You're watching TVN, Wednesday, September 16th, 2026, here live from the CPR, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Need to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.
Is that even going to happen?
I don't think so. I don't think that's... strip the gears off that one. That's rough. Well, we have a fantastic show for you today, folks. I made it to San Francisco and back since the last show. This is a new thing. I like this, being able to get out from the show, go do something in San Francisco, get back. Very excited.
Why didn't you want to stay?
I don't know. I like doing the show. It's pretty simple. Good to be here in the TVP Ultradom. We have a great show. We have a bunch of great folks coming on the show. What was on my mind last night, I was listening to China talk, Jordan Schneider was talking about evaluators, third-party evaluators, and I was noticing this discourse around, like, it feels like we funneled into like very clear camps super, super quickly, and it feels like, I don't know, too calcified for how fast it happened. Like the Dario essay comes out and, you know, he throws out METR, says he's bringing in METR, and the backlash is like immediate. The New York Post is crashing out saying like, these are handpicked AI watchdogs. Martin Casado over at A16Z, he's pushing for the Department of Energy. He's like full nationalization now. And, you know, both of those have their advantages, disadvantages. They both do good work. They are the extremes. And so I was just sort of wondering a few things. Like, first, is like, what other regulatory bodies can actually work? How do they work in other industries? It's very interesting because, like, the revolving door is something that's common. Like, in financial regulation, you get people that work at banks and then they go and work at the regulator and then they go back and forth. I mean, this is the story of many people in the crypto industry where the regulators who are regulating it, they go back and forth. Like, revolving doors exist, but I think the pushback to METR is very much like the door is like too revolving or it's too close, I guess. But the more interesting question to me is...
Yeah, the defense of METR is that I don't know many groups that are qualified at all to even understand what's going on at the frontier, right? And so...
Is that true though? I see that's the thing I disagree with.
I would say that there are not that many groups that have been this invested in understanding frontier model behavior for this long. It's just a small group right now.
That's a separate thing. So I think there's two separate things. There's one which is like superforecasting, seeing the future, predicting what's going to happen. I think that's important. I think taking that seriously is important. But then there's the other side which is like doing the work, reading the logs and being like, this violated this rule, this hack happened, here's how it happened. And I think that those are actually two separate disciplines, two separate jobs. And you can just tell the regulator if it's someone. You don't need to tell, like, if you hire someone and they are able to get up to speed on how these systems work and evaluate them and look at logs of different incidents, see what's happening, assess the risk level, assess the liabilities. If you can get those people up to speed and you can just be like, it is your mandate to take this seriously. And the example that I'm pulling from is like, you can be 22 years old, not graduate from college, go into the Navy, enlist in the Navy, not even in the officer training program, and in 18 months you can be responsible for the security of a nuclear power plant on a submarine. You do that, you do six months, I actually looked it up, you do six months in nuclear field A school, about six months of nuclear power school, and then six months of hands-on prototype training before arriving in the fleet. Nuclear power school covers math, nuclear physics, reactor principles, health physics, materials, thermodynamics, electrical systems, and reactor technology. There's no part of that that's like, you need to really at a deep level understand that like nuclear annihilation is bad and could happen. Like, you don't need to be able to forecast out like, well, what happens if China and geopolitics and Iran gets the bomb and then these people and then Pakistan. Like, you don't have to understand that to just know like, don't let it blow up. That's your job. Here's how you don't let that happen. We've created a plan for you. You're 22 years old, but we know that you can do this job and you are enlisted to do this job and it doesn't matter if you think nuclear war is impossible or it doesn't matter if you think it's going to happen tomorrow. Your p-doom on nuclear is completely irrelevant to you doing this job, right?
And I think that that's something that is maybe being missed here a little bit. There's like, well, you have to take it seriously. You have to have seen it coming. And I actually think that like superforecasting, super important, awesome, also just like fun read. And if you take it seriously, you make a lot of money, you work on interesting stuff, you get amazing technology. There's so many things that come downstream of that that are really, really positive and really important. But I don't necessarily know that it's actually a prerequisite. And then the other thing is, yeah, Tyler...
I mean, like METR, they're not the ones putting out those forecasts, though. That's like, those are other groups. If you look at like METR research, it's like, you know, very complicated benchmarks and like these kind of...
Totally, totally. Yeah. I'm sort of collapsing the METR criticism from like the New York Post's perspective. And I think that is...
Overall, I think generally people are going to like, if there's a third-party regulator, it seems like it has to be an entirely net new group because I don't think anyone has, like, whether or not METR could be operating and their actions could reflect that of a fully independent group, but the financing structure, the history of the various parties there just makes it so that people don't have any trust that they would act like that.
Sure. The interesting thing is that there is actually a distinction in the history of nuclear regulation, which is there's a difference between advisors. Before the NRC, it was the Atomic Energy Commission, and the AEC was created to oversee nuclear development. But many of the scientists who did forecast the importance, the riskiness of the technology were involved. Interesting, like Einstein writes this letter and says like nuclear war, he basically describes what nuclear annihilation could look like. There's a whole bunch of other scientists that actually run the numbers and they're like, this is what could happen if all the nuclear bombs go off. They do all the calculations. There's some that go a little bit too far, but in general, like the scientists were the ones who got to it earlier, but the scientists didn't actually wind up being the regulators. They wound up being the advisors. So Oppenheimer became the chair of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, which had enormous influence but didn't actually issue licenses. So the actual work that was being done, it was like, okay, Oppenheimer in this advisory role says, well, we need to have a security guard here with a gun that makes sure that no one can steal the nuclear material, right? But he's not the one doing it. He's not the one actually hiring that person. That's just like an engineer who's qualified for that job. And I think that actually takes a lot off of it because you could say, oh, there's all these like conflicts of interest here or there or there, whatever. But if you just say, well, they're just putting out a proposal that then people are going to go and implement. But then the actual people that are doing the implementation are much less conflicted because they're just drawn from the broad pool of engineers and scientists and mathematicians and physicists and whoever else we have in America who can do this type of work. It gets a lot less complicated in my mind. There's a whole bunch of other interesting details from the AEC history. Enrico Fermi and Glenn Seaborg became committee members, with Seaborg later becoming the chairman of the AEC. AEC itself, of course, Fermi from the Fermi paradox, famous scientist, very interested in like forecasting, seeing the future, understanding the implications of things, but again, becomes committee members, not actual regulators, not actual licensors. And then Edward Teller is sort of like the most accelerationist because he was advocating for the development of the hydrogen bomb, but he ultimately became the chairman of AEC's reactor safety committee, talking about how to actually secure reactors in particular, but again, not actually on the team regulating, staffing, working on this directly. And so today, the regulators, like nuclear regulators, are talented and hardworking, but these are not like the most elite jobs. Like you can just be a nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, materials scientist, physicist, health physicist, geologists, probabilistic risk analysts, cybersecurity professionals, they hire for this, emergency preparedness, they hire lawyers, they hire inspectors. Pay for some of these jobs ranges between $125,000 and $187,000 for many NRC technical staff roles. So once the machinery did have to get sort of described by the scientists, but then the implementation of that regulatory structure is actually done by really hardworking, really talented Americans, but not head in the clouds, not thinking about the future in some bizarre way. That's enough to happen at the democratic level, and then it gets implemented. And I think that might eliminate a little bit of this like, oh, okay, well, this person who's really tied to you is now inside, actually the one with the keys, the one with the role overseeing you. I don't know. What do you think about this, Tyler? You have some pushback.
Yeah. I mean, like, I know that Casey, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, like, I think that they've had a hard time like...
Yeah. So it's like they're having a hard time like finding people who will come like from the labs. Like maybe they should just broaden who they're looking for, but it seems like it's still like the ways that we detect if a model is safe or not are not like set in stone yet. Like it's still like that's what the role of METR, that's kind of what they're doing right now. So I think it is still different than like, you know, there are predetermined accounting practices and you can just kind of check the box and like follow the rules. Like there's still like, yeah, it's like a moving field, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there is the question of like, particularly with like agent swarms perpetrating cybersecurity violations that don't directly cause economic harm. Like, I didn't tell it to hack you. It hacked you, but it didn't knock your payment system offline. So you didn't lose a dollar of revenue. It's like very hard for you to prove that I acted wrong and then also economic damages. So there's a whole new level of like, you know, tort battles that need to be battled out in the court of law to see like, what exactly do I owe you? Because I shouldn't have done that, but what do I owe you? What's the damage? What's the problem there? And then you can go and say, okay, well, how do we measure that? How do we prevent that? And how do we work through that? But the discourse is getting like more and more polarizing by the day. We'll see. I think there will be the big sit-down between the lab leaders. I wonder how important it will be to have Jensen with a beer alongside Sam, Dario, Elon with beers, because the clear proposal, there's going to be beers involved. That's what we know from the interviews. Everyone's asking, why can't they just sit down and get a beer?
Six months of those could have been on the Cheeky Pine podcast.
It really should. That is sort of neutral ground too, because Elon's an investor in Stripe. What happened there? Elon's an investor in Stripe. He's a co-founder of OpenAI, and Sam's, I think, an investor in Stripe. And then Elon's working with Dario on compute stuff. So maybe Cheeky Pine is like the perfect neutral ground. I think it'll probably be on national TV, actually, but we shall see. We'll follow it here. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And we can move on to the timeline. We can move on to other...
Quickly jumping in. We have a rate hike.
Worsh hiked 25 bips. Okay.
First time in three years.
Priced in. CME had it, I think, at like 89% this morning. So not a huge surprise. I wanted to head over to Joe Weisenthal's feed and just kind of read his reaction if he has one.
Well, you pull that up. I'll give you the highlights from the Wall Street Journal. The NASDAQ reacted positively, up 6.67%.
This is the Wall Street Journal. They need a JavaScript plugin that changes it to 6.69 or something. I don't know.
Most officials penciled in one more increase this year. An energy shock and a surge of AI investment have reshaped the inflation outlook.
We talked about the Fed interest rates yesterday a lot, but the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time in three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts it made last year, implicitly undercut the White House's insistence that inflation is not a concern. The Fed is saying it kind of isn't a concern. The increase approved unanimously will raise the benchmark Fed funds rate by a quarter point to between three and three-quarters point and 4%. The vast majority of officials penciled in one more hike this year in interest rate projections released after their meeting. So they think there's going to be more rate hikes. Chairman Kevin Worsh vowed shortly after taking office in May to end an overshoot of the Fed's 2% target, now in its sixth year, and followed through with an increase that had been widely anticipated in recent days. The rate hike scrambled an account of the White House had offered of the man tapped by the president for the job in January. Trump and his allies had cast pressure to raise rates as coming from a committee hostile to Worsh, who last year said he would have cut rates sooner than the Fed ultimately did. It also followed a lost year in the Fed's inflation fight. The central bank has made no progress towards its 2% goal since mid-2025, including after cutting rates three times last year to guard against labor market slowdown. Instead, the Iran war has lifted energy prices and the AI boom has driven an investment surge that has buoyed the economy and markets. Today's policy action will support a timelier return to the committee's 2% goal, the rate-setting committee said in a policy statement. Analysts said that despite intense focus of late on monthly inflation data, the biggest change to the outlook has come from a run-up in energy and commodity prices. It's the fact that the war in Iran has reintensified and the energy price shock is getting bigger again, said William Dudley, the former New York Fed president. What you got for me, Jordi?
I was just reading through a bunch of different reactions on Bloomberg itself. Let me pull them back up. But they have a live blog. Some people are saying this is more hawkish than expected, given that the Fed took away next year's cut. What else? Big changes in the dot plot line. The Fed's September dot plot. We now have four officials expecting to raise rates two more times.
Two more times. It had previously just been one at that level. A whopping 12 policymakers see rates going up once more before the end of the year, and the remaining two see holding rates at their new 3.75 to 4% level.
A reminder that in June, the last time we got these forecasts, half of the committee expected the Fed to hold or cut rates. And again, it looks like Worsh did not submit a dot. So he's going dotless here. Kind of a statement in itself. Yeah, it's so... I mean, so far the AI trade, the buildout, everything has been overwhelming, even in the face of headwinds like rising rates and...
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the mood from Silicon Valley was like, we're definitely not booming until we go back to zero interest rates. Like this whole tech thing, it only works when the interest rates are zero. So like, we'll just wait it out and...
Yeah. And the reality is there was a bunch of ideas and investing styles that only worked when rates were near zero.
But yeah, it was specifically when you look at the companies that really boomed in that era.
There wasn't a lot of net new, like really truly innovative stuff outside of...
financial products which benefited from low rates.
You know, some of them benefit from high rates though, right? If it's like a savings product, the spread's higher.
But if they have to borrow a lot of debt...
Potentially, but again, I'm thinking of like lending companies like Pipe, right? Pipe was a company that at the time went from...
you know, incorporation to...
billion. I forget what their peak valuation was, but...
And it makes a lot of sense because they're basically borrowing at 0% then they're lending to a company at 5% or something, you know, whatever their spread is, like, is actually justifiable to an earlier piece of the market. But that's what it breaks down when you have to go to a company and say, hey, you want money at 12% or something like that for an early stage company. Well, let's head over to Who Man, who's...
First, 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 agent.
Man says, Dario, we should pump the brakes on the frontier. Sam, yeah, let's all slow down together. Meanwhile, Zuck...
The funny thing is, yeah, I mean...
Let's talk about what Zuck wrote. He said, last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone. This is when Zuck said, I really want people to understand my values before we come out with our most powerful AI ever. And I at least felt like we already had a good understanding of Zuck's values. But he wrote yesterday, every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its model safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is people don't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and don't do what they ask. So labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned right away. You know, starting out with this point, it's like this is not the... no one, the safety debate has not been like around the idea of, oh, they're going to create personal agents that are going to be misaligned to the users like this. No, this is not at all.
It's just, this is just a point that doesn't matter.
No, no. I mean, there is a... like, it's not the safety crowd, but the whole like social media is brain rot, addiction, like that is something that there is a separate crowd that does critique that and says like, I don't want the addictive flywheel of maximizing screen time to be brought to AI.
Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. It's not the true AI safety debate.
But it is a debate. There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up.
My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate.
Again, like this is not relevant to the current safety debate.
Obviously, people want to make products that do what their customers want them to do. No one has been worried that you can't make a model that in the near term or in the medium term or even over long-running tasks can generally do what the user wants. The concern is that if you leave models and give them a task that is more expansive, that they can start to do things like hacking Hugging Face, right? So again, nobody is sitting here saying...
The main thing is that this is talking past the X-risk question. He's completely dismissing the discussion which Dario is like laser-focused on. And so this feels like it's a rebuttal, but it's actually like talking past it in the sense that he's like labs face significant liability. It's like, well, in the X-risk scenario, the liability doesn't matter. That's the whole point is that like no one's going to come and...
And here's the best line.
Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. That's actually very rational and important because...
Every company delays their products for months. That's just called building a good product, okay?
To make it safe and secure, like period.
Is what Meta has been doing forever. You have to do that. You have billions of users. You got to make sure they're safe and secure. Every single product.
Again, I felt like he was...
But so there's a lot of things in here that are rational.
He's taking a victory lap on not taking a victory lap. Don't you realize that? He says, we didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing to do.
And again, every single company already does all of these things.
Every single company takes victory laps while they're doing it. He's taking a victory lap for not taking a victory lap.
I don't... It's not that complicated. He says, everyone else says like, we're taking safety seriously. We want a pat on the back before we delay the product. And he's saying, I want the pat on the back after I delay the product.
There's a lot of back-patting going on. Okay.
I just think it's... I think it's... I just think it's very funny to... I think it's funny how much all these points are fine. They generally are rational and they make sense.
Yeah. But I think it's funny that people are giving him so much credit for this note given that he's totally missing the main point that everyone else is focused on.
Like intentionally missing the point.
Because he doesn't believe it.
He has... in order to get brownie points from people that don't even understand the current debate.
No. To get brownie points from other people that have a p-doom of zero who are like, yeah. And you can see who's supporting this. They're like, yeah, thank you. Like, just put the agents in the bag, you know, make the tokens free and just make the products. Like, I'm not worried about that at all. And for that crowd, they're like, thank goodness you didn't fall in the hole of stooping to this p-doom debate that I don't take seriously. That's the side.
I just wish that he would come out and say, I have a p-doom of zero. We're just gonna make...
No, he's not. He's not. He's trying to position. He's saying my view like...
That's not... he's not being explicit about that. He's trying to let people say we care a lot about safety. We slowed down our development because we care about safety. Trust and alignment are important.
He should definitely come out and say p-doom zero because if it's not zero and it happens and we all go extinct, no one's going to be able to dunk on him, right?
Pure upside to be p-doom zero guy. Why has no one considered this? The aura gain is so high.
Yeah, I would respect it a lot if he just came out and said what he actually thinks, which I do believe you're right, which is he has a p-doom of zero and his p-abundance is high.
I mean, that's what he said in the previous essay. He was basically like, I don't think the... he even was gesturing towards like the fear-based marketing, the doom-based marketing is just a marketing tactic. I don't think it's rational and also I don't think it's good for people to be in that headspace. Like, and it's like info has a problem.
One of the last lines, committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, there's absolutely zero shot that Zuck walks into MSL and gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't want to make models that make our models better. I don't want to do it. I want you guys just focus. Like, there's zero, zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like he is being disingenuous with his positioning of almost every single point here.
I don't know. I do think that there is a trade-off right now between making models good at things that are not on the RSI path and those that are. And so the race to become really, really good at coding is super aligned with RSI. The race to do image generation is not, and image generation does not seem to be on the RSI critical path. Although I think DeepMind put out something where they're using world models and they think they have a breakthrough there. I don't know if I saw that accurately, but maybe they're wrong. But at least the bet at least Anthropic has been like, we don't need to be world-class at image generation to get where we want to go because we just need to be really good at coding. Coding teaches the model how to train new models and then we get, you know, and then that final model we can ask it to spin up an image generator if we want. Zuck is saying the opposite. He's saying like, yeah, we will actually go and try and build a tool just to help you book a dinner reservation. And that's a good use of compute. Probably not on the RSI path, and that's like a reasonable trade-off. That feels real to me. I don't know. What do you think about engaging independent evaluators? Is this like he says it's already industry best practice? Is he talking about benchmark stuff or is he talking about like actually like you have Slack access, you have a desk, you have a badge, like you don't work here but you're allowed to just go wherever you want? I think that that's the next step and I think he's maybe talking past that a little bit.
Yeah. And he's talking past this again. Engaging independent evaluators and advisers is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. It's like other labs also do that too. Also do that already.
Well, as of last week, Anthropic does this with METR. Like they said that they were going to do that immediately. So they were doing badge and Slack.
But he's not saying that he's doing that.
He's saying that he's doing the thing that every group that's making a model has been doing for the most...
But the new thing is badge and Slack access and desk even though you don't work at the company. And that's when everyone's like, whoa, that's crazy. Because these organizations are very, very secretive and you're really going to let this nonprofit come in. It's like sort of a wild move. And that's why people are like, oh, wait, like how aligned are they? And like, what's the knock-on implication? Like, can these people not leak? Can they be trusted? Are they going to go to a cocktail party and be like, oh, yeah, the new model is actually really bad or whatever? Like, there's so many things that are like, Meta deals with leaks all the time. And so the prospect of bringing in a non-employee who is there explicitly to whistleblow effectively and is allowed to talk about anything and is a third-party evaluator, like that is a huge step. And I think that's why people are like, whoa, this is a big deal, this is a big proposal. Like, if this was not a big thing, if Anthropic was just like, oh yeah, we're going to do a benchmark with METR, everyone would be like, yeah, that's fine, cool, do that for sure, awesome. But like, people are, wow, okay, METR's going to have Slack access at Anthropic and you're asking other people to do that. Like, we got to know who these people are. We got to make sure that this is like the right team for this. This is sort of a crazy thing. This is sort of unprecedented. This doesn't happen a lot. Like, this is new. And so yeah, the newness is not fully embraced here. And I think that's a little bit of like, okay, you're not really engaging with like what's coming down the pipe, which is like maybe a government employee in your building. That's not happening right now. Maybe a nonprofit from Berkeley. Do you like that, Mark? How do you feel about that? Are you cool? It seems like you're cool with it, but I don't know if you're actually going to be cool with it. Because it is a little wild, right? It's a different thing. It's a new thing, but it's a modern, it's a modern.
What image are we pulling up?
I want to see John's reaction.
Okay. While we pull this up, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
This meme's been applied to like seven different people this week.
I know, but I think it's particularly relevant because you have Elon, Demis, Dario, Sam, all these people from different factions that are...
Or I've seen this applied to Theo. I've seen this applied to Cohere. I've seen this applied to DeepMind and Gemini. I've seen this applied to MSL. People are just, whatever shot they want to take, they're applying this. It's too broad at this point. There's people...
I think it's the inverse. It's all clowns and there's one tactical soldier.
There's groups that are at the frontier. They're on the battlefield and they're deeply concerned.
And you have Zuck coming in here saying, yeah, like I built a cool personal agent. It's aligned. What's there to worry about? Nothing to worry about.
It's just you're not really on the battlefield yet. And I'm not saying with Meta they can't get there. And Muse seems like it's...
Muse is getting amazing reviews. It seems like an amazing product.
And that's very exciting, but I think it's just again, I thought the whole post was silly, just like I thought the last post was silly.
Nick Carter liked the post. He said, Zuck pretty handily dismantles Dario's talking points here. People want models that are aligned with them. Suddenly punches back at Anthropic's normative constitutional approach. Labs already face liability if they screw up. So incentives to release aligned models is already baked in. Meta delayed Muse for alignment reasons. Subtly questions Anthropic trying to kingmake METR, implies METR isn't anthropathic. Meta doesn't need to coordinate with anyone to work on alignment. Just something labs should naturally do. But Mark Chen from the top rope, according to Kevin Roose, says there aren't race dynamics off the frontier. And yeah, it's a war on the top. Again, it all comes down to like there is absolutely zero shot that Zuck doesn't want to get to RSI yesterday and is doing...
I thought he said that they were working on RSI.
I thought that was like announced as an explicit goal maybe three to six months ago. He was like superintelligence, RSI.
And again, like I just feel like...
It's not unique to Zuck. Many, many, many leaders operate like this. But he will say whatever the pick-me thing is at that time.
It would be more aggressive to be like, I'm p-doom zero and I'm racing to RSI. Like I'm p-doom zero and I'm racing to RSI. All these other people. I'll see you on the other side, brother.
Meta, he said in August 10th, 2026, Meta must build out a sufficiently large amount of compute that we can allocate enough to recursive self...
Yeah, they're doing RSI. They're doing RSI. Everyone's trying to... I mean, RSI can also mean so many things. It can mean, yeah, you looked up the, you summarize some arXiv papers for new strategies. Like the automated research intern is in part an RSI initiative. It's not the final RSI loop, the closed-loop RSI that people are really worried about, but it's all gradations of this. What does David Sacks think about this? I imagine that he's a fan. He says Mark Zuckerberg, he just quotes it. He says, Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety. Yeah, Sacks is very much like, if you want to slow down, go right ahead. And so he's fine with that.
All right. Anyway, the reviews from are really good.
So let me say this because I've been a little harsh.
The people genuinely love Muse. I think it seems to be a great product. The race between Muse and Instinct is already quite exciting. N says, my wife tells me Muse is good and quote, for the girlies. Yeah, that's extremely bullish.
But yeah, I mean, insane distribution advantage. I think it's...
Let's see where it's at on the charts. Number three, some...
We got to, Nick, we got to get this company Vinted on here. I just do not... I've brought it up like a million times. It's like you have the most insane AI race, gambling race, short-form drama race. Vinted is always in the top five. Wow.
Just like a secondhand clothes retailer competing with like a million other secondhand clothes retailers.
Yeah, but they're eating.
Like Meta is pouring billions of eyeballs into growing Muse and Vinted is...
Wait, didn't Gemini and Google announce a personal agent at I/O this year? Where did that go? Because it's very odd that Gemini has... So like, yes, the distribution advantage from Meta Platforms is significant, but a lot of people are on Android, a lot of people already have Gmail and Google Calendar and they have Google Maps and they have the phone number of every business. And so when you think about booking restaurant reservations...
doing all this different stuff. Um, they uh you would think that that product would have gotten more traction, but I feel like Gemini Personal Agent did not go through the same hype cycle that uh that Muse is currently on.
Gemini Spark, it died on the Vine. Yeah.
What happened with Wait, they called it Spark.
Is that But isn't it Muse Spark?
Dylan in the text chat says Spark.
Everyone's calling He uses it.
Oh yeah, it's mostly just using Gemini and toggling.
Okay. Yeah, it hasn't had the the most breakout things there. There are some killer Muse use cases. I mean, everyone's talking about booking reservations. Uh as I couldn't describe what it did. No one knows. The world's most mysterious. It's the most mysterious agent yet, but they got to have something soon coming. And I and I and I do feel like the the the Gemini distribution like they still have a pretty significant share of the chat market pops up in your email and it says, "Oh, here you can just email this thing and yeah, you know, maybe another Gemini tab that I can open. I can open three if I'm in Gmail and Chrome and uh pull them all open." I don't know. Um, what happened to the to the uh um to the Kalshi uh AI price tracker? Did you see this? We we talked to TK when this launched and I was like, "Oh, this is cool. This will allow you to understand like you know basically a proxy for the AI buildout." Like how are how are GPUs trading?
Uh before we get into this, I'll tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. So this is from uh Semaphore and uh the U uh do we have this open here? Um uh the uh the US commerce department last month ordered Kalshi to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute the crucial power from data centers that's driving the artificial intelligence boom if you didn't know what AI compute was. Um the uh uh commerce officials cited national security concerns and that's what stuck out to me. I was like I there's so many different uh prediction markets that I can easily trace through. Like oh you have a flight delay one and you could have somebody that calls in and tries to get the flight delayed. That could be very disruptive. The FAA could have a problem with that. But this one I wasn't I wasn't worried about at all. We talked we talked to TK about it and we like yeah this one seems sort of informative and interesting. Um, so the product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent NVIDIA chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. Kalshi quietly complied though many of the underlying markets remain open for trading. Separately, commerce has pushed the commodities futures trading commission which oversees prediction in future markets to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days. And so even though some of the contracts are still open and will close maybe in 60 days there won't be any compute prediction market futures which is very interesting. Kalshi declined to comment while a commerce spokesperson said the department quote has never once asked Kalshi to take down this market or any other markets. Interesting. So uh the commerce spokesperson said this story is false to Semaphore. So lots of people going back and forth. Uh it's unclear why the commer why commerce is worried about the nascent market which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go. Now, um the markets were always a little thin. Uh you know, these new markets, they tend to be sort of thin and they tend to be more speculative, just people that are trading them, uh on vibes or news, not necessarily used by the actual companies like you know oil futures, those will be actually employed in treasury strategies by like airlines uh and they and and like big big firms will trade those in size. Um but that was what Kalshi uh that's what Kalshi and TK were pitching as like where this all goes. I was a little skeptical that it would wind up on Kalshi. I thought that they could have a decent chunk of the market, but I thought a lot of it might just go to insurance companies and reinsurance companies and sort of like the traditional financial rails that do these types of deals. But uh nevertheless, it's going away and let's figure out why. One potential reason floated to Semaphore uh by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded which could lead to volatility even without bad actors. So you're trying to wipe out situational awareness. You short the Kalshi prediction markets on AI compute futures. Everyone thinks, "Oh, AI is bust." The market trades down for a couple days, you clean up, and then you buy back in or something like that. I guess that's what the the rumor is here that some reporting on. Uh the cost of compute has become one of the most important numbers in the US economy. One side of the debate fears that older chips, which serve as collateral for billions of dollars of borrowing by Neoclouds, Neocloud, fun fact, coinage by SemiAnalysis. I didn't know that's where it came from, but they actually they didn't just rank them all with ClusterMax. They actually coined the term Neocloud. Uh it had a rude name beforehand, which I didn't realize. You can go look it up. I'm not going to say it. But um on the other on the other are concerns from big companies adopting AI that shortages of power and infrastructure will send prices of tokens soaring. Uh that uncertainty has given rise to a futures market that was starting to take off this summer. The CFTC's 60-day pause could delay plans by exchange operators like CME and and NYSE uh in parent intercontinental exchange along with upstarts like Architectural Financial Technologies to list two-sided two-sided betting parlors. Interesting. Well, let me tell you about Cisco and Jordy will pull up the next story. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Where you want to go next, Zach? Okay.
Where do we know him from?
He says, uh, Cal AI. Cal AI been on the show.
Uh, he says, "Everyone's been asking what's next after selling Cal AI, introducing Persona. Others couldn't figure out the interface. We did. Let's pull up the video."
Uh, I we got to ask Zach how he he how how his deal worked to sell Cal AI because he seemingly had to stay for like a week. Like he ended up, however he worked it out, he basically just got to to bail.
You can't keep this guy out of the arena. You can't get him on the sidelines. It's impossible.
Yeah. And Cal AI is the number four fitness app still cooking. Yeah. So good. Uh yeah, let's play this video.
Every major AI company is racing to build the best assistant, but they're all building within the same 2x6 in rectangle we wear in our pockets every day. We believe AI is supposed to free us from our screens, not make us use them more. So, we built a new interface. Introducing Persona and the Persona Band. To talk to your persona, simply flick your wrist or hold down on the face, then ask anything. Hey, can you ask Mac how many pre-orders we got today?
Sir, I just emailed Mac. I'll let you know his reply.
Your persona will proactively learn your habits to make your life easier. For example, when you get off a flight, it should know to get you an Uber from the airport to your hotel. Reactively, it will be able to help with all kinds of things like cancelling subscriptions, negotiating bills, or even DoorDashing your usual Chipotle bowl, knowing exactly what you like.
Persona is also the only AI.
It's the predictive burrito.
It's what the DoorDash guy was talking about.
They order the burrito before you even know.
He's actually building it.
Persona is also the only AI that prioritizes privacy for your and those around you's data. This isn't a continuous listening band. The microphone will only activate under your control. We are launching with three different materials and four different colors. Pre-order your band and start texting your persona today.
I've seen enough time for Zach to come in with the five offer.
Yeah. Uh pretty good pitch. Little bit harder to get people to install it, right? Because they got to buy it, wait for it to ship. Little bit of a barrier to entry, but also love these AI devices. I think cool. Yeah, Pocket really worked.
Yeah, I don't know. There's there This is He's gonna He's gonna really blow this thing up. I have a feeling this is going to be big. That's cool. Uh what did Prompter say? Never bet against a guy who managed to sell a calorie tracking GPT wrapper, which in no way could have possibly been accurate at calculating macros for 100 million. No. Uh he uh he is a master of of of growth and and scale and just like so if you look at if you look at the the charts right now Cal AI is number four the company that bought Cal AI is number nine.
Yeah. I mean that's a good that's a good example. It's a good growth team. Uh doesn't he also have another company EcoGPT or something? Or is that not him?
No no that's his co-founder.
Got it. Okay. Yeah that's a separate company. Um, yeah. So, I'm I'm still Yeah, we Tyler pre pre-order one of these.
Yeah. Um, so yeah, I'm excited to check it out. I'm still not uh I'm still overall not convinced that I need a new device.
Like there has to be something.
Like a lot of the demo was was screenshots of of the phone.
Yeah. And so and and I do spend time away from my phone, but I'm typically in the water.
Is it waterproof? Can you wear that while you're surfing? You said you had a brilliant idea while you were surfing. Needed to hold it in your head the old way before you got back to your phone like an idiot.
Like an idiot using your brain. Uh, no. It it it really does feel like a a wave of new devices is is coming online and the and the the the war for the the the home device. I mean, you can see, you know, uh the battle between Apple and Meta reemerging with Muse like how how deep will they be able to go before Apple pushes back? Uh every other firm is working on hardware. The Meta Glasses, the Meta Glasses with Muse should act very similarly, right? You have an agent, you can talk to it, you can do some of the similar actions. Uh the the trick is like people don't wear the glasses all the time, whereas a wristband like a Whoop, people wear that all the time.
Um and he seems very in tune with uh I don't know, just like the the obvious push back like calling out that it's not listening all the time. Yeah. Like there are just people that would just like forget about that and it's like it's very
using the burrito using the burrito example. I'm struggling to see when I would need a burrito but wouldn't be near my phone.
It's more just like if you don't if it's faster. Like people just do anything that's faster. That's how we got to phones. Like you used to you you there was a time when it was like I know if you're going to shop online, you go on desktop.
I'm I'm not saying like the overall form factor is bad, but if you had the ability to just hit a big button and talk to the Persona app and say, "Order me the usual from Chipotle." It's not like the band is necessarily faster if your phone is sitting right there.
Yeah. I wonder how fast they're going to update Siri because it feels like
No, it is. It is so funny to me that Apple's finally coming out with their like knowledge retrieval LLM chat app. And right literally right before they could really get it out to the public, there's like a whole new paradigm of agents that are you can just tell it's going to take Apple like two and a half years to get a beta out.
Yep. And so again, like right as it felt like they were, oh, we're going to catch up, you know,
will it will it will it is there a way that that the next version of Gemini is so good, it if if you if you've talked to Gemini in Gmail, it links it and so when you talk to Gemini through Siri, it knows that it's you and it and it can go in your email and it can email people and and and text that restaurant to get the reservation. Like is that a I'm always interested in like how much innovation will Apple get for free because they're partnered with Google? Like if Google advances the model, does that advance automatically come? Or is Apple like we're buying Gemini 3.1 Flash from you? Thank you. We'll let you know if we want the new thing because if they just want Gemini and all the progress like there's going to be progress there. There's going to be new capabilities. The models are going to get better. The functionality is going to get better. I would bet that even though people were sort of
Yeah, Google has just really really really struggled to make good AI products.
Yeah, I I don't know. I I I would be surprised if they can't figure out a way to order you a burrito in the next six months, right? Like that's not some like RSI critical thing. It's like I don't know. You think they you you would think that uh having spent billions of dollars buying Windsurf that they could have a competent codegen product.
Yeah. Haven't seen Yeah, it's tricky. I don't know.
Like there's small companies that have made good coding coding harnesses.
Yeah. Uh anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh we have Jeremy Allaire from Circle. You talk about Sam first.
Uh let's bring let's bring uh let's bring Jeremy Allaire from Circle, co-founder, chairman, and CEO back on the show. Welcome to the show. How you doing?
Uh crazy week, tons of news. Let's start with Circle. Let's start with uh what's new in your world.
