Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 12/17/2025. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Days till Christmas, baby. We're live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital
Speaker 1:It's Christmas.
Speaker 2:The North Pole of net income, the I don't know. I don't have any more. Ramp, time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:We're mixing it up today.
Speaker 1:Put ramp under the Christmas tree.
Speaker 2:The elf today. Jordy's the elf today. We're tracking Hitting it. That doesn't really work. Woah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Stockings are hung on the gong with care. We're back. Good to see everyone. Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:We have a great show for everyone today. We have Sarah Guo joining us in the TBP And Ultradome. We also have Doug O'Laughlin from Sun Analysis hopping on to hopefully break down the Amazon OpenAI deal. That is big news. I was talking about this with some friends about, you know, SpaceX is potentially going out, gonna hoover up 30,000,000,000 of capital.
Speaker 1:They're going.
Speaker 2:They're going out at 1,500,000,000,000. They're talking to bankers now. They're gonna hoover up all the capital. They're hoovering. The public market's gonna be tapped out.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, Sam Allman would like a word with Andy Jassy. And he says, I need $10,000,000,000 And Andy says, sure. As long as you buy a bunch of Tranium chips, that's basically the story. We will get into that.
Speaker 2:We'll
Speaker 1:dig Yeah. Isn't it like mostly or all credits?
Speaker 2:We will see. We will see. We'll get into it. But first, I wanted to dig into a little bit more. We we we touched on
Speaker 1:Don't forget. We also have Logan
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And Google coming on to talk about Gemini Flash, the new model they released today. We also have David Senra joining at the end of the show Yes. Just to hang out.
Speaker 2:What is the what are the odds that David Senra will be in a more elaborate Santa Claus costume than me?
Speaker 1:Zero. I hate to I hate to say it. We'll give him this hat. Can he hat. Can have
Speaker 2:Anyway, so the the closing out the story with the Ford f one fifty. Of course, this broke earlier this week. The CEO of Ford did a did a round of press interviews talking about the news, which is that Ford, the historic automaker, is killing the f one fifty Lightning their electric truck. Sales fell 72% year over year. Of course, they that is a 72 decrease specifically in last month, which is post EV tax credit going away.
Speaker 2:And the whole project was a money pit, so they took a $19,500,000,000 charge, and now they're shifting strategies. I mean, first question that I was sort of toying with that we've been debating is, did truck buyers ever really want to go electric? Was that even was that ever a good idea? Because it always seemed like, who's the last person that's going to buy an electric car? The truck buyer, right?
Speaker 1:So one thing that I was thinking about is I feel like the Cybertruck probably got truck buyers to like, traditional truck buyers to go electric. But it wasn't because it was electric. Yes. It was because it looked electric.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It looked crazy. It looked wild. Completely agree with this. And so, yeah, there's this weird thing where, like, the f one fifty silhouette is iconic, but you sort
Speaker 1:of Forgot I had Yeah.
Speaker 2:He is
Speaker 1:elf ears on.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, there's just like I mean, ballpark, how many how many ads, how many billions of dollars have been spent on ads that associate trucks with
Speaker 1:Being like a being a cool dude. Guy, dude, you know Guys being dude.
Speaker 2:Driving through the mud. And a big part of that is the engine note, and a big part of that is the actual exhaust coming out of the back. Like, rolling
Speaker 1:All that all that advertising worked on me. Oh, I grew up in a in a Toyota family. Yeah. We only had Toyotas growing up. It's truck Toyota.
Speaker 1:Point at had two Priuses. Right? Yeah. And but as soon as I was an adult Yeah. And I could afford it, I bought a Ford Raptor.
Speaker 1:There you It was black on black on black on black. It was lifted. Yeah. Like, I just wanted the truck that I was at that was advertised to me as a kit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then, of course, I realized quickly, like, it's very difficult to to to park. It Yeah. It was so loud in the cabin that it didn't make sense for a lot of reasons, but it but I but I I wanted that truck since I was a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And a $750 tax credit probably wouldn't be enough to pull you off the the Raptor if that's what you've been programmed from a young age
Speaker 1:75 from
Speaker 2:7,500 EV tax credit. That's probably not enough to pull you away from, okay, I've been watching The engine now. Super Bowl. Engine now. And every year at the Super Bowl, I see truck ads with big loud engines, and they've been marketing this to me for decades.
Speaker 2:And, yes, EVs, it's very logical. There's a lot of cool benefits. I mean, the Ford f one fifty Lightning had crazy stuff. You you'd open up the front. It just had four household power outlets.
Speaker 2:So you just have, like, a full you could have a full, like, tailgate. There was a two twenty volt. You could power a washing machine on it. You could just, like, pull up with a washing machine and just do your laundry, I guess. Also, big part of big big problem with trucks, I'm sure you experienced this, is that, you don't have anywhere to store anything.
Speaker 2:If you because if you put it in the back, it could just get taken. You have to lock it down if you put something in the back. So if you have like
Speaker 1:I think most people that are buying trucks for Yeah. A daily are getting cover over the bed. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Locking cover potentially. But then you're in this, like, weird half and half. Instead, the f one fifty Lightning, there was a front trunk that was actually very large, and you could and it had outlets in there too, and there were a bunch of features. And they really went crazy with the features.
Speaker 2:But, like, ultimately, it wasn't really it wasn't really enough. And there was some interesting there's some interesting data that Ford was sharing that they were framing as positive when the F-one 150 Lightning launched, but I think in retrospect might have actually been sort of a canary in the coal mine. Totally. So the first stat was that of the people that reserved the F-one 150 Lightning, 50% had never owned a truck before. So they're new to trucks.
Speaker 2:And then 75% of the reservation holders had never owned a Ford before. And so Ford was celebrating this. It's like, did it. Did it.
Speaker 1:New hero product.
Speaker 2:New hero product. It's gonna bring new people into the Ford ecosystem. It's gonna be bring new people into the truck ecosystem. We are expanding the market. And in hindsight, what it feels like is the truck buyers didn't want it.
Speaker 2:The board buyers didn't want it. And they're the two biggest markets. And so, yes, there were a class people of that were like, oh, I would always I've always an electric truck, that sounds really interesting. I love the idea of a two twenty volt. I'm a I'm a unique purchaser.
Speaker 2:And they're like, this is a niche product. And they go hard for the niche product. They show up immediately, and they'll do it no matter what.
Speaker 1:And you wrote in the newsletter their Yeah. The first electric truck was the Rivian.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well And that
Speaker 1:it only launched a few months
Speaker 2:months earlier. Yeah. So the Rivian came out in September 2021. That's the r one t. Ford shipped in April 2022.
Speaker 2:That's actually very impressive to me. I was very impressed with how fast Ford was able to respond to the idea of electric trucks happening because electric cars have been around for a really long time. Yeah. But there was always this, like, is it ever gonna happen with trucks? And then all of a sudden, it was like, it's happening this year, and you need big company.
Speaker 2:You need to respond within six months. Like, big companies are typically not that good at responding. Usually, it's like, oh, we'll let the startup. We'll let this Rivian company show up. They'll we'll let them ship, see how they do, and then we'll move.
Speaker 2:They like, a lot of big companies like being second movers. This feels like they were like, no. We're we're moving in the first wave. They did successfully. A lot of that's because they built off of the f one fifty platform.
Speaker 2:They were able to reuse a lot of equipment there in the supply chain. But ultimately, they didn't ship a product that delivered at the level of the R1T. So Doug Dumurro, friend of the show, former guest, gave the R1T a 73, which is a very, very good score. It actually earned Doug's car of the year or vehicle of the year. The next year, Rivian runs it back again, wins car of the year again with the r one s with the SUV.
Speaker 2:And so Rivian has two back to back car of the year with Doug DeMiro. But the R1T gets a 73, so that's the benchmark for where you should be if you're competing with them.
Speaker 1:And Rivian doesn't break out sales, which is super annoying. I really want to understand this. But my guess is that over 90% of their sales are the SUV.
Speaker 2:I agree. Yeah. That And sounds
Speaker 1:that is generally just because of the popularity of SUVs among the cohort of people that are gonna buy an EV. Exactly. And it and the car just looks fantastic. I think that's under underrated. Like, people critique the headlights early on.
Speaker 1:You didn't really like the headlights, but the car, the silhouette is just amazing. It feels like a twenty first century, a very, very modern very kind of modern take on a Range Rover. Right? And it has the same capacity.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. And so the so the the the r one t got a 73 DUG score. The Lightning only got a 65. So on day one, even with all the features, even with all the heritage, even with good pricing and time to market and all this stuff, couldn't actually be a step forward.
Speaker 2:And it, I think it tied the Raptor, but lost on the on on some of the some of the weekend categories, obviously, because Doug likes to drive these cars, for fun on the weekend. But, you know, people wound up, obviously buying some of them. I've seen some of them around. But my question was, how much does the iconic silhouette help or hurt the Lightning? Because you would imagine that there's value so in the f one fifty silhouette that you would you would that would be a huge advantage that you're driving something that looks like the classic canonical truck.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, if you see those Rivian headlights, you know that that person's driving an electric truck, and that's maybe more of a signal, more of a more more badge value there. It is just crazy reflecting on how, you know, you with the way you're talking about this the Rivian silhouette looking good. I was thinking the Rivian name. Do you like the Rivian name?
Speaker 1:I think it's I think it's fine.
Speaker 2:It's weird. It it it sticks out to me. It was also weird when I'm on it. It it it was weird when it first stuck out. It it sounded like something that came from like a like a brainstorming session at a pharmaceutical company, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's like this weird like like, what does the name actually mean? I guess it means river in Indian kind of portmanteau.
Speaker 1:But So the reason so is a blend of syllables from the river, symbolizing adventure and connection to nature. Sure. Like, I I always looked at Rivian as as something like the the whole foods of cars. Right? Like, the the REI of cars.
Speaker 1:Right? It's like people go to REI. Sure. Like, the average person going into REI is not necessarily, like, buying gear for the most rugged adventure. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, they might be buying gear for their backyard
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Or, like, going on a hike that weekend. And and again, like, I feel like the Rivian cars, again, we I mean, we had the CEO on, but, like, have that range where it's like, it really is just like a good daily.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they've built it. It's super powerful. It's very capable. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Well, if you were to daily a Rivian r one s, let's say oh, by the way, just to close out the Ford f one fifty thing. Ford's plan is to pivot. I will tell you what they're going to pivot to after I tell you about linear, the soft the the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from road map to release. So they're going to be pivoting to hybrid, hybrid trucks and hybrid designs.
Speaker 2:But what's interesting is that it's one of those, it's this extra long range hybrid where you have an electric powertrain that is charged by a gas motor. And so you can get, like, 700 miles of range. I saw someone demo one of these in China, and it felt like one of those, like, crazy, like, okay. Is it just a gimmick like the jumping car? Or is this a really interesting, like, value prop because you could fill up once, you have all the towing power.
Speaker 2:Like, you have the energy when you need it. Yeah. But then also, you you don't you don't have any of the ranging range anxiety of the electric car ownership, which is still a little bit real.
Speaker 1:Magnus is a little triggered. Rivian is terrible. Stop talking about it.
Speaker 2:It doesn't like
Speaker 1:it. Ever bought.
Speaker 2:What was bad about it? Tell us the details. Give us the details. I've only heard good stuff. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Interesting. We'll have to dig it. We'll have to dig into it. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. There's an update today.
Speaker 2:State of the art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. So here here's a here's a question. Here's something that people don't like about Rivians. It's they don't have CarPlay. Is that a deal breaker for you?
Speaker 2:Do you like Apple CarPlay?
Speaker 1:I think it's solid. Mhmm. The thing that I find annoying Mhmm. Is car like, the fact that there's no the cars that I've owned are all defaulting back to the the actual operating system.
Speaker 2:Oh, really? So Wait. What do you mean they're defaulting?
Speaker 1:So in I have two Mercedes. Yeah. Yeah. They have, like, the regular Mercedes operating system.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:And then, like, Apple is
Speaker 1:layered on top. Yep. But I still find myself, like, turning on the car sometimes, and it's Just in car. The stock system. Totally.
Speaker 1:I'm like so I just wish there was a single operating system. I wish I could I
Speaker 2:mean, so Apple's trying to do this because I've noticed this But the
Speaker 1:manufacturers are like, well, we sell to Android, and we don't want you to control us forever Yep. Through some type of, like, new blue bubble scenario.
Speaker 2:Totally. So I've noticed this weird thing where there are there are a set of buttons that I can use to interact with CarPlay. So, like, changing the song is is a button that's mapped to my steering wheel in this Cadillac. And as I as I if I push the button, it will go to CarPlay and say, play the next track on Spotify. Great experience.
Speaker 2:But if I have if I've if I'm turning the volume dial, the volume exists at the at the car operating system level, and that overrides CarPlay. And so then the all of the all of the all of the buttons in the car are in, like, okay. We're we're now out we're now elevating to the to the volume knob UI. And so if you push a button, you you're not clicking on the actual screen anymore. You're clicking on the volume overlay.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's very weird. There there
Speaker 1:Think about it. It'd be insane if you're on a a Mac, and it was like running two operating systems Yeah. At the same time. Yep. The difference of being in a car is like you're in a moving vehicle that's thousands of pounds.
Speaker 2:That's a lot.
Speaker 1:And so it's Yeah. Yeah. It's really I do think we'll look back at this kind of era being like, okay. What were what were we doing?
Speaker 2:Yes. So let me tell you about Cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. But so Apple's trying to solve this their way. Apple's saying, hey.
Speaker 2:Let us take over everything, including
Speaker 1:You can let the fox attack on into the henhouse. We can be trusted.
Speaker 2:Yes. We're a
Speaker 1:good fox.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so and so they're they they will do we'll we'll handle the volume. We'll handle the the speedometer. And we will do all of that in in in Apple CarPlay Plus or something, and it'll take the whole screen. And that seems great.
Speaker 2:That seems like a solution to a lot of the problems that we've identified. Rivian's gone the other way, said no Apple CarPlay. He was on Ben Thompson's show on Sir Techery and Ben asked him about this. So Ben said, why is there no CarPlay in Rivian's? RJ says, the the CEO of of Rivian says, it's a good question.
Speaker 2:We get asked a lot. We're very convicted at this point. We believe that the aggregation of applications and the experience, and importantly, now with AI acting as a web that's integrating all these different applications into a singular experience where you can talk to the car and ask for things and and where it has knowledge of the state of the health of the vehicle, the state of the charge, distance, outside temperature. Everything becomes much more seamless in time if the vehicle is its own singular ecosystem versus having a window within the vehicle that's into another ecosystem, Ben says. And that's the issue, just the implementation effort on your side.
Speaker 2:Or that cut is that the issue? Or is it implementation on your side? Or is it that customers are actually short circuiting themselves? RJ says, we could turn on CarPlay really quickly, but then you end up with
Speaker 1:I think I know why he's doing this. Either. Yeah. Wants the consumer to be able to say, Rivian, get me the fastest production car lap record at Laguna Seca.
Speaker 2:And it just does it.
Speaker 1:And it just does it.
Speaker 2:It just does it self driving. Right? So he he basically doubles down and he says, you know, in the age of AI, you'll be able to say, Rivian, tell me what's on my schedule for later today, And it will go talk to Google Calendar, pull that information. And maybe you get stuck in an Apple ecosystem a little bit more. It still feels like a lot of duplicate work where over the long term, Android Auto and CarPlay will be compounding and adding more features, and they should outrun the individual car companies.
Speaker 2:Ben actually asks, is this a bit where Tesla covered for you because they don't have CarPlay either? But now there's a rumor that they might add it, and it might make it all a Is little it bit more confirmed that Tesla is going to add CarPlay? I I didn't know that that was confirmed. But
Speaker 1:As of November 13, Tesla from Bloomberg, Tesla plans to feature CarPlay
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Within a window inside its broader interface.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is normal. So CarPlay is coming to Tesla. Will CarPlay come to Rivian TBD?
Speaker 1:The question is, will the fart sound effect come to CarPlay?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. For sure. The the 100% gonna happen. Anyway, if you wanna make a more serious soundboard, go to Fall, the generative media platform for developers.
Speaker 2:Develop and fine tune models, serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Anyway, I think I think Rivian will eventually get on CarPlay. I think it's got to happen because I just think of the car as like, the car is not fully a device. The car is a speaker.
Speaker 1:It's not your life.
Speaker 2:It's not my life. Exactly. It's not my life. And so if I'm if I'm going on a run and I'm and I and I and I'm listening to music on headphones and then I get back from the run and I go in the car, I'd like a seamless hand off. And then I go in my house, I'd like another seamless handoff.
Speaker 2:I I don't want my house to be like, oh, no. Like, we're building house OS. And, like, we don't interface with Apple. We don't play nicely with Google. I actually as a consumer, I do sort of benefit from a monopoly, at least picking an ecosystem and staying into it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm I'm seriously considering going just I know that the I think the audio quality isn't that good on the Apple Air whatever the Air speakers are. I can't even I don't even know if they're HomePods.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:The HomePods. But I'm thinking about just dropping those everywhere because at least it will be integrated, whereas Sonos has just been falling behind, falling behind, falling behind. And imagine if you're in a situation where, like, the Sonos situation plays out to Rivian. Like, it would be really, really unfortunate where you could be like, well, at least it still has CarPlay. Like, people will go buy retro cars or or
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or old cars and then go retrofit them with CarPlay. And and then it's like, okay. Yeah. Like, it has analog knobs and stuff. It's old car, but at least runs CarPlay.
Speaker 2:So I know that if if I switch from Spotify to YouTube to Apple Podcasts to anywhere else where you can leave us five stars, you should it will still continue to play. It will still continue, and it'll play seamlessly because that technology will just continue to get better regardless of what happens. Anyway, let's move on to other news. But first, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:So the big scoop from Katie Roof. She says, Amazon is in talks to invest over $10,000,000,000 in OpenAI. And so let's read through some of this. Get the scoops. Valuation
Speaker 1:three people familiar Yeah. With The valuation be higher than 500,000,000,000. Okay. The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford some of the commitments it has made
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Some to rent servers from cloud providers, including from AWS.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is like it's like there's somewhat there's some circularity, but it's not entirely
Speaker 1:fully beating the circular allegations on this one. OpenAI last month announced it would spend 38,000,000,000 renting servers from AWS over the next seven years, making AWS one of at least five cloud providers OpenAI use Yeah. Uses to develop AI. The deal also could help Amazon find a new customer for its Trane AI chips, which compete with the NVIDIA chips.
Speaker 2:This is kind of like a rebate. Know? It's like they they said, hey, we're we're gonna buy 40. And they said, here, take 10 back.
Speaker 1:And we'll take a piece.
Speaker 2:Take take 10 back. I I mean, is the this is the semi analysis like the The bigger thesis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the bigger $20 and the more notable news here is that Amazon and OpenAI have discussed commerce partnership opportunities.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting.
Speaker 1:OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into a shopping hub Sure. And has discussed earning fees for referring customers to retailers. It isn't clear whether Amazon OpenAI deal would involve any arrangement related to such features in ChatGPT or AI powered shopping features that Amazon is developing.
Speaker 2:So Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I just look at this in the same way as like the Disney deal, which is like, hey, we're gonna invest, but we're gonna give you access to this thing. And I would expect that I mean, you can imagine OpenAI has been working on getting referrals to from from basically getting a revenue stream from referring products out to Amazon for a really long time. Right? Yep. They've done the Etsy deal.
Speaker 1:They're they're doing deals with Shopify. Mhmm. They have not done eBay Mhmm. Notably, and they have not done Amazon, notably.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think there's been some there's just been some general hesitance to let, again, let the fox into the henhouse. Right? Because you can think about it, like, the Google search experience is like or sorry. Searching for products on Amazon Yeah. Is extremely profitable for Amazon.
Speaker 1:Right? If if consumers start just going to ChatGPT
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:To find products on Amazon
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That like, Amazon needs to be really careful around that because, yes, they can get a referral fee. Yeah. Or they're getting a customer, but then they Amazon or sorry, OpenAI wants them to pay them for that customer. And that's a customer that didn't just go look at a bunch of ads, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I do not like searching for products on Amazon because the experience is I'm just trying to find I always use the example, like paper towels. Right? It's been so And it's like
Speaker 2:maxed out.
Speaker 1:It's so frustrating to search on there because I just wanna buy like, I'll spend $20 to $30 on this thing. And then it's like three pages of like $6 versions of the product that I know are gonna be terrible and a bunch of ads for those things. Right? And so being able to go into ChatGPT and just say like, hey, I want to buy this item from a manufacturer or a brand Mhmm. That has been in business for more than thirty years Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like pre ecommerce. Yeah. I want a brand that has just been making this thing well for a really long time. And so I I would be defaulting to the LLM Yeah. And skipping Amazon entirely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You wanna fight you wanna fight to be the aggregator. You wanna like, I I I guarantee that although Amazon shows up on Google search results, like, they want people to open the app and search in the app and be the main starting point for their commerce, their entire commerce journey. And we've seen this with Shopify as well. Shopify, obviously, would love for the for the commerce journey to not start on Facebook or Meta properties.
Speaker 2:Instead, start in the shop app. They're working towards that. The same thing is true of Amazon. And every aggregator is acutely aware of aggregation theory and acutely aware that they should not let someone
Speaker 1:Amazon is on top of that. Apparently projecting 60,000,000,000 of advertising revenue Yeah. Which is growing way faster than the core retail business. It's sort of Good. Like the core retail business is probably growing at the rate of overall e commerce Yeah.
Speaker 1:Penetration. Whereas this is just like extremely high margin, fast growing, and they wanna protect that.
Speaker 2:And probably bigger than what they could make off of a referral fee on top deeper in the stack if they're deeper down. Like, they if they control more of that purchase, they can probably take a higher take rate essentially Yeah. Because I imagine their margins on top of all of those is is is very high. Well, the other side of the Amazon OpenAI deal is that the deal could also help Amazon find a new customer for its Tranium AI server chips, which compete with NVIDIA AI chips that OpenAI primarily uses today. As part of the deal being discussed, OpenAI plans to use Tranium chips, two of the people said.
Speaker 2:The cloud deal Amazon announced with OpenAI last month only made mention of service powered by NVIDIA. So if the the interesting thing here is is is what will they be doing with those Tranium chips? Will they have a specific model that runs on Tranium? Will they will they set up some sort of abstraction layer that they can run any of their models on any hardware or any ASIC, basically? Like like, will you see or will it be like, okay.
Speaker 2:We still have GPT four point zero workloads. Let's recompile four point zero for Trainium and let it just chill there and Trainium is pool for four point zero. Or you know what? Trainium is going to be our workhorse for ImageGen or VideoGen, and let's do our ImageGen optimized for that particular stack. When we talked about Trainium initially during the latest launch, The Wall Street Journal highlighted real time video as an interesting place where Tranium could potentially outperform.
Speaker 2:They weren't making the case, at least to the journal, that Trainium is what you want if you're gonna do the biggest and most massive training run. That was sort of the narrative that the TPU was pitching with the latest anthropic round, like, runs. But they did highlight, you know, real time video generation. And so I'm what I'm what I'm interested in is that is is does Trainium get abstracted to a point where it's sort of like model agnostic? Or is OpenAI like the ChatGPT, the app, has a whole host of models because these models are now mixtures of models, and there's model routers, and there's different products, video, audio, image, you know, deep research.
Speaker 2:Is one of those going to be on Trainium, or will Trainium be a like a liquid pool of compute that cuts across the entire stack? Do you have any, you know, instinct on this? Or
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I I think the abstraction thing is pretty hard. Right? Because you always hear about TPUs and how the TPU team and, like, the Gemini team are so closely integrated. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, every Yeah. All all the model architecture is, like, interlinked with the with the TPU architecture.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I I think it's hard to actually abstract all the way up. But it's interesting. I mean, Anthropic has been like multi Yeah. Platform platform for a while now. So I'm I'm curious how how they think about this stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Good question for Doug. Yeah. Maybe Doug will will be able to get us up to speed.
Speaker 1:Something that's interesting, if I search on Gemini Mhmm. For a product on Amazon, find me the best blank on Amazon, it takes me it says top recommendations on Amazon, and then I click the link, and it takes me to a Google search for that product that is a sponsored result on Amazon. So then
Speaker 2:then I click Who? So
Speaker 1:Amazon is paying Amazon is paying Google to appear in search
Speaker 2:results AdWords. Okay.
Speaker 1:In AdWords. Yeah. And then Gemini is routing basically to AdWords to get the click through there. Yes. So there's no direct integration at all.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, that that is like the the odd Google has so many odd advantages. It's crazy. Like, the the the the the fact that the Google bot just sees so much more of the Internet feels extremely important.
Speaker 2:And yet, I just don't know if it will be enough, if it will be enough to win in consumer in some meaningful way. What does it mean? Does it mean 50% of the value of consumer? Does it mean that they can win, come from behind, defeat OpenAI, ChatGPT? Like, it feels so important, and yet it it it also feels extremely hard to actually pass that message through.
Speaker 2:Maybe they need, like, a whole ad campaign around it or something. But and and also, I haven't even did did Matthew Prince over at, Cloudflare ever publish those results? He was saying he was asking people, like, how much of the Internet do you think Google sees relative to OpenAI's web scraper, like their bot? Because no one has blocked no one's blocking the Google bot. Like, you have to be insane to be like, don't want my company showing up on on Google.
Speaker 2:That like, you would just never do that. But if you do, then you also show up in Gemini like that, like you like what you just showed. Now there are plenty of blogs and plenty of people out there who are saying, I don't wanna show up in ChatGeePeeTee because my content is valuable. I'm monetizing it in a particular way. We're not talking about products.
Speaker 2:Products on the other side, they're on ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGeePeeTee. You reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No. But seriously, like like like, if you're if you're a brand and you're you wanna be mentioned everywhere, but if you're, like, a newsletter writer or you write reviews about best Amazon products, you might not want those reviews just to get sucked into Chatuchiki and anonymized.
Speaker 2:Right? So you might turn that off, but no one's turning off Google. So Google should have an advantage there. The product should be better, but it all matters on, like, how much does the consumer feel the betterness of it. Because even you can see it even with the image releases.
Speaker 2:It's like we're into one's 99% of the way there. The other one's 99.1% of the way there. There's a benchmark that says this one's better, but people aren't really shipping
Speaker 1:This one is really good at doing ornaments. Which one? Like, that was That
Speaker 2:seems that that's the first value prop I've heard where I would switch immediately.
Speaker 1:Well, that that was that was like something they were pushing yet. That was something OpenAI was pushing yesterday was basically like you can turn yourself into an ornament.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Christmas.
Speaker 1:Trying to kick off a new That was good. Meme super cycle. Nir Nir is not loving this line. The the Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford commitments, including from AWS.
Speaker 2:That's very funny. Well
Speaker 1:Liquidity is showing the gang standing around. Alright, Jeff. You're up next to invest in OpenAI.
Speaker 2:LMFAO. Yeah. Literally, almost all of them.
Speaker 1:Well I guess To be clear, don't think Elon is. I don't think Sundar is. I don't think Zac is. Okay. And I don't know.
Speaker 2:Would To know Tim Cook's partner with Gemini. Yeah. So this meme is actually slop. I'm sorry, liquidity. I love But
Speaker 1:Well, it hit.
Speaker 2:It was funny, but then as I dug in deeper mean, 10 k likes, but it is not it's not it's not accurate. It's not accurate. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Amazon, $10,000,000,000 investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits. You got Satya Nadella
Speaker 1:couldn't find where
Speaker 2:2% for Amazon, maybe less if it's a if it's at above a $500,000,000,000 valuation. So Andy Jassy is getting one and a half percent of OpenAI. Satya's sitting there with over 20. He's pretty happy. Pretty happy looking at the screen.
Speaker 2:This is a oh, and this is a Gemini meme. Very funny. Well, Jared Kushner is pulling out of the Paramount bid hours after his father-in-law took aim at the Ellison clan, apparently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To be clear, I I don't know where Nick pulled the credits line. I haven't seen that.
Speaker 2:Which credits line? Sorry.
Speaker 1:Nick, that this post before
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazon $10,000,000,000 investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Seen that confirmed anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's actually not in the form of AWS credits. It it it's it's just cash and then but but it's just it feels like credits because they do have obligations with AWS to buy
Speaker 1:stuff. Spend all of it.
Speaker 2:Well, no. It's like it all goes to your bank account.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So but but it fits it fits the narrative to be like it's in the form of AWS credits. This is a good that that is a good correction. Thank you, Jordy. Anyway, the the the latest news in the Paramount bid for Warner Brothers, the story that just keeps on giving, is from, Semaphore here. Let's see what this says.
Speaker 2:In the news, in back to back salvos Tuesday, the president and his former or and his family distanced themselves from Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers discovery. I think we know what's going on there. It's about Foghorn Leghorn. It's about Tweety Bird. Is that it?
Speaker 2:Porky Pig? It's Porky Pig. It's a rebuke to owner David Ellison's attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the $108,000,000,000 takeover effort. President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been treated far worse by the Ellison owned CBS since the family closed a deal for CBS parent Paramount.
Speaker 1:Which is so interesting because I've seen a bunch of there's been people have been riled up about Barry Weiss Yeah. Running CBS. The the reason that you maybe would say that she's doing a an effective job as a manager of that asset is because people are talking about CBS content Yeah. In a way that I have not seen in ever. Right?
Speaker 1:You ever like, remember maybe couple times here you'd see something and she she's she's clipping CBS content. It's like she's
Speaker 2:It's doing stories that working.
Speaker 1:I I Yeah. If if if there
Speaker 2:We were joking about this. I mean, no no shade to the people that were running CBS before, but, like, what what content was on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We just don't know what they were doing before.
Speaker 2:We it like, it's it's like it didn't exist, and now it exists. And you can like it or you hate it depending on your political persuasion, but you can't No. No. It's this is like It's a thing.
Speaker 1:The Ellisons were like, hey, we can get a truth engine and we can help Sure. We can help, like, we can
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Basically shoot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean I I mean, there there's definitely, like, the brand is still great. Like, CBS feels like a solid news source. I agree with that. But the distribution was so far behind that people weren't talking about what's going on there.
Speaker 1:I And I still don't know. Reason the reason one way to think about the value of CBS is what would it cost and how long would it take to recreate a brand like CBS. Mhmm. Probably cost it would take you decades.
Speaker 2:I don't think you can buy it. Like, I Yeah. I actually don't think I think you could I think you could be Sam Altman and Marshall a $50,000,000,000 fundraising
Speaker 1:round. To snap your fingers and
Speaker 3:get And
Speaker 2:and it would still take fifty years to
Speaker 1:get there.
Speaker 2:And that's the thing is that it's not it's not like, if you if you get 50,000,000,000, what do you have to do? You have to go buy the legacy IP because there's only you can't just you can't just you can't snap your fingers and create a brand overnight. Like, just takes time. Yep. So
Speaker 1:Warner Brothers sent a letter to shareholders
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This morning Mhmm. Basically saying that they're riding they they wanna the board of directors still wants to go with Netflix. They believe it's superior in a number of different ways. Mhmm. One thing that stood out to me is that Paramount has consistently they said Paramount has consistently led WBD shareholders that its proposed transaction has a full backstop from the Ellison family.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. It does not and never has. Paramount's most recent proposal includes a $40,000,000,000 equity commitment for which there is no Ellison family commitment of any kind. Instead, they propose that you rely on an unknown and opaque revocable trust for the certainty of the crucial deal funding despite having been told repeatedly by WBD how important a full and unconditional financing commitment from the Ellison family was. And despite their own ample resources, as well as multiple assurances from Paramount's guidance during our strategic review process that such a commitment was forthcoming, the Ellison family has chosen not to backstop the Paramount's guidance offer.
Speaker 1:And a revocable trust is no replacement for a secured commitment by a controlling stockholder. The assets and liabilities of the trust are not publicly disclosed and are subject to change. So they basically, like, have this entity being like, yeah, we're guaranteeing it. But it's not actually them saying, like, you know, they could move assets out of that trust and, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So Anyways. So I just Strength of offer not as strong potentially as Netflix.
Speaker 2:You know Netflix is good for it. It's a huge company. They've already signed a deal with a massive termination clause, and they've I believe they've raised debt for this. Like, they're they're ready to rock. So bird in hand is worth not too in the bush.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other thing is Paramount has not offered to reimburse the breakup, the termination fee.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:$2,800,000,000 fee. Yeah. There's also financing costs that Warner Brothers would have to take on if they don't complete the debt exchange. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, what do the Ellisons do at this point? Right? They've been they've been doing deals. Right? They're they've got CBS now.
Speaker 1:They've got the UFC. They're trying to build this streaming platform. And I again, going back to some of the conversations that we've had, like this entire the entire strategy to date has been predicated on getting this Warner Brothers asset.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And it's and it seems like it might not happen. But game's not over. I I I I anticipate I I
Speaker 1:Announce the $1,000,000,000,000 backlog.
Speaker 2:Figment. Think bigger. Build faster. Figment helps design and development teams build great products together. Also, Avi Shipman got back to us.
Speaker 2:He answered the question. Is he leveraged up? Is he levering up to buy billboards? He says, every out of home agent I've ever talked to has offered 50% reductions in price when doing a large scale campaign. Most of the inventory is actually pretty cheap if you don't focus on the most premium assets.
Speaker 2:So what where haven't you seen a friend.com billboard? The the one zero one. You haven't seen it, you know, in the iconic places. He hasn't done the Times Square buyout. He's in the subway.
Speaker 2:Right? Like like, when when we saw him, you always make fun of this one. It's there's one that's, like, up against the wall. I saw one just on a random bus in my hometown. It's like, there's just there's just, like, random places, but there's so many
Speaker 3:of them.
Speaker 1:The alpha and out of home in LA is there's so much traffic Yes. That you're kind of moving slowly by some areas
Speaker 2:And you'll just see random stuff. And so, yeah, I was kind of fighting on you, fighting you on this. Like, was this truly one of the greatest campaigns of the year? And hearing his extra context, it's it's incredible. He might have unlocked some entirely new strategy of just, like, the go big massive billboard campaign.
Speaker 2:And I wouldn't be I wouldn't be surprised if we don't if we if we I I wouldn't be surprised if next year is the year of the copy paste the strategy for, you know, a company that has a million dollars to spend on a big campaign. Let's do an interesting billboard campaign.
Speaker 1:And maybe they have a million dollars in revenue too.
Speaker 2:Maybe Ideally, yes. Ideally ideally, yes. I mean, he he clearly, like, it was, you know, he's he's, like, risk on exploring, testing new things, like learning. But but just the core the core arb of, like, a big billboard campaign paying off, I think you gotta credit him. You gotta check-in with with Avi Shiffman.
Speaker 1:Did you see his other post? He said, SF is over. Yes. Still a beautiful place to live. Hype around LLMs has subsided.
Speaker 1:It's not an interesting place to be anymore. Why go to a hackathon? It's not like GPT four just came out. There's nothing too interesting to discuss at a party anymore. All the big companies are too mature now.
Speaker 1:Most of what is new is just y c slop startups. If you're still in pre seed exploring stage, it's mostly too late. The directions have been positioned in. It's just a performative scene left. There are always a cycle to these things, and this is fine.
Speaker 1:I've enjoyed I've enjoyed 2022 to 2025. I hereby declare New York the new bastion of what matters in the near future. Could not disagree more with every single pretty much every single word in here. It is I think this is this is I think Avi has shown, you know, brilliance in in some ways, even though many don't. But this this was I I put this up as one of the worst takes of the year.
Speaker 1:It's just like it's it's literally like saying, like, back in in two like, it's like saying in the early days of the Internet or or in the early days of the iPhone, like, hey. Like, yeah. It's over. Just don't build anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Avi, underrated reason to stay in San Francisco. First, fin dot a I, the company's headquartered up there. It's the number one AI agent for customer service, and I know you love AI agents, Avi. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel.
Speaker 2:Also, you should get in if you're bored with the hackathon, you're bored with the YC demo day, get into shark diving. Go dive in the bay. Put on the the seven mil wetsuit. Swim out to Alcatraz. Take on a shark head to head, and emerge victorious.
Speaker 2:I think that will really give you the sort of the glory. You'll be excited again. You will have survived a shark attack. That will energize you in a way that GPT 5.2 might not be energizing you. Totally.
Speaker 2:Fighting head on with a great white shark in the San Francisco Bay. That's something you can only do in the Bay Area.
Speaker 1:Or who's making who's making friend.com for sharks? Oh. Right? Like a wearable pendant that a shark
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Could use to, you know, better navigate. Yeah. Maybe they're lonely out in the high seas. Right? It's cold.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:It's dark. Yes. Maybe, you know, in between hunts. Right? They're just kinda hanging out.
Speaker 1:Right? Maybe yeah. Just having a having a digital companion. Why reserve digital companions for why reserve those just for humans? Right?
Speaker 1:Like all life Think bigger. All life matter. Think bigger. The other thing I was thinking why I was saying this yesterday. Why has no one made like a telemedicine for anabolic steroids for your pets?
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Somebody has. Right? Wasn't isn't that a real thing? You you I I think Tyler was saying loyal
Speaker 4:No. I was saying loyal,
Speaker 2:but I was really. That's Yeah.
Speaker 1:That I wanna see a golden retriever as a mass monster.
Speaker 2:I think that's just a Rottweiler. Like, think you just
Speaker 6:get No.
Speaker 1:But nobody nobody
Speaker 2:A jacked
Speaker 4:golden make your, like, cattle really jacked. Right?
Speaker 2:That's like what SARMs Metformin. So you could just SARMs.
Speaker 4:You couldn't you just give it to your dogs?
Speaker 2:You know way too much about performance enhancing drugs. Anyway
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just say the word SARMs is like, just just say that you've been deep in bodybuilding forms, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Just say you're a day one.
Speaker 1:I'll Put on the
Speaker 2:more plates, more dates.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of
Speaker 2:restream.com. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Before our first live in person guest gets to the TBP and UltraDump, we gotta open a Christmas present. But if you have breaking news, break it down.
Speaker 1:I wanted to talk about this Christmas show.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. We got a Christmas present from friend of the show, Sahil Bloom. Let's open it up. It's under Christmas.
Speaker 2:Also, I got a belt on today. I'm looking much more Santa.
Speaker 1:Belted up.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is from Sahil Bloom himself. Look at this. Look at this nice New brand alert. I love this.
Speaker 2:So he said, I got sick of putting things on my skin that I'd never put on my body, so I spent eighteen months creating the perfect solution. The perfect solution, Wild Roman. I can smell it. Everyone says the TPP and Ultra Drum smells bad. Now it smells great.
Speaker 2:This this actually smells fantastic. So, Wild Roman is 100% natural skin care for men made with grass fed tallow, cold pressed oils, and wild botanicals. You can order today at wildroman.com. Just wanna give them a shout out. And then
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is So so this is good stuff.
Speaker 2:You've been using this?
Speaker 4:I've been using this for about like two weeks.
Speaker 2:Wow. Working so far. Yeah. Two weeks on Wild Roman and you look like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Wow. I mean, I think it's been, you know, it's helped with like beard growth and just skin clarity.
Speaker 2:You look fantastic.
Speaker 4:I'm feeling Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're you're glowing. Yeah. You're really glowing. I'm glowing from the inside out.
Speaker 2:It must be the grass fed tallow and the cold pressed oils. Or maybe it's the wild botanicals. But it's clearly
Speaker 1:never stop really, truly never stop using this product. Yeah. Because I do not want you to go back.
Speaker 2:Never churn.
Speaker 1:I don't want you to go back. Never churn. I think you're a customer for life.
Speaker 2:No. Never never churn. Never churn from this. Anyway, back to the show. What do you think it takes to win in this category?
Speaker 2:Sahil's obviously a an influencer, an author. He has a massive newsletter. He has 1,100,000 followers on on X and has an audience. But something we've been keep we keep coming back to is, like, an audience might not be enough to truly win in a category. What are
Speaker 1:these new hard on Target. Target. Feels like a good brand to introduce, like, tallow Yes. To the Target audience. Right?
Speaker 1:This feels, again, like, going for the set, bunch of products out the gates. This screams end cap to me. Mhmm. I I was talking to a friend, and they have a brand that does over a 100,000,000 a year Yeah. Only in Target.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't sell anywhere else. Yeah. And so it's just such a such a massive channel. And so I think Sothel can probably leverage his brand to just go really hard into Target early.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But I'm sure but I'm sure he can he can at least get some initial traction. D to C.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The D to C thing is great just because it gets the business up and running. Kind of like, you know, iron out any of the kinks, get the supply chain going, you know, learn the obvious Yeah.
Speaker 2:Customer service questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The main the main thing that people miss with personality led influencer brands like this is that no matter how big your audience is, you can be Kim Kardashian. Yeah. And in order to build a truly big business, you get this initial boost from your audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but but the the nature of, like, any audience is that the longer that you just advertise against it, you can saturate it. So like It becomes a tough Kim K can post, like, five times in the first week. Yep. But then eventually, have to go find new net new people Yep. That aren't necessarily Yeah.
Speaker 1:Getting exposure.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a fascinating it's a fascinating question. Anyway, liquidity is having some fun with Databricks. He says, you're laughing. Startups are raising series l's instead of going public, and you're laughing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is it is crazy. I was thinking about the the product that that Databricks is offering, like a product that Databricks is offering.
Speaker 1:Like So funny. The deal the deal director who's in the who's in often in the chat here says replied to this and said, don't be salty. VCs need to get paid too.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:Couldn't agree more.
Speaker 2:There is something to the fact of, like, of, like, if you have a growth fund with billions and billions of dollars under management and you need to park a couple 100 mil in a safe place that's going to grow, the cut it's not some, like, Databricks is not like a, oh, started a year ago AI company that might, you know, be gone if or or there's gonna be some, like, you know, different competitive pressure. Like, it's a real company that's really going. The the Databricks series l looks pretty good.
Speaker 1:Anyway Trey in the chat says, wait according to Reuters trying to reverse engineered ASML's EUV machine with the help of former ASML engineers and it's undergoing testing.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Well Well, they've never done this before.
Speaker 2:That's another good question for Doug. We can Just kidding. Into that. Don't know. It does feel like there's a there's a bit of a boom in lithography machines right now.
Speaker 2:We we had one founder on the show talking about it. And it feels like that was for a long time thought of as unassailable. You could not build a business that was that deep in the chip supply chain. It was just too difficult. And now people are at least trying.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Maybe they're maybe they're seeing
Speaker 1:This is what I've always said on the, like, China Yeah. NVIDIA or just the China AI debate. It's like no matter how many chips you give China, they will never say, oh, yeah. We actually wanna be dependent on foreign Yeah. Like, suppliers for this technology that's so critical to the future.
Speaker 1:We'd love to just remain dependent. It's like, no. They'll take the chips, and they'll continue to innovate and copy and invest to get to parity.
Speaker 2:I can't believe we got a crossover between good skin care and Databricks, but it is here on the timeline. Fahad says, the real reason Brian is trying to live forever is because he was an early investor in Databricks and is waiting for the liquidity event. Of course, there's probably plenty of times to to tender your shares if you want to. But
Speaker 1:I gotta say, Brian is looking fantastic in this new image. He looks
Speaker 2:2025 is the best he's looked.
Speaker 1:This is a great version. This is a the twenty twenty three
Speaker 6:Twenty three
Speaker 1:three is like the trough of disillusionment. Trough of disillusionment. Everyone's like, he looks like he's dying. This can't be good. Yep.
Speaker 1:Look at him now.
Speaker 2:I think the legend is also doing a little bit of work there. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. But just the general skin tone.
Speaker 2:He just feels more balanced.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's good. Well, we mentioned we mentioned Netflix before. Obviously, they're trying to go for Warner Brothers. But they're going for Barstool Sports as well. Before we take you into this story, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you.
Speaker 2:Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.
Speaker 1:Actually pull up the Portnoy video. I wanna pull up
Speaker 2:Portnoy video. So Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool says, breaking. I am proud to announce in our continuing twenty plus year evolution, we are now partnering with Netflix for exclusive video podcasts. And the way he frames this in the video is remarkable, so let's play it.
Speaker 7:Emergency press conference time. If you haven't heard the news, I'm proud to announce that Barstool has partnered with Netflix for three of our top podcasts exclusive video only on Netflix starting next year. I'm talking you wanna watch video part of my take? Netflix. Three.
Speaker 7:You wanna watch video of spit and chicklets? Netflix. Four. Actually spit there. That's just my brain.
Speaker 7:You wanna watch video of Ryan Rizzillo show?
Speaker 2:Where?
Speaker 7:Netflix. Five. Netflix. Netflix.
Speaker 2:Six. Seven.
Speaker 7:Video. Audio stay the same. Video. Netflix. Eight.
Speaker 5:Nine. 10.
Speaker 7:We're proud to partner in one of the best in breed companies. That's what we do at Parcel. Evolve, rotate, evolve. Video next year, PMT, Chiclets, Rhyme Risolo, Netflix, Netflix,
Speaker 2:Netflix. Yeah. 13 Netflix. So So pause 13. Pause.
Speaker 2:In a forty seven second video, 13 mentions Out
Speaker 1:there. Founders. Technology founders. Yes. Next time you think, oh, need to film
Speaker 2:this I
Speaker 1:need to film this crazy cinema. I need a I need a studio shot of me sitting down on a couch looking all put together. Dave is sitting there with with a with a bunch of windows behind it Yeah. That are reflect Actively sitting. One shot of this video.
Speaker 1:And it's way more engaging than than him Yeah. Just being, you know, trying to be all professional.
Speaker 2:No. This is just But I I mean, to be fair, like, in order to do that, twenty years. Twenty years of experience. Like, most people cannot just one shot that on day one of their career on on camera. It is hard.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. Turbo Puffer. If you want serverless vector and full text search, Turbo Puffer. If want something built from first principles and object storage, Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 2:If you want something fast, Turbo Puffer. Puffer. No cheap turbo puffer. Percer turbo puffer. Scalable turbo puffer.
Speaker 2:It's a it really does work. It just worms its way into your brain. Anyway, the other big get for, I guess, the modern tech companies is, the Oscars are moving to YouTube, which is a bomb Okay.
Speaker 1:So explain the Oscars.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it's like you know how we did the award shows for, you know, random obscure achievements
Speaker 1:Journalist of the year.
Speaker 2:Yes. Absolute hitter of the year. It's like that, but for movies. Of course, the Oscars
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And they said they recently deal with YouTube for exclusive rights to show this to to, to the show starting in 2029. So, I mean, really feels like forever, but I'm sure it'll be upon us in no time. But, probably the right time, but, does feel particular it hits particularly hard because it's it's like the whole show is about the theater. It's about the movie industry.
Speaker 2:Yep. And the movie industry is saying like, yep. Like, YouTube beat us.
Speaker 1:It's over.
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:We're so back. But also, it's over.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let me tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this video of Vlad, and then we'll bring in our
Speaker 2:first holding? Is he holding an auction paddle or
Speaker 5:Earlier, I showed one of the many weather contracts we offer on the platform. Here's another one. Some people have already started to realize that using prediction markets can be cheaper than conventional fire, flood, and hurricane insurance. You can just place a trade on your on your phone without having to deal with a traditional broker. Earlier, I showed Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Give your take. I have a take. Let's break it down.
Speaker 1:So on one hand
Speaker 2:Give the funny take first. The funny take is instead of buying insurance, you just
Speaker 1:Well, yes. Yeah. So the funny thing here is like instead of insurance is like a pretty cool product. It it gives you a lot of peace of mind. Yep.
Speaker 1:Pay for it once, you know, a year.
Speaker 2:Just pull pulls it out
Speaker 1:of your You got a policy. Whatever. You don't have to think about it. In this scenario, it would be like, okay. You're heading into the next month, and you're like, alright.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm pulling up the weather charts. Like, I'm I'm trading I'm trading on I'm I'm trading effectively, you know
Speaker 2:Will my house burn down?
Speaker 1:Will my house burn down some of the fire. The other problem here is, like, if you're betting on a fire happening in a certain area and depending on the odds and if there's a lot of volume on it, it could very well incentivize somebody to start a fire Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It does. In your in your neighborhood. So I I think obviously, I think prediction markets are are very cool in a lot of ways. But the the CEOs that have been integrating prediction markets have been coming out and giving some pretty wild examples of their value when I think that the value is that consumers want. They want these product experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that there is a world where you do wind up building a like, an actual financial product on top of all of this that feels a lot more normal instead of, the DIY version. But obviously, it's very funny. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sarah Guo. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:And thank you for dressing up. Good to see you. You're welcome. You look fantastic. Feeling feeling the Christmas spirit.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna move this out of the way.
Speaker 2:The base.
Speaker 8:What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:How you doing?
Speaker 8:I'm feeling good. I'm feeling the spirit.
Speaker 1:Have to take my ear off so I can get the It's a mess.
Speaker 8:Those look very natural on you.
Speaker 1:Yes. I know. They really do. I I I said earlier before the show starts, John's more Santa coated. I'm more elf coated.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's just you're looking like a lot more a lot more polished.
Speaker 2:I like the nails. They're like frosted nails. Yes.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 8:We don't have skincare but we've got nail art.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool. Amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 2:How did you process the storytelling the storytelling cycle, news cycle yesterday? We asked pretty much everyone about storytelling. Do do you did you did you I mean, I'm sure you saw the virals
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of announcement that there's a lot of companies that are hiring people. Storytellers, is this just a rebranding? Is this a valuable thing? If a if a founder came to you and said, my my second hire is gonna be a storyteller, what would you say?
Speaker 8:I'd say that's your job.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Actually. No.
Speaker 1:Well, so then the question becomes can like, is it is it a skill set that you're kind of born with? You maybe start at an 80% and you can get to a 100%. But if you start at, like, a 10% capability wise, like, you should probably just focus on other things. Right? You're maybe never gonna be great at that.
Speaker 1:I I I was classifying it as, like, it feels like there's, like, Joe Rogan CEOs, which are CEOs that could go on a three hour podcast and deliver an amazing performance, some of which would be about the business, a lot of which would just be about, you know, random stuff. But it feels like have you seen founders in your portfolio go from just okay to, like, truly excellent?
Speaker 8:I think so I'm an extreme growth mentality person. Right? I'm like, if you are smart and you are a high work ethic, most skills are accessible to you. Yeah. Not everybody can, you know, be TBPN.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 6:But you
Speaker 8:can go from like a d to a b plus. Sure. And that does a lot for your company, but I don't think you can outsource it. Yeah. And so if you take this like storytelling idea and you just kinda disaggregate it a little bit, you have you have like channels that have changed.
Speaker 8:Right? Sure. Yeah. This matters and like traditional media, you know, it's it's having a time of it. It's struggling.
Speaker 8:Right? Sure. Yep. And so if you think about the job, like, does anybody wanna like start off as a junior PR consultant today? It's a hard job.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? I'm not saying there's not room for that, but the traditional, like, low grade version of that, that was I'm going to call a bunch of journalists. I'm going to repeat the pitch from the company. I have no point of view. I don't really have storytelling or taste and I'm a I'm a c.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Like, think there's not a lot of room for that. Right? Because if you think about it from the reporter's perspective, even if you think about where the attention actually is, you could be like a mid sized AI influencer Mhmm. And have as much followership Sure.
Speaker 8:As a large media publication that's relevant today. Right? And so I
Speaker 1:think And weirdly, like the hardest job on our team is Nick, who's somewhere around here. Yeah. And that is actually just getting inundated with pitches from from various PR teams, companies, agencies, etcetera. And he has to functionally, he has to say no to 95% of them just because we don't have there's not there's no time in the show to do as many as many as are coming in.
Speaker 8:So Yeah. I think there are a lot of people now where they like, why do they call it storyteller instead of like content person or PR or whatever?
Speaker 1:Or just advertising specialist.
Speaker 8:Or advertising specialist. Like, the meta has changed. Right? It's saying, like, we need people with taste. Yeah.
Speaker 8:We're chasing the moment. There's a lot of noise. And we have to, like, create some signal even if we want the traditional channels. Yep. And so some of it is skill set.
Speaker 8:Some of it is the story about, like, what the job is. Yep. But I I do think a lot of it is is hard to outsource and you can get better. We run a grant program, which is like an uncapped note for 10 companies twice a year called embed. And the highest rated session for the program is a storytelling session.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 8:Right? So you come and you pitch your company, and it goes from a d minus to an a plus in But terms of where people people get a lot better in the span of a week before they do demo day.
Speaker 1:And so I definitely think it is. It is relatively Right? It's it's not like if you're making a film, it's not like, hey, I need to reinvent the hero's journey. Like, the structure works. And I think there's the same type of approach you can apply to storytelling about your company.
Speaker 1:I I would have this. I would get sent a deck, and I'm like, your idea is cool and you're great. Your deck is terrible. And I would just send a Figma file that is like, here's the deck template. Here's like an example for each like, six examples for each slide.
Speaker 1:Just like completely redo it, and then it and then it's automatically, like, a few times better.
Speaker 8:But you have amazing intuition for this now. Did you start great at it?
Speaker 1:No. I made Like, you're I made No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's definitely yeah. I don't know. I I think I started I've I've I've been sort of naturally I've studied advertising since I was a kid. Not directly, but just like understanding, like, why do I want this product so much more than this product.
Speaker 1:Right? And that started with, like, skateboarding and snowboarding stuff. Right? And so I, like, fully understood, okay, this this brand, it's like their event athlete strategy, the design, this collaboration that they did, how you know? But, but again, like, it was very, very refined to get to that ultimate structure that I have in Figma that I can just be like, this is the structure that that has worked for me, and it's worked for a bunch of other companies.
Speaker 1:It's, like, tried and true. This structure, even just my personal one, which I haven't shared broadly, has, like, directly contributed to raising, like, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, just across the years. So I don't know. I think you can systematize it.
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's art and there's alpha in it, but it's certainly something you can practice.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 8:And I think people have discovered that, like, you need to be good at this now. Yep. And I think that's
Speaker 2:Do you think people
Speaker 1:Well, the other the other thing I've I've noticed with, like, company storytelling is, like, if it is truly
Speaker 8:And people take you more seriously if you do it in an elf costume.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Of course. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:But the the thing that I've always found is, like, if it's really difficult to get the story out in a cohesive way
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Then your whole strategy is just f'd. Like, it's just bad. Yeah. Right? And if it comes out very naturally, it means that, like, there's alignment, the strategy makes sense.
Speaker 1:But if you're, like if if making the deck takes, you know, fifty hours, it's like you probably just don't have that great of a story in the first place. Like, the actual facts of the situation are not that great.
Speaker 8:Yeah. This is so true for me. So the version of it is, at some point, I actually thought I wanted to be a writer. Mhmm. Like, thank god I'm not.
Speaker 8:I find writing incredibly painful. But I still have to write every week for my work as an investor. Course.
Speaker 1:Like memos, LP updates.
Speaker 8:Yeah, yeah. Mostly memos. And the problem is writing is thinking. Storytelling is thinking. How do I actually communicate the strategy of the business?
Speaker 8:And do I believe in it? And the difference between like, I'm procrastinating, I'm avoiding writing this memo for six days in a row because I got to talk to my partners about it is I actually understand the strategy of the company or I don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And sometimes it's because like I just don't know enough. Right? We make our first defense investment and I'm like, well, I need to call like 45 people to understand what I don't understand about this yet in terms of the procurement process or whatever else. Yeah. How important is electronic warfare?
Speaker 8:Like how quickly is this cycle going to go? But some part isn't knowledge. It's just like, does it make sense at all? And I have learned to trust that signal of like, well, if I'm not missing information and it's still like not super cohesive, it's not because I'm an idiot. Because I have to go tell this story to recruits
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And to the media and to the next investor. And if it's hard, they're not going get it either. Yeah. Right? And so I think there's substance in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I think part of the, at least, backlash or virality around the idea of
Speaker 1:Still so funny too.
Speaker 2:To be in Santa?
Speaker 1:We almost did Santa. We almost did Santa for for for Evan from Snap on on Monday. I'm very for it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm not.
Speaker 1:Well, you go.
Speaker 2:It's like the first time Yeah. It's the first time you're meeting someone. Like, can you really go full Santa mode? Mhmm. But, yeah, I mean, part of the reason there was like some backlash is I think people are worried about startups leaning in like over rotating to all style, no substance, all storytelling, no plot.
Speaker 2:Like, you have to forget that, like, without some plot points, you can't tell a story around it. If you haven't built anything, you haven't raised you didn't raise a funding round. Like, a lot of the stories get told around, we built this thing, we satisfied this customer, we hired these people.
Speaker 1:Also need you also need tension. You need you need some like adversity, So we'll have founders come on and we're like, aren't is this not like the most hyper competitive category? And they'll be like, no, it's not. And then like not give like the follow-up as to why.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 1:And it's like, it's okay if it's competitive if you're gonna win. Yeah. You might be the one to win but you it's better to just admit like it's competitive and like here's what here's what the market is like missing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sometimes people don't wanna share whatever their alpha is, but Yeah.
Speaker 8:So I I've like learned a little bit more about I'm just gonna go ahead and say marketing, advertising, storytelling, but that category of things that has existed for a little while over time. But I'm still like I taught marketing at Warren. But I'm at my core.
Speaker 1:Wow. She didn't just study. Book. No, no, no.
Speaker 8:Studied Did storytelling? I studied a little bit. But like I'm a product absolutist
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. To your point of I actually had just this like pretty full contact debate with a founder in our portfolio Okay. Very recently about how much of like the success of a company is its ability to raise money, get to momentum, look like it's winning to customers, look like it's winning to hires, and go faster than others. Yep. And I'm like, well, you know, there's some it it depends on the space.
Speaker 8:Right? And if you're in take an example, like like late twenty ten SaaS, the degree of freedom you have for like what you're going to go build in any given category, not to denigrate the product work. It's just like you can only do so much without fundamental technology change if you have certain integration points and certain workflows. Totally. And you can have amazing execution there.
Speaker 8:But I'm like, you know what you probably want to do? Invest in people who understand the workflow, have amazing execution, and are told animals about storytelling and momentum and all of that. And that doesn't mean there's no substance. It's just like, well, there's not as much creativity.
Speaker 2:That doesn't sound like twenty ten advice, though. That sounds like advice
Speaker 8:No, no, no. Okay. So today, I would argue actually like
Speaker 2:Is it different?
Speaker 8:Yes. Okay. So
Speaker 1:There's more white I mean, late twenty ten SaaS, there was no it was struggling to find white space, Like, I you look at the 2021
Speaker 8:not that different.
Speaker 1:Well, The 2021 era, you saw this like, it was crypto and fintech. Sure, there was a lot of SaaS, but, like, even with fintech, there wasn't there what there was some new infrastructure with fintech that made it easier, but yet that you were still competing with companies that started five, six years ago.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. And so that was that was just really rough. And so I think the difference today is, like, we have super powerful LLMs. We have machines that can think. And so maybe there's, a little bit more like kind of random white space and categories that you can Yeah.
Speaker 1:Find and and go digging in.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I was talking to an investor friend yesterday about this. And he like, we were discussing whether or not you just want to invest in the smartest people you could within some constraints of like they can convince other people to come to their cause and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And such. And I'm like, I actually think there's a much better strategy now than it was in the late twenty tens, twenty twenty period.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Because you're like, well, the variance on what you can build is really wide. And that's both information and ability creativity. People are trying to build very different products even in software. And it depends on what you think you can do with models or robots or hardware, whatever it is. And I think it's just broader.
Speaker 8:And if you can do more different things with product, it matters more. So substance matters more than ever. The storytelling too.
Speaker 2:If you believe in the midwit meme, then you should invest in the smartest founders but also the dumbest founders because who knows they might lock into the same thing. No, I don't think
Speaker 1:that works. I think that works in CPG, I think it works in CPG. I've seen some people both sides do very, very well. And in the middle, it's like innovating on four to five different dimensions. It's like way too complicated.
Speaker 1:Too crazy. And tends to
Speaker 2:Anyway, tell me, what is a NeoLab?
Speaker 8:Okay. So there's this category of company that has been you know, a handful of these things have been funded this year that are quite controversial in the investing community, which is essentially like, we're gonna raise a solid amount of money. Mhmm. Let's say, you know, $50,100,000,000 dollars plus. And we are going to invest in large scale AI research and training upfront.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:not a rapper company.
Speaker 8:Not a rapper company, though. We can come back to that. Yeah. And I think this is, like, one of the reasons it's so interesting is because you had this dominant narrative for a lot of the last couple years of just, like, how could you compete with Google and OpenAI?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And maybe people threw Anthropic in there.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And then a little bit But that was the first.
Speaker 1:And and it's notable because you have you have if you're if you're trying to build, like, a new LLM or maybe you have some new ideas around that type of product Yeah. And people are already saying, oh, OpenAI can't compete with Google because And Google has all this cash even though they have, like, almost a billion weekly actives, like, they're burning so much money. And then and then you get a new company, a NeoLab, that's like, oh, yeah. We're also gonna compete. We don't have any users, and we have a fraction Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of the money. And so that's why I think it's been, like, almost a narrative violation if you're gonna, like Yeah. Or or at least, like, contrarian to say, like, no. We actually are gonna bet even more into
Speaker 2:this So point of clarification. Thinking machines, SSI, Anthropic, are those neo labs? Or are the neo labs post those labs?
Speaker 8:I think the definition would be post those labs. Okay, that's helpful. But that was the first generation of this because they also fought that narrative. That makes sense. And opening I did before them.
Speaker 8:Totally. And so I think it's just like this big open question in venture investing. It opens a can of worms of like, well, how much money do you need to go do venture investing at conviction? I've got to say, like, 14 times.
Speaker 6:Like, we
Speaker 8:would argue not that much necessarily if you're very early.
Speaker 2:No. It changes the economics completely to, like, growth fund. You need to be able to build a position. Because it used to be you could take a flyer for two per you know, get get $10,000,000. For a couple million bucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if that's just not gonna happen on day one, it's just the economics just don't work. Right? Yeah. So so is that changing your
Speaker 6:fund, or have you figured out a way how
Speaker 8:do think about it? It's not for us. And we have supported some new research lab efforts, but think that's also a tactical thing of how early you are. But I think the broader thing that is really interesting is this narrative violation or question of, is scale the only thing that matters?
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And and, like, if you're gonna spend the GDP of a medium sized country on training Yeah. Can anybody keep up with you?
Speaker 1:Or Yeah. Even even if so Greg had a video that came out yesterday or this morning where at OpenAI and he was just saying, we've tried everything but scale and scale is the thing that works. Right? And so again, it's it's very contrarian to be like, well, no. We actually can come up with you're basically if you're raising a $100,000,000 to compete Yeah.
Speaker 1:With these other labs, you're saying, like, we don't need scale just because you're never gonna be able to compete on scale when these Anthropic and OpenAI are running away in the capital markets.
Speaker 8:You know, the I think one of the more nuanced arguments about these things has been let's say a bunch of people can go raise hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to, you know, a $100,000,000,000 plus, which is a wild claim to begin with. Even so, like, where you spend that money matters, not just size. Right? And so, like, one of the things that's happened with open source is that there are large pre trained models
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Some Chinese, some European, now hopefully more and more American ones, that people work with and are really powerful, like the big joke that Silicon Valley runs on Quang.
Speaker 1:And they're distilling them.
Speaker 8:They're distilling them, and they're also, I think if you're a research lab, you tend to be post training or just trying entirely different architectures. And so people are the argument, I think, goes something along the lines of, know, more is better eventually. Right? Like I do need the GDP of Japan in compute. But on day one, Ilya Sotzkopf basically said this, like, in the age of research, we need some amount of money to just validate our ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:But it's not a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean Yeah. His interview I I took away, he's like, kind of like, we're gonna do a couple million here, a couple million here, a couple million here.
Speaker 8:And he's a little bigger than that.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Okay. Okay. But but the idea is, like, he's not just like, we're one shotting. We're gonna try to one shot this Yeah.
Speaker 1:With 60% of the dollars that we've raised. Sure. It's much more, again, experimental research driven.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And and then I think the second part of the argument of, like, you know, we're we're doing actually new things versus fighting symmetric warfare with Ant or OpenAI, which is seem seemingly a bad idea Yeah. On Google, you know, money machine Yeah. Is that, if you have these pre trained models, like, can just focus. Yeah.
Speaker 8:If you have the GDP of Japan and you have the GDP of Germany and, you know, I have some other equivalent country, California.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Let's give it up for California.
Speaker 8:Let's go California. We love you. Total failure of governance and accident of history,
Speaker 1:but We're stressful still cooking.
Speaker 8:Still cooking. Thank you, semiconductors. But but if everybody has some huge amount of money and I put it all toward post training or self improvement or diffusion or SSMs or some other bet, and you're like serving inference and also doing pre training and whatever else
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Then like my effort on the thing that matters might be bigger than your effort even if you have more money overall.
Speaker 3:That's the story.
Speaker 2:Let me pitch you on a fund thesis and I want you to push back on it potentially or agree with it. So I I have a
Speaker 8:gross fund. I'm gonna
Speaker 2:do it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't know.
Speaker 2:You know, let let's say I have, like, you know, a billion dollar fund. I'm gonna put a $100,000,000 in 10 of these neo labs, one you know, a $100,000,000 each. They're all gonna go and try different ideas. My thinking is, you know, 10% chance one of them goes really, really big. But I'm also underwriting these on talent acquisitions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I say that, hey, you know, I'm not gonna lose money on basically any of these even though I'm paying crazy prices at seed for just a couple people with barely an idea. Mhmm. I'm gonna get a lot of money out because the because the big hyperscalers are gonna continue to acquire. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are you telling me I think that party's over? Or do you think, no. There's gonna be an endless stream of billion dollar acquisitions coming out of the hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like shoot shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land in in Satya's arms.
Speaker 2:Yes. I that true?
Speaker 8:I do think that is part of the calculus that's happening here Yes. Where the distribution of outcomes is like how you know, without naming names, but how many people want to hire The stuff. Or Mira Moradi Totally. Or Barrett or any of these folks that have started new labs. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Like a lot of people that could have that think that winning an AI race is very valuable to
Speaker 2:them. Yeah. So so so you think that the the hyperscalers definitely aren't, like, exhausted of these, like, lab tuck ins. Lab tuck ins.
Speaker 1:So actual Well, I think I'm sorry. My point of view is, like, as long as you have a bunch people spending something in the range of a $100,000,000,000 a year, and they believe that by spending a billion dollars to acquire a team
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That they can make that money go further, there's a good chance that they will.
Speaker 2:Always It's been easy
Speaker 1:for me. If there's a again, if there's, like, a pullback in new information, then you'd start to run the calculus of, like Yeah. Well, we're actually cutting spend, and we've figured out what we need to figure out. And just adding five new smart people to the team is not gonna give us that much of an edge in this market.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think this is exactly right where one of the craziest reframings of this to me made by somebody at a large lab with a lot of money to spend is, like, just imagine Jordy as a researcher and it's like his GPU budget for experimentation is a $100,000,000, personally. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 8:Right? And I have to give that to him all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? So he works yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, you start looking around. You say Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well,
Speaker 8:and and the question is like, well then, how much am I willing to pay for Jordy?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:Or the talent that is 1% better?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:10% more likely to like make the thing work? Actually a lot of money.
Speaker 9:A lot
Speaker 8:of Right? Because like the way, I'm not saying that you should start your growth fund with this risk calculus. It takes a certain strength of Fullness. Right? It's it's not irrational to be like, these players have already committed to spend x billion dollars of compute over the next years, and they will look at the people as leverage on that compute.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 8:And so, like, I don't I mean, lots of things can happen in the macro and people can change their minds and some of these like contracts are on performance. Right? They're not like fully solid. But the way it looks now, I'd be like, I think people are gonna keep spending money here. So probably safe with your fund.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 8:No financial advice.
Speaker 2:If the fund pans out, I'm going big on Christmas, what should I give to all of the founders in my portfolio who have made me so much money? What how do you think about gifting? Is there a top gift recommendation for this Christmas season? Is there anything that you can share about Yes. Top Is there anything you can think about Yeah.
Speaker 1:Look at the Christmas theme on this too. We got Santa Claus.
Speaker 8:You know, this is a gift to advertising. I learned recently that Coke made the modern
Speaker 2:We fact checked this. It's not true.
Speaker 1:They solidified it. No. They solidified it.
Speaker 2:They solidified They it. Like they did.
Speaker 1:They basically like shtick. They didn't create the meta, but they they owned it.
Speaker 2:They owned it. They story told around it. Yeah. They story told around it.
Speaker 8:Over substance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So gift guide or maybe like a book recommendation that you could put under the tree if you I I always like giving books. What what do have? What do
Speaker 8:you think? No. I'm a I'm a big books person. I want people to give me time and books and nobody seems to be able to give me time. So Oh.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. That's deep. Woah. Woah. It's crazy.
Speaker 8:Yeah. My my husband hates this. He's like, what do you want for Christmas? Do you want like stuff? Do you want jewelry?
Speaker 8:I'm like, no. I want time. And he's like, you saw
Speaker 2:Maybe he's terrible answer. Maybe you should get your luxury watch on getbezel.com or sponsor. What's better? The only way you can get time is if you get a watch on getbezel.com. Nice.
Speaker 1:Nice. She said that. How how are you processing The ad. How are you processing the current moment and, like, what are you what are you looking out for in the next twelve months?
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:It feels like it's hard to think that we could go things could get crazier.
Speaker 2:I Can can I give
Speaker 8:one book talk about '26? Okay. Only one. No. I'm gonna give you three.
Speaker 8:So I think I think Dan Wang's book, Breakneck on China Love you. And The US was worth reading. Yep. It's like a little stylized, but I think like really substantive. Totally.
Speaker 8:Actually just good storytelling, I suppose. There's a book on IMBRUVICA. Like, think a lot of people are suddenly like interested in biotech.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm not saying that's bad. I think biotech is amazing and it will get a lot more impactful and it's, more efficient. Mhmm. But the book is called I think it's called For Blood and Money. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But it's about Great title.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm interested.
Speaker 8:Yeah. No. It's it's sexy. I think
Speaker 1:doesn't sound like a textbook. Yeah.
Speaker 8:As hot as and interesting as a book can be about a non technical founder of like a breakout leukemia drug Yeah. Like, this is worth reading.
Speaker 1:Okay. Very cool. Very cool.
Speaker 8:And then, if anybody Okay. I mean, this is a lot of tech nerds in this audience. Yeah. So if anybody hasn't read Masters of Doom Okay. This is Yeah.
Speaker 8:This is a story of like the like the
Speaker 2:Carmack. Right?
Speaker 8:Best era of the video game industry. Oh, Carmack. Worth reading.
Speaker 1:Alright. These are great.
Speaker 2:Masters of Doom is great.
Speaker 8:Okay. Actually, have one more niche one.
Speaker 2:It's also the Prince of Persia book by Strike Press. That's a good one. In that Masters of Doom.
Speaker 8:No. Haven't read it. Now, I'm excited.
Speaker 2:That's sort of like it is similar similar theme.
Speaker 8:Okay. I'm gonna screw up this title because it's
Speaker 2:Speaking of storytelling, I mean Yeah. The the story of a individual video game is particularly great because it's a tech company Yeah. But it's always hard to tell the story of a full tech company that just keeps going and going and going. Yeah. And the video game companies, they do, but you can also tell just the story of that one game.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's a multi year project. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Whereas no one's like, oh, yeah. We needed to talk about, like, you know, the story of Figma in 2018 specifically. Like Yeah. It's like this whole it's such a broader arc. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, other book recommendations or are going 26? Predictions.
Speaker 8:Okay. Maybe last niche one. Yeah. Though we could do the rest of the episode this way. The there's a book I I'm really interested in like what environments make for good ideas.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Right? Oh, yeah. And like consistently good ideas because part of like extreme growth mentality is you think environment matters.
Speaker 9:And so
Speaker 8:you're like, how do we like help people create the environment where they're doing their best work? There is a book called Apprentice to Genius. Mhmm. And it's about a series of researchers at NIH and Johns Hopkins that had like just huge contributions
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:To biology, chemistry, science for a while. Like way more than you should have in just a small lab over like decades. Yep. And Was it
Speaker 1:the feng shui of the building or something? What about the environment? Were they obviously like the academic I think environment.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think it's a think
Speaker 1:Even a couple key people that were kind of like around during that period?
Speaker 8:It is definitely about a couple key people, but the question is like, how come their students also are like Nobel Prize winners? Right? Yeah. Because it's hard to imbue the next person with like magical
Speaker 1:win a Nobel Prize. Here's the playbook.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But like three times in a row, man. Yeah. And so I think
Speaker 1:the Just look at this deck. Study this deck. Yeah. Study this Figma file for an hour
Speaker 2:and you'll be It's actually an online course now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nobel Prize. Thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:For for a grand.
Speaker 1:With with Clarna payments attached.
Speaker 5:So How
Speaker 2:did I get this Lambo? I won a Nobel Prize. And then this whole course
Speaker 1:on how to win a Nobel Prize. Let's The
Speaker 8:course is $9.99.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Oh. That Yeah. How are you what are you looking forward to this next year?
Speaker 1:What are you what are you kind of wary of?
Speaker 8:I think all the other investors should, like, go away and leave AI alone.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It's over everyone. It's over guys.
Speaker 2:It's over
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. The demand was not real. Look at the Oracle stock price. That's what's happening here.
Speaker 2:They're picked clean.
Speaker 8:If I can't move the markets that way No. I'd okay. Here. I I have really high conviction that like, you know, '26 is gonna be a year of a bunch of new applications of AI and that doesn't mean that there won't be like market panic or some bumps. Of course, people will like claim it's winter.
Speaker 8:But I think there is now so much proof that the models are powerful in a bunch of different domains.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Yep. And it starts with ones that maybe are not like so obviously commercial. You know, rent tech aside, people are like, what can you do with math?
Speaker 1:Like, feel
Speaker 8:like oh, here's my prediction for '26 that you can like come back to me on is I think somebody out there is gonna make a lot of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on AI trading. Oh, Like it's not happening at that scale yet, but people are certainly gonna try and I I see no reason
Speaker 2:that would. But but but do you think that would happen on Wall Street? Will there just be like a pod that is like training models? Or is that, like, a start up in Silicon Valley? Because they're very different cultures.
Speaker 8:I I would love to see a big
Speaker 2:start up. It would be fun if it was our team, but I think it's gonna be who knows?
Speaker 8:I think people are already trying it in lots of different environments.
Speaker 2:I have talked to some I've I've talked to some high frequency traders who are just like, yeah, I worked at I worked at Meta and like Meta's better at machine learning than we are. I don't know if that's like holds across the entire industry, but I do think that like the the the ad tech industry might be better even though the high frequency trading industry is, like, a little sexier and a little bit, like, more discreet.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. One reason you might see a startup do it is just because the labs have been and just, like, the West Coast has been recruiting
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From some of these trading firms on the East Coast. Yeah. And so they already have the experience and then they're like, hey, we made something that's pretty smart. Maybe maybe. And we're seeing like, I I think NASDAQ announced like twenty four hour trading and They're getting there.
Speaker 1:There is a lot of volatility
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question for me. Do you we we've been wrestling with this debate over whether some of these AI tools become like video games. We talked to the founder of Suno and it's like and Midjourney is similar where Mhmm. There's a lot of people that are using Midjourney as a prosumer tool.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. There's other people that are using Midjourney just as like a game. Like, they have an idea for a funny image, they make it, and then they're satisfied when they get that image that they created. I think there's a lot of people that are creating songs on Suno and then just enjoying them themselves and they're not actually sharing them anywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you think that like the how do you how are you thinking about the nature of like Gen AI interfacing with like prosumer, maybe new consumer flows, this like gamification? Or is any of that resonating from you or any of the portfolio companies?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Okay. So one thing I have is I think it's inspiring as an idea is that most people are much more creative than they get to express in daily Right? If you are a creative of any type, like, people have more ideas and points of view than they have tools and skills to go execute. And so if AI allows people in images and music and video, I don't know if it's a good thing in writing with Slop, but or or code even.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Right? Like, if you can make things at a much higher level
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Then you're, like, you're going to enjoy making things and making more things. Right? Yeah. Like, know, what's the, like, saying? Inside every adult is an artist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because who doesn't draw character? People just don't know what the process like, people that get viewed as, like, creative people
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Are often people that just take two very different ideas and them into one idea. Yeah. Or take something that's working and make it different. And I think once people I've seen people in their head kind of like unlock that concept, and then they realize like, oh, I can be creative because like here's a product that I like. What if I made it healthy?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Here, you know,
Speaker 8:to But did they make Santa?
Speaker 1:Or did they Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's not clear.
Speaker 1:What if we made a soda and then marketed it with Mhmm. By creating Santa Claus.
Speaker 2:Back to storytelling.
Speaker 1:I guess, one question, maybe fun prediction. How much do you how many dollars do you think will be spent on ads within LLMs next year?
Speaker 2:Do you think
Speaker 8:next year? A little early.
Speaker 2:Little early.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's that's my feeling. Yeah. Like, I could see it ramping in the back half of the year and, like, actually because I think the ads are gonna be extremely effective. People are saying, like, oh, a lot of these queries are not that high intent.
Speaker 1:It's just research. But I think that a lot more of them I'd I think a meaningful amount are product research. Mhmm. And once you're driving these sort of, like, high intent clicks
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think it will scale pretty quickly, but I think it will take I think it will I think this will be, like, a second half of the year 2026 story as it starts to scale. But we've had founders on the show that have said, like, when somebody lands on my site from ChatGPT, they can convert at 7%, and my average conversion rate is like 3%. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like
Speaker 8:I think people don't quite I think when it happens, it's gonna happen really fast. Mhmm. And the question is just like, how quickly can the companies with a bunch of traffic build any kind of product? Because the inventory is going to be so good. And I think it's useful to look at open evidence as a precursor here.
Speaker 8:So it has been reported that the company went from like two to a 150,000,000 of ad run rate already.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's fully ad supported. It's just the biggest
Speaker 8:ad business in AI today.
Speaker 1:Right. I forgot about that.
Speaker 8:And like what happened? They made a product that was free, that so useful to doctors because you're literally answering the question of like, well I don't know what's happening in this area of like personalized medicine for this domain of oncology for this type of patient. Right? I'm from Wisconsin, so we'll use Wisconsin as an example. Like I am a doctor in rural Wisconsin that's never seen this type of leukemia.
Speaker 8:So I'm going to ask Open Evidence for help. Guess what? That's a really high intent query to go serve ads
Speaker 1:against Here's a treatment.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So think when you compare that to the ad inventory that exists in the world, which is just like, I'm looking at a bunch of random stuff, my average is two words or whatever. Yeah. Like, I I think that
Speaker 1:there's gonna be amazing. There's a level of trust that I think someone will have with open evidence that they maybe don't have with Google search.
Speaker 8:Totally. Yeah. They understand what the sources are. Yep. It's it's, you know, research
Speaker 1:That is.
Speaker 8:Trials, etcetera. It's generated data from other doctors. Yep. So I think I think that if you can make the right products here, it's gonna be very big. The my only question is how how quickly they make those ad products.
Speaker 1:Last last question. Mhmm. Are you long or short, forward deployed, engineered? Like, the model.
Speaker 8:I think it is a symptom of how quickly AI is happening. And so, like, if the long is people are gonna pay for a lot of FTE next year, huge bull.
Speaker 1:Right? So maybe more like 2027, 2028.
Speaker 8:2028, I think, like, in the long run, like, you should deliver that as a product and people are going to.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? I don't I I don't think I think FTE happens when people don't have a transition happens too quickly or they don't have the talent Yeah. Or the ability organizationally to do, like, change management, the corporate term, but it's real. Right? It's really hard to like completely transform an asset manager or a big public company.
Speaker 8:And so like that's what you're paying for in '26 and '27 and maybe '28. Yeah. But I think eventually it's going be product.
Speaker 2:Yep. Well, thank you so much for coming by. More time. TVP and L. This was super fantastic.
Speaker 2:Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 1:Hit the gong. Hit the gong for conviction.
Speaker 2:For conviction, all the progress you've made. And we will bring in Doug O'Laughlin. Whoo. For the president of semi analysis is coming on.
Speaker 1:Hanging.
Speaker 2:TBPN. While we bring him in from the restream waiting room, let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we've been keeping Doug waiting, but let's bring him in to the TBP and UltraDome. Doug,
Speaker 1:how are you doing?
Speaker 6:Woah. Look at that.
Speaker 2:Outer Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Galactic dot. I'm so glad that the show
Speaker 2:was delivered. It looks fantastic on you.
Speaker 10:It it dude, it's great. I've been telling we're gonna make some analysis. Like, we're gonna try
Speaker 5:to do this work.
Speaker 10:It's so good. You have to. I got it yesterday. I actually didn't realize I was on today. I just wore it today for work.
Speaker 1:I'm not
Speaker 10:I'm not I'm not joking. Then I was like, oh my god. My schedule, my calendar, I'm doing this. I was like, dude, this is perfect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we were we were talking Amazing. And and Tyler was like, oh, did you book Doug specifically because you knew that Amazon was gonna do this deal with OpenAI? He's the perfect person to talk to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We booked Doug because we love Doug.
Speaker 2:I said, no. They did the deal because they knew Doug was going on TBPN on Wednesday, December 17. They were like, we gotta give them something to talk about. Let's do a deal. And so Sam and Andy, they got together and they were like, this is good content for TPPN and seminalysis.
Speaker 2:Anyway, take us through your reaction to the deal. And if you could actually just start with, like, setting the table on where are we on the Trainium narrative. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it like, what do we know?
Speaker 2:What how is it changing? What's the updated thinking around just Amazon's chip efforts?
Speaker 10:So I think it's pretty good. We wrote an article about training three. We think it's gonna be a lot better than training two, mostly because there's a lot of interaction and help with, from the the labs themselves. And let's not forget, oh my god. It's beautiful.
Speaker 10:Let's not forget, one of my favorite parts of this whole story is everyone's like, okay. We wrote about the TPU article and people hated it because we said, oh, it's a it's a Rubin quick bait. Where did all the TPU engineers go? A lot of them went to training.
Speaker 1:So This
Speaker 2:is too this BrainRot's too NVIDIA focused. I botched it.
Speaker 1:But I like We wanted to give you some BrainRot.
Speaker 2:We wanted to put the BrainRot directly in the show because we've been we've been enjoying the BrainRot edits, and we thought, what if we do it live? But my prompting was maybe below below standard. But I like the Two is not. It a cake or not?
Speaker 10:That that's pretty good. I honestly forgot what the is it cake.
Speaker 2:Anyway, sorry. Just resetting on on on trading. You you wrote the article. Obviously, there was, a bunch of back and forth, but, but but how are you thinking about it currently?
Speaker 10:So, look, I think we actually in in the seminalysis premium, you know, product that I've managed, we definitely we kinda made a a call that we thought there would be some kind of announcement open eye Mhmm. At re:Invent mostly because and and, like, first principles, here's what it is. Data center execution is starting to become a real issue. Okay. Oracle's delayed.
Speaker 10:Fairwater's delayed. Mhmm. Core is and Quariv is delayed. Mhmm. And you know who is not delayed?
Speaker 10:Amazon. Amazon has like, their execution is flawless when it comes to data center power. Yeah. And they're I think they're gonna put, like, five, six gigawatts online next year. It's a big number.
Speaker 10:Like, a huge number. Wow. And so OpenAI is always trying to secure more compute at at every single point in time and who has the most power available to them and has a project that they, you know, obviously are very interested in getting more customers for. I think OpenAI's power constraint is going to it like, that's one of the reasons why the deal. And then also, you know, OpenAI is always down for fresh money.
Speaker 10:At this point in time, they're like they're hitting up Disney. They're hitting up SoftBank. Everyone who has money, they're trying to get money on investment from. So that's kind of like a, you know, a win win for them.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the question that I was kicking around was there's a there's there's this $10,000,000,000 investment into OpenAI from Amazon. Simultaneously, OpenAI has around $3,837,000,000,000 dollars of commitments with AWS over a series of years. And my my question is, like, how how do we see how do you think about the way the way OpenAI will be working with with AWS and and Tranium chips broadly? Is it something where they can basically make all of their models multiplatform and run them and kind of create one fluid compute resource, a pool of compute that that can fluidly shift across Trainium and GPU from NVIDIA?
Speaker 2:Or are they going to sort of take the Trainium chips and have a specific model, like maybe they'll do their video generation over there or their image generation or they have old four o workloads that are sticking around longer than they expected. Let's replatform that model to Trainium and have it run really cheaply on Trainium or something like that. Like, is it a per per use, partnership, or is it something that cuts across the entire org? Do you have any visibility into that? Did we lose audio?
Speaker 1:I'm not hearing I'm not hearing, Doug. Lost him.
Speaker 10:Oh, how about now? How about now?
Speaker 1:Now we're good.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 10:sorry about that. Okay. We're back.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:We're so back. I I don't think we have perfect visibility
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:First and foremost. But you can look at someone who's already doing that, which Anthropic is TPUs. They they use GPUs and they use Traniums.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 10:And so there's a certain level that you can abstract it at. And I think TPUs, for example, are just trying to do it on Torch TPU, right, so at PyTorch. And I I think having the multiple compute, like, elastic pools of compute is good for negotiating power, and that's probably in OpenAI's interest. But it's like a pain in the ass to get this to work. So there's, like, a two two brains.
Speaker 10:One, if you're really focused, you just buy more of one and be the best at it. Two, at the same time, you get to pay less gross margins if you can kinda diversify your suppliers instead of just one. It's possible. Anthropic has shown you that they people could do it. They already have, and that's probably what we yeah.
Speaker 10:So that's kind of my brain. I I think it really comes down to the power constraint, dude.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:That's what Amazon has that no one else has, and that's, like, that's the art of the deal, if that makes sense. Yeah. Also And is that is
Speaker 2:that is that a refer is that like, does that tell me that Amazon was more excited about the AI build out a year or two ago? They didn't pause when Satya Nadella went through that pause, or is it just Amazon's been building sort of linearly growing, growing, growing for a decade, two decades? And so this is just more of the same what we should have predicted from Amazon. Do you have do have an idea of, like, is this them catching up? Is this them just maintaining their level of excitement?
Speaker 1:Well, mean, part part of why you look at Oracle's, like, backlog announcement. They were basically saying we're gonna build AWS in, like, a couple years. Mhmm. Meanwhile, AWS has, you know, multi decade head start. And it's like, yeah, we're also that, like, imagine their thinking, like, we're gonna we're gonna build that capacity too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're welcome to, like, you know, have your deal with Oracle, but it makes sense that Amazon can kind of, like, beat them to the Yep. To the punch. Yep.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think that that's I think what Jordi said is probably more down the more realistic what's happened. So, like, last year, we had the pause from Microsoft. Obviously, it's a big deal. But even before the pause, Microsoft at the infrastructure level was never as sophisticated from Azure versus AWS.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:AWS is the OG, all in house, did everything themselves and has, like, a very reactive and, like, battle tested infrastructure. Hey, they're the largest logistics company in The United States. They're one of the largest logistic companies in the entire world. Before all this AI stuff, they had the biggest amount of compute and the biggest infrastructure shell and the whole pipeline and platform and all of this. And I think that that's the like, pretty much they finally got everything turned in the right direction with a focus on more AI, and then you're seeing the the results of that.
Speaker 10:About a year and a half later, like right? But you're you're while Microsoft pulled back, they pushed ahead. And then now all of their long term investments are going start to bear fruit meaningfully in 'twenty six and 'twenty seven. So I think that that's the simplistic way to think about it. When I talk to and I work with people who have worked with, let's say and this is from the before times, before GPUs.
Speaker 10:The difference between AWS and Azure is junior varsity. They're a totally different league. And think that that's and you don't bet against AWS' infrastructure execution there. We've seen almost like like, Oracle is a perfect example, dude. It's been delay after delay after delay.
Speaker 10:Like Mhmm. These timelines are starting to be pushed out, and and we think that that's gonna become, like you know, more than just, like, trying to find power. It's just, converting that power into a powered shell seems to have a real execution risk. And I think Amazon is more money good from that perspective.
Speaker 2:How did you process the AWS, like, direct pipe to GCP news? It seems like they're maybe trying to get into more, like, cross data center training. I know Google, has some experience there. Is AWS is that is that something that the the big labs are demanding at this point? Like, is there also multi cloud?
Speaker 2:Like, are there any special offerings other than or is it really just like, hey. We just have capacity and no one else does, and that's enough?
Speaker 10:I mean, I think I think the labs probably demand it. Mhmm. And historically, the the biggest rake that everyone got paid or, like, had to pay in these in the multicloud world was egress and ingress. Yeah. I don't like, this is, like I don't know.
Speaker 10:You remember maybe 2019? Everyone was like, oh, these freaking egress fees are, like, too high. Then that's kind of I think that's, like, kinda how what they did is they forced all the data to stay inside their data centers, and they charged you, like, crazy to open the door. Yeah. I think I think they're just kinda breaking because they're they're seeing that, like, the customers' absolute size is so large and they need so much demand that you have to pay.
Speaker 10:How do you win these customers? Well, you need to build a pipeline, a door to your data center, especially if your data center isn't where they started at and their data lives in Azure and not in AWS. Yeah. Right? You want to have a door to AWS because up until now, it was everything within AWS.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 10:I think that that's kind of the story there. Yeah. I think I definitely think the multi data center multi data center training and inference probably, like, to a certain extent, is, like maybe not inference, but, like, that's part of the story too. Mhmm. I also think maybe even rolling back to the previous question in terms of, like, there was a paper or article where maybe it was, like, a conversation that Anthropic had where there are different models that have different TCOs and different values at on different hardware.
Speaker 10:So, like, certain types of hardware, I think, is much more profitable on certain types of memory bound
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And or, like, FLOPS bound. And so I do think having all those different options is gonna have a better cost per use per model per hardware. And so that's I think that that's gonna be a, like, strategically valuable thing going forward in terms of, like, lowering the cost AI.
Speaker 1:Do you accept expect to see any announcements on the commerce side between OpenAI and Amazon? We were talking earlier. It feels like this could be a scenario where, like, Disney invested in OpenAI and in exchange. As part of that, Disney is giving them a one year exclusive on all that IP, which is, like, an insane, I think, underrated advantage. With Amazon, you can imagine ChatGPT, OpenAI has been working since inception to, like, be able to monetize some of the product, like some of purchasing that they are driving monetize across the Internet and could be.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, Amazon is a $60,000,000,000, like, ad business and they wanna protect that. And that's based on people landing on Amazon and searching for products there.
Speaker 10:My impulse is nah. No way, man. That's like the, you know, that's like the unassailable that's the unassailable thing. So yeah. It's a golden goose.
Speaker 10:Why would you let why would you let the fox into the in into the henhouse? Like, just no way. No way.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. So so the weaker weaker companies have, the Etsy's of the world have said, like, yeah. We'll we'll do it because we
Speaker 10:They have more to win.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Your background
Speaker 10:Number two.
Speaker 2:Doesn't look like you're in space. Are you developing a thesis around data centers in space? Or is that coming? I know you probably don't wanna leak too much alpha on this particular show. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:I are you thinking about it? What's the timeline? Is there gonna a space data center model for sale anytime soon?
Speaker 10:So you're talking I'm from the space data center team, research team, SME analysis Yes. Right now on the ISS. Let's go. And and and I'm
Speaker 2:Santa Tracker Online.
Speaker 10:Santa Tracker Online. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm a space data center hater. You're a huge space data I'm a I'm a giant hater. I'm sorry.
Speaker 10:I know I know Gavin talked about it. Gavin's really intelligent and, like, a very well spoken, smart individual in the space.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:But like, guys, it is hard to train a model on Earth today. Okay. It's hard enough to train
Speaker 2:a model.
Speaker 1:It's hard to it's hard to build a box and put some chips in it and plug it in and on Earth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's it's dude, we're telling me that we have power delays on Earth?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:Wait. What is gonna like, we
Speaker 3:you know, we're
Speaker 2:It's hard to square those things. And so So and so and so hater hater
Speaker 1:I mean, the the pushback there would obviously be, like, there's a lot of energy in space, solar energy. But but again, it it it it I just felt like there was, like, a very organized effectively narrative pump
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Tied to this. I I mean, do you wanna know why? Come on.
Speaker 10:I can tell you the answer. Yeah. I could tell you the answer. It's because space SpaceX is racing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:You gotta remember what bagger what bag is being pumped at any given time, and the fact that you heard the SpaceX round come out maybe a few weeks later is not it's that,
Speaker 1:like It wasn't it was within the same week it was in the same week that the $800,000,000,000 round, like, details came out. I could see them raising more now because they've announced the, like, target 1 and a half trillion. So, like, that that just creates space for, the pre IPO round, which could land at easily a trillion or north of a trillion now that all these people realize, hey. It's gonna go out. I'm gonna have, like, a a shorter liquidity timeline.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I would expect, you know, more
Speaker 10:I I think that's part of it, but also, you know, if we're talking about data centers in space, there's only one service provider. Right? The whole so, like, you know, the one of the reasons why I'm, like, a hater of data centers in space is, like, hey. Like, you know, a 3,200 pounds or whatever, a one ton GB 200 on Earth costs a lot of money. 10 x the cost to get it into space.
Speaker 10:Right? But if a space data center was to ever happen, right, there's only one company that has really lowered the cost of moving something from on Earth into space. And so if that was to even be part of the TAM, all of that TAM would belong to SpaceX. So that's my that's that's that's my belief at least is that, like, when when these, like, large narratives come around, a very large funding round, there's no it it isn't a coincidence. Maybe that's what they were talking about in the SpaceX round, and that's where you're starting to hear all this stuff.
Speaker 10:Hey. This is something in their long term planning. And then, you know, investors who are very excited about it talk about it. That's very plausible. And if if there are data centers in space, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it.
Speaker 10:Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. However you feel about it, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So It's sort of the same thing as, like, the Mars narrative, which is still years and years away and and, you know, maybe decades away. But you still have this, like, call option on it because if we get to Mars, it's probably gonna be a space
Speaker 1:Something something I've been thinking about is I mean, it seems like I mean, so far Paramount's Skydance effort to acquire Warner Brothers seems to be falling apart a little bit. Warner Warner Brothers board doesn't wanna do it. They're happy with Netflix. It seems like Netflix very clearly is, like, good for the deal, and there's less certainty on the on the Paramount side or at least that's how Warner Brothers board is positioning it. And I have to imagine that there's a handful of people that are looking at that money that was like soft circled by the gulf and they're like, I want I want those tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1:So like, if you're SpaceX or you're OpenAI and you're like seeing an opportunity of like, hey, this this kind of money was soft circled for a deal that might not be going through.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Everybody should be going after that.
Speaker 10:Yeah. You should be raising. Always be closing, bro.
Speaker 2:Always be closing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Always be closing. I wanted to ask you about storytelling, but in a very specific context. Obviously, everybody on the timeline was talking about storytelling this week, if you should hire a storyteller. But I wanted to ask you about Meta, specifically their storytelling, because they came out this year with a story around personal super intelligence.
Speaker 1:And then there was some reporting recently, I forget by who, that was saying, like, some of the execs apparently were just like, hey. We should just work on ads, basically. Like, let's just make the core business better. And I feel like I I personally as a as a user in the meta ecosystem, I have no idea what, like personal super intelligence like really means. Right?
Speaker 1:Is it is it a better like, are you trying to deliver a better version of ChatGPT and get into the search business as a as a meta shareholder. I'm like, I don't know. I also don't I also don't totally know what it means. And so my question is like, do you do you think that Meta needs to kind of dial that in or or do we just let them cook and and we can form an opinion once they once they ship?
Speaker 10:Looks okay. I I think forming an opinion when they ship is, like, the most reasonable way to live your life instead of speculating, but I'm gonna put my my Zuck hat on. Okay? Zuck hat on. Let's think about how I would do this.
Speaker 10:3,000,000,000 people use our products every single day, and it's important part for of your day to day thing. I would argue the ChatGPT universe is actually like, don't even include us. Include The United States, actually. We are high ARPU users who, like, pay for, like, max or pro or whatever and, like, can can amortize, know how to use these things. The adoption in The United States is pretty high.
Speaker 10:The long tail of Meta users is, like, pretty astounding. You know, in in some places in Southeast Asia, like, hey. Meta or, like, WhatsApp, which is on my Meta, is, like, the primary mean for people to do business on, right, for people to talk to other businesses. Hey. All of sudden like, I'm sure have you ever done, like, a random, like, tour in, like, Southeast Asia or, like, Japan or, like, wherever the hell you've gone?
Speaker 10:And you, like know, you sign up for it, and they they send all these things. There's clearly, like, a whole business flow behind it. WhatsApp actually does have a ginormous, you know, billion user moat that I think can, like, kind of, you know, kind of become the super app. That's, like, if I Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that but the other thing, they have to be feeling pretty confident with the experience with threads where they have effectively ported their user base to an entirely new app. Like, they it's I I believe they could, at some point, once they're confident in the product experience, get the Meta AI app to half a billion users in the way that they don't think Threads is at that yet, but it's at hundreds of millions of of active users. And that that distribution advantage does give them the potential to, like, come from behind, especially in some of these sort of more international markets.
Speaker 10:I mean, have you guys ever seen the, like, the really sloppy I I think they're AppLovin' app advertisements actually for the games. It's like the guy and he's shooting a gun and he press one. It's like the the pure brain rot video game ad that, like, gets
Speaker 3:you to
Speaker 10:click through.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Meta Meta has the ability, in my opinion, to serve that kind of crap in your feed that is so gamified, it it makes you press a button. Yeah. When I am when I am doom scrolling on Reels or something like that, occasionally, would be a thread where they have, like, such a debated, ridiculous title where I'm like, I just have to see that. And, of course, it ends like the word before the hook that you want to know the answer.
Speaker 10:And so you click it, and then you go through. And then, like, that's how you can, like, juice ARPU. So, yeah, you're I think you're right. There no one else has quite the on ramp, I think, in terms of engaging active users ASAP if they wanted to. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:But I think you have to have, like, you you know, you have to have the Galaxy brain addictive perfect use case done first. Because I think they have the on ramp, and they can spend enough GPUs to tell you, here's how you convert a random user to try our experience for thirty seconds, and we could probably mechanically show it to enough people to get you know, to to easily boot up ten, twenty, 30,000,000 people to to try the app very quickly. But the real execution that I think it's gonna be on them is to get those ten, twenty, 30,000,000 people to become addicted users who share with other people and make that, you know, personalized superintelligence part of your day to day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember to the WhatsApp point, they did boot ChatGPT out of, like, the WhatsApp ecosystem, like, not too long ago, remember, which had, like, a ton of users. I think it was I've I've it it was at least
Speaker 10:When did they boot this up?
Speaker 1:This was, like, I think a couple months ago.
Speaker 10:That's actually really interesting. I might have to follow-up on that idea, actually. That's pretty it's pretty interesting. It might kind of
Speaker 1:That tells you that tells you yeah. I mean, it tells you, like, how how they'll integrate their own models
Speaker 10:Yeah. Time.
Speaker 1:Anyways, we're we're way over. I wish we had more time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Always.
Speaker 2:But Let's do it again.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being a part of this this year. What what are Most
Speaker 2:so much for everything you've done to help
Speaker 10:Dude, thank you guys. I love I love TPP. Like, seriously, I love TPPN. Like, straight up. We're we're on the moon, I guess, or we're in outer space.
Speaker 10:It's amazing. You guys are in LA. I would love to do it I gotta do it person sometime.
Speaker 2:Please. Calm down.
Speaker 10:I'm like never out of
Speaker 2:the house.
Speaker 10:No. I would love to. Anytime. It'd be great.
Speaker 1:Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2:Have a great holiday season, and we'll see you in 2026.
Speaker 1:You're the man. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Doug Bernour from Radiant. He's right across town over in El Segundo. He's one of the one of the original El Segundo hard tech companies.
Speaker 2:I have been a huge fan of
Speaker 1:Look at that bow truss.
Speaker 2:Look at this building. It So beautiful bow. We're looking for a building
Speaker 1:that's not like that. I didn't know that terminology until this year, and now I only wanna spend time. If I'm not at home, I wanna be in bow truss buildings. They're just they're iconic.
Speaker 9:You could come on by. Yeah. I think it's a double boat truss because they got the two.
Speaker 2:No way. They they got double boat truss.
Speaker 9:For that. That might be
Speaker 2:a name for that. Anyway, we're not here to talk about architecture. We're here to talk about nuclear reactors. So please kick us off with a get us up to speed on what's happened in the last year. How are you describing the shape of the business?
Speaker 2:Where's the progress? What are you building? And how do you frame it for everyone?
Speaker 9:Thanks, John. Great to be here. We are actively building our first nuclear reactor
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Which should be the first new design going critical at Idaho National Laboratory since 1977, so before any of us were born.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So it's extremely exciting. I think last time we had talked, you know, a year ago, we were still working on the design. Now all components are ordered. Are parts here. There are peep there are technicians assembling it.
Speaker 9:Yep. We're on qualified supplier list, and, you know, just this morning, we
Speaker 1:announced the You said the first. That's right. Some competition to really be the first? A lot of people wanna say they're the first.
Speaker 9:Absolutely. There's always competition, and I welcome all the competition. Let's all build a huge amount of reactors. Yeah. And, alright, make American nuclear energy reach as many people as it can.
Speaker 2:So the design's still the same, one megawatt, roughly the size of a shipping container. Have you thought about who the buyer is? I know we've talked in the past about you throw it on a military base or you throw it on a an oil and gas exploration zone, stranded area where where diesel might be really expensive. Are you still thinking about those types of customers, or have the AI folks come calling?
Speaker 9:We're absolutely thinking about those types of customers, but, really, nuclear energy is for prosperity, driving prosperity. That means letting humans put power wherever they wanna put it. Just so happens if you make a compact reactor, you could put years of megawatt scale power wherever you want. Mhmm. We have made progress with you know, we have a data center customer, Equinix.
Speaker 9:Oh, He has put down an order for 20 units.
Speaker 3:So That's amazing.
Speaker 9:AI is definitely driving that.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. That's huge. That's a lot. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then more more progress with the military customer as well. And we have a contract now with the Air Force through Defense Innovation Unit for several units there as well. So it's it's really we're working on the same stuff that, you know, the design does not need to change. We submitted a regulatory document over 500 pages to the Department of Energy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. The one shot in with Chad Jubilee.
Speaker 9:It's not a good it's not a good thing to do. No. You definitely can use AI to learn fast, but not to do fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. So take us through the news today. Massive new funding round. What exactly happened?
Speaker 2:And and then I wanna talk about some of the some of the uses of that funding.
Speaker 9:Yep. Yeah. So we have raised over $300,000,000 in new funding K. Through Boost and Draper Associates.
Speaker 1:Massive. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's a huge that's a huge number. Are is that because you're expecting to order lots of parts at this point because you're actually fulfilling orders? Is this hiring more r and d scientists? How much of this goes into r and d?
Speaker 2:How much of this goes into OpEx, CapEx? Like, how are you thinking about the uses of the funds?
Speaker 9:All d, no r.
Speaker 2:Okay. All d, r.
Speaker 9:It's we're building. We're building right now. Just done. That's right. But it does accelerate our ability to go and build and get some more trained operators to run at Idaho National Lab.
Speaker 9:We'll be running twenty four seven with the reactor up up and functioning. But a lot of those funding will go towards actually our facility that we announced in Tennessee, you know, in over 80 acre site where we're putting down new construction on Department of Energy land, and that's fueling facility, what will become the mass production of reactors coming out of that facility.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What so so the next INL milestone, do you have a specific date locked in? Are you working against a particular time line? And has any of this shifted since there's been sort of a flurry of efforts to speed up the development of nuclear specifically? Has anything been able to be pulled forward?
Speaker 2:I know that there's a lot of there's a lot of excitement around nuclear just over the past year. Has anything changed from your initial plan?
Speaker 9:I think that things are accelerated across the board.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So we got access to fuel in May. We know that's been transported now. It's at the fabricator. Fuel is being made for the reactor. That's very new.
Speaker 9:Probably the most important thing to know that we'll hit schedule.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:That but nothing's really changed in, you know, in long run. You know, we had a goal of going critical of the reactor full scale. Mhmm. One that's designed, built by, and then operated by Radiant Yeah. Along with the National Lab.
Speaker 9:And that'll happen before summer, which is pretty exciting. So it's very, very soon that's coming up. A greater question, though, there there's a a whole bunch of executive orders, and there's a lot of impetus from current administration to make things move, make them go quickly. And the national labs and the NRC are both looking at their processes and going, well, we've got new reactors coming, and so let's plan for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so there are new processes that have already been released Mhmm. As part of the effort. So it is not an open call to action, but we're seeing a lot of real action.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Switching topics, I wanted to we had the tragic news yesterday that the MIT professor passed. I know he was studying and and focusing on fusion. Can you talk about maybe the significance of of his work and and kind of the more industry reaction? Because a lot of people on on, the timeline were just kind of reacting to that, and and, obviously, it's incredibly tragic, and, just con you know, concerned around the work that that he was doing.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I am actually not a fusion expert. So I think that the probably that story is best told by someone else. Mhmm. Of course, energy is critical, and we're all building off of those marvels of the past and the technology that's developed, even just the ideas.
Speaker 9:And those people who are willing to, you know, take their make their life and their life's work about something so important as, you know, clean, safe energy and access that energy for all of humanity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What
Speaker 9:So I applaud that.
Speaker 2:You one of your unique sort of, like, experience has been at SpaceX watching development of early rockets and then the the transition from making one that works to making, you know, dozens and eventually hundreds that work of these, like, you know, massive machines. How are you thinking about setting the company up for success in the transition to the point where you're churning out dozens of reactors? Are does it can you already feel that Radiant is a different company because you're thinking about scale down the road?
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's absolutely the case. So pretty much everything with nuclear does not have a thing you can go and just carbon copy and say, we're gonna make somehow make reactors a thousand times smaller, but yet follow, like, all the rules and use all the same suppliers who are used to making those types of parts and things. Yeah. And I think at my core is that SpaceX kinda derived first principles approach.
Speaker 9:And, you know, that was absolutely the case if and we usually point folks to talk to the national labs or other entities who are not us to talk about us Mhmm. And go, you know, what's what's different about those guys? And we really we feel strongly that you must really own every aspect of the design down to and including the printed circuit boards and the software that goes on them. And that is not at all dissimilar to right? That's the thing SpaceX also did.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So it wasn't just, hey. Make rocket engines. Only make that. There's also it's really required that you think through integration and go put everything you can get from the modern world into something so they end up with something that's not outdated or slowed down by lack of of integrating that new technology.
Speaker 2:How big is the team at this point? And and are you gonna need to set up a second facility at some point? Because it it feels like, you know, SpaceX started and El Segundo eventually sort of outgrew that, and now it's an entire city. Is there gonna be a, like, a a a radiant base city somewhere in Texas or something at some point?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So Tennessee is our factory site.
Speaker 2:Tennessee.
Speaker 9:Construction will start really soon on that. I think we will have a functioning building Yeah. Able to able to handle fueling reactors before the end of next year
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Which is a wild timeline only supported by the NRC being able to move fast today, which is very exciting. Yeah. But we already actually have two buildings in El Segundo. We just got our second building last month.
Speaker 2:Congrats. That's amazing.
Speaker 9:So we have ES 1, ES 2.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool. Chat Gabe in the chat said the Koreans are making major moves in nuclear, he thinks. Are there any countries that are kind of like re rebooting their their nuclear energy efforts that you're looking to of
Speaker 2:America right now. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:As or, yeah, inspiration or people that have been inspired by your efforts and and other companies in the space?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So nuclear spans this wide range of power levels.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So very true. Korea's, they're building a whole fleet of reactors that are, I think, 1,400, even up to 1,600 megawatts. Woah. So some of the biggest that there are. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they're able to do it on really short timelines, you know, five to six years to construct a giant facility like that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Which is grid power. But it's it's so different from what we're doing. And I I don't know if it seems like America might be ahead and might be first in the area we're in, is these one megawatt, right, systems. The real tiny and portable stuff. But there are because The US is so innovative, there are startups that are working on this as well and some established US nuclear companies, but there's handfuls of them.
Speaker 9:Though, you know, there are even more federal dollars being pointed at this problem.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So the the army actually have a really big program called Janus that's been announced that we're really excited about. Yeah. So that could provide even faster motion to the tip of the spear. Right? And Yeah.
Speaker 9:Go make it so that nuclear can go in a box and can go anywhere you want, which isn't isn't the case Yeah. For those big reactors in other countries.
Speaker 2:How much of what's happening in the admin is just a different level of energy, a different perception versus, like, there's, oh, that one law changed, that one rule changed. And because it felt like we we've talked about this in the past. There wasn't necessarily just, like, one line in the legal code that was holding you back. It was more like this sclerotic system of, you know, like a large organization. A lot of people trying to do their best, but just not really pushing things forward.
Speaker 2:So is it more of, a cultural shift, or has there been particular regulatory changes that have been helpful?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a great question. I think it's always a it's kind of a combination of things. But I would say that, you know, we have Department of Energy. We have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. These organizations have been around a very long time. There are people who've been there.
Speaker 2:Oh, did we lose audio and video?
Speaker 1:We lost both.
Speaker 2:We lost both.
Speaker 1:You're back.
Speaker 2:You're back.
Speaker 9:Oh, sorry about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No problem.
Speaker 9:Re Oh. Re answering. So the NRC, right, the Department of Energy, there are people there who've been there for decades. Mhmm. And it's not like there's a real cultural shift, but there's a there's a culture within them that just need to be unleashed.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:And so a lot of folks, it's the same people. Yeah. But they're just answering a different call.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? And they're they're excited by and they're they're deploying fuel. Yeah. You know, there's a a reinvestment in enrich enrichment assets Mhmm. In this country as well, which since 2013, there there had been nothing.
Speaker 9:So I think we're we're just really out of a dry spell.
Speaker 2:That's great. Yep. That's Well, thank you. A lot
Speaker 9:of belief.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a busy day, and congratulations on the massive series d. It's 1,800,000,000.0 valuation. You're officially a unicorn. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Unicorn mode. Congrats to the whole team. I'm sure you guys are not gonna have very relaxed end of the year.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine you resting on your laurels. That's what that's what we do over here. We got timelines timelines to handle the laurel resting.
Speaker 9:That's right. The build plan includes weekends and holidays.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Locked in.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great have a great holiday season. Cheers. Cheers. Privy.
Speaker 2:Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We have Jacob Efren from Red Point. There he is. There he is.
Speaker 6:Hey. How you doing guys? It's great to be you, hon.
Speaker 1:Great to finally have you on. Got it in before the end of the year. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:It's an an honor to be here and a very very happy holidays to you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you. What's going on in your world? Maybe maybe first time on the show, quick quick introduction for the folks watching.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm Jacob. I'm a managing director over at Redpoint. We're a $6,000,000,000 fund, and I co run our our early growth fund, which sounds like an oxymoron, but basically means series b and c. So that's where I spend all my time and do a lot of our AI investing across a bunch of companies.
Speaker 1:What's what's your favorite?
Speaker 6:You know you can't answer that question.
Speaker 1:I think you can answer it. I think I think it's I have a friend who does a's and b's, and like he has like a very very clear a very clear clear preference around like one of I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm not gonna, you know, share his alpha, but, like, he has a lot of reasons about liking one versus the other, and I think I think they track. But I'm curious how you think of that b to b to c range if there's, like Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well
Speaker 1:what what
Speaker 6:you're gonna say first first investment I ever worked on at Redpoint was was show sponsor ramp, which is sitting nicely up there in the in the top right. And so I feel like that that set the bar pretty high for
Speaker 2:Was that the
Speaker 6:for team velocity.
Speaker 1:Was that the was that the b or the c that you guys
Speaker 6:That was the b. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was the b. Yeah. Yeah. No. I I I remember those days.
Speaker 1:You guys were had a lot of conviction and it it certainly panned out. What yeah. What like, how how are you kind of reflecting on this year?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's been it it's it's it's been been quite the year. Right? I think we've you know, on the application side, I feel like there's been a tremendous amount of stuff that's really started to work. I feel like, you know, obviously, coding being the killer use case, but there's been a ton in customer support, healthcare, legal.
Speaker 6:And I think the big question going into next year is what's the next set of dominoes to fall on the application side? Are we in a time period where models are relatively plateauing and it's going be this set of applications for a bit or are we going to see some improvements and then get a whole next wave of application areas unlocked? At the same time, there's been a ton of interesting stuff on the model side outside of Core LLMs. Obviously, you guys have talked at length about some of the cool stuff happening in the image and video world, but even in robotics, biology, material sciences, it's been fascinating to see. And then next year, I'm really fired up about infrastructure actually.
Speaker 6:I think with the with the models slowing down a bit, I actually think it's a great opportunity. There's finally a stable set of things to to build infrastructure for. And so Yeah. I think it'll be really really interesting '26.
Speaker 2:Do you think that there's any chance that we'll get a new consumer AI company out of a company that didn't start as a consumer AI company? I'm just fascinated by this this
Speaker 6:Like OpenAI part two?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean I mean, that is one of my hottest takes is is that may maybe maybe the OpenAI nonprofit spawns another for profit because perhaps there's something just innately, you know, it's like like, just there's no better place to just do unstructured research and start a company than a massively funded nonprofit. It happened once in history. Maybe it happens again. But but, I mean, to be clear, I I was talking more about, like, there's there's these, like, pseudo mid journey. There's this interesting there's this interesting wave of companies where they have a model, and they turn it loose.
Speaker 2:And it seems like people are kinda playing with it themselves. And and everyone reads on immediately as, oh, job displacement. That's a prosumer tool. That's an enterprise product. And maybe that's right.
Speaker 2:Maybe there is a big enterprise opportunity or big prosumer opportunity or b to b opportunity. But I'm I'm more interested in in these new patterns of consumer behavior right now and and and trying to find areas where where where consumers just might land. But I I don't know if you've even looked at any of that or or Yeah.
Speaker 6:No. We've we've looked at all these. And I I think there's obviously a ton of of interesting new consumer behavior around, you know, remixing these models, playing around with them. Think Sure. Suno especially, I mean, we we play around with that with that tool all the time.
Speaker 6:And so I do think that there you know, I think that the key will be, and you're starting to see this with OpenAI and Disney and even Suno which had an arrangement with Universal recently. It's like bringing IP onto these platforms, I think will just be fascinating. Right? Because what's the it it's fun to remix something that is, you know, maybe a friend or somewhat abstract. It's a lot more fun to remix something that involves, you know, Taylor Swift or, know, Darth Vader or some form of IP.
Speaker 1:How do you look at that category evolving? Because I was debating somebody Monday night who has managed some of the biggest global superstars, and we were talking about music creation as a category and consumer AI in this kind of prosumer category. And I was taking the side that, like, I like, you have to assume that every lab or not every lab, but a lot of the big players get into you can imagine Gemini letting you make music, OpenAI. Every I think a lot of people will get into this because it's just like a it's a great hook, and it's something consumers clearly want. I was much more on the side of, like, I think music is, like, nuanced enough, and, like, there's a lot of depth to it, and I think it deserves a standalone app.
Speaker 1:And I think that there's a lot of people that will just pay for the Suno experience for a long time even if they have some of these other subscriptions. Meanwhile, like, clearly, like, you don't need like, the average person is not gonna necessarily have, an an image gen app and then also, like, their normal MLM. So I'm curious. You got you guys are obviously quite biased here given your position in Suno, but like how you see that structure evolving.
Speaker 6:We're not investors in Suno, just a fan. Oh,
Speaker 1:really? Sorry.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm from Boston, so anytime there's like an epic Boston based company, I get very excited. So Suno being from there is is awesome. But I think that to your question, you know, I I I agree with you. Like, it it probably doesn't live within a larger consumer app.
Speaker 6:I think if anything, what you're gonna see is there's a whole set of experiences to be built around how artists interact with their fans through these platforms. And I think that when someone captures a lot of the volume of folks that are interested in this, that's where the artist will go. It's not like an artist is gonna go to 10 different you know, to Gemini, to Claude, to ChatGPT where music's embedded and like, you know, have back and forth with fans that are, you know, remixing their songs and interacting with it. I think that the, you know, the IP holders here will go to the consumer landing page that aggregates as many people as possible. And so, I actually think it makes a ton of sense as a as a space for a standalone category because it's not really just about the quality of the model.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. I wanted to Chad was asking about pricing and I was curious too how you guys are how you guys handle some of these companies that are being formed have are getting off the ground basically with like series a pricing out the gates. How do you guys handle that at Redpoint when you have an early stage team and then you're doing early growth and you're like, where do these even fall in?
Speaker 2:You incorporate the company and you say, I don't wanna talk to the Redpoint seed investors. I wanna do a growth round on day one. I wanna talk to Jacob. Jacob. He's not
Speaker 1:gonna have fun with you.
Speaker 2:They call you. You wanna go straight to I don't have an idea, but I need a growth round right now. Put a 100,000,000 in my account.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, is where, you know, I think it's just one of the really fun parts of working at a a small firm. Right? There's, you know, there's eight of us that are that just work super closely together Yeah. On all this stuff.
Speaker 6:And, you know, a company can be a seed one day and five days later be a series b. And so we, you know, I think it involves us just working super closely together. But it's, you know, it's it's an interesting time. Right? It's both crazy valuation environment and also these markets that folks are going after is just absolutely massive.
Speaker 6:And so, think I you have to hold both of those both of those truths simultaneously.
Speaker 2:Okay. On the valuations broadly, just in the last half of this year, we've seen Oracle sell off post a big excitement around the backlog and the RPO. We've seen CoreWeave sell off. We've seen Rich Sutton and Andrei Karpathy and Ilya Sotzkever on the Dorkesh Patel podcast talking about how maybe the models are slowing down. Is any of that
Speaker 6:Yeah. Though I love that Andre's take was taken as bearish. He was
Speaker 2:Yes. Like Yes.
Speaker 6:Yes. I think this stuff will automate all enterprise work, but it will take a decade. And everyone's like, oh, it's over.
Speaker 2:Like, it
Speaker 6:takes a
Speaker 2:decade. Yeah. Don't want Well, there's the question. Is that is that is that how is how is the venture community how is how how are all of those different data points? Some of them bullish, some of them bearish potentially, many of them up for interpretation.
Speaker 2:How are they being interpreted in series a, b, c prices?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think what's what's very clear is there's both gonna be, you know, massive massive new companies created in this wave. And I think even with just the capabilities of models, even if even if you believe that models aren't gonna get that much better without some algorithmic breakthrough, and you believe that we're overbuilding on the data center side, it doesn't change the fact that this current generation of models works really well in a bunch of different application areas. And so I do think on the app side, there's going to be massive businesses built. They'll require a bunch of infrastructure behind them.
Speaker 6:I think you were talking earlier with Sarah about some of the NeoLabs. I think that's the most interesting question of you know, what what is the form of model progress gonna be in the next five, ten years? And is that something that occurs within the labs or or outside of them? But I don't think that anyone's questioning whether really large companies will be rated today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about the overall venture the venture e like, the the amount of dollars flowing into venture funds right now? I'm sure you have a view and you have a couple data points. There's this chart that looks incredibly bearish. It looks like it's completely over for venture capital, and yet that doesn't match with anything I was feeling because there's huge rounds happening.
Speaker 2:I mean, I guess it doesn't count as venture capital, but OpenAI is raising $10,000,000,000 from Amazon. Like, there's big deals getting done. But for some reason, there's a chart that shows venture dollars going down. How did you process? Did you see that chart?
Speaker 2:Did you process that same way I did? Walk me through your interpretation of that. What's going on?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think you're spot on on on the vibes. It didn't it didn't totally match what it feels like the game on the field is. Yeah. I do think there's probably you know, it's definitely harder for emerging managers or first time funds, and so it doesn't surprise me that the overall count of funds was was down a bit.
Speaker 6:But like, you know, lot of that data can be skewed by some pretty outlier large funds that were raised in kind of 2021, as well as the fact that those funds in '21 were deployed in, like, you know, six, twelve months or something. Right? And so I think actually maybe we're back to slightly more normal fund deployment basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then do you think there's also shift over the last few years to more SPV usage amongst fund managers so that maybe the maybe the dollar value that's flowing through is high or is growing right now. This year certainly isn't
Speaker 1:Well, look at look at rate we just had Doug on from Radiant. Yeah. The two funds that led Yeah. Are not, to my knowledge, multibillion dollar funds, and yet he raised $300,000,000 that had to come from Yeah. Assuming that came almost entirely from SPVs.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, are are you seeing an uptick broadly? How does your firm have a view on SPVs?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think there there definitely, you know, seems to be both SPV activity as well as Nvidia, like large the hyperscalers, a lot more investment coming in from all sorts of other places. I think for us, we keep our fund size focused. Wanna be direct investors and long term partners for the companies we work with. But I do think, you know, I do think that's probably part of the story here too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think there's any are are funds losing, like, losing rounds to hyperscalers? Like, oh, yeah. I put it in a term sheet, they went with NVIDIA instead of me.
Speaker 6:I think usually these rounds are are kind of a combination of, you know, traditional Traditional plus. Venture firms and and some of the other folks. But obviously, people have different incentives in those arrangements, and so, you know, it can change change the pricing sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Jordan? What are you what are you expecting out of robotics broadly next year or maybe the next two years?
Speaker 6:Did you guys see the news from from physical intelligence today? It's actually pretty nuts. What yeah.
Speaker 1:I didn't I didn't see it.
Speaker 2:Break Sorry. Break it down for the audience.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So for those that didn't see, and I am not a robotics AI researcher to be clear, but I'll do my best to play that.
Speaker 1:But you guys are investors in physical intelligence. There
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 6:Let's ring the gongs. Exactly. Exactly. I love that. So what they basically what they basically showed is there's been this question for a long time of can you use, you know, egocentric human video data to improve robotics models?
Speaker 6:Because god, we have a lot of human video. What we don't have a lot of is teleoperated data and other data that's more difficult to gather for robotics. And so what they were able to show is that basically they they built these models already on know, they had this model pi point five that they built using a bunch of teleoperated data. And once the model got to a certain ability, they then threw a bunch of egocentric human video data at it, and it actually made the model way better. And this was what's called an emergent capability.
Speaker 6:This capability didn't happen when the model was way worse. And what's exciting about it is it kind of parallels actually a lot of what's happening in in reinforcement learning right now. After AlphaGo, there was this huge push to to do reinforcement learning for everything. Yeah. And it didn't really work because the base models weren't powerful enough.
Speaker 6:But then fast forward, we did this massive pre training. We got these much more powerful base models, and then reinforcement learning started working really well. And so it seems like as we're starting to scale some of these robotics models, we're starting to see some pretty cool effects of the ability to apply video data, which we have a lot more of.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:It's awesome.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Those guys Any any
Speaker 1:predictions around just like I feel like for people, you see stuff coming out of labs. It's really exciting. But for people to really start to, like, actually believe that robotics are gonna transform our entire world. Right? You have to, like, get zipline delivered to your house and have that, like, moment.
Speaker 1:Right? You have to be you have to be in a Waymo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone seems to be waiting for, like the touring test of robotics is, like, do my dishes. And and it's, like, it's unclear that that's going to be the first really big business in robotics. Like, it could be something else that comes out, but we already have the robot in the house. It's a vacuum cleaner.
Speaker 2:You know, a variety of companies have duked it out there, but, like, we we have some robotics that deliver some value, but we want something that's like the full humanoid. We'll probably accept the dishwasher robot in the interim with, like, one arm.
Speaker 6:I'll I'll definitely accept the dishwasher robot. Like, I'm here for that. The laundry robot, like, dishwasher
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Sounds sounds Dishwasher robot?
Speaker 1:I'll sell you a dishwasher. It's an AI dishwasher. I just $20. You want
Speaker 5:it? Yeah. Yeah. For
Speaker 6:for under my Christmas tree, I'll I'll take it. Yeah. Okay. But, no. I do think that, you know, basically, as these models get better, we'll start to see some pretty interesting probably to start in like, know, some of the enterprise use cases where you control the environments a bit more Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And it's less on the home side. But I think there's gonna be a ton of really interesting stuff people build on top of the models. To be clear, there still needs to be improvement in in the underlying models until we get there. But I think it's so clear everyone from the government to the largest companies in our economy are are are quite focused on robotics right now and and rightly so.
Speaker 2:Have you looked up have you looked at other AI hardware stuff? It there's this weird phenomenon happening where there's a lot of AI hardware companies that go viral, get tons of press, and then it doesn't seem like there's massive sales in the short term at least. And then we wound up finding some company that was just doing basically AI device for note taking. It just records and gives you the notes. It's a very simple, like, you know, you very I can explain you.
Speaker 2:You already know exactly what I'm talking about in terms of the product value prop, and they're making, like, a $100,000,000 in sales, maybe $2.50 or something already. Have you looked at that? Have you thought about how like the future like AI hardware plays out? Or is it scary because the big device companies like Apple might wanna just go after that and just eat that at some point?
Speaker 6:Well, think all all big markets, the big companies will wanna go after. Right? So nothing nothing I think that's the the price of it being really interesting. Sure. We're we're investors in a company called Sesame that is going after, you know, both
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Kind of
Speaker 6:the better voice models, but also like, you know, the the AI glasses world, and I think that it's interesting to see so many people coalesce on that as like the form factor for a bunch of these products going forward. And so I think that that is hugely exciting, and I would be really surprised in the next few years if there wasn't a much more prolific usage of hardware that has a bunch of these AI capabilities built into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. That's exciting stuff. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 1:The amount of glasses that are gonna be available in a few years is is wild. Probably gonna wear a Sesame, Snap
Speaker 2:I mean Apple. That's less than you walk into a sunglass hut. There's 25 brands. Why not 25 brands of electronic products?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. I I I just think it's exciting. It's gonna be very cool.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's gonna be pretty sweet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We we got the demo Monday of the new new the snap.
Speaker 2:Spectacles.
Speaker 1:Spectacles that are coming out next year that are dev only right now and we were running around everywhere here having having a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:I mean, the AR Are
Speaker 6:you guys gonna rock them on the show next year?
Speaker 2:The augmented reality is remarkable. They're really chunky. They're they're big. Like and and I I I've actually thought about this, like, like Well, no.
Speaker 1:The developer version is not what they're releasing this next year.
Speaker 2:But but I like, wearing augmented reality glasses, I mean, I guess I could have a screen. It's like I could kinda use this like a teleprompter. Like, I I I sometimes I will, like, text with the team on my laptop here. Oh, is the next guest, you know, on time, or do I need to hang out in this interview longer? Not to break the fourth wall here.
Speaker 2:But and I could imagine I could imagine glasses I hope
Speaker 6:you're not texting that directly right now.
Speaker 2:I'm not, but but Logan from Google is actually a few minutes late, so we can hang out here and chat. But and then maybe it would be fun to have a camera on there that you could feed into the show, so you could be like, let's go to the John cam. Because sometimes we go to the the Gong cam, imagine and if you could watch me hit the Gong in first person as Santa Claus, like, sounds like entertainment. Of course, I'm a sort of a niche use case or use sort of a niche a niche user, but I don't know. I just came up with two pretty cool use cases.
Speaker 2:I I I think it's gonna be a fun future.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think the fun part about this stuff, I mean, reminds me of the models. It's like you put it out in the world and you can't begin to imagine the way that people are gonna use it. Right? And I think that once you have a product that meets the aesthetic bar of something you'd actually wear, people are gonna use it in all sorts of ways that I'm sure anyone making these things couldn't possibly predict.
Speaker 6:In the same way that I love whenever the model companies release a model, it's like they have some idea, but they're always, day one, shocked at, like, all these, know, things that that work about it are ways people use it. They had no idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question. With with all the competition in the foundation model space, it does seem like there's a lot of startups that you've probably invested in that are spending a lot of money with the foundation labs. Have you seen that manifest in gross profits? There was a data point from Notion in The Wall Street Journal that their gross profits went from like 95% to 85% or something.
Speaker 2:It was like very slight gross margin compression, certainly not cause for concern. But have you do you feel like you have a view on what the impact of, you know, high usage LLM inference might be for growth stage software companies on gross margins?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think for the the thing that makes it challenging to to know where it all shakes out is just the price of these models changes so much every two, three months. It just keeps going down. And so if we stay on this treadmill of capability improvement, then maybe you're always paying for for the most cutting edge thing. But I do think that for anything that one of our companies was doing six months ago, it's gotten 10 times cheaper.
Speaker 6:Now they may be doing a whole new set of things as well, but take any set of capabilities. I think the gross margin for that set of capabilities will end up being, you know, being pretty good just given the competition that exists in the foundation model space and just the insane rate at which this stuff keeps getting cheaper. And we're gonna see the same stuff happen in video, in other spaces, and I think that'll be incredibly exciting too for for folks building on top.
Speaker 2:That's good to hear. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 6:Super fun. For having me. Super fun. With Logan. He's the best.
Speaker 2:Guy. Yeah. We're gonna have a great time. Well, have a great rest of your day, and we will talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great. Great hanging out. Sounds good. Good.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:See you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.
Speaker 2:Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.
Speaker 1:I had
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 1:kind of a brutal night.
Speaker 2:Do you have a rough night? That's too bad. I'm sorry. Well, maybe you'll need
Speaker 1:to Sixty three, four hours.
Speaker 2:Need to book a wander in the meantime. Book a wander Do for hotel grooming, hotel great amenities, dream beds top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:I forgot to Jacob better. What he felt is inappropriate. Tip, founders end of year Yes. Little holiday tip.
Speaker 2:We didn't ask Sarah either. I got an 89. So let's go.
Speaker 4:Wow. I have some breaking news.
Speaker 5:Breaking news.
Speaker 4:Jared Isaacman confirmed What? Senate. Go.
Speaker 2:You have to be online.
Speaker 7:Friendly brain together.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm I'm very excited. You know, whether the data centers go to space or not, there's obviously a lot of interesting and important things to be done in space and very, very excited to have
Speaker 1:He's that guy.
Speaker 2:Leadership in the position in the
Speaker 1:seat. Guy.
Speaker 2:Hopefully doing some cool stuff.
Speaker 1:You know who else is that guy?
Speaker 2:Logan Kilpatrick from Google? Of course. He's in the restroom waiting room, and now he's in the TVP And Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Logan, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:He's that guy, pal.
Speaker 5:Hey, guys. Happy holidays.
Speaker 2:Happy holidays. I love the background.
Speaker 5:The UAV online is incredible.
Speaker 2:Well, we have we have Christmas themed ones now, so there's play the drummer boy one.
Speaker 1:Hostile drummer boy on your six.
Speaker 2:Hostile drummer boy on your six. That's a good one. The team had fun with that. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Please, everyone knows who you are right here, but take us through the news today.
Speaker 2:Gemini three flash, what are the highlights? How how are you positioning the communication around that particular launch?
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. It's a great question, and thank you again for for having me on. Of course. I mean, I three flash is the most capable model, I think, along a bunch of dimensions that we've shipped before.
Speaker 5:And it's also just this model that is gonna bring intelligence to everyone, which is the exciting thing. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like I
Speaker 5:that feel is we need to do this for Gemini launches is we should get I'm gonna get a Gong for the office and
Speaker 2:we'll be launching.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll help you out. We've we know all the suppliers and It's we we get bulk pricing.
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This we're help you guys out.
Speaker 2:We can
Speaker 5:get etched etched Gong for the office when we launch would be perfect. No. But I think the model is incredible, and I think it builds on the momentum from three pro, which is really exciting. But and it's actually the crazy thing is it's actually better than three pro at some dimensions,
Speaker 2:which wild. At this. I'm looking at the model card. It it it outperforms on ArcGI two, which is, like, my personal favorite benchmark. We love the team over at Arc AGI.
Speaker 2:And somehow the flash model outperforms the pro model. It like, I would I'd be very interested what the thesis on that. Is it like, Gemini three Pro was overthinking it? Is that what's going on?
Speaker 1:We also did our own bench, shrimp bench.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 1:Shrimp bench went very well. Had, it it came up with, supposed
Speaker 2:to think of you're supposed to think of jokes that have the same format as you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice.
Speaker 1:So shrimp fried rice snap, it said, you're telling me a ginger snap this cookie.
Speaker 2:It's pretty good. Pretty good. It's it's funny. We're we're loving it.
Speaker 1:Not all the some of the models absolutely fall on
Speaker 2:their face that
Speaker 1:are that are that are quite smart. So it's it's a good it's a good, benchmark, sir.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Really quick, though. Like, the reason Flash is so much better like, there's a very pointed answer on this. Not that it's so much better.
Speaker 2:It is in certain places.
Speaker 5:Some places, it's a little bit better, and this is because the model is a little bit smaller. So they'll, like, iterate like, we're able to do a little bit more iteration.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And it has, like, a slightly updated, like, post training recipe versus the pro model, and this is just because of the timing. So, like, we finished pro and finished some of the training, like, probably a little bit more than a month ago. So, like, just within the last month, have, like, made a bunch of innovation on the research side. It makes it into the smaller model just because of, like, the timing and the release process.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But so you'll you'll see some of that. So there's no, like, specials, you know, silver bullet behind the scenes of making this possible. It's just, like, literally time. And with enough time, we can keep making, even better and better models, which is exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about the like, I I feel like the Gemini team is very, very good about offering, different models at the along the Pareto frontier, not not over fixating on a particular benchmark, but delivering a high quality product at each incremental price or the best product for a given price. Do you envision like the left and right bound expanding further? Is there like a nano coming, something even cheaper, even smaller, even more compressed? How do you think about offering a product from the same sort of API structure but at, you know, an even cheaper price.
Speaker 2:Is that something that's coming?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. So we're we're working hard on this. So the flash or the sort of three model family historically or 2.5 model family historically has been pro flash, flashlight, which is the smallest model. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And then I think I don't know if we still call it nano or not, but nano is our on device model just like the the smallest model.
Speaker 2:So we
Speaker 5:will hopefully have a flashlight model early next year. Yep. It it takes time to sort of trickle the innovation through, and, it's the holidays are busy.
Speaker 2:Joking with with, with with Jordy because Nano Banana, the the code name sort of leaked into, like, the public consciousness just because it was exciting as great model. And so people figured it out. Nano banana. But it but it but it implies the existence of just a normal banana or banana pro or a mega banana or gigabanana. And so we want the gigabanana.
Speaker 2:We want the full image, the the the even bigger model, the biggest the biggest possible model. But, of course
Speaker 5:Nana banana pro is your giga banana. We actually thought about calling it giga giga banana.
Speaker 2:Giga banana.
Speaker 5:You did. Wasn't as catchy as nano banana.
Speaker 2:Nano banana already has its own brand, so you kinda gotta just run with that. Like, you got the bird in the hand, just run with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe getting a little bit more specific, how how have conversations been going with with startups that are leveraging kind of the suite of models? Sure. Like, what where's where's where are people most excited in terms of actually implementing them?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think the cool thing and this is, hasn't been unique to this launch, but I think the cool thing is that for 2.5 pro customers who are paying, I think it's, like, between a dollar 25 and $2.50 per million input tokens and then, like, 10 to $12 per million output tokens.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:It this model is actually almost across the board completely. Three flash better than 2.5 pro. So, like, if you're a startup and you were, like, 2.5 pro was the model that which for meant, like, literally tens to hundreds of thousands of customers in production right now. This is the case for them. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're able to sort of migrate over to this new model and, like, out of the box cost saving, their product just gets faster. And I was talking to someone earlier today and, like, the fact that two years ago, this, like, narrative of being a model wrapper was, like, a sort of, like, bad idea. And then now I think about this for our team, actually. Like, we have APIs for developers to build with, but we're also building a vibe coding product in AI Studio.
Speaker 5:And, like, the vibe coding product, we ran the, like, silent test behind the scenes, and it was, like, just with Reflash actually because of how much faster it was, and it was, like, reasonably the same quality as three Pro. Retention went up. The number of things people were building went up. Engagement went up, and it was, like, free. We didn't have to do anything.
Speaker 5:We literally just changed the model in the drop down. It's actually cheaper for us to run that. And, like, as a product builder, I don't think there's been a time in, like, human history of building startups where, like, you just get to show up one morning, somebody made your product 40% better and saved you 50%. Like, the Yeah. The analogy is,
Speaker 1:like, if you make something 40% better, you're, like, get ready to pay 50% more. You know?
Speaker 5:Exact exactly. So it's it's crazy. I I think it's like that that continues to get me just, like, in the fiber of my being so excited about what startups are able to go after. And, yeah, it's it's a great moment. So, hopefully hopefully, folks get a chance to adopt.
Speaker 5:And then I think the next thing that I'm excited about is, like, taking these these two models, Flash and Pro, now become, like, the default models to build on top of for our other, like, custom variants and, like, the the image generation is one example of this. But, also, we have text to speech models and live audio models and a bunch of other stuff in the works, computer use models, and they all sort of rebase onto this new thing. And then, again, by default, just, like, get better out of the box, which is really, really cool. So I think you'll see the not just, you know, coding and all these other agentic capabilities, multimodal that we've showed with this specific three Flash based model, but you'll see this across pretty much every other dimension as all those more bespoke checkpoints rebase to these new three Flash and three Pro variants.
Speaker 1:What's going on with the agent builder that, that that you got did you roll it out last week? I'm losing I'm losing track of time. But
Speaker 5:In in Google workplace?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I know it's I know it's outside of your kind of, like, key territory, but, I would I would love to kind of hear why what what's exciting about it to you.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think and and so what I mean, truthfully and I'll I'll give you my very candid take, which is I've been I was trying the version of that product for probably and I tweeted this out probably, like, three months before it came out. And the part that was most the reason I loved it so much is because inside of Google, like, you know, we can't just use random start up products. Like, there's, like, a very rigorous process in order of, like, what software are we actually using as Google employees. And so this, like, whole grown solution for me to be able to, like, have an agent builder and, like, connect all my stuff up and build workflows and all these things, like, really is the AI product that I get to use on a daily basis.
Speaker 5:So, like, I it is exceptionally important that it's world class and that it, like, pushes the frontier and that it's actually good because I I don't get the sort of free market of options. I can't just go and choose between any one of a 100 AI startups who are providing something similar to this. And for what it's worth, I I get those in my personal life, which is awesome, but I don't get those in my work life. I feel like it's, like, sort of hit the mark of where I wanted it to be. Like, I really do get genuine product utility.
Speaker 5:And as somebody who my email is out on the Internet, you can email me lkalpatrick@google.com. I get many, many emails. It is helpful to, like, have a system. I still respond to all of them manually humanly, but it is nice to have some sort of, like, filtering mechanisms and then sort of separate my external stuff from my internal stuff. And it's and also hook up to the rest of my Google information.
Speaker 5:It's awesome. So I'm a huge fan, and it's also just chapter one of this, like, AI native workspace story, and I think you'll see this across other Google product services. I don't know if y'all have had Robbie Stein on who leads AI product for search. No. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We I think we did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We did. I think we did. That's right.
Speaker 5:Robbie's the man. I I love Robbie. He he we talked probably six months ago about he he was telling me this story, and it was a story at the time of, like, how search was becoming this frontier AI product, and I, sort of had to extend disbelief a little bit. And I think now you sort of see this with AI. Like, AI mode is crushing it.
Speaker 5:Like, it really is like a just as competitive frontier AI product as a lot of the other ones that are out in the market, and it's, like, at search scale, which is crazy. So they're doing a great job, and I think Workspace is gonna go through that same arc where it's like they're gonna become a frontier AI product, which is great for the, you know, billion plus users who are using Workspace.
Speaker 1:Anything any shipping again this year, or you're gonna give everyone a break? Let people Mhmm. Let the other labs rest.
Speaker 5:Offline starting next Monday. So we've got a we've got a couple more things in the pipeline the rest of this week, which I'm excited about, and then people really will be offline. It is the the blissful last part of the year where people actually take time off and relax, and then the road map for January is gonna be ridiculous. So
Speaker 2:You should try and get a massive company wide secret Santa going. It's it's like a thousand
Speaker 5:One more pitch for both of you. I've been pushing for the blimp. So don't worry. I'm having a conversation behind scene.
Speaker 2:For the blimp. It's time to blimp. It's time
Speaker 1:to blimp.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Feel gonna be a blimp coming.
Speaker 2:It's in I'm not gonna say goose DNA. I I feel like I'm
Speaker 5:gonna say who's involved, but we've got we've got some people involved. So
Speaker 2:we'll I love this. See what happens.
Speaker 1:We would be we'd be Twenty twenty six static. TVPN live from the air. Christmas gift for us. Yeah. That'd be incredible.
Speaker 2:Anyway
Speaker 1:What a what a year. You and the team should be incredibly proud, and we've loved every conversation. So thank you for being a part of this. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm glad we'll be off when you guys are off so we can all
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I expect what some someone out there to be like, we're launching something on Christmas Eve. Yeah. Because everybody's but Imagine. Anyways But we'll cover it when we're back in January. Awesome.
Speaker 2:But thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. You a Have a great rest of
Speaker 5:Cheers, Logan. Christmas. Happy holidays.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow. Six. Goodbye. One last. If you if you don't if you don't have access to a blimp and you wanna run a billboard ad, you go to adquick.com.
Speaker 2:Out of home measure out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy,
Speaker 1:and make We need some David Senra buy David Senra billboards. Yeah. When's the billboard? Million dollar ad buy.
Speaker 2:We have David Senra in the studio in the TVPN UltraDome. We're gonna bring him down. We'll talk to him about podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on media.
Speaker 2:No. You know what I wanna talk to you about first? We've beat the story to death about a few days ago. This Wall Street Journal article went viral on how all tech companies are trying to hire storytellers. And I want your unfiltered thoughts on on storytellers and and entrepreneurship and whether storytellers can be bought or or they merely exist.
Speaker 2:I I think the read just to set the table was that so basically, there are a number of jobs that have popped up in Silicon Valley, $250,000 for someone whose job title is just storyteller. And that feels very broad because is that a copywriter? Is that someone who buys ads? What what are they doing?
Speaker 1:You think it's important for a founder to be good at telling stories?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:I'm just kidding. I'm
Speaker 1:just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2:Well, take us through Well,
Speaker 1:and and so my my take was like the best storytellers are just not for hire because they're running companies.
Speaker 3:Right? I mean, who do you think is the best storyteller or salesman alive today?
Speaker 2:Probably Elon.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And before him? Jobs. There you go. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:very important.
Speaker 2:Steve Jobs.
Speaker 3:There's a great quote from Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, who talked about this. And I actually put it in my ads for one of my partners.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And he's like, the art of storytelling is critically important. Most entrepreneurs that come to us can't tell a story. Mhmm. And that learning to tell a story is really important because money flows as a function of the stories. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, yeah. I don't know. I I didn't read the article. I don't read any of that shit. But I do but I do listen to you guys and I heard you go over it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think, like, Vanta was one of them trying to hire.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, like, I I think, yeah, they were one of my big partners. Like, they pay a lot more than $250,000, and I think I'm just, like, the person that needs to tell that story. I think, like, that's the yeah. I think, like, the obviously, Christina's really good from a founder level.
Speaker 3:But even if you don't have, like, the Elon very few people have the Elon or the the the Sure. The Steve Jobs skill set. And so I think, like, we've talked about this over and over again. And, like, you just partner with the people that are able to tell that story.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Like, let me give you example. Mr. Beast texted me, like, two days ago. He's like, look up my Spotify wrap. And number one was the it was Founders Podcast.
Speaker 3:Sure. I wanna talk about the new show, not Founders,
Speaker 2:but Sure.
Speaker 3:So we'll get to that in minute. But he we're in a group chat. It's me, him, and all the founders of
Speaker 1:Ramp. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And his whole thing was, like, he didn't know what Ramp was. He he texted this to Kareem and Eric, and he's like, now we've switched over my company to Ramp because, like, I feel like I know every single thing that's going on inside Ramp because I get a minute or two minute update every week from David.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you
Speaker 3:listen to my Ramp ads, it's not like this is, you know, it's just corporate cards.
Speaker 2:It's not the same every time. It's how You're digging into different pieces of it.
Speaker 3:It's not that it's not the same every time because I think actually repetition is persuasive. I have three or four versions and I repeat them over and over again. Oh. But and I, as you guys know, have a multi year partnership.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So but his point was just like Oh, fair.
Speaker 1:It's more than a partnership.
Speaker 3:So his you should see the shirt I have underneath this hoodie. Yeah. It's Ramp. So the point that he was telling them, it's like he now knows how Eric, the CEO, thinks. He knows how Kareem, the co founder and CTO CTO thinks.
Speaker 3:He knows their hiring practices. Like, my ads are just stories about ramp, not and if you pay attention to them, then you're like, oh, like, I wanna work with a company that takes this that seriously, that does 300 different updates to their product on a yearly basis, that's nearly impossible to get hired as an engineer, that is trying to lead from the very front in AI. Mhmm. And, you know, these are very effective storytellers to the point that those ads converted the biggest creator on in the world to use your product. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I think that's what companies should doing. Paying somebody $250, maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 2:How how structural do you think storytelling should be? Because I I really like systems thinking. I like I like systems and processes. So when I think about telling a story, I actually do think about a three act structure. I think about who's the protagonist?
Speaker 2:What's the antagonist? Like, I can map it out out of a piece of paper.
Speaker 3:I know. This is what What
Speaker 2:are thinking?
Speaker 3:Your YouTube days.
Speaker 2:Yes. Exactly. No. I literally think that This is how I met. Studied I studied the books on it and I studied and I created like structure on it.
Speaker 2:There are other people that are much less structural. But when you when you are trying to like, when I tell the story of a founder on a YouTube video essay, I would literally map their journey to a beginning, middle, and end, and act one and act two and act three. What happens at the end of act one? You're crossing into the unknown. What happens to
Speaker 3:You're describing the oldest story there is.
Speaker 2:Of course. The hero's journey. Yes. Hero's journey.
Speaker 3:I may be trying not to the
Speaker 2:horror to the hero's journey. Do you think about that when you are constructing an interview for David Senra, your new show? Are you trying to start with let's do the early life and then at at one third or or, you know, twenty minutes into the interview, I'm gonna try and get you into the tell me about the crossing of the unknown. Okay. Then how are you structuring the episodes if not following a heresy am just
Speaker 3:like, the way I think about my work is very simple.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I think it's really important because there's this great line from Munger where he's just like, know, the rarest of all things is to keep things simple and remember what you set out to do. Mhmm. Right? The value in what I do is that I'm gonna be doing very similar things now. I was doing it ten years ago.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I'm gonna be doing it ten years from now. Yes. That is the value. It's in the compounding nature of it.
Speaker 3:So the way I try to keep remember to keep things simple is Founders is the books that I'm intensely interested in reading
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And the new show is who am I intensely interested in speaking to?
Speaker 2:In talking to.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yes. There have been multibillionaire public company CEOs that asked to be on the show, and I started doing research about them. Was like, I don't want to spend any time with this guy. Like, I'm just not interested in talking to him at all.
Speaker 3:And me and Rob, my partner some partners are Angie Heumann and Rob Moore on the new show. And, you know, Rob kind of pushes back sometimes, he's just like, I just don't want talk to him. What do want me to tell you? And, you know, he's like, this is actually good that you would say no to somebody like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't think of things in in like, obviously, the hero's journey. If you listen to founders, like, that is essentially, that is what I'm doing over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that comes naturally to me. I don't think of things in structure. I'm just very almost everything for me is like, I can I'm intensely interested in what I'm working on. Yeah. I consume I try to consume more information about that subject subject matter than anybody else in the world.
Speaker 3:And then I just go straight off intuition.
Speaker 2:I just wonder if
Speaker 1:I think one one thing about that.
Speaker 2:Intuition will develop a structure. I don't know. I I think that might
Speaker 3:sound don't know. Listen to the podcast. I mean, you see a structure there?
Speaker 2:I will you're how many episodes in?
Speaker 3:Six.
Speaker 2:Six. Like, I would assume that in a decade, I will be able to somewhat predict a structure. And you won't need to ever sit down and map out, I'm gonna ask this question before this question. 'll just come to you naturally. But that intuition will happen and it will make sense.
Speaker 2:But you will know the rules and also know when to break them. So it won't like, there are stories that are told in four acts. There are stories that are told in five acts. There there are stories that don't map perfectly onto the hero's journey because it's actually a love story or it's actually, you know, some other structure of story.
Speaker 3:I think storytelling is downstream from interest. So I heard Jordy said something that I think is dead right. It's like you you guys are using the term storyteller when it's really like you're talking about like copywriter. Right? And what I would do is I'd go back and study this guy named Claude Hopkins.
Speaker 3:Can one of the guys check? I think it's episode one seventy of Founders. Mhmm. And he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I found him because I read not only, you know
Speaker 1:It is January. A life in advertising.
Speaker 3:When did I do that?
Speaker 1:How how long ago was that? March 2021. Okay.
Speaker 2:So 2021.
Speaker 3:This is my point. It's just like Unmarkable. Intensely interested in what you're doing, and then and then just try to collect as much information as possible. So essentially, the I found this guy named David Ogrevy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Then he would write about every single person that you're interested in will tell you who influenced them. And this guy wrote this is Claude Hopkins, probably the greatest copywriter to live, and he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. That, I'm pretty sure if you buy his autobiography on Kindle, you get my life in advertising, and in the end you get Scientific Advertising for free. But I think every single person on the planet should read Scientific Advertising because Claude Hopkins worked for this guy named Albert Lasker. Albert Lasker built he made more money as an advertising agency founder than anybody else in history.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And all he did essentially cut away all the fat. He didn't have an art department, didn't have a research department. He had two of the best copywriters, and their words made the cash register ring. And inside That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:It's like it's such an elite skill set. Like using using only your words, you can you can get the you can ban the world.
Speaker 3:But you have this is the amount of you have to, one, be intensely interested in the subject, and two, you have to be willing to do an insane amount of work.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. In Well, that was why that was why sorry sorry to interrupt you. No. When when the point you brought up earlier the point you brought up earlier, like, if I'm trying to hire a storyteller, I wanna hire the
Speaker 3:He wrote Scientific Advertising. Albert Lasker reads it. He's like, this is our trade secrets. This is why I'm so rich. Like, it's going in the safe.
Speaker 3:He literally locked the manuscript in a safe for twenty years. Then when he retired, he let Claude Hopkins publish it and wind up selling eight or 10 or 12,000,000 copies.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:And so but when you go into there, Claude Hopkins let me give you an example. And this is something I think I do really good on the podcast ads. It's like talking about the story behind how the product is made. Mhmm. And so there was this beer at the time.
Speaker 3:Was like Schlitz beer or something like that. It was like fifth market share. Yeah. And so they hire Claude Hopkins. He goes and visits him.
Speaker 3:He visits their distillery. He interviews all the top founders, the founders of the company, the executives. He spends an insane amount of time with it. And then he goes, hey, you have this remarkable brewing process that is fascinating with all these machines and this technology. Like, I drank your beer, but I didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 3:Why didn't you tell that story? And their whole point was, but our process isn't different from any other beer company. He's like, yeah, but no other beer company is telling the story. All he did was tell in text of like a 2,000, 3,000 words Yeah. The story behind how the product is made.
Speaker 3:This when you when you hear a Founders episode or the new show, like, the James Dyson episode just came out. It was one of the best days of my entire life to be able to spend several hours with him. The amount of fucking people am I gonna get you in trouble on the stream cursing?
Speaker 1:No. No. It's fine. It's fine. There's there's one listener that that takes issue with it.
Speaker 1:Tell me how doesn't like the swearing.
Speaker 3:Okay. I apologize.
Speaker 1:David has a potty mouth. But it's it's you. It's you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:The that's funny. The now I lost oh, the amount of people that sent me messages after that podcast or the other podcast have been made on him Mhmm. That now because I understand who the person is and what went into building the product, like I went and bought his hair dryer or his vacuum cleaner. Works Yeah. For everything.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yes. I Yeah. It's interesting. We every that that the style of advertisement, which was like you had a page of a magazine and you had basically an opportunity to put us a picture and then a block of text, it kind of, like, comes back in fat it's constantly, like, coming back in fashion. And I think the reason for it, even though it's not, like, the most native format for the Internet, it's it's because when companies sit down and they're like, how do we sell our product in a short paragraph?
Speaker 1:Oftentimes, companies never do that. Right? The modern ad you the modern way that you communicate is like you have a big website. Somebody has to scroll all over the website to really be sold on something or you have an ad that's like targeting different things or different value props. So when you just sit down and write one paragraph of exactly why somebody should care about your product and why they should purchase it, it's just extremely effective.
Speaker 3:Ramp's doing this with Harry Dry. Have you ever paid attention to Harry Dry's Twitter feed? Do you know who that is? No. Fantastic copywriter out of Europe.
Speaker 3:I think he's might be in England. Mhmm. And he's worked with Eric Hand in Hand, and they've done a couple, you know, and and it's posted, if I'm not mistaken, on, like, Eric's Twitter feed. It's like, that is still a very effective ad unit.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So to answer your question, I don't know. Like, yes, telling your story is a good idea. Like, the founder should do as much as possible, then the founder should be really teaching how they think about their business. I I always like Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, has this great, this great quote where he's like, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your And his whole point is like, the direction's coming from you. You talk about this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing, this is how we do it, you repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again.
Speaker 3:And, you know, people are oh, yeah, but Jim Senegal, know, he's running Costco, it's not a tech company. Well, go re go watch, the episode I did, How Elon Works. And in that, I just break down, I separate everything that has nothing to do with how other than how Elon works and this four step algorithm. He got to the point where he's like he says in the book, I repeated it so much that the executives are sitting in the meeting would mouth the next word that's coming out of my mouth. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Speaker 1:Dave Portnoy did this today. He he had this announcement video. I'm so And it looks like very unprofessional in the way that it's shot. It's clearly shot in an iPhone. He's standing in front of Glass, and he's just kind of like rambling, but he's just going Netflix.
Speaker 1:He he said it like 15 times because they were announcing a deal. A bunch of Barstool podcasts are going on Netflix. He's just like, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. And like, just immediately like, it doesn't look
Speaker 2:You wanna listen to the part of my you wanna watch part of my take? Netflix. You wanna watch Spinning Chiclets? Netflix. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He just keeps saying Netflix. It was very,
Speaker 1:very effective. On on repetition, something that I've appreciated about our relationship is I feel like when we all get together, it's almost the same conversation every single time. And you think you'd get bored of it, but because we're extremely obsessed and focused, it's like it's actually helpful in that, like, we're remembering, like, why we do this, why why why we make the decisions that we make, and almost just constantly reminding ourselves. And I think that's very helpful of not we talked about how we're thinking about next. Somebody asked us what our this the Emily Sundberg?
Speaker 1:Yeah. She asked that.
Speaker 3:You read that exact quote? I thought it was really good.
Speaker 2:Oh, were supposed to it's in the show notes, I think, today or yesterday, but
Speaker 1:I'll pull it up. Our 2026 resolution is to lock in. We had a great 2025, and it opened up a lot of amazing and fun opportunities. But the most contrarian thing we think we can do the next year is simply double down on the core show itself. That means having to say no to anything that doesn't improve the show directly.
Speaker 1:No fun, no products, no world tour, Just three hours of talking about tech and business at 11AM every weekday.
Speaker 2:The world tour was my little sneaky joke because what is a world tour? Isn't there that whole meme of like, it's gonna ruin the world tour?
Speaker 1:Well, we we did we I mean, we are we had an opportunity to go to Switzerland. Oh, guess that's that down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess we've had a couple like world tour not not full tour, but like trip international trips.
Speaker 1:But if we were to go to Europe, it'd turn into a tour.
Speaker 2:It may be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's possible. If went to The Middle East, it'd turn into a tour. Sure. You know, you're going all the way over there.
Speaker 2:Maybe that happens, but not next year. We're locking in next year. The interesting thing is that friend of the show, Bryce, said that the he he was he was sort of like framing it as like these guys have realized that like media can be a better Roberts? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He he texted me yesterday Yeah. And asked for advice on this format of a new podcast. I was like, I'm not watching that. I won't say what it is though.
Speaker 1:I don't even think it it's not that it's a better business.
Speaker 2:This It's
Speaker 1:just a better business for us.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So so obviously, like, no no shade here. But, it it it is just like, you know, the founder market fit.
Speaker 2:Like, it is ridiculous to say that media is a better business than asset management. Like, that's just not true. Look at the Ford 400. There yeah. Like, it's it's it's all industrialists or asset managers.
Speaker 2:There are very, very few media figures that actually are in the 100,000,000,000 plus club. It just doesn't happen. But can you be hugely successful? Absolutely. Can you be very happy?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Is it a better fit for us? Absolutely. And so I would
Speaker 1:not Yeah. Could I could have
Speaker 2:a leave and pivot
Speaker 1:I consider Makes sense. I I enjoy investing in startups. Mhmm. I always have. I've invested in probably every every few months I gotta add another 10.
Speaker 1:Sure. But yeah, some over 60 companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I last year wandering in the wilderness trying to figure out how I wanted to spend my life, I considered that.
Speaker 2:Like a
Speaker 1:fund Yeah, that or join a fund. I think like being a solo GP is maybe overrated in a bunch of ways.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 1:would be 10% as happy or fulfilled doing that even though there's a career to be built. Cheers. The Europeans side. I wanted to talk ask you about
Speaker 3:question one second. Wanna go back to what you just said about like the the the conversations being very similar and and Yeah. Repeatable. I just did this episode on Bruce Springsteen, which I was like very unsure if I was gonna put I recorded for, like, three hours. I edited it down to, like, one hour and, like, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 3:It's the most unusual, episode of Founders that I've probably ever done. The amount of people that have now text or sent me messages that, like, they're crying during it has been, like, shocking. It wasn't it turned out I thought I was making a podcast on, you know, somebody had one of the most extreme work ethics that I've ever heard of. That's that was my introduction to him. I didn't know wasn't like a Bruce Springsteen fan.
Speaker 3:I'm a huge Jimmy Ivein fan who's
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Really, like, almost like best friends of Bruce. And, you know, he says, one of the hardest working, like, most extreme people ever. And it wind up, you know, taking a a very the second half of the book is pretty crazy where you have this guy that, like, essentially gets everything that he thought he wanted and try almost kills himself. And, like, what happened there? Why is he doing that?
Speaker 3:And then how did he he was 34 when that's happening. He's almost 80 now. He looks phenomenal, by the way. It's like, what happened there, and how did he actually get what he he had he mistake he was mistaken on what he thought he wanted. Once he got what he wanted, it's not what he wanted.
Speaker 3:He realized what he actually wanted
Speaker 2:It was a sports car.
Speaker 3:But he was no. But he was in but he was incapable of getting that and then he figured out a way. I think the the episode title was like Bruce thought
Speaker 1:he wanted a GT3 RS, but he really wanted a Renz part.
Speaker 2:Is that the one that
Speaker 6:you said I should
Speaker 2:drive? I
Speaker 1:always tell you to get the most insane
Speaker 3:But this is the point.
Speaker 1:There's It's so funny. David, you were you you were like, oh, if I wanted to if I would have like wanted to buy a Ferrari, it would be this one. Was a $8.12 comp. $8.12 comp. For like a there's just a car to keep in California.
Speaker 1:I was like, that's so you to just pick like the most elite car
Speaker 2:History's greatest cars. The spin off. What are we getting car reviews out
Speaker 3:of Well, hold on. There's a line in Bruce's autobiography that I don't even think I put in the episode that I thought was interesting. He's like, people don't come to my shows to learn something new. They come to be reminded about what they already know is true.
Speaker 2:Oh. That is great. I love that.
Speaker 3:Wow. And I think if you look at again, I think of founders Yeah. As like church for entrepreneurs. Yeah. I think a lot of that.
Speaker 3:It's like, dude
Speaker 2:don't think about it. Yeah. Like, what they do, the like, the the rhythm Yeah. And the repetition as like that, that's very interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I do I think think, again, my natural instincts is fewer deeper. Yeah. So it's like, I talk to the same people over and over again. I don't like, there's another line in in the autobiography.
Speaker 3:He's like, I'm fairly insular by nature. I don't let new people into my life casually. I feel the exact same way. Mhmm. And so I I do feel the best the best things in life, all of them, are come from compounding.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Whether it's relationships, money, knowledge, everything comes from compounding. So my instinct is to just go and have the same conversations with, you know, the fewer deeper people that I actually trust. And then Yeah. You meet remarkable people and you add very slowly.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think about that. The opportunity cost of having a dinner with somebody that we've never met versus just hanging out and having my favorite conversation, which is the same one we always have. The other thing about I would say the difference Like, the quote you just gave around going to a show to remember what you already know. Think about when I discovered Founders, one of the most powerful things was learning that certain elements of myself were okay.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not the most organized person. Right? And so to hear that other people that have gone on to do great things, like, some of them are hyper organized, like, you know, like incredibly dialed and others are just like chaotic and Mhmm. It's actually learning like what's actually okay is, I feel like, extremely powerful.
Speaker 3:You're we we are listen, we may be like a small percentage of the overall human population, but we are not unique. There have been people that have our same experiences, think the same way that we are, have our same natural intelligence, talent, everything else. And it's just like, it's foolish not to to to utilize, like, their experience and knowledge for your own benefit on how to build a life
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Not a fucking business.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:A life. That was one of the craziest things, realizations that Bruce Springsteen has in this in this episode where he's like, I thought I was building, like, work. I wanna be a rock star. I wanna do all this other stuff. He's just like, I got that and I have a shitty life.
Speaker 3:How do I fix my life? And for
Speaker 9:him to go through that was,
Speaker 3:you know, a pretty intense, like, And I think that's why and then his dad I don't wanna talk too much about this, but, like, you know, he had one of the worst dads that you could possibly have. His dad was a misanthrope, had no friends, alcoholic, beat the shit out of Bruce. I think he said in his entire childhood, his dad said less than a thousand words to him. Wow. And then later on, he gets diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and the amount of messages there are just like the part about his dad is like that hits way too close to home.
Speaker 3:It's exact like, why? Because there's people out there that have had that same experience too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is your favorite book that is not a biography? Really hard. Right?
Speaker 3:Favorite book that's not a biography?
Speaker 2:So examples would be like, you know, 1929 doesn't really have a Breakneck by Dan Wang. We we
Speaker 3:I'm not reading anything new.
Speaker 2:No. I know. I'm just giving examples like I'm just looking through what I've read recently and there's a lot of books that are that I would imagine that it would be very hard to make a Founders episode about a mean, certainly a work of fiction.
Speaker 3:No. I think I can make a great about any book that I really enjoyed. Like I did last year, did Haruki Murakami's What I Think About When I Think About Running.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:And I remember I was in Malibu. This is why I spent so much time out here because I really do believe I do my best work out here. There is something very, very special about this place. About Hollywood or Malibu? No.
Speaker 3:Not Malibu. Hollywood, I come because I love you guys. Mhmm. I was whipping through the mountains just now, by the way. That's great.
Speaker 3:I was like, gotta slow down. This is not a good idea. So I started reading that. I got this idea from Elon and he's like, you know, he wants to read more books and he realizes like carrying books with him is difficult, so sometimes he would just read entire books on the Kindle app on his iPhone. And I I started reading I forgot how even how I discovered this.
Speaker 3:I because I didn't know who who Ricky Murakami was before this. I started reading it, and I think I've read the whole entire book on my phone in like a day and a half. Mhmm. And then I was like, this isn't really a Founders episode. This is kind of weird.
Speaker 3:And I'm like, no. The the fact that you couldn't put this down means that it is a Founders episode. You are going to make an episode about it. And then the response, because you're so intentionally interested and you can transfer your interest to podcasting industry energy transmission for some of us, you're able to transfer that enthusiasm, that passion for this guy's ideas and life to the audience. So I think I can make it on any book that I'm intensely interested in, like I've been rereading Freedom's Forge.
Speaker 3:Right? I mean, I could make the episode on just Bill Knutson.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bill Knutson.
Speaker 3:But I think telling the whole story of the fact that in the nineteen forties, The United States, they took what was this hugely sophisticated manufacturing base that was just applied to consumer products and on a dime turned it and started producing the most war material than any other country in the world. How they did that is a very fascinating story. But to answer your question, favorite book that is not
Speaker 7:It's a so biopic? Interesting
Speaker 2:because I I would never put Freedom's Forge in the pipeline of Founders episodes. And yet, I would 100% listen to a Founders episode on Freedom Forge, which is like unmet demand or unknown demand.
Speaker 3:I don't wanna talk too much podcasting because you know, like, I I will not shut up about this. But like, I think one of the most important parts of like, if you're going to do this for a long term Yeah. Long term. And like, there's another thing that Bruce Springsteen, I think, was very smart. He noticed, he just like observed his industry.
Speaker 3:He's like, this industry is very transient. There's a person that has a hit song, maybe a hit album, maybe two hit albums, but like then they they either get on drugs Longevity is They die I think there's what is it? The 27, all these young musicians die. He's like, I was built for durability and longevity. Interesting.
Speaker 3:And so he worked backwards from like, what are these people doing? And how do I just avoid it's very Munger esque, Charlie Munger esque. Invert, always invert. And so with with podcasting, you think about that a a lot. I can't say who this was.
Speaker 3:And Rob I shouldn't even say this. Rob put me across from like a I I would consider him like a legacy podcaster.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And he did this at dinner. Think he did this on purpose because he knows like what's gonna happen. Mhmm. And I just started asking him questions about like his show and like how and he came up in podcasting when like it could be your second, third, fourth, fifth thing that you were doing, which is like those days are done. And I remember I didn't even eat that night, I think.
Speaker 3:Was pounding my chopsticks on the table because his answers were like, You're not going make it, man. You're already dead. This isn't going to work. So the point of being here is if you're going to do this long term, I think you have to show the audience who you truly are, and therefore they will over time I think people came to Founders because it was the books and the biographies, and over time they're just like, whatever this guy thinks is interesting to read, I just wanna hear his insight or his takeaways from that. You guys are doing a good job with all the personality you have.
Speaker 3:You're fucking dressed as an elf right now. You have this giant horse behind. The million little things that you guys do, even now, I was here probably a month ago, and even the stuff you have hanging up on your walls, I'm like, Oh, they're just becoming more and more natural and authentic to who they are. I want to answer your question. Lessons of Will and Ariel Durant, It's not technically a biography.
Speaker 3:I would say it's a 100 page biography of the human species. And because I think if you have one skill set that's going to help you throughout your life, it's really understanding that history doesn't repeat, human nature does, and you really should study how humans humans react in very predictable ways when they're exposed to specific stimuli. And I think understanding that is one of the most useful tools you can have as you go through life.
Speaker 1:Patterns do you see in the Founders that have appeared on Founders and the new show in terms of how they landed on the thing that defined their life and their work. Someone, v in the chat says, how does one find their purpose obsession? But I feel like it's very, very different across, but I'm curious if you see any patterns.
Speaker 3:Somebody came up to me at that party, with that Peter Tails party. We were all together at a few days ago, and they asked me that question. They're like, I forgot the exact way this guy said it, but it was just like, you know, it's obvious that you found your thing, like Mhmm. And, like, how do I find my thing? And the the story I told him was just like, obviously, it's internal.
Speaker 3:Like, one can answer that question. I I gave that story from a Mozart where, you know, this 21 year old kid comes up to Mozart. It's like, how do I write a a symphony? And Mozart's like, you're too young. And Mozart's like and the guy goes, you you were writing symphonies younger than I am now.
Speaker 3:And he's like, yeah, but I wasn't going around asking people how to do it. And I just think like all you have to do is like just look how you spend your time. Actions express priority. Like actions express priority. You I I don't give a shit what you say.
Speaker 3:Just like I see how you spend your time and you I will know what is actually important to you. And so if you're looking for that thing, you know, just like where are you naturally drawn to? Like this morning, I spent like six I don't
Speaker 1:know. But at the same time, when you were when you were I I feel like there needs to be an openness to, like an openness to not like, can't just if you're trying to find your life's work, it's not something you can just decide. I I'm I'm gonna find my life's work this week. I'm gonna No.
Speaker 3:No. So you can't.
Speaker 1:You were 20, it's not like you were like, I'm gonna be a
Speaker 2:Not everyone can be a pro basketball player their entire life.
Speaker 1:And and more specifically, like when you were 20, it's not like you were thinking, well, when I'm in my forties, I wanna have a business podcast.
Speaker 3:So what I would say if that kid is 20, find out how old this guy is in the chat, I would say read Paul Graham's How to Do Great Work, that essay. I think it's episode three fourteen of Founders. Can you check for
Speaker 2:me real quick? I might
Speaker 3:not. One shot it.
Speaker 1:Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work, So episode three
Speaker 3:so hold on real quick. Yeah. And I think it came down to like, you're he's just like, how to do great you're just following what you're intensely curious about.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so like like this morning, I woke up and essentially I just like read for, I don't know, four or five straight hours.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then I was like, oh, shit. I forgot. I have to
Speaker 2:go to TPPN today. Yeah. And that's why
Speaker 3:I was driving so fast. And like What is no one told me like no one's like, David, you should read for self develop development. It's just like, like reading. I feel good when I read. It's way better than looking at my goddamn phone.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. It's outside of like spending time with people I love, like there there's not another activity I like to do. I would put like our relationships, spending time with people I truly care about above that. But in terms of, like, if I'm by myself, like, there's not another thing that I'd rather wanna do. And that's just me listening to my curiosity.
Speaker 3:Yep. I'm gonna go oh, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. I was just yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can continue.
Speaker 1:If you could interview anyone that is dead, who would it Oh. Was there was there any like is there anyone you've studied that you feel like there's this open question where no no text captured it or no interview that they did.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like particularly lost.
Speaker 3:I mean, that has got to be the case. I had a weird experience last week, in in a great way.
Speaker 1:A ghost?
Speaker 3:No. No. The
Speaker 1:ghost of Rockefeller?
Speaker 2:The ghost of the
Speaker 3:day So the answer would probably be rock I mean, the the simplest thing would be, like, Rockefeller
Speaker 1:Rockefeller.
Speaker 3:Maybe Steve Jobs, maybe Sams Murray because Sams Murray is just, you know, such a savage. And I think I have definitely, like, a wild side to me that, you you know Lulu. Yeah. Like, she's she's constantly like, you cannot travel anywhere without a crisis comms person next to you.
Speaker 2:Like, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. That's funny.
Speaker 3:And so I think there's, a a wildness to Sam's Murray that that's very attractive to me if I'm being honest about this. But I I in terms of, like, it does not come across in the text. So what I'm trying to do is, like, obviously, with the new show, wanna be differentiated. Right? I wouldn't be doing it, you know, if if it just to be the same as anybody else.
Speaker 3:Like, I find being the same as anybody else disgusting. It makes me wanna vomit. And so I I'm working on some people that, like, have literally never done podcasts before.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I skew to, like, older killers. Mhmm. Like Yeah. I'm not interested in the in the in general. I do try to spend time like, I do feel I'm in, like, the middle child where, like, you get access to all these crazy people who have done things for decades and aren't really successful, they're willing to, like, spend a lot of time with you.
Speaker 3:Most of them listen to the podcast. And then I get a lot of information out of these relationships and conversations, these dinners. And then, you know, every once in a while, identify like a younger founder maybe to spend time with that if you think you can help them, you should. But in general, I skew way older, way like, you know, somebody that can actually point to a body of work to prove that they are actually like somebody you wanna spend time with. And I had I spent time with a 71 year old guy last week in New York, and he sold his company for $60,000,000,000 recently.
Speaker 3:And he's never done a podcast, And I did an episode on his episode of Founders on him and his family. And the reason he wanted to meet me and the reason that he's now going to do the new show and he trusts me is because there's only one book written about this and he listened to the podcast. He couldn't believe the insights that were in it. He asked his son, asked David who he interviewed in the family to get this information. And the answer was nobody.
Speaker 3:I read the book and then I tied it together because like you're the same person that there's been a 100 of you, 200, a thousand of you Mhmm. For the past few hundred years. Like we're not I know we like to feel we're special, like we are there's just we're not as unique as we think we are.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so I don't think you know, obviously, if you can have conversations with these people, you you should be you should do that. One of the reasons that is because, like, in an hour we talk for an hour. The amount of information that guy transferred to me in an hour would be literally imp you could give a 25 year old founder, 30 year old founder weeks, and he just could not convey that much knowledge and information that this guy was able to do in an hour. So, yeah, if you can have conversations with him, you should, but I don't feel like I'm ever missing out, like the text wasn't enough.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been a fantastic conversation. You, Chad.
Speaker 1:Chad says more swearing, please.
Speaker 2:Chad's fans of it. Well, that concludes this episode.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me
Speaker 2:again, We will
Speaker 1:be Retired, John?
Speaker 2:Back at eleven. No. Do have
Speaker 1:to go. Oh, you actually have to I
Speaker 2:have to go. Yeah. Sorry. But I mean, you two could hang out here if you want.
Speaker 1:Well, you guys been a great show. We're in the fourth hour. We're we're almost
Speaker 2:I gotta I gotta
Speaker 1:halfway through the fourth hour. And we'll be back tomorrow. Yeah. We got two more. Every day this week has felt like Friday.
Speaker 2:Thank
Speaker 1:you. But thank you for hanging out with us. Being you here. Of course. Apple Podcast.
Speaker 1:Spotify and We love you.
Speaker 2:David Senra by David Senra to your podcast player.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:you. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.