yes, maybe they just like supporting Anguilla.
Tyler is using AI.com to launch a personal AI agent. Is it your Gen Z? Is this cheugy?
Wait, what is cheugy again? I don't know.
Cheugy is like Gen Z slang.
I think it's like millennial slang.
It feels a little cheugy to me. I'll say that. I know enough about that. It feels like cheugy. It's chopped. It's Dubai. Dubai would want like the name of the thing, but it's chopped.
Cheugy is a slang term often used by Gen Z to describe someone or something that is uncool, outdated, or trying too hard to be trendy. Typically referring to millennial trends from the 2010s.
So, it's a dig at millennials from the perspective of zoomers. Makes sense.
It describes a post-basic aesthetic that is slightly cringeworthy, such as 'live, laugh, love' signs, skinny jeans, or side parts.
Okay. Interesting. Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Let's go over the mansion section. There's some good stuff today.
We got a bunch of stuff. So, Miami's Coconut Grove. They're calling it Billionaire's Grove. The ultra-wealthy buyers have discovered Miami's once-sleepy Coconut Grove neighborhood.
Cam in the X chat says, 'Cheugy is being carried by millennials.'
Okay, interesting. Thank you, Cam.
Van says, 'What an unc term.'
Once known as a bohemian enclave, Miami's leafy Coconut Grove neighborhood is quickly transforming into a billionaire's playground thanks to a string of mega sales in the area. Unlike hot spots like Miami Beach and Indian Creek, the Grove, with its massive banyan trees, winding streets, and small gated communities, was little known to people outside of Miami until recently. 'Most people hadn't heard of it unless they were local,' said real estate agent Danny Herzberg. 'Now, the secret is out in a big way.' And it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal mansion section. Since late December, Google co-founder Larry Page has spent $188.4 million on three properties in Coconut Grove. Well, businessman Jorge Mas, a co-owner of professional soccer team Inter Miami...
Okay, but what did he actually do?
Yeah, that's a good question. Look him up. He just says he's a businessman. Just getting introduced as a businessman is incredible. Well, that's a life.
Jorge Mas, president of Real Zaragoza.
Okay. Is he really just a soccer guy, I think?
No. American billionaire businessman and chairman and largest shareholder of MasTec, a Miami-based construction and engineering firm founded by his father.
