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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, June 1. We are live from TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.
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Speaker 1:Breakout news in Hollywood. YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017.
Speaker 1:It took a decade to get here, but, YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood and there's a bunch of crazy statistics. But, 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win win here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not Yeah. Total disruption.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? No. No. Not that.
Speaker 1:Actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them off the top of my head. What's this?
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Speaker 1:Yes. That's true. So I I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades and it's so bad. It's piracy, like you used to just be able for a lot for all through like the mid two thousands, people would just download movies. Then better TV shows, like TV just got so so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater.
Speaker 1:And then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV, we went through like the era of great TV. Streaming, obviously, that moved a lot of people out of theaters. COVID, that shut down the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the double strike, writers and directors strike, and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. There was competition from other production markets, lower cost, and that, you know, that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood, the physical place.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean meanwhile Yeah. Streaming just created the such a massive boom Yeah. In spending Yeah. On like a bunch of random projects, not necessarily like, you know, block like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there was a lot of competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the the streaming thing is a big one of that, that there were jobs and projects that were getting greenlit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like, even though the number I was looking at the number of, like, shoot traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood, it's fallen off a cliff post COVID, never fully recovered. But the number of people working in front of the camera, behind the camera, around the camera in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy.
Speaker 1:Boom. And so, this was always unsatisfying to cinephiles though because no matter how viral a TikTok goes or no matter how much money MrBeast or some other creator, like, makes, it never feels as as culturally important as The Godfather or some other or the Titanic or some some movie that everyone comes together. Everyone has the shared cultural experience around. We were all in these, like, little bit of these, like, isolated niches and, oh, yeah. I I I'm really into this creator.
Speaker 1:But time I try and bring it up to anyone, they don't know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Yes. Our our shared our our moment is I see a meme starting to grow Yeah. And I tell you I I make the call to you. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then we just kinda bet on it, basically.
Speaker 1:But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your your little nephew or your Sure. You know, you know, uncle, and they both have an understanding like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the God Father era, like they did during Star Wars, which is at the center of the story because The Mandalorian and Grogu is the latest Star Wars project and it's actually been declining in the box office. It's been eclipsed and there's been three movies that have been really, really breakout performances. So, also, the Oscars are gonna be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029, this this whole this whole trend is gonna be in full force.
Speaker 1:So look at the stats. So Kane Parsons Backrooms opened to roughly 81,500,000 in North America and a 115,000,000 worldwide on a $10,000,000 budget reportedly. Curry Barker's Obsession climbed is climbing in his third weekend and hit a 104,000,000, 104,700,000 domestic, becoming Focus Features, highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1,000,000. That seems
Speaker 2:And right now on X, every single day Yeah. There's a post that goes viral about obsessions return on their budget. Yeah. They're like, this million dollar film. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, it it's just happening over and over and over. Yeah. And then And so, like, the business story
Speaker 1:Oh, excuse me.
Speaker 2:To me is, like, way more I mean, is everything.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Definitely. And then we also talked about this earlier, and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself $3,000,000 production budget reportedly and opened to 18,200,000 domestically before grossing 41,100,000 domestic, 51,200,000 worldwide, huge return on investment. And so, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is a YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. But that's not exactly it's not really that clean, and there's a bunch of counterexamples.
Speaker 1:So are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been like a toy unboxing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge huge channel. And they actually made Ryan's World the Movie Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10,000,000 budget. And so, he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young
Speaker 2:Was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet and just go down to the movie theater? Because that's part of the issue with with with these channels and and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual like buyer is. Yeah. The person that controls purchasing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Power in the household. So you might have like an eight year old kid Yeah. Who loves these videos. But anytime they actually wanna act on Yeah. The content, they have
Speaker 1:to There's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though. You know, you see the advertisements of the the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy.
Speaker 2:Danial says ads back the world to see you.
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Speaker 1:Okay. So what is different about Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had they'd shown they didn't just have huge audiences. Like, some of these Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the the the the folks behind Backrooms and Obsession are in, like, the single digit millions. They they they alone, if if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the the risk taking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of, you know, draw attention in theaters. I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over.
Speaker 1:Like, the conversion rates just don't match up. Because if you're on 1,000,000 subscribers and you did a 100,000,000 in box office, the math just doesn't match up. Did some did everyone did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like, that's not what happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this like, the the idea of, like, this creativity, risk taking, new IP, this is like at the core of Hollywood successes. I was reading The Hollywood Reporter. They were saying like, this harkens back to like the 1970s, George Lucas' first film. Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through.
Speaker 1:But these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. They do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story. Kane Parsons, who goes by Kane Pixels, produced these original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects.
Speaker 1:And the Internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork, and we can go into some of the lore of Backrooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with, like, a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time, and that picture just went viral and went, and just, like, kept building lore and became one of these, like, creepy pastas, And then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series, which turned into this film. And it's one of these like very interesting, like, origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie, but let alone a successful movie, but here we are.
Speaker 1:And so Markiplier, he did have an objectively huge audience, as I said, but he still went full stack when he was producing Iron Lung. He even talked about building a server rack in his bathroom so that he could render VFX shots on a faster turnaround. He had a VFX studio, but but it was taking too long to go back and forth. And so he he racked a whole bunch of servers and had a big electricity bill and put 220 volt outlets, like it's an electric car charger in his bathroom, all so that he could render, like the blood splashing in his film, on on a faster turnaround. And so, this is sort of like this like the YouTube feels like a creating on YouTube feels like a way to attract an audience, but also feels like a way to demonstrate your do sort of like a talent audition as like a full stack creator.
Speaker 1:Like, I understand the color grade, the vibe, the sound design, and I can have opinions on all of that when I go into production. So it's an easier project to underwrite if you need that. Markiplier was able to fund it himself, but the other folks did have partners on their projects. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates.
Speaker 1:We're seeing this with the sort of like YouTubification or retention editing on Netflix. But I think the bigger value is being like a full stack filmmaker. So, gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for The Mandalorian and Grogu because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you how do you think the big studio execs are processing these two these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits driven business. Mhmm. If you have a $100,000,000 budget Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, about it like an if you're an early stage investor Mhmm. Like, super early stage seed series a Mhmm. And you have a $100,000,000 to invest
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, sometimes the best move would be putting a $100,000,000 into one team. Yeah. But there's a reason that people say like, hey, we're gonna make 20 to 30 investments Yeah. Across this fund, maybe maybe more Yeah. Depending on the strategy.
Speaker 1:They're doing a lot more
Speaker 2:than $10,000,000 films. Yeah. And so and so it it feels like It already happened. So much sense Yeah. Because one film can generate the entire
Speaker 1:Fund returner.
Speaker 2:Can be a fund returner. But at the same time, there is it is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal? Right? Oh. Is it is is there some As opposed to Not not basically like direct financial incentive Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where like there's just some like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think I I I do think we will see more $10,000,000 films, more more lower budget films. But I don't know. It it it feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their their, their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put a 100,000,000, 200,000,000 to work and actually guarantee a return on that. So they're gonna be working on the Avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the Harry Potter movies.
Speaker 1:But for the next generation, that that track feels like very much bought in. So there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. One is from Wesley Wang who went viral for interestingly Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return. He went viral for a non horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. TriStar picked it up with Darren Aravnowski's Protozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer director.
Speaker 1:And then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibbidi Toilet, which was created by Alexey Garasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth, but reportedly, Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe movie. But that as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it does it did build like a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering.
Speaker 1:There is a little bit more nuance there because on the IP side, because it was created in source film maker, which is basically like Half Life or Counter Strike. So you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. And a lot of the assets pull from Half Life two or Counter Strike Source.
Speaker 1:And so if you wanna maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which, you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell. It doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this, and there's already been back and forth on, like, takedown notices. So that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. But I do think there will be more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And some members of our production team saw both Backrooms and Obsession, and I want to get some reviews. What do you what do you guys think?
Speaker 1:Which one was better? Take us through it.
Speaker 5:My vote's Obsession. Obsession.
Speaker 2:Scott, what'd think? Obsession.
Speaker 1:Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?
Speaker 2:So Obsession was great. It felt like I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently. Okay. Like this Ari Aster type wave.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I remember leaving midsummer and just feeling like like gross for like And I felt like Obsession like walked it back a little bit and it was a bit of a comedy too. It was Okay.
Speaker 4:That's good.
Speaker 2:I felt like the the memes are all over it which is great. Yeah. Backrooms, we all kind of walked out. I love backrooms. Production design should win an award.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Something was missing from the movie, I think.
Speaker 1:Apparently, they built 30,000 square feet of actual set for backrooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, yeah, just send us the Blender files.
Speaker 1:Like, we'll just continue using like, you're already working in CGI. Like, it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did and clearly you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out. I thought
Speaker 2:it was really fun. Something.
Speaker 6:I wanna shout out Haley Johnson who produced Obsession two.
Speaker 2:She went
Speaker 1:to film school. Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben
Speaker 2:your class at your film school Gojin. I think no longer exists. Truly, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. Well done.
Speaker 1:So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said, in 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote Goodbye Gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood, created the conditions for his predation. So he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising.
Speaker 1:However, the Internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another.
Speaker 1:And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every year seen entire 2016.
Speaker 2:With two phones. Watching two things? Reels on both phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Subway surfers.
Speaker 2:Screen. Yeah. Just going like this.
Speaker 5:Well, you have VR, you can have way more screens open. You can. Because you can just
Speaker 2:You can.
Speaker 1:When is subway surfers getting an adaptation? That feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway surfers the movie? I think we got something. I I think I think it has we cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers
Speaker 5:Angry Birds is like us, you know
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They're making a third one or No.
Speaker 2:But I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you know Yeah. On you're basically just going one direction.
Speaker 1:No. It has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues. He says, it's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the Internet and digital media has affected media.
Speaker 1:Text first, then music, then short form video, etcetera. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And, of course, movies ask the most of customers in return. They actually have to leave the house. It's also notable I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies.
Speaker 1:Like Johnny Harris, a video essayist, talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of The Middle East, history of Europe, and history of China, Taiwan. And his last few videos have been two hours long, which is just a movie. He's just making an actual documentary. It used to be there was a twenty minute cut off. Well, it used to be like eight, ten minutes because of the ad breaks.
Speaker 1:You'd want two ads in there. Then people sort of went to twenty, thirty minutes because of watch time. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the only the only other difference is I feel like if somebody's making a documentary or a film, they'll do more maybe walk and talks, things like that. Whereas if you like the classic like YouTube Yeah. Video is just like like thinking about your YouTube videos. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're just set up like in an office like talking to the camera. Yeah. But just that slight difference makes what makes it feel like way more like a film.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. There is an interesting way where you can you can pretty pretty easily rotate from video essay scripted long form, get just write the script longer and longer. I've I've put out video essays that have been over an hour. To go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in, and then do some sort of like walk and talk at the beginning.
Speaker 1:And you can have like a low budget documentary very, very easily with just a few shoot days. And I think a lot of people are are moving towards this, but it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a two hour video. And I think a lot of that has to do with how the algorithm surfaces content at certain moments in time and then also resurfaces moments. So for a two hour video, they know that they're going to need to give you like a couple shots on goal to show it as a thumbnail. And then also, if you click on it and you watch ten minutes and then you close your phone and you go do something else, they know that that's not necessarily means that that doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they will say, hey, do you want to keep watching that? And so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a two hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a casual casual world. So Ben Thompson continues. He says, that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies.
Speaker 1:First is that this is simply a new place to discover talent, and that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact AWS had on venture capital. Cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers, and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms, meanwhile, didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund Sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations, not just their ideas.
Speaker 1:That's what I was talking about. The audition, the YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82,000,000 views in the example of Backrooms, like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with the startup that shows up on Sandhill Road raising a Series A that already a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need $10,000,000 to do a single prototype. Can just build it.
Speaker 1:True than ever in the age of AI. The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's almost certainly true. Kane Parsons, made Backrooms, has 3,200,000 subscribers, which feels low based on how big Backrooms is, but that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to actual subscribers.
Speaker 1:Curry Barker, made Obsession, has 1,200,000 subscribers, again, that comedy channel. And then Mark Fischbach, who made Iron Lungs, Mark Plyer, has 38,700,000 subscribers. Huge account from years of streaming. And he purposely leveraged that to get distribution. Bloomberg sort of broke it down.
Speaker 1:He he was set to release his $3,000,000 film, Iron Lung, in 60 independent cinemas. Fishback led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters and request iron lung screenings. Is something that a lot of people say in, like, CPG, like, oh, fill out this form. Request me an Eriwan or Whole Foods. But it's usually really, really hard to get someone to actually do that because the conversion rate might be like 0.001.
Speaker 1:But if you have 40,000,000 people that are, you know, loosely entertained by you and you get, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A fraction of a percent
Speaker 2:10,000 people who really, really, really care.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you talk about a thousand true fans. He probably has a million true fans out of that 40,000,000 that are Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then 1% of those phone
Speaker 6:calls. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a lot. And so the film was ultimately picked up by major chains including AMC, which has been on a tear. AMC said that this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years And I think Today. The stock is up 20%?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. $100,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:100 Wait. What? No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Not not. It's a $1,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're they put some data centers in the theaters, I guess. Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark
Speaker 2:set it up so if you rock you rock in your chair,
Speaker 1:you get
Speaker 2:film. A
Speaker 1:They capture the energy. You're powering You're powering small GPUs. Yeah. Potentially powered by Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Speaker 1:Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. So the unsatisfying act aspect that Ben Thompson's referring to is best understood through the lens of the movie Backrooms and Obsession Finished Ahead Of from Variety. So they talk he talks about The Mandalorian and Grogu, which we mentioned, and he calls back to George Lucas' original film. So his initial claim to fame was American Graffiti, which made over $200,000,000 on a $777,000 budget. That's a crazy ROI.
Speaker 1:Over 200 x return on investment for American Graffiti. The success gave him the support to make Star Wars
Speaker 2:How do Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been I've been I've been pitched like invest in my movie Yeah. Before. But given that I don't watch movies,
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:didn't feel like was really my strike zone. Mhmm. But how does it typically get structured? Like, if a film needs a million dollar budget, like, are is are the investors getting like, an independent film needs a million dollar budget. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How does equity work? Any any rough ideas?
Speaker 1:Typically, there's there's a series of buyers and Sorry. Distracting you guys from running. Similar to We'll do it live. So so
Speaker 2:Scott's job is
Speaker 1:to oftentimes, a screenwriter will sell an option to to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. They are the the the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it, and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. They might attach a they might go pitch a do the deal to bring on a star. And then from there, they go to another producer.
Speaker 1:And then the last the last time, the last moment is is the actual, like, marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards and like the Super Bowl ads. And that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point.
Speaker 1:But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3,000,000, that means he spent $3,000,000 paying the
Speaker 2:actors Yeah. Because even with Obsession
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA. Yeah. Like at least a million dollar campaign
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right when the videos were coming out saying Obsession just turned 750 k into a $100,000,000. And so I was like, well
Speaker 1:lot times that might happen after the fact.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's an after there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now. Let's like
Speaker 1:And then and then basically at every phase, there can be sort of an in kind investment where you get they call it like points on the back end, basically, but it it's basically like, the the the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Junior in Iron Man. He he took a very low salary upfront, cash upfront, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series.
Speaker 2:You're saying he's goaded?
Speaker 1:He's goaded. He's actually goaded. I think he made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Marvel franchise that came from that. And there is a world where he would have said, no, I want only cash up front. You're gonna have to pay me a ton.
Speaker 1:And then a production team has to come in. Put the money in. They get the equity, and then they get that on the back.
Speaker 2:So now that Curry has this insane hit
Speaker 1:Yep. Can People are Star Wars.
Speaker 2:Are people gonna come to him and say, like, I want I wanna basically buy your next five films Totally. Kind of thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Multi multi film deal or if it depends on what he's pitching. Like, he could like, somebody could just come to come to him with something very open ended.
Speaker 1:They could come with him to something narrow. Maybe he's already working on something, has a script, has an idea, and then wants to get that, you know, made or locked up. Or maybe he wants to be it's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, hey, we already have this IP. Maybe we want to bring back Scream and we would love for you to do it.
Speaker 7:He's actually he actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw
Speaker 1:There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With eight twenty four.
Speaker 2:Wait. Curry is?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he Generational run
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 7:Obsession. He got his next feature Yep. Which is called anything but ghosts. Okay. And then from that, he hopped on with a 24 to do the next
Speaker 1:Texas chainsaw master.
Speaker 7:So he's already got stuff
Speaker 1:on been remade a few times but it's Yeah. But but but it's established intellectual property. And bringing him on sort of, you know, derisks in some ways, but it also just brings some fresh energy to that that IP where whoever did the first Texas Chainsaw or the reboot, maybe they're doing something else or maybe the studio wants to take a different direction. And so they license that IP because Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not like a it's not an a 24 property from day one. But at this point, they went and got the rights and then they got the director and then they put them together and so it's all a package deal.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Ben Thompson's black pilling on Star Wars. He says, it turns out, however, that actually making good movies still matters. A late gen xer like me who saw who as a teenager saw The Phantom Menace twice in its opening weekend so excited was I by the return of Star Wars and did not and did the same for The Force Awakens has basically no interest in The Mandalorian and Grogu. Has anyone in the studio seen The Mandalorian and Grogu? No one?
Speaker 1:No one's into it. It's not what I'm looking for. I I I'm looking for Andor. That was more my my speed And he and he agrees. He says, I'm I'm clearly not alone.
Speaker 1:It's been clear for a while now that all the things that Disney worries about when making a Star Wars film or TV series actually making it good has not been one of them. Brutal. The thing, that's the thing with IP based business model. However, Disney seems to have assumed that because they control distribution, thanks to the massive consolidation of movie studios over the past years, that they could shove whatever supply they wanted through the tubes and audiences would slurp it up because they had no other choice. This is the exact opposite of YouTube specifically and the Internet generally.
Speaker 1:On the Internet, distribution is free. Anyone can set up a website or start a YouTube account and they can post whatever they want. Content that breaks through has to do so on its own merits. It is good and is it good and compelling or is it not? If it is, it gets more and more views.
Speaker 1:That's what the algorithm does. Is respond to and amplify interest. And if it's not like 99.99% of YouTube content, it's barely seen by anyone. In short, the reason these movies are successful is not just because their makers were spotted by powerful producers or because they brought their own fans. I agree with this.
Speaker 1:It's not enough just to bring their own fans. It's because the necessary precondition for those two things happening is actually becoming popular on pure merit. It's a more merit based system. These movies are successful because their makers are good and we know they're good because they're successful on YouTube. No.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean everyone on YouTube is good. Indeed, that's the entire point. There's no quality bar to get onto YouTube, which means the quality bar to get noticed on YouTube is much higher than any gate. Indeed, as much as Hollywood types might look look down on YouTubers, it's the latter who are far more impressive at least if the goal is actually trying to make something that resonates. Very good.
Speaker 1:Very, very fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create, modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out at figma.com.
Speaker 1:Famously not dead. Still cooking. SaaSpocalypse is over. We'll get to that later in the show. Not a car, Ethan.
Speaker 1:Not a car. No one's a car.
Speaker 2:Did you see the new George Lucas Museum Cinema?
Speaker 1:I I thought this was interesting that this was going viral at the same time or launched at the same time. You know, it's it's sort of a Throw turn on a tux. Yes. It it looks very cool. Apparently, a billion dollars to make this, a billion dollar investment in this whole facility, the George Lucas Museum Cinema opening in September.
Speaker 1:This looks absolutely amazing. Quote, all through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other one shows short films, some only a few minutes long. It's in Los Angeles. If you're coming by the TBPN UltraDome, make a stop at the George Lucas Museum Cinema. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:There's also a a cool video here of the history of liminal spaces we should pull up because Backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman Show?
Speaker 1:Haven't seen it? I've seen it. It's great. I can't believe you've ever seen Truman Show. It's so good.
Speaker 2:Should we get some liminal spaces here in the UltraDome?
Speaker 1:The the UltraDome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some there are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups. Unbox Therapy is a famous You
Speaker 2:guys haven't seen it, but do you know, like, the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is?
Speaker 1:No. What's that?
Speaker 2:Okay. I mean, I guess no spoilers, but
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can put tape on the wall. Toys. People have seen
Speaker 5:it will know
Speaker 2:what that means.
Speaker 1:That's a very cool shot. The Shining. The Shining. I never I never put The Shining in the same bucket as this. It follows.
Speaker 1:That's a good horror film. Yeah. That's a great one. Very cool. Anyway, we can just vibe out to Liminal's faces for the rest of the show.
Speaker 1:Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen too Shipinator. With AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the Internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business from YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about subway surfers.
Speaker 1:We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Oh. All the simulators? Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator the movie. Can you imagine?
Speaker 1:We got Data Center Simulator for what was the other one? Coconut Simulator? You gotta get Coconut Simulator the movie. Realistic mode.
Speaker 2:Capybara Simulator
Speaker 1:the That's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there, you're done. You're good. Very interesting. Well,
Speaker 2:Finance David Attenborough narrating gameplay from Capybara Simulator.
Speaker 1:Oh. I think that I think we got a hit on our hands. Call a 24. They're ready. Well, Bernie Sanders is talking about taking a stake in the AI labs.
Speaker 1:He says AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op ed in the New York Times, a guest essay. I need to confirm my account if I want to log into this.
Speaker 1:But we can we can see the I I think I subscribed to my phone and so it doesn't sync with my Chrome installation. I don't know. Let's see. Andrew Curran is highlighting it.
Speaker 2:This is this is rough.
Speaker 1:Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing a one time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs which will be used to fund the American AI sovereign wealth fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take 50% and, like, when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies like decades to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for fire selling
Speaker 2:Yeah. After the IPOs. He's just he's
Speaker 1:just like, this is the top.
Speaker 2:I didn't tell you how there was gonna be a dividend.
Speaker 1:Dividend in sales.
Speaker 2:No, it's I mean, the the positioning I'm I'm trying to get into the New York into my New York Times account too, but the positioning blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. Yeah. What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was looking at a lot of
Speaker 2:TBPN is built on is built on humanity's collective knowledge. True. True. Humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines.
Speaker 1:Hey, be careful what you say. The United States American citizens might own 50% of TBPN soon. You never know with this.
Speaker 2:You never know.
Speaker 1:It might.
Speaker 2:You just never know.
Speaker 1:You're tempted
Speaker 2:to wait here. But
Speaker 1:Bad example.
Speaker 2:But yeah. The the the other thing is, you know, we we have
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a it it it is it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew and we'll see we'll see where all this goes, you know. I don't know.
Speaker 1:We'll see. It's a lot of people are are Rather sort of framing it as
Speaker 2:have universal basic tokens.
Speaker 1:Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know. He says
Speaker 2:But it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the data center moratorium Yes. Act. Yes. But then he also Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wants half. Yeah. Those two things feel like like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, you know, misalignment here. He says, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show.
Speaker 1:This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I I I think that there is a world where if you if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say, we're all gonna slow down simultaneously. That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50 control over everything. Tyler, what do think?
Speaker 5:Yeah. But you can just do like the AI, FDA. Yeah. You don't need like actual equity.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Okay. This is my kind of contrarian take.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:But this seems like extremely bullish. Right? Because Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person. Yeah. But implicitly, like, classically
Speaker 1:implicitly He's saying that the stock's underrated?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Undervalued? These are gonna be the biggest Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because because of all the stocks we're going to
Speaker 5:so big that this is gonna be like disruptive to the economy. Sure. Like, this seems like he's extremely AGI filled.
Speaker 1:It seems like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Seems like he's he's basically saying, like, the data center stuff is, like, probably not gonna work out. I'm not gonna be able to ban these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But Mark in the chat says, mister Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a baby center babysitter when there are no other options.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.
Speaker 2:Another Mark in the chat says, my wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys. Mark is on vacation tuning into TBPN.
Speaker 1:Say hello to everyone for us.
Speaker 2:We hope you're enjoying the sun, Mark, and thanks for being with us.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in. So my question is, I mean, this is New York Times It's op I not know what you're gonna say.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppenheimer?
Speaker 1:I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. But first off, I mean the big news today, Anthropic is confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public.
Speaker 1:Google's public. Open AI. There's rumors of of, of an IPO file.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's what that's what gets really crazy here. Right? Because is is Google Google's a leading lab.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Does Bernie Bernie want
Speaker 1:But then yeah. But then is is Salesforce an AI company? Is Meta? Is Meta? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Meta is Mark Mark
Speaker 2:would be we were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like, me? Trying to build personal super intelligence. I'm not an AI company. I'm not an AI lab.
Speaker 1:I'm just doing some experiments.
Speaker 2:Got these GPUs to to 99% better value.
Speaker 1:Were created is just recommendations.
Speaker 5:He's gonna take half of all birds.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. He's gonna take half of all birds. But seriously, like how how deep does he go down the stack? I mean, Intel like Trump already NVIDIA. NVIDIA?
Speaker 1:NVIDIA makes a
Speaker 2:lot the American open source hero.
Speaker 1:But what about Microsoft? Like Microsoft doesn't have like they have a huge partnership with OpenAI. They don't have a frontier foundation model, but they're they're definitely like a front door to a lot of AI services with Copilot and they're vending these tools in everywhere. And so there's just a whole like Amazon. I heard Amazon Rufus for AI shopping.
Speaker 1:Surprisingly effective. It's working very well. Like, this is an AI assistant that's powered by other models under this under the hoods. Doesn't need to be the most aggressive mythos 5.5 pro, like, you know, it doesn't need to be the the the the frontier, but it's it's actually working and customers are using it. Same thing with Sparky at Walmart.
Speaker 1:And so is Walmart an AI company now? Like, the definition around this will be hotly debated, but of course, you don't want get too over your skis here because this is just an op ed. It's not in legislation. It's a it's to provoke thoughts.
Speaker 2:Well, if the argument is that basically if something is built on humanity's collective knowledge Yeah. The government should get half
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is built on humanity's collective knowledge. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think everybody should get ready to I mean, even your your own home. Right? Your own home Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is built on
Speaker 1:Who invented the nail. Collective invented
Speaker 2:the by four.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. You can Somebody
Speaker 2:invented cutting down trees.
Speaker 1:Yes. So maybe it ends with some sort of tax on corporate profits
Speaker 2:for Tax on corporate profits would
Speaker 1:would If feel a if a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government. That would be.
Speaker 2:Why has no one thought of this, John?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Take that to DC right now.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So there's a hot debate. Apollo's chief economist says there's zero evidence of AI related job losses and this went viral.
Speaker 1:Torsten Slock, the partner and chief economist, has zero evidence of AI related job losses. He says weekly ADP employment data, there's zero evidence of job loss. Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts, and the data center build out is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts. On prices of semiconductors equipment and energy, the bottom line is that AI spending boom the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and inflation. As a result, non farm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the 95,000 expected by consensus.
Speaker 1:This is Jevan's paradox playing out in real time. Cheaper technology is creating more demand for more jobs. And he has a chart there and you can see ADP is in a really strong position. It looks great. It's really good.
Speaker 1:There is more nuance here because if you dig into this, what's actually driving the hiring boom is healthcare and the AI affected areas. There's not a massive wave of layoffs that's happening broadly. We're seeing layoffs at different tech companies. But broadly, like white collar work is not going through a massive unemployment spike. But the employment spike that we're seeing, the upward trend in ADP weekly employment, is still driven mostly by health care jobs.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know how much you can actually say Jevan's Paradox in real time. Maybe you can in the sense that asset prices are going up. There isn't wide broad unemployment, so there's more justification in hiring more in the health care sector. But this felt like maybe a little bit too soon to take a victory lap on this. I'm not exactly sure.
Speaker 1:It's certainly a better place to be than seeing unemployment go up. We want to see lots of hiring. We want to see a low unemployment rate. That's what we're seeing, which is great. But it is soon.
Speaker 1:It is early and we're just getting to start to implement these tools and there's still risk all over the place. Maybe not as much risk as what Jason Oppenheim thinks though because he went on the iced coffee hour and made an audacious claim about job displacement, pinning it at eighty percent of people out of the workforce. 80 unemployment. We can play this clip Which would be the iced coffee hour.
Speaker 8:Far There won't be any work. I disagree with Kevin.
Speaker 1:There won't be any work.
Speaker 8:Percent of people out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about. So I think what we have to do is start creating showing and creating value for those things. Start ascribing value to family and to hobbies and to sport and to relationships more, and it has to be less about work.
Speaker 2:So I hear a lot of I thinks, and you guys are real estate people in the eyes of the viewer. What gives you guys credibility to talk about AI?
Speaker 9:Fair question. I would say that I've spent probably five hundred hours listening and reading a lot of podcasts.
Speaker 1:Did the homework. I think it's
Speaker 10:You studied it.
Speaker 9:It's the quintessential, like, intellectual pursuit of the last two years of my life.
Speaker 1:Called David Center AI. Listening to podcasts is the quintessential that. Intellectual pursuit. Jeremy Kefalin on suicide watch. Tyler, you had something?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Just for some context. Yeah. So in the peak of the Great Depression, unemployment was 24.9.
Speaker 1:24 And
Speaker 5:you're saying 80%.
Speaker 1:Okay. So three times, four times the Great Depression is what we're looking at with AI? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just it's so it's so funny to listen to to go and just like listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with with the 80% number. It's wild. Because you also asked for know, we would have to qualify that. Like Yeah. What what set of technologies actually enable that?
Speaker 2:Because you certainly would need like, you know, highly effective efficient humanoid robots, you know, fully deployed throughout society. But yeah, don't strongest take we've seen yet. Yeah. So very concerning
Speaker 1:But this is a stronger take potentially. Yeah. This is the other side of it.
Speaker 2:Sam Sulik revealed that 95% of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace discipline, grit or hard work. Mhmm. Instagram.
Speaker 1:How did this
Speaker 2:No. Really looks like Instagram. I made this. This is a fake quote. I sent this to John over the weekend.
Speaker 1:It looks like the fact that it added the little Instagram buttons makes it look way more legit to me. I know you made this but I I I still did a double take. It's absolutely wild. So funny. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Wanna change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very happy to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. It's really going. Really going today.
Speaker 1:Man, thank you to Area, area. Tech. They produced all of our show graphics. The Chiron.
Speaker 2:Legends.
Speaker 1:The intro. They've worked with us for a long time. And they also activated my AI Siri for some reason. I don't know why that happened. On my phone and my MacBook.
Speaker 1:Wow. What a day. Salesforce is on an absolute tear. We talked about the dueling narrative. So Anthropic is IPO ing or they confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Speaker 1:Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. There's a race between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Meanwhile, it was so over for all the SaaS companies, but the SaaSpocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up.
Speaker 1:Some of them are up on Anthropic Holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their Mark's
Speaker 2:got to be feeling good. He invested 50,000,000 Yeah. Into Anthropic, I think, in 2023 or 2024.
Speaker 1:Cheeky 100 x?
Speaker 2:Very cheeky. Very cheeky.
Speaker 1:I think he's He's
Speaker 2:feeling good. He's now gonna deploy €2,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Into France. Love it. Our strong team He has of 1,800 employees in France. Wow. More committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country.
Speaker 2:And I love this new meta. I think this picture is this is the new this is the new Vibrio meta. Okay. So anytime you do a business transaction One farm. Snap a selfie Yeah.
Speaker 2:With your business partner. Post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, you know, sort of videos throughout history of of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So And I'm dropping after this partnership, I just gotta say, we're canceling my personal beef with France.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great.
Speaker 2:This is a fantastic progress.
Speaker 1:Benioff won you over.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. If they have Benioff's full faith, they have my full faith. And this €2,000,000,000 I think is significantly more than their previous investment that they announced that created the original beef. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress, The fiscal year twenty seven Q1 results, record revenue, 11,130,000,000, up 13% year over year.
Speaker 1:This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Operating cash flow of 6,700,000,000. Agent Force crossed 1,000,000,000 ARR or yeah. ARR.
Speaker 1:Combined with Data three sixty and Informatica now at 3,400,000,000 in AI data We're not just talking about the here.
Speaker 3:We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering the shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable.
Speaker 3:Fire emoji.
Speaker 2:34% on that real margin. Really? What is a sarsaparilla? What's a sarsaparilla?
Speaker 1:Sarsaparilla is a beverage. It's like a Coca Cola. It's a drink that you get at a soda bar.
Speaker 2:Sarsaparilla. What? Sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla. Sars I'm seeing Nostalgic soft drink.
Speaker 1:You just call it sarsaparilla. I I know it says sarsaparilla, but everyone pronounces it sasparilla, I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink, herbal plant, native to the Americans, sweet earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for $20 a bottle at Erewhon.
Speaker 1:Don't you think? I bet bringing back sarsaparilla, good business. Somebody do the call call area, call day job right now, start your branding packages and and I think you got a winner if you bring back Sarsaparilla successfully. Well, Mark Benioff teased a little bit of the progress on our show and we can play this clip from him on TBPN giving us a little bit of a view into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing I in their
Speaker 11:wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year, a year ago with you guys. But if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year twenty twenty six, the year it just passed. Because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year. And I didn't hire more service agents in the year, I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20% more sales people that Sales people Paul.
Speaker 11:Salespeople. I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever.
Speaker 1:Demand.
Speaker 11:In market from small, medium, large customers, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs, building a great business like TBPN, really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack. I know you use other products. Got And that's our job
Speaker 2:is to
Speaker 11:make you successful. And to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an
Speaker 1:Sales guy final boss. Yeah. You need final
Speaker 2:boss. It is it is I think the pushback there would be, well, you do sell customer service agents. Yeah. Don't sell coding agents. And But you are selling sales focused agents.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So why So basically, you're getting so much efficiency in these other places
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That you don't need to hire more people. But in the kind of category in which your primary products operate, you're he's not making the efficiency argument, he's making the demand argument. Mhmm. He's saying we have so much demand, we need more reps. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But he's selling a product that should be able to sort of meet that demand. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes and no. I mean, he's selling he's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep. If there's a booming economy, more sales, you would think that there's more people that go into sales, more people that need a Shopify or sorry. Salesforce, like, installation alongside them. There's there's still a bull case there.
Speaker 1:I mean, all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported. And and there's certainly, like, so much of the diffusion discussion is around actually meeting someone, having a human in the loop, having someone alongside you as you implement these tools. So you don't go over your token budget, token maxing. Token maxing seems like a hair brained scheme cooked up by an SDR.
Speaker 1:You just okay. You're going to Salesforce. Agent Force, what should I do? Tell them to token max. Tell them to create a leader board where they produce as many tokens as possible.
Speaker 1:Like, okay. So okay, Agent Force. Got it, buddy.
Speaker 2:Did you know that Jensen was such a good dancer?
Speaker 1:I had no idea. Do we have a video of this?
Speaker 2:We do.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's play this and then we'll read Brandon Grell's deep dive on Jensen's Computex twenty twenty six keynote, which is being hotly debated. Okay.
Speaker 2:Look at this. It's pretty good. Look at this.
Speaker 1:He's got it. He's flowing. Oh, I like the swimming. He's having fun.
Speaker 2:He's gotta be feeling pretty good this quarter. Yeah. You gotta read into these. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, we read into we read into him doing the arm linked, you know, trucking beers in Korea.
Speaker 1:5,400,000,000,000, up 6% today. Wow. Absolutely wild. Where is he sitting on multiple? Pop quiz.
Speaker 1:What movie features a dance to this song?
Speaker 2:Pulp Fiction? Yeah. It
Speaker 6:literally says it in the caption.
Speaker 1:Okay. I don't know. Sometimes you're so
Speaker 2:out of the
Speaker 1:you'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John Have
Speaker 2:you seen Pulp Fiction?
Speaker 1:I have. Oh.
Speaker 2:Okay. I have. That's one of the five.
Speaker 1:That's one of the five movies. We're slowly discovering that there's more than five movies. There's like 20. It's a good time. Anyway, let's go through what Brandon Graill summarized from Jensen Wong's Computex twenty twenty six keynote.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's Annual Technology Expo. I guess it's their CES but more enterprise focused even. He introduced the RTX, the NVIDIA RTX Spark Superchip, an ARM based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production and he announced several foundation models, a world model, an open weight flagship AI model. Do we have a model card for that yet?
Speaker 1:That seems like big news, open weight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but I I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the five fives, the what is I'm talking about four eight now. And and the three fives from Google, like the closed source models have been on the frontier. And there's been the chart showing that the open source models from China have been sort of decelerating or they're just they're growing more linearly than the American closed source models. So is there a gap there?
Speaker 1:Where does NVIDIA fit in with their open weight model? That's an interesting question. And he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote came is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple Silicon Moment, and Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Can you play Crisis on it?
Speaker 1:Can you game on this thing? Is that cool or is it all about running agents locally? I wonder what the demand for these local agents on the desktop will be because so many so many workloads, you know, you just hand it off and you wait twenty minutes and you come back. But there is some value to being able to do at least like the voice transcription locally, just all sorts
Speaker 2:of things.
Speaker 5:If can do like tool calling, then that basically gets you like most of the way there because then all the hard things outsource well. Sure. And then for like gaming, I'm still very excited to see any of these like real time video models used in gaming. This seems like Yeah. It'll be a thing
Speaker 2:you Yeah.
Speaker 5:You do with these like super nice
Speaker 1:We gotta get David Zazuki back on the show for to talk about Roblox and the and the the real time uprising of Roblox games because I think that that's such a such an incredible technology. Think it's going be really popular but it's going take time for it to actually roll out. Anyway, there is a cut down of Jens' keynote that you can watch. We linked it in the newsletter and we will go into that more later. But we have our first guest from The New York Times.
Speaker 1:He's a journalist, Adam Iscoe. Just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction markets and he's here with us on the TBPN Ultra. I'm Adam. How are doing?
Speaker 12:With a
Speaker 2:slat wall.
Speaker 1:Slat wall?
Speaker 2:Ready to pop you Is
Speaker 1:that a slat wall or is that a virtual background? What what we got? What we got?
Speaker 4:It's real. It's real. You can do a virtual background on the album? I mean
Speaker 5:Thank you. You.
Speaker 1:With the suit. With the suit. Oh, you look fantastic.
Speaker 2:Bringing a slat wall and a suit. Fantastic. You are ready to podcast.
Speaker 1:Okay. Are you in New York City?
Speaker 4:I'm in New York City. Long time listener, first time caller. Thank Fantastic.
Speaker 1:You. Since this is the first time and we have some and we do have some time to kind of unpack this, I wanted to hear a little bit about your journey, your history, how you wound up in the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process. Just sort of give me the the one zero one on you and then we can dive into prediction market specifically.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, at a party if someone asks me what the hell do you write about, are we allowed to curse on this show? Is it
Speaker 2:You're to. We don't. We
Speaker 4:We don't. You're welcome to. I'm surprised the New
Speaker 1:York Times would let you. Are you allowed to drop fanny and the great lady?
Speaker 2:I can tell he's a bit of
Speaker 1:a In the bad great
Speaker 4:it's been the great controversy with me working at at the Times is that I spent the last five years at the New Yorker.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:It's a magazine that encourages profanity in the But The Times, you know
Speaker 1:A little more bites out?
Speaker 4:Things are a little different there. But I spent the last five years at The New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City, or it's like, you know, every year I read a story about a cool boat on the New York Harbor.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 4:You know, I'm just trying to like go interesting places and see interesting things.
Speaker 2:And What drew you to the boat? I gotta know about the boat Yeah. Since you brought it up.
Speaker 4:Oh, I mean, y'all ever see a shipping container ship?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, you ever wanna get on one? You ever been on one?
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever been on a ship ship. Ship. But I have one to go on I've one. Been on
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very cool. You've been on an aircraft carrier? I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vinson as part of the distinguished visitor program.
Speaker 1:Oh was a my program where you can sign up for. You have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. And I had a friend who waited years and years and years and they slotted me in at the last second. So I got to go with like a lot of like big Hollywood producers and stuff and they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for two days, meet everyone. Two days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Two days. You're like at sea with them and they they you have no cell service. They don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate, okay, well, left from San Diego. We're probably around Mexico.
Speaker 1:But but, yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they take you and they fly you off and stuff. It's it's a wild experience.
Speaker 4:We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York Harbor. Okay. Like, we came under the Verrazano Bridge and it was great. The cargo was a miniature of the Statue Of Liberty.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:It was a gift from the French government to
Speaker 1:They gave us another one?
Speaker 4:They gave us another one. Wow. They just ran it back. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I wanted to get on the ship. So I just sort of made some calls and I I asked around and Cool. They were they were super psyched to have me on the onboard.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:Yeah. How do you
Speaker 1:think about sizing stories in that context? Like, when you're at the New Yorker over a couple of years, I I imagine that there's there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like, how much is it just a conversation with your editors and the team on, okay. I actually have something here. I need to go heads down on this for months and pull on this thread, and there's a 70% chance it's great, 30% chance it goes nowhere.
Speaker 1:Like, what is the process? Because we have, like, the same show every day. It's always, the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're, we're gonna do an eight hour show, you know, next week, but we're going to take a couple shows off. Like, how do you think about sizing projects?
Speaker 4:It's such a great question. You know, it's like if you're going to write about a used car auction in Brooklyn, you know that that piece is going to be eight fifty words. You know, it's gonna be a little just like a little tasty morsel for the reader to enjoy. But if you want to do something where you're really trying to contribute to, you know, to society, to our culture, to, you know, then you need more words to tell a deeper story. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:You know? And so, yeah, I want to write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City, and have New York City be a sort of proxy for the nation, then it's Yeah, we need 6,000 words. We need 10,000 words, which means I need six months or a year to work on that project. Yeah. And then, of course, you know, because The New Yorker is a business, you know, you also need to be writing shorter stories along the way Yeah.
Speaker 4:While you're spending your investigating something that's really sort of topical and important.
Speaker 1:How did you first come into contact with prediction markets?
Speaker 4:Oh, my gosh. I mean, I don't know about y'all, but isn't isn't I don't know your friends just like, you know, degenerate gambling on on sports or on on on all of these things?
Speaker 1:For some reason, I actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports
Speaker 2:group chat no one has ever talked about a sports bet
Speaker 1:But years. They were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe, what was it, three cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver before the Silver Bulletin, the five thirty eight dashboard, everyone was refreshing that constantly. He famously called all 50 states correctly. It was a bit of luck.
Speaker 1:But those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures everyone's attention. And during the last presidential election cycle, it felt like the prediction markets were really having a moment. But I didn't actually know that many people that were actively betting on them one way or another. It was more just a curiosity to say, Oh, well, that source might be biased or that source might be biased, but at least if there's just money on both sides, maybe it's more neutral. Maybe it will give me a stronger vision of the future.
Speaker 1:And I think that's where a lot of people, a lot of the goodwill around prediction markets came from because it sort of told the story of the election somewhat more independently or more accurately. And so I think they carried a lot of that goodwill into the sports betting that you're talking about. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've always been I've personally, I've been interested in the tension between if you're just using prediction markets as a data source and, like, you're just logging onto a website not even logged in
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You you kinda want people to be insider trading because that's gonna make all the data more accurate. Yeah. But but the platforms I'm not saying like generally that's good for society, but I'm just saying like if you just wanna get an idea of what's gonna happen in the future, if there's no insider trading happening, it just means that people are just purely just
Speaker 1:That's true. That's not true.
Speaker 2:Because in the Yeah. Mean, could be doing like sophisticated research Exactly. Sorry. But on some but on some of these markets Oh, yeah. Like for example, like the the the war markets around Venezuela Sure.
Speaker 2:Where there were you were seeing like spikes in activity and then, okay, it turns out Yeah. Somebody would that did have inside knowledge on the operation was putting the Sure. Whole operation
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's gonna be better.
Speaker 2:Because because they wanted to make, you
Speaker 1:know Yeah.
Speaker 2:$100 or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But when
Speaker 4:you look at the election or you look at, you know, you look at you look at financial, any anything, you know, sort of unemployment or the Fed rate or what what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non public information. You can just you can sort of do what Wall Street has always done, which is go out and find an edge. Go out and find the best information possible. Go and talk to a bunch of people. Go and look at really complicated weather data to predict oil prices.
Speaker 4:I mean, you can do, like, sort of really intense research as just like an individual or a group of individuals working together. And so you don't need to be that guy that, like, you know, compromised national security by illegally trading up Venezuela. You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average user or better and kind of create tremendous informational advantage for people. I mean, the stat that I came across sort of crazy is that a third of adult voters in America have been sold to the prediction market. Right?
Speaker 4:That's like a that's like a lot of that's like a lot of people.
Speaker 2:They're basically at the ballot box being like, who should And I vote
Speaker 1:I mean in low liquidity
Speaker 2:I only vote for winners. Who should I vote for?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. I think people do. I I think people do actually see, okay, there's momentum.
Speaker 1:It's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win, then they artificially shift the odds of that candidate. They spike and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, I'm at 60% on the prediction markets. You should definitely donate because I'm going to run away with it. And then they and then it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1:There's like a weird cycle there that could be bad. I don't know.
Speaker 4:I think six months ago maybe, eight months ago, that may have been at least pre pre 2024 election, this may have been possible. But the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient Sure. Just like in the market on Wall Street
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just would just buy your Okay. Money and just crush you
Speaker 1:Interesting. Crush the Okay. So tell me about, like, what smarter money looks like in this context because we've heard about, you know, big hedge funds. Citadel is doing clearing, and there's, I think, Steve Cohen's fund has a desk for this type of stuff. There's, like, traditional Wall Street.
Speaker 1:Then there are Sharps, and then there are the average traders. Like, how do you segment the market? How would you characterize the different market participants?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I would say that the average trader, and like, that's me,
Speaker 13:to
Speaker 4:be clear, we're just getting crushed. Absolutely decimated. I actually want to I want to read y'all something that that that one of my sources told me. Yeah. This is someone turned $200.
Speaker 4:They're quite sharp. They turned $200 into half $1,000,000 just Wow. Last And so and so and and, you know, it's it's a grad student. I'm gonna keep them sort of protect their anonymity. They're quite worried about being crypto kidnapped.
Speaker 13:Sure.
Speaker 4:They go by the screen name Frozen. And they said, I really am just taking money from people. Every dollar I gain is someone else losing, and there's a lot of people joining and betting, and losing, and leaving. And then there's a group of a couple 100 guys winning, and that's the whole story. And, you know, that's not the whole story, but but that's a lot of it.
Speaker 4:It's that you have you have really smart people Yeah. Just crushing the average trader.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what I find weird about this is that I like I I I don't have that many friends who fall into the
Speaker 2:But but do the people that get crushed quit right before they're about to hit it big?
Speaker 1:Yes. Clearly.
Speaker 4:I wonder. I wonder.
Speaker 1:So so I I have been I've had friends who have been in that camp of like smart grad student, tech person able to build a real model. And I always go to them and say, you shouldn't be trading because there's a much more sophisticated market participant sitting at a hedge fund with, you know, a data center worth of compute behind their models and they're going to crush you. And so I'm surprised that an individual of any sort can have an edge in this market. Like, is it just that like did you try and talk to any of the Wall Street funds that would more professionalize that like, activity because it feels like even the smart, clever, individual, disciplined individual who's maybe feeding off of like the casuals that are just coming in and out would eventually get crushed by something that's even more robust and professionalized.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, I was so delighted. I had a wonderful conversation with Jeff Yas, who co bought SIG. Yeah. You know, one of the sort of most respected firms in the country, if not the world.
Speaker 4:And I asked him this question, and he said, we are just getting taken for a ride. We're just getting crushed by these sharps. Really? And I was sort of trying to figure out why. I talked to someone who actually, know, SIG is trying to go out just like a number of other places, and they're trying to hire these sharps, right?
Speaker 4:I talked to someone who had an offer from SIG, and I said, you know, why didn't you take it? Well, you know, wouldn't you get, you know, better health insurance? You know? And he said, not only am I just baiting for killing, but I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can you know, he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader.
Speaker 4:Trades trades how is a film going to do on Rotten Tomatoes? And he's turned, you know I don't have the numbers in front of me, but he's made quite a bit of money, you know, 7 figure easily. And so, you know, he's guessing not guessing, he's predicting, he's building models to figure out how is the Rotten Tomatoes film going to perform and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites and he's doing things that maybe SIG, through their corporate policies, wouldn't allow. And he asked in the interviews, like, could I do this technique?
Speaker 4:And they went and they said, yeah, probably not. And so, it's been in these markets, you know, and there's just so many markets.
Speaker 2:Well, that because it's illegal?
Speaker 1:No. It's not Yeah. It might be against terms of service.
Speaker 2:Yeah. An individual Yeah. Like a law, but like a terms of use.
Speaker 4:Just, you know, as well. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. Interesting. Exactly.
Speaker 4:And this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because he's someone who, you know, he you know, pardon me, I'm going to swear, but he self described as sort of like a dipshit from the Midwest.
Speaker 2:Know, the first person talked to him was like,
Speaker 4:you know, hey, I'm this guy. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. Yeah. And I'm able to outcompete Wall Street with a $600 Lenovo laptop.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 4:Like, if I didn't go to a fancy school, I I could never have gotten a job on Wall Street. This is not this is not my world. But I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction markets.
Speaker 1:The American dream. Carl Sager and Jetty. He's going to be so happy to hear that. No. I mean, there has been a ton of pushback.
Speaker 1:But it feels like greatest gift to the prediction market industry has been AI being more controversial. And I'm wondering if you are tracking any of the potential political moves that might change the regulatory landscape for prediction markets. They've grown so fast. Feels like there's federal preemption. They're going to be legal everywhere.
Speaker 1:But has anyone popped out as a voice of what regulation might look like in this market, whether there's just, hey, no insider trading or, you know, make it more of a level playing field, more disclosures. Even something as simple as with a lot of the Vegas casinos, can self exclude. I don't know how that applies in a modern prediction market world, but that's something that the, like, the anti gambling lobbies would certainly like to see, I imagine.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think the regulatory landscape is incredibly important with all of this stuff. The Trump administration has been incredibly favorable to Cauchy, to Polymarket, to the CFTC, which regulates these things. They also regulate, you know, like the derivatives that you might trade lean hog or wheat or corn on. So, you know, the Trump administration, CFTC, has been much, much more willing to play ball with prediction markets.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, you talk to folks and they say, there may be, you know, come 2028, come 2029, if there's sort of a change of power in Washington, things may shift. Things may change. Yeah. And in the meantime, I think, you know, who who knows? It's really hard to think beyond three months from now.
Speaker 4:So it's really hard to think that far out. But in the meantime, there's a lot of people doing really, really good work. You know, the Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, is doing really, really good work. I'm thinking through how how do we just kind of come up with sensible solutions on how to better regulate things. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, how can we make sure that, you know, our national security is not, you know, imperiled by, you know, a lone wolf kind of going out and trading on there's gonna be a strike in Venezuela.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. It seems like there's a bit of a game of whack a mole where there's some really, really, really, really problematic markets that have negative externalities like the Venezuela one you mentioned. And then I still don't really have a first principles problem with a broad presidential election market. That seems totally reasonable, totally useful, very valuable.
Speaker 1:I found prediction markets useful all the time. We were checking call sheet constantly throughout the OpenAI Elon lawsuit because we're trying to cover it independently, it's a good source of, okay, what what does the market think? And it was accurate throughout the whole the whole affair. But, yeah, I mean, certainly people can get sucked into all sorts of different markets and there are gonna be hot hotly debated issues for for many years, but it does feel like this is like, the the the key focus at the federal level will be AI, at least for the next
Speaker 2:What what do you think what do you think sensible regulation looks like? Because in the case of there had to have been some guidelines that would, you know, have somebody in the special forces, you know, if they check the rule book, say like, should not send a signal to the Internet that we are, you know, going to attack a foreign country, which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on Strike on Venezuela.
Speaker 4:It's terrible. Terrible.
Speaker 2:But that doesn't feel like like that just feels like, it's not even necessarily like, that must have been violating, like, a number of policies, I would imagine.
Speaker 4:Policies and and federal law and, you know, the Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. You know, you also wanna see better enforcement. Right? You want to see you want to sort of flag these things before they even start. You know, I talked to Kalshi about this.
Speaker 4:I talked to Polymarket about this. And they say, you know, they say, hey, we're really working quite hard to stop this kind of insider trading. We're working quite hard on we're building AI systems to do it. We have, you know, teams of people working and working and working on this. We need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that, and, you know, this is where, you know, there's lots and lots of other great reporters at the Journal at the Times, that NPR There was
Speaker 1:a good story in the Journal about an independent watchdog that discovered a polymarket trader who was betting on Google search results and he wound up working for Google. So he just had the exact the the exact data available, which obviously is a violation of the terms of service. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What percentage of the sharps do you think just have inside info and are kind of taking you on a, you know, basically telling telling you
Speaker 1:a little story about I built a cool web script for
Speaker 4:I I think, you know, I talked to to to dozens and dozens and dozens sort of really top traders. Wow. And, you know, I asked for receipts, you know, I wanted to look at their models, you know. I went down to Texas and, you know, knocked on doors. I went I went and there was a group I went down to Texas with to sort of check out their approach to modeling Texas Democratic primary.
Speaker 4:And they called themselves MAGA QB Club. It's or so guys, and they went and knocked on, you know, more than a thousand doors, nearly a thousand doors, to try to get a leg up in this election. And they were right. You know, they were right. I think there some sort of really bad wolves out there that are taking advantage of the system.
Speaker 4:But the sharps, the sharps that we're talking about, people who are using information to make the markets more efficient, are in a totally different category. And that's sort of that's the vast majority of the activity. That and Wall Street. Yeah. You know, making money platforms.
Speaker 1:We have a question from Emily Sundberg. Why is a New Yorker writer taking a job at an AI tech company?
Speaker 4:It's a great question. That's a question from Emily or from from me or you want me to
Speaker 1:It's Emily for you, clearly.
Speaker 4:From Emily for me. You know, I I love my job. And, you know, I've been I've been so lucky to have gotten to talk to all kinds of just wonderful people over the last five years. I have a sense that things are changing, and I really rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and watch as things sort of change and be become a tech reporter, I think this would be the thing that I would do is I'd go be a tech reporter. Sure.
Speaker 4:I'd write wonderful stories about, you know, what's happening. And got this sense that I couldn't do it from the outside. Like, I've become increasingly convinced that AI is like the thing that I need to think about over the next n number of years. And I didn't have a sense that I could do this as a sort of a reporter from the outside without sort of having, you know, the street cred at some level of being in AI world. And then I went around and I had to sort of find a place that shared my values.
Speaker 4:And I was lucky enough to sort of, by happenstance, meet, you know, this guy Ivan who runs this company, Notion. And I really loved his vision of the world, and I love this company's vision of the world. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll give it a shot. We'll see. And it seems like it's the kind of place here that you can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world, and that sort of has a has a sort of, you know, a genuine curiosity and a sort of a genuine ambition to to tell to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world.
Speaker 4:And I'm, yeah, I'm quite excited to do it.
Speaker 1:Do you think about the opportunity at Notion to tell stories about the technology that, you know, ultimately drive traffic insight into what would make Notion like a dominant product for the next generation of writers? Like, those two opportunities seem both interesting, but is there one that's sticking out to you?
Speaker 4:Well, maybe you could ask a different question or ask it slightly differently. I don't quite understand the
Speaker 1:So Notion is a product that writers use to actually research
Speaker 2:Writer and all kinds of
Speaker 1:All sorts of people. But people also use it for organizing information of all sorts. But there is a world where you, as a member of nontechnical staff, help advance the product. And then there's another side where you tell stories and do more written output to attract customers to Notion? So it's more like product versus marketing if we went back in time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I don't think product or marketing really resonates with the thing that I really do here. Yeah. I think I'd be a terrible marketer. Don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But what I think I can do is come into this place Mhmm. Ask a ton of questions about what's happening here. Go elsewhere, ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere, and then, yeah, maybe tell interesting stories. Maybe the first thing I can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does AI look like in the economy?
Speaker 4:What is And, yeah, maybe there is an economic benefit for the business. Sure. I sure hope so. But but I think there's also just sort of a deeply felt duty here to to do good work in all kinds of different ways. And so I think, you know, part of that is is this.
Speaker 4:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Is there anything else?
Speaker 2:No. It's great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you. Thanks for coming on
Speaker 2:on the show. It down. Yeah. Congrats on the cargo new ship, you know, just call me up, let me know. Let's run it.
Speaker 2:Next one.
Speaker 1:Let's talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great to great to hang out of. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let
Speaker 1:me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. There's a whole bunch of IPOs going out. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI. If you're on public, you wanna make sure that you don't go and buy the wrong ticker because apparently people are are doing this on Wall Street Bets.
Speaker 1:Somebody claimed to put a $129,000 to work in SpaceX IPO. They wound up buying Virgin Galactic by mistake. That's a different company. But the Virgin Galactic stock is mooning on the rumors of SpaceX's IPO or imminent Virgin
Speaker 2:Galactic has the ticker SPCE.
Speaker 1:Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me.
Speaker 2:And fortunately this guy I mean, he held
Speaker 1:He gets some after
Speaker 2:the comments came in because he'd be up a 126%
Speaker 1:last time. Wait, it's still up? Yeah. Who knows? Maybe there's a comeback for Virgin Galactic.
Speaker 1:That would be very cool. I mean, I think a lot of I don't know what will happen to the rest of the space economy. Potentially, there's there's more capital for SpaceX, more competition, more more demand for a duopoly if you're a wireless carrier and you don't want be locked into Starlink exclusively and so you want to get an ASTS working for you and you continue to back that. Or if you are a company that needs to launch satellites into space, you know, you are helping Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to chop down the wood that they need to do to get to space regularly. And so that's actually bullish or you know, maybe they just eat it all up.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:Tyler says, yo, we just got an ad read. Just made my day.
Speaker 1:Just made
Speaker 2:my day.
Speaker 4:We love
Speaker 2:you guys.
Speaker 1:Kyle Kuzma, friend of the show, guest as of last Friday, said look at IBM hashtag quantum.
Speaker 2:He's had a lot of fun in the
Speaker 13:last market.
Speaker 1:He was a very he was a great interview. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Micron is also way way up. They extended gains to rise above a thousand dollars a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle.
Speaker 1:Of course, this is very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2,000.
Speaker 2:One one person on the team is clapping especially hard A over Micron. I believe. It was so funny because I was seeing this right as I was getting notification that the ceasefire or whatever the negotiation had blown up. Mhmm. And of course, Micron overpowering Yeah.
Speaker 2:Geopolitics.
Speaker 1:Two different things not dependent on the Strait Of Removes apparently. Well, the stock is now the company is now worth over 1,200,000,000,000. The stock was worth just 60,000,000,000 thirteen months ago. Absolutely remarkable. There are some rule changes from the space That says
Speaker 2:IPO. Micron is a Lambo candle.
Speaker 1:Lambo candle. That's a Lambo candle. Up 22% today. Absolutely insane. Rule changes for the SpaceX IPO.
Speaker 1:Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from ninety days to just five. This forces over 30,000,000,000,000 in passive four zero one k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S and P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within six months. The Russell one thousand and then Nasdaq one 100 funds will absorb 24%. The rules built to protect to protect passive investors.
Speaker 1:One S and P 500 required twelve months of trading and four quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both are waived now. Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from ninety days to fifteen. And the FTSE Russell cut its to five. All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends.
Speaker 1:So lots of buying activity for SpaceX. Nick Carter says, so this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end. And, yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to deal with this. If you, for some reason, don't want SpaceX in your S and P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetic S and P four ninety nine.
Speaker 2:And Probably do it on public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can probably build something that is neutral to this move. Of course, if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll happy that it is in your retirement account. And if the progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about, should work out for everyone. But there is a lot of risk in the system.
Speaker 1:So we will continue to monitor it. Well, there has been a lot of back and forth about how much you should work. How much you should work. Corgi is going back with Kari at Linear. We can go through this big debate.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of a lot of long posts. People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebbings had the Corgi insurance founder on the show and he said if you're not working seven days per week, you're going to lose. Kari takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him.
Speaker 1:Interesting timing with the Willmanitis.
Speaker 2:Grind slop.
Speaker 1:Grind slop SA. I think that the Corgi insurance I I I was unsure if it was just random timing or if the like, was the Corgi Insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Will Menidas post or was it recorded No.
Speaker 2:I think that I think think that that Nico, this is just part of their culture Yeah. As a company. Working for him. And it's working for him. It's clearly working for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot of reasons not to have a culture that sort of expects people to work seven days a week, but there's a lot of reasons to have one. And in Nico's defense, he's built a, I think, a $2,400,000,000 company in in a very short period of time.
Speaker 1:Remarkable.
Speaker 2:And it's a remarkable remarkable feat. Kari, on the other side, has also built a very big business. Yeah. And done it in maybe a more calm way. This is personal.
Speaker 2:Like, I I felt like over the last eighteen months, we've worked harder than ever in our Mhmm. Careers. But weekends are very much time off. And and part of that is, I mean, we're still talking like multiple times a day and making, you know, decisions around the business. But I actually felt that was especially necessary because five days a week we're coming here and hanging out trying to put on a show Yeah.
Speaker 2:Three hours. Yeah. And so the weekends are are good time to be able to actually it feels like unwinding is Yeah. Is particularly helpful.
Speaker 1:I mean, overall, Will he makes a bunch of good points in the Grind Slop essay, but I'm different and they don't apply to me. That was basically my takeaway. We have we have the founder
Speaker 2:Apparently, two thirds of Corgi's employees have the company tattooed.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So Wilmanitis was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay, which we should read at some point. That's a great essay if you haven't read it already. Wilmanitis, Grind Slob.
Speaker 6:We could read
Speaker 2:it and put ads in it. We can.
Speaker 1:Finally, the final form of the content Ouroboros
Speaker 2:as well.
Speaker 1:All We have essay about Well, a we have our next guest from Saras here in the TBPN Ultra Humble Desk. Love to
Speaker 2:Do you believe in working eight days a week?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where do
Speaker 2:you Where stand on do you stand?
Speaker 1:Five days a week, seven days a week, where do you stand on on relentless work above all else? Don't think Are
Speaker 13:you guys able to hear me?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can
Speaker 2:hear you.
Speaker 13:To hear. You can't hear Oh,
Speaker 1:no. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Why don't you why don't you jump out and We will bring you back in. We'll bring you back in. Okay. Well He was about to say every person on my team has a tattoo.
Speaker 1:Somebody should make headphones that work seven days a week. That would be an innovation. We'd like That would benefit us. Anyway, what did what did Kari say? He said, I get that business insurance is similar, Nobel level type pursuit of groundbreaking physics and the Manhattan Project hopefully the blast radius will be contained.
Speaker 1:They are burning back and forth fighting back and forth on the timeline. The timeline is in turmoil. Well, we do have a challenge that I want your take on because I actually saw this post and I did a whole deep dive and I have a very informed opinion. I want your take. So Alex Taberroepfer friend of the show, former guest as of last week says this one is genuinely difficult and Selah in SF, Selah underscore says you have a one way flight.
Speaker 1:Do you have this pulled up? I want you to these images. And Tyler, you too. Wait. Are you laughing at this or something else?
Speaker 5:Okay. I'm looking at this. I'm looking
Speaker 1:at it. Okay. Okay. I want everyone to weigh in on this. You have a one way flight somewhere unknown within the red boxed region.
Speaker 1:You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given $2,000 in cash or precious metal equivalent, an uncharged phone, three days of food, two changes of clothes, and an Israeli passport you're not allowed to get rid of. Your mission is to get to New York City. You get $10,000,000 if you arrive within one day, 5,000,000 if you arrive within a week, 1,000,000 if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose?
Speaker 1:And the first option is right between Panama and Colombia in the Darien Gap. The Darien Gap which is uninhabited. There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Chiron too? What happened?
Speaker 1:Or Chiron, of course, is created by the area.com.
Speaker 2:I did have a crazy, pretty wild travel story Oh, generally in that region.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I was in Panama.
Speaker 1:You crossed the Darien Gap?
Speaker 2:I didn't cross the Darien Gap, but I was dropped into Panama and I I was going to a place called Bocas Del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean. And I took an all day bus and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port Mhmm. Like at around midnight and there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I'm
Speaker 1:You're trying to get stuck.
Speaker 2:Because legally, I guess they're not allowed to make like, you know, boat runs. Yeah. And we ended up having to make a find a guy that was willing to willing to to make the charge. So we made the made made the trip lights Mhmm. Lights out, which was very sketchy.
Speaker 2:You're not supposed to be going, you know, traveling by boat Mhmm. At night in harbors without lights. But this one captain was was on board. And if we and and there was no like, there was no lodging in that little, like, port town. Okay.
Speaker 2:So it was like
Speaker 1:Sleep on
Speaker 2:sleep basically at a Yeah. Bus stop in a Caribbean port town or or make, you know, make the the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat. Mhmm. We were surfing that next morning.
Speaker 1:Okay. So the options are North Korea, remote Russia, the Iran Pakistan border, Gulf Of Oman Box or the Darien Gap. Which one would you go with and why? Tyler, do you have a pick?
Speaker 5:I'm going Darien Gap. Yeah. Why? You can just so you can get a ferry around. Right?
Speaker 5:Because you hear about these stories people motorcycling Yep. Like, you know, South America to Alaska or something.
Speaker 1:Yep. And I think the passport is less of an issue.
Speaker 5:You just get to the border.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I think if you land in Iran, you're screwed. If you land in North Korea, you're immediately a political prisoner. And Russia, probably the same thing. Also extremely cold, very very harsh conditions.
Speaker 1:Would you go dairy and gap as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The two the $2,000 I mean is the big constraint. Right? Because it's not really enough for a significant incentive for someone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You only fly business class so like you would be stuck. You'd get there and you'd be like, well, sir, business a one way flight from Pyongyang to New York City business class is gonna be 25 I
Speaker 2:I just think if you're trying to get to the if you're trying to get to New York from these places with $2,000 Yeah. And you don't have
Speaker 1:No. Darien Gap for sure. Because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medellin, either one is gonna let you with that passport get to New York City.
Speaker 2:Oh, right. For sure. But but this I'm an American.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you have this Israeli passport. So the one that you they will see this.
Speaker 2:But it's valid passport.
Speaker 1:It's a valid passport. Okay. And so they will see it and they will say, okay. Well, if you're in Iran or North Korea, they will say absolutely not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Regardless of your actual passport. Whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say, right this way sir, like you can go to New York City. It's it's much easier. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Gabe says, if I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a Mossad super agent on an undercover mission which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post so not sure what happens next but I picked that one.
Speaker 1:And Sean Frank agrees with us. Darren Gap first. Anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Danial. Are we back?
Speaker 1:How are doing? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're back.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm well. Fantastic. Folks.
Speaker 1:Let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened?
Speaker 13:Sure. I'm Daniel. I'm founder and CEO of Sirus AI. We build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions focused on the back office.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:It's sort of the unsung heroes of, you know, any company in the back office. Yeah. So we're helping automate a lot of their tedious complex tasks that, you know, the humans don't enjoy. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So how how diffuse is your customer base? Because credit unions, I mean, feel like there's there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in The United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. That your goal to be, I guess, like, more like mid market versus, like, we're going straight to JPMorgan and and we're gonna be at that level on day one?
Speaker 13:Yeah. That's a great question. We are working with one of the larger G SIB banks.
Speaker 5:But Okay.
Speaker 13:To be honest, it's it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with this particular story or a segment of the market.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 13:And as you put it, right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8,000 of them all across The US. Mhmm. And they're serving, you know, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. It's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage, or we have another customer in Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans.
Speaker 13:So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the the heart of the economy.
Speaker 10:So it's just kinda cool.
Speaker 1:And how much of the business is, like, I mean, we're already in unsexy territory. Let's get unsexy or how much of the business is, like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems? Because, mean, I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that, getting that into something that's, you know, interpretable from any computer system. It it seems like it's still a challenge.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this story. The first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy Yeah.
Speaker 13:You know, especially with foundation models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect humans, you know, the work that humans do
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 13:With the regulatory environment, with the infrastructure, with integrations, with systems. Not everything is API accessible with semi structured, unstructured data, like you said, in papers and so on. Mhmm. That orchestration, that's where the magic is. And I think that's where the moat is for a lot of startups, to come in.
Speaker 13:Because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear Mhmm. Foundation models will probably figure that out. Yeah. So I think that's the first part. The second part of the story is more human again, and it's what we call or what I call the dignity of work.
Speaker 13:Right? So I'll share a story with you. Like, we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on. But let me share some stories on the ground. Right?
Speaker 13:So we have one one of our customers. Their team had a backlog of 300 sort of loan documents, and they are literally spending the time from 5PM till 09:30PM, five days a week. Mhmm. Completing that backlog because nine in the morning they have to get to another backlog. Yeah.
Speaker 13:We launched ours about like three weeks ago. Now they're going home at 06:20. They can be with their families. Right? That's dignity of work.
Speaker 13:That's amazing. Yeah. We have another case where, you know, we it's it's it's
Speaker 2:That's happened other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Which is great. Just more efficiency, more higher productivity, is the good news.
Speaker 13:Exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So that so so we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. Mhmm. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members.
Speaker 13:So one other example quickly I'll share with you is, you know, we've had a case where the president of a credit union sent me a text that, hey. We were planning on hiring five people this quarter. Yeah. But because the output of with with Tyrus is so much higher, they didn't hire those five people. However, they gave a raise to the existing team.
Speaker 13:Everyone's happier about that. Right? So so those are kinda like interesting things we're seeing.
Speaker 1:K. Give us the fundraising news because we're running late. What what'd you raise? Who'd you who who funded you?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So it was, I guess, love at first sight with a partner. We raised $28,800,000 in the same
Speaker 6:thing. Nice.
Speaker 2:Congratulations, What
Speaker 13:what partner BC.
Speaker 2:What partner led
Speaker 13:the deal? It was Alex, man. It was Oh, Alex. Our side. And then then we got a meet with Joe as well, who's who's just an awesome guy too.
Speaker 13:So it was great.
Speaker 1:That's great news. Well, sorry for cutting this short. A little bit of technical difficulty but thank you so much. I'm sure you'll back
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Be back soon.
Speaker 2:Together. Good
Speaker 1:luck with the journey. Corner. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 13:Cool. Awesome. Cheers, guys. Great to
Speaker 2:meet you.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Mike from Gigascale Capital. Mike, how you doing?
Speaker 10:Awesome. How you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Former CTO of Meta, by the way. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the fun, the strategy. I have so many questions.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I've been in Silicon Valley twenty five years. Been an operator. Joined Facebook meta 2008. Scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook AI research lab.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I stepped away from that job.
Speaker 1:Just everything. Just every important project there.
Speaker 10:A lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot
Speaker 10:of stuff. I mean, with a lot of great people. Yeah. So, I don't wanna overly take credit.
Speaker 14:But Of I
Speaker 10:I saw this this change happening in the world a couple years ago which was I thought we're moving from atoms or bits to atoms. Just like the physical world mattered again.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:That is the marginal cost of software went to zero. The thing that really mattered is how much stuff can we build and how are we gonna build it. Yeah. And so I started a venture capital firm to sort of prove out this thesis. I've I've, know, wanna improve it first by investing my own money to make sure sort of I knew it was working and then, know, our company started working.
Speaker 10:The question isn't do they wanna buy it? It's how fast can they make everything? Yeah. Because making it sort of better, faster, cheaper than the way we did it for the last, I don't know, a hundred hundred fifty in a lot of cases. And so we brought on a set of institutional investors and raised more money and are just getting going on this journey.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise?
Speaker 10:$2.50.
Speaker 2:$2.50. Quarter bill. Quarter bill. Wow. What what were some of the what were some of the standout companies in that first kind of like angel fund that you mentioned that that made you think you were onto something?
Speaker 10:Well, there's a there's a bunch of them. So Panthalassa is building ocean data centers for inference. Think you have Garth on here a little while ago and is one example. Heron Power which is a more recent investment but it's just on a tear. They're they're saying like, the way we brought energy to data centers is using 100 year old technology literally.
Speaker 10:We've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your model three model y and we're putting them on the grid and we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. You know, we've got Radiant nuclear is building a container size micro reactor. It gives you a megawatt half of power for five years with no refueling.
Speaker 10:And they've got form energy that said, hey, you know, these data centers, you you got power swings, you might have renewables which are on and off. We're gonna build a new kind of battery that lasts a hundred days. So if you're dependent on solar and it's cloudy for three days, no problem. I got four day battery and that battery is super cheap because it's made out of it literally like rusts and on rusts iron is like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery and it's big and it's heavy, but who cares because it's on the grid.
Speaker 10:So again, you're just like rethinking problems in a different way and using modern technology and you come up with a solution that that works for everyone.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about publics versus privates? Because there's this massive boom and I'm so excited about Doug and new and Radiant and Nuclear and bringing new solar And on the there's so many different key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where, like, it's just hard to pull forward these foundational technology efforts in the private markets and start up world where, yeah, you're doing something completely new. It might take five years. And so in the meantime, it's just call up g Vernova and 10 x the amount of, you know, natural gas. And that that that is like a technical debt that I think we're gonna have to pay at some point.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering about, like, is there a crowding out effect? How How do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets? And I'm just wondering about like where like the is the time compression, is the time scale a factor one way or another? Is it a benefit or curse or both? Double edged sword?
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about that?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups. Yeah. So I think you're gonna you're gonna get my belief that it has never been a better time to start and I'm seeing this firsthand.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 10:mean, just think about the speed at which I can build tools, you know, AI, using robotics in the physical world, you know, even just using platforms like Stripe and ramp and like all of these, it's just like the amount of time you would said monkeying with things before is just like free. You can have these tiny six, ten, 12 person teams have incredible, unbelievable impact and you throw off all the all the, you know, deadweight of doing it the way, you know, you've done it even for the last ten years. You started a company six months ago, you would you would form it differently than if you started it twelve months ago. Yeah. Because like that's that's prior to you know, Opus four seven.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And it's just just an incredible time and and we haven't talked about this just like a immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like, oh, we know how to do this like 10 x better, faster, cheaper starting with with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories, you know, we used to build factories with like a central like steam thing that would spin all these like shafts and you built the entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor, but everything else was the same and productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works.
Speaker 10:This is how I think it's happening in robotics now. We're dropping in a robot where a human used to be and you're like, a second, if I just like took a building and said, actually my goal is to feed the robots and keep them 80% utilized, how would I build this factory? And that's a very different structure than like replacing a person with a robot in terms of it. That's where I think you get five x 10 x points.
Speaker 2:Are you worried we're gonna run out of problems in the real world for startups to solve? No, I'm kidding. I do I do
Speaker 1:No one's ever asking
Speaker 10:that one. No,
Speaker 2:mean it is it is Return the funds,
Speaker 1:There's no more ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Just return capital.
Speaker 1:We're we're done. We're
Speaker 2:But but any any intuition around like the, you know, the next big big category in sort of atoms? Like, is it is it just robotics generally? Like how how did do you have a do you have a any ideas around like timeline of robotics and the application of them across different industries? Because this is one of those, you know, categories that I think it's been it has been happening. It's real in certain industries, but it's been promised for so long.
Speaker 2:This time around does feel a little bit different, but I'm wondering I'm wondering how you view it just because if you get the if you obviously, if you get the timeline wrong, you can get the bet wrong entirely.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Predicting these things is, you know, it's we we have two bets in fusion and the fusion has been the, you know, the joke. It's ten years away every ten years for a long time. But this time it's different. But the so robotics I think is quickly going into that zone.
Speaker 10:I'm really bullish on industrial robotics and we've already used robots in fact car factories all the time. And so the question is, can you move into like slightly less well structured things like taking a box? If you look at a lot of like factories and warehouses, like there's a surprising amount of like unboxing and boxing that happens. I get a box, I get a box cutter, cut it open, I pour all the stuff out, I get rid of the plastic bags. It's all done by humans now.
Speaker 10:That's a really hard thing to automate with like a Cucco robot like because it's just every box is a little different and like the bag gets stuck and all the rest of it. And so like those are the sorts of like things that I think are gonna be really because they're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet.
Speaker 10:So I think the home is like and like I'm excited about it. I want a robot to fold my laundry and empty the dishwasher. Can't wait. But like man, you're playing on a hard mode to like start in the home. I've shipped home electronics like people drop stuff.
Speaker 10:They spill wine on it. Like there's all sorts of things that happen in the home that I just don't have to worry about in a factory. So I think you're gonna see it in factories and warehouses first and then you're gonna sort of see it go out from there.
Speaker 1:Spilling wine on your Oculus or your Quest. That's a wild time.
Speaker 2:That's something you would do. I'm sure you're
Speaker 1:therapist. You ship millions of them. So yeah.
Speaker 10:Oh, yeah. No. No. This the the thing that created all the gray hairs is like you do all this work making this awesome product. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And then you're like, oh, we have this thing called a drop test. Oh. Like the consumer takes it out of the box and it's supposed to go on my face. Instead of putting my face, I drop it on the floor. Yep.
Speaker 10:And like does it break or not? Yeah. And so we spend all this time like dropping them and putting these high speed cameras to watch like which part breaks and then go reinforce it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just like And that creates a lot of weight and that hurts the product. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The bigger issue with robotics is like then you have like, you know, there's not a huge risk of like if I drop the Oculus does, maybe it does some minor damage to the floor and the device itself, but you add these like big humanoid form factors and suddenly it's like the dog died because like the the robot, you know, just fell on it, you know. This is a or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean besides laundry and emptying my dishwasher, wanted to like make me breakfast. Right? But like now we got a robot like operating with hot oil Fire. You know, on a stove with a flame.
Speaker 10:Like what could go wrong?
Speaker 1:That's gonna be wild. Solar. I feel like there's, you know, the the Elon Musk of space is Elon. He did electric cars. He's working on robotics.
Speaker 1:He's been a little shy about solar. I mean, he's optimistic about solar, but he hasn't actually scaled up American manufacturing capacity of solar. We have a number of founders. You know, if you have Palmer Lucky in defense and there's a number of nuclear founders who have sort of taken up the mantle to go on the press tour that's necessary to get folks excited about nuclear. I haven't seen that in solar as much.
Speaker 1:Am I just not paying attention? Is there some sort of fundamental constraint why solar is not going through as much of a fast takeoff? We've talked to the CEO of t one energy. That's sort of this, you know, acquisition changing the management. It's very exciting, but it's not the same, you know, startup seed round, you know, visionary founder all the way through this really broad vision.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if that's gonna happen, if we're early, if it's already happening, and I'm not I'm just not aware. What what are thinking about solar generally?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen. And, you know, it's 99% cheaper than it used to be. It's mostly manufactured in China. It's a scaled manufacturing problem.
Speaker 10:That's not a great problem to go after as a startup where it's like manufacturing scales How
Speaker 2:compete China?
Speaker 10:Against China. Yeah. Like, good luck. So so I think that that that explains a lot of it. What I do think is gonna happen is if I'm just trying to make a, you know, 400 millimeter by 300 millimeter solar panel cheaper than China, good luck.
Speaker 10:But like for a long time, we treated these things like they were like precious minerals. And so if you look at a solar farm, you like lay down all this steel and you put up all this framing and all the rest of it to like put this panel on. Well, when that panel was the most expensive thing on the field then like, yeah, that makes sense. That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, they're like steel frame cost more than the panel.
Speaker 10:And so I think what we're going to see and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this who are saying like, let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor, from an automation perspective and like just go after installation cost. I'm assuming the cells themselves are basically free. It's basically glass. Yeah. Like what would you do differently?
Speaker 10:And that, again, I think this notion of like constraints have changed is what creates a new opportunity. So that's to me what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And even from a yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with The US and China. But at the end of the day, like, a solar cell is not the same as buying, like, a full computer or something that has spyware on it. Right.
Speaker 1:Like, it is just a chip there that that it's, you know
Speaker 4:It's Yeah. Where where the
Speaker 1:spyware be exactly. And so I think you'll see more like hybrid approaches like this, like what Waymo is doing where they're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board.
Speaker 10:So
Speaker 1:it's a little bit more, you know, less politically dicey, I think. Yes. Anyway, last question. On fund size, fund structuring, I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. How are you thinking about actually participating over time?
Speaker 1:Do you think you'll be doing SPVs to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that? And do you have a strategy in place?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, the first thing we have been doing is just going to work to get these companies fundraised. So we have a giant network of of others. So Panthalassa is a great example just raised a huge round from from Peter Thiel. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We were very early investors in that. So the first thing is get these companies successful, then you have the options. Mhmm. In terms of how we take advantage of that access and option is something we're gonna figure out over time. You know, I think this is the beginning, not the end.
Speaker 10:We are oversubscribed in this fund, so there's lots of opportunities for us to raise other vehicles And I get going but I wanted to keep it felt, you know, I give all our entrepreneurs advice, stay focused. So let's get out the gate, stay focused, prove that there's a bunch of early stage to your first question. Are there opportunities for early stage companies in the space? I think so. I think you're gonna see a lot of interesting progress in the next year and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure how to participate as these companies grow.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Very excited to meet more of your companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 10:Thanks, Zepul.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Okay. Up next, have Nico from Default with an amazing series a. I've known Nico for a long time, but it's his first time on the show. So we'll bring him in to TBD Ultra.
Speaker 1:How are doing, Nico? Good to see you.
Speaker 13:Phenomenal. Long time
Speaker 1:no see. Get that overnight success button ready. Overnight success. Another one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Give us the news. Tell us what happened. These guys
Speaker 2:get out
Speaker 1:of their system.
Speaker 6:Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners.
Speaker 4:Good to
Speaker 2:see you.
Speaker 6:I'm Nico, one of the co founders here at default.com. Most recently default.ai. We got a nice URL redirect you on.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 2:Wait. You were
Speaker 6:at default.com.
Speaker 2:Wait. You're going from .com to .ai domain?
Speaker 6:We we kept the .com still main main domain. Had to pick up default.ai, have it redirects to redirects.
Speaker 1:A.com respect? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I am.
Speaker 6:Dare You're just
Speaker 2:just the .com.
Speaker 1:No. Very good. Tell us about the product.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top of funnel orchestration tools primarily for inbound scheduling Mhmm. Inbound routing, enrichment for very fast growing b to b companies. And over the last, like, twelve, eighteen months, we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents. It was running still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And we took a really big bet and basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year. And last Wednesday, about five days ago, we launched it to the world, and it's been it's been great so far. I've this is my twelfth meeting of the day, so I'm glad to be to I'm glad to jump off the demo demo router.
Speaker 1:Explain the the flow. When does the agent come into the in into the into the process? I imagine inbound lead, b to b SaaS company, they have a landing page. There's at some point, they collect a form or an email, and then the magic happens. Like, what is the magic?
Speaker 1:What is happening?
Speaker 6:Yeah, John. So we, you know, the the way we used to work before, you know, before we launched a new product, so we'd basically come in, we'd hook into the forms of their website, we'd add a little piece of code that told us, you know, how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, etcetera. Mhmm. And then we'd kind of build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top funnel signals, and your CRM, and your sales team. Now what we do is we give you an out of the box data layer.
Speaker 6:And what data layer is it's a real time data warehouse you plug into your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar. Yep. We pipe in all of all of that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these tough to usually really tough to answer questions about your business. And, you know, everyone says that, you know, all growth problems are data problems, and, you know, at least in at least in go to market. And effectively, what we what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems as well as different activity like meetings and formal submissions and website website visitors into a language that, you know, agents can actually understand and use to answer, you know, these really tough questions.
Speaker 1:Isn't this gonna grow into a CRM at some point? It feels like the opportunity to do a compound startup, do many more features, like, you have not only is your company AI enabled on the product side, but your engineering team is enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case?
Speaker 1:Or do you have ambitions to build out something that looks like a legacy workflow? Is there demand for that? Or do you see the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM?
Speaker 6:I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today, even as they're navigating this really challenging really really challenging kind of transition Mhmm. Even at at really, really large scale. These are the same problems they were running into ten years ago. So there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:For us. That being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers really, really build some really cool stuff internally and completely flipped the way, you know, things have been done for the last last couple decades. So that being said, you know, every every road in in this category and and, you know, more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or or similar. So Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We've we've we've built with with that mantra since since day one.
Speaker 1:How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins? Like, if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound and has a go to market motion or in b to b software, there are other niches within b to b software. Right? More dev tool focused, more finance focused b to b software. Do you find that there are sort of mini network effects in these niches?
Speaker 1:Have you been successful finding a few? Or do you want to deliberately cast a wide net so you can sort of cross pollinate all the the learnings from one category to the others, like, immediately?
Speaker 6:So I would say, you know, really early on, we were focused on working with the fastest growing, you know, really the fastest growing startups. And there was a bit of a yeah. I don't know if network effect is how to put it, but there you know, a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on. Yeah. You know, people would would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite favorite new recently launched and fresh off the assembly line product, and they'd see the little powered by default logo down at the bottom.
Speaker 6:And that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. But, you know, it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers you know, we serve a lot of customers in in software, a few in, like, medical devices, some services services businesses, fintech as well. And more or less, everyone, you know, everyone runs into some some version of the same problem, which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another and really kinda create this sort of, like, data soup or this, like, Frankenstack is what we call it that just makes it really, really hard to grow. It creates this, like, growth task.
Speaker 6:You know, every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain, you know, past a certain threshold depending on the vertical or market, you know, requires sort of army of operations people to sort of maintain the Frankenstack and keep it at bay. So
Speaker 1:like that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how prevalent is the Frankenstack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like Databricks exist, Snowflakes exist, like everyone has this beautiful data lake. And of course and and not only that, Zapier exists and and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly, every company has done that.
Speaker 1:Sounds like they haven't. Is there is there, like, a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice? And then is that is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations?
Speaker 6:Yes. I'll I'll give two answers here. First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:I'll I'll say that, first and foremost. Second, you know, I think it's very rare that we run into a scaling, you know, revenue org that has, you know, very deep technical proficiency and Mhmm. You know, is is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Or writing SQL. Typically, they're pulling reports and trying to answer, you know, a lot of these slice normally tough to answer questions. That being said, one of the things that I've been you know, my the the team and I have been really excited about here over the course of last year is seeing so many really, really fast growing companies. Owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Norton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible go to market operations team.
Speaker 6:They built so much internal you know, basically just building their own distribution product, their own foundation they can use to scale. And as a result, they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage, and they started doing that very, very early on. You see the same thing with other hyper growth companies like Ramp and Rippling and and many others. But, you know, the the best companies treat their distribution as as product and, you know, as an extension of of products. And, you know, I think that is that is getting earlier and earlier in terms of when when companies start prioritizing that.
Speaker 2:Tell us about the round. Last well, before that. Please. Seven day work week. Five day work week.
Speaker 2:Logo day
Speaker 1:work week.
Speaker 2:Do you have a default as like kind of a back piece?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I've got a nice stamp down here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's nice.
Speaker 1:The whole back. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, you gotta I
Speaker 1:mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's it's intense. You know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year. It's basically major project
Speaker 2:for GTM.
Speaker 6:For b b c s Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:No. But it is a competition. You want to win, and there's other players. And, like, you know, if you if you're on the beach five days a week, like, you're just gonna get smoked. This is real.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:We're we're definitely not on the beach five days a week. Yeah. I'm I'm too pale too pale for that. But no. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We get you know, we're we're solving a lot of a lot of really hard problems. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really, really excited at, you know, kind of solving solving the growth rate of your problem and trying to help help our customers grow better and faster. A lot of that stuff you know, a lot of the the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds, you know, thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out. And, you know, we're we're very excited about the future.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Tell us about the round. How
Speaker 4:much are
Speaker 1:you ready?
Speaker 6:So so we did a $10,000,000 a last year. Again. Every cow. There's another one?
Speaker 2:That one more. There
Speaker 6:we go.
Speaker 1:Sounds like there are a couple rounds.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. That's hard.
Speaker 1:That's a hard one.
Speaker 2:That's a hard one. Anyway. Expert mode. Great to catch up, Niko. Thanks for coming
Speaker 12:on the Catch
Speaker 6:you all soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Very fun. That is the hardest one to hit.
Speaker 1:Good. The glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Kim from Brilliant. She's the co founder and CEO and she's here with us in the TBPN Ultra. What's going on?
Speaker 1:Sue, how are you doing?
Speaker 14:Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on the show. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and the launch and for you to just take it through take us through it.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So I'm Sue. I'm the co founder and CEO of Brilliant. We just launched Brilliant's new AI tutor. His name is Koji.
Speaker 14:He's a little green guy. He helps you learn how to think and problem solve in math and coding. If you come check out the product, everything starts out very visual and interactive. And this tutor can see how you're interacting with all the concepts and the problems you're solving and point and sketch and annotate on the screen with you. So we call it a graphical tutor because it's designed to feel like someone sitting next to you looking over your shoulder and ready to help.
Speaker 2:Talk about how people have processed the intersection of AI and, and education to date. It's been such a big a big selling point overall. And personally, I think it's most powerful as as a way to ask like the dumb question that you might be embarrassed to ask, you know, a friend or an actual teeter teacher or even even a tutor. But how have you kind of processed it? Obviously, you can use the base models themselves to to learn, but there's a lot of missing functionality and opportunity for you to kind of, you know, extend out that kind of raw capability.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot that, you know, the student who would never ever raise their hand in class and ask a question or, you know, even with a tutor, it's just kind of like, oh, I still don't get it. Like, can you explain it a third way?
Speaker 14:It's just hard to do. And, you know, I think that these models have helped a lot with that, like lowering that embarrassment. And one of the things that we haven't yet seen them do is design for something other than the moment of explanation. Yeah. You know, when we designed this tutor, we designed it for that moment of understanding, not for the moment of explanation.
Speaker 14:And there's actually a lot of research on tutoring that shows that when human tutors don't just sit there and explain stuff to you, the tutoring conversations become a lot more interactive, and then students just do a lot more of the work. And, you know, these, like, magical outcomes of why tutoring is so broadly effective, you know, ultimately, a lot of that just comes down to the learner spending more time on the material. And, you know, if the tutor talks too much and just, like, spits out tons of stuff for you to read, that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work, and then, you know, lowering the embarrassment, improving their motivation and engagement, and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident tackling these things on their own.
Speaker 2:Do you feel like you have a duty to make learning addictive?
Speaker 4:How would you pass something similar?
Speaker 2:Because every every, you know, there's a lot of big companies out there. I won't name them. They certainly want people to spend as much time in their applications as possible.
Speaker 1:It's like every company, but yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not not every company. There's there's there's
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:matter let's say like the the algorithmic video feed. Sure. Right? Like they want as much of our time as possible. I feel like you have a duty to take to try to make learning as addictive as Good addiction.
Speaker 2:It's a positive addiction. Right? I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world Yeah. Furthering their skills, etcetera.
Speaker 14:Yeah. You know, we talk about this a lot. Like, a big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. And, you know, the goal is that you scaffold the learner and allow them to ask questions until they get to a point where they can do it for the for themselves. And then you wanna get out of the way.
Speaker 14:So, you know, one of our goals is that if we are doing a good job over the course of learning a concept, coaching should become totally unnecessary. Like, you should be asking the questions that he used to ask you. And, you know, one of the things that I I find a funny parallel is that on our board is someone who started the dating company OkCupid, and then he went on and, you know, became the CEO of Match, was on the board of Tinder. And he was like, know, the funny thing about consumer dating apps is that if you're successful, churn is built into the product. Like, you want people to churn.
Speaker 14:Like, you don't want people just in the app just going on dates all the time and not, you know, meeting that long term partner. Yeah. And so, you know, we do measure whether or not people churn and but we measure it very differently from how most other consumer products would think about it. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But I feel like I feel like learning is much more learning is way more continuous. Like, everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner whether Whereas, like, maybe it's not so healthy to aspire to be a lifelong dater, you know. Somebody that's just like, I never wanna, you know. I don't feel like It's interesting. There's there's never been a subject that I've, like, learned about where I've just run out of things to learn.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting. That happens to me all the time. I feel like I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'm talking about more
Speaker 1:I'm done. I know everything about I know everything about I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:No. But I mean Of course. Of course. You're joking but there is specific things where you're like, okay, I've learned enough about Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And I don't really care about it too much, know, let's say, but like I've learned the basics and I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics. For me, that's nutrition. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every single point Yeah. Yeah. Every single place that I've gotten to in terms of an overall understanding, like, wow, this goes deeper than I thought.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how are you thinking about multimodality? I feel like the the big labs all have different ways to turn out a result that's not just a big block text. There's an image, an infographic. We saw with Google IO there's the omni model that can show a ten second video diagram or an explanation, a whiteboard lecture.
Speaker 1:And it feels like there's maybe a gap right now in that you have to come to the model or the chat app and ask for what you want. You have to say, I want this as an infographic or I want this as a video. Or you might even have to go to a specific model or a specific company. Like, if you want video, you go to Google. If you want an image, you go to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if you're thinking about how that fits into your process of actually picking the right tool for the job.
Speaker 14:Yeah. It's very you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process. And it's one of those things where when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like, typically, the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question, you get your answer, and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these, like, homework help type learning queries, people answer people get their question answered, and then they leave.
Speaker 14:And so the model gets back no data on did the learner actually learn this thing. And, you know, going back to the point about, you know, addiction, the thing that we try to get people really immersed in is, like, tons and tons of, like, dense real time reps to in learning a topic so that we can self improve and hyper personalize in real time. And to do that, you have to have a dense user model. You have to have a learning graph. You That's not gonna come out of a model company anytime soon.
Speaker 14:The UI UX matters a lot too. Has to be purpose built for teaching with all the features that come along with that. And also, some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic. Like, you have to be correct, and you have to guarantee that correctness. And so I think there's a lot of things that ultimately just add up to a lot of friction when you are asking the user to pull and sort of scaffold and structure their own learning.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Whereas, you know, our philosophy is we're going to pull you in Mhmm. And give you things to do that are the right next thing for you to do.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Where can people get started?
Speaker 14:Go to brilliant.org and we have apps as well in the App Store and Play Store.
Speaker 1:Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on Great
Speaker 2:to meet you and congrats.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Goodbye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Before our next guest joins, we have a new a new release, new information from Sam Sulik. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work five days a week or seven days a week. He says you only need to work five days a week. Don't overdo it. You do not need to work twenty four seven.
Speaker 1:Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time, you're not working on the Manhattan Project. Work hard, recovery, keep some balance. So wise words from Sam Soulek. I just took your image and put it in chat GBT, but it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding.
Speaker 1:Know, you do need to take rest days in bodybuilding. So it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say. But that, of course, is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Fortunately, we have someone with some very real news joining us.
Speaker 1:We have Bernie Su, the Emmy winning series creator to talk about movies. Go back to the YouTubification of Hollywood. We'll get his takes on my takes, my very novice takes. But why don't we start with an introduction on you and yourself? Can you tell us a little bit about you?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Sure. Hi. My name is Bernie. I am been working in the entertainment industry and tech adjacent industries for over a decade.
Speaker 12:I've created Thanks. Many We created many shows across YouTube, Twitch, and other new media platforms, including some shows that were in traditional Hollywood, but I'm most known for my three Emmy winning shows, Emma Approved, Lizzie Banner Diaries, which were the first and second primetime Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show and the show Artificial, which was the first Emmy win for a Twitch show, which also won a Peabody. That's so cool. And it's been it's an honor to be here, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for coming on
Speaker 2:Thanks the for popping on.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, I I Rattle off
Speaker 2:your takes.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I don't I don't know if my take was that contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029 and we have back to back to back YouTube massive successes at the box office, something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10,000,000 YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out but this summer it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with Obsession, Backrooms and Iron Lung.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering how you're interpreting those three movies. Is this an actual turning point? Has this been a slow gradual grind for years? And maybe this is less of an important moment than maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing and it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent viral news around Backrooms, obsession, Iron Lung, etcetera?
Speaker 12:I mean, you kind of said it there. Think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. Mhmm. So if you I speak at VidCon every year, for example, and I've asked every year on this kind of the same panel, like, when is, like, you or when are the creators of YouTube going to take over Hollywood and all that And I'm like, they are already going and getting there.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 12:They're just not seeing it and like, you're seeing the ramp up and of course, it's just getting bigger and getting bigger and getting bigger. It's like like I think, you know, regarding say like the Emmys, like MrBeast is not a YouTuber. He's a prime creator
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Because he has a show on prime. That's what he's going for. Right? So so these are this is we're now seeing in movies as you said, like now we're seeing it in the in the last, like you said, the back to back to back run of this year. Yeah.
Speaker 12:But this is something that at least I've been seeing for, you know, five years or so as this ramp up and you're kind of where you where the earlier genesis of this was is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber kind of led movies, influencer led movies. The movies probably weren't regarded as great movies, but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude Yep. In there. It's like, oh, you've got 10,000,000 followers. Let's just put you in here.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And the problem with that is that that doesn't work because it's not on brand with the audience that it's coming from. Right? So so now with like, Iron Lung and Markiplier and all that stuff like, it's his. Right?
Speaker 12:Yeah. It's it's his. Yeah. So it's very much him being him. Beast Games is him being him just amplified.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And you're seeing that tech and social media play coming in all at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've heard a lot about this in in casting calls these days where actors and actresses will just get asked like, oh, well, do you have 10,000 on Instagram or a 100,000 on Instagram? And it feels like that is it maybe it's some sort of signal, but it's not really going to move the needle on is this going to be a success at the box office if a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people. It's more just like are you serious and have you figured out the Instagram algorithm to like get a bunch of views? Do you think?
Speaker 2:Living in LA for most of my adult life Yeah. I've been surprised. I've met a bunch of people who are like work in in the in the movie business Yeah. Directors, producers. Sure.
Speaker 2:And you'll ask them like, oh, do you do you have like a YouTube channel? Like And they'll be like, no. No. I don't I don't don't do that. And it's always like surprising to me because it's basically saying like, I'm going to let other people and like gatekeepers sort of like dictate my creative
Speaker 1:already have the key to the gate, why do you need to it's no problem for you because you're going right in.
Speaker 2:No. I know. But no. Some people like that are trying to break in. If I was trying to break into the movie business, movies.
Speaker 2:Start digging up. Like as much as possible even if they were, you know, ten minutes, twenty minutes, you know, or just figuring out some of these other formats. Yeah. Like I think that's like when you look at obsession Yeah. That's an example of somebody who'd like really really really really got their reps in
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:Even if it wasn't like the format that led to the breakout, you know, like proper like like box office hit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean Thousand percent agree.
Speaker 12:I mean, I'll add to that that like right now, all these young creators, you you like you said, breaking in, you you are more armed today with just tools, like like not just audience, but audience and tools with like the if whether you're the AI side or not with the creative and the Gen AI, you have all this automation and all these like like efficiency points you can activate.
Speaker 4:I mean, that room is a blender.
Speaker 1:Blender. It's a free Yeah. Open source CGI package and
Speaker 12:Exactly. And
Speaker 1:and you go to Skibbidi Toilet and it's like made in Valve Filmmaker and people are making movies in Fortnite and and Halo from a long time ago if you remember Red versus Blue. Of course. Another burning.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess my my big question is Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige and it's still seen as the the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have a film on the silver screen and have a box office smash, that's great. But in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now and I'm not anticipating like a flippening where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense. But I'm excited by the idea of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious, you know, Hollywood filmmaking scene. But I'm just wondering like how much of this is about cultural shelling points, these moments that bring us all together versus something that's more abstract prestige?
Speaker 1:Like, what is the long term relationship here? Because it doesn't feel like you're going to see, oh, YouTubers aren't making any money anymore and everyone went back to making money in Hollywood. It feels more like Hollywood's just getting some juice back and restructuring a little bit to bring some young talent up. But YouTube will still continue to be a behemoth in terms of monetization on ads and brand partnerships and whatnot.
Speaker 12:Yeah. All of that is is accurate. I would just add clarification on like YouTube is yes, it is bigger, but it's also more diversified Totally. Because it's just so many channels. Yeah.
Speaker 12:It's like Hollywood puts out whatever 50 movies a year at most and you know, YouTubers are doing that one YouTubers doing that a month.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like well, movies, but videos. You get one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 12:And so what We're putting
Speaker 2:away one Hollywood's worth of content.
Speaker 1:Like every basically.
Speaker 2:For a minute. Right?
Speaker 12:For a second, whatever. But like so what you're going toward there as far as the the business side of things is Yeah. Is the kind of what I call the franchising.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Right? So Hollywood is still the best place to like amplify your franchise. Like take something and like send it to a bunch of other places. Okay? Obviously this is a little cherry picking, but like k pop demon hunters is masterful in the sense of that.
Speaker 12:It it became a franchise overnight And now, the irony and fun of it is that Hollywood's trying to catch up to it. It's like, oh my god, we need more everything. We're like behind on the toys, we're behind on the merch, we're behind on the videos, we need another series right now, all that stuff. Okay? So it kind of comes hand in hand and you finally seeing it as you kind of mentioned the top of this thing, was that the YouTubers are now, okay, you know what?
Speaker 12:I'm really good here on this platform. Let's go up. Let's give it a shot. Let's see if we make it work and we're seeing successes as we as we were talking about. I'm sure there's many failures.
Speaker 12:Okay? But we're seeing those successes now and now like the market pliers and these guys like they have basically a burgeoning franchise. Now, whether it continues over years and sequels and everything, doesn't mean it has to be a sequel by the way. Like if it becomes a video game Yeah. And that's successful, that counts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 12:Like, maybe even more. Right? So, like, going kind of what they call transmedia, it's a weird term, but like, if they can jump to different formats and different avenues, that's where the if you're coming with the money, like, that's where the real franchisability of this thing comes from. And YouTubers, if anything, are actually way more nimble. I'm not saying they're better.
Speaker 12:I'm saying they're more nimble at this than Hollywood because just because the the the the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate corporate behemoths, have tons of resources but have all this bureaucracy that could slow the the system down. So that's where we're seeing this kind of not not a clash, but it's like an evolution as this goes forward where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys' these movies, it's like it's like, alright, alright. Let let's let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 12:Let let you guys do what you do too. Yeah. And see where we land.
Speaker 2:What do you think what do you think Obsession will do for low budget film funding? Like the the potential return here is so extreme. I imagine a lot of people would see this and go try to fund other projects like this, or is it so so out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it?
Speaker 12:I mean, Hollywood loves trying to replicate. So we've we've actually seen this kind of cycle before. We've seen it with Blair Witch Project, you know, over twenty years ago. We've seen kind of these versions of these like virally kind of things, paranormal activity. Right?
Speaker 2:Like Oh, yeah.
Speaker 12:Like these these started as very very low budget movies that were just very very cleverly done, became sensations in their own out own way and became franchises. And you also saw this kind of wave of like found footage movies after Paranormal Activity and like What is it
Speaker 2:about horror movies that like is a is a category that seems to do well with with a low budget?
Speaker 12:I think I think it's because it's very just we are it's very understandable. Like, universe and it's not a there's no language barrier, there's no like cultural jokes you have to hit. It's universally understandable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so it's one of
Speaker 12:those things where like, you know, as much as we love comedies and we're like, why aren't these comedies a hit? Like, it's still our cultural taste. Like like, funny to us in America
Speaker 2:fear is fear is like more Universal. Than than comedy and Yeah. And you can create like an extremely scary situation with just a house in the woods. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Or you
Speaker 1:don't side, yeah. Just a house in the woods works whereas even if you're doing a romantic comedy, you might want to shut down a street in Manhattan for a scene that's outdoors or go to some physical place and like travel around or let alone sci fi where you have to do a whole bunch of CGI and be on the be on a spaceship or something building complex sets whereas, you know, you can go and film something in a
Speaker 2:Team is also saying no a list actors. Usually, it's weird to see a Marvel star in
Speaker 1:a horror movie. Yeah. You don't
Speaker 2:Why don't a list actors
Speaker 1:Because it's more relatable. Because if I see Tom Cruise there, I'm like, he's not gonna die. But if I see some some no name actor, I'm like, oh, that that person could go next. I don't know who's gonna be the last one standing.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of a it's a way for, like, new talent
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like in front of the camera and behind the camera to try to basically break in. Mhmm. So so you're saying we're we're gonna see 1,000,000 obsession knockoffs in the next twelve months?
Speaker 12:I mean, I don't know about 1,000,000, but we're gonna definitely see some. That's for sure. Okay? Like, the question is whether they're good or not or and all that. But it's like going back to your your the the think with horror, you can bring the budgets down.
Speaker 12:Like, you have to pay Tom Cruise. Right? If you're gonna bring Tom Cruise in, you're gonna pay everybody everybody is is a cost there. And if horror can just kinda generate its own audience, like, well, why are we paying for it? Like, why do we need to to, you know, shell out all this money to bring in a star, a named star or someone with a big following to do this.
Speaker 12:So it's like it's a bit it's a business play. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's historically the case. Like, look at any horror franchise. It's rare to even see any type of a list, b list, whatever, a recognizable star even, you know, headlining it. Like, look at, you know, the latest final destination.
Speaker 12:Right? That's a seven movie franchise, I think. And it's like even the seventh movie didn't have a really anybody any household names Sure. That were in there. Scream is a little bit of an exception.
Speaker 12:I'll give
Speaker 2:it that.
Speaker 12:But Scream is kind of built its own. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. When how long until you until you think we see a hit in theaters that where 90% of the budget was AI compute? Woah.
Speaker 12:A hit. Can you
Speaker 2:define hits? A hit a hit is like over 30,000,000 over 30,000,000
Speaker 1:At the box office and over three x return on budget or something like that.
Speaker 12:Oh, it's a good question. I mean, I think we're gonna 10
Speaker 1:in, they get 30 out, like it's
Speaker 2:Somebody has to be working on it. The question is Is it like, do they have the talent? Well Are the models actually good enough?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we would do AIM a lot was literally last week, there was a of out of it. Right?
Speaker 12:The Amazon announcements and, like, the Hicksville movie. Sure. Heat check, think. What was I'm sorry if I misnamed it. Like, that's a that's a 100%, I think, or 90 Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like, qualifies as far as your compute power situation. Could it do, you know, 30,000,000 at the box office? I based on what people I've not seen it, but based on what I'm hearing about it, I'm gonna guess no, but prove me wrong, please.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 12:Like, if you're gonna go for it. But, yeah, I do think it'll come. I do I think there's two factors here. Right? So one is the does it matter that's AI?
Speaker 12:Like most of the most of the public worldwide audience just wants to be entertained.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 12:Okay? It just want to be entertained. Like if it's if it's real or not, like we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like we
Speaker 2:still want
Speaker 12:to entertain. Good movie or bad movie. Okay? So there's that. But right now, you still have this kind of public ritual shaming of like, oh, it's AI, ban ban ban.
Speaker 12:And we're still seeing a bit of that coming out of AI in a lot even. So so when we think of, like, experiences that, like, you know, we're building, we're just like, okay, we use a lot of AI right now. Okay? And, like, we're just trying to build entertaining experiences. So to me, like, it's I would say it's sooner than later, except for just that that x factor of the vitriol.
Speaker 12:Like, I just don't know how to predict that one Yeah. Of when it'll be okay.
Speaker 2:But it does feel like there's someone out there who hasn't broken in yet, who has nothing to lose, who's just gonna be sitting at home just prompting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 2:and it could That's why I think I think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before.
Speaker 1:There's also there also might so be it might be like an AI movie that could break through because it's either like self referential or making fun of AI or doing something in a different way. Like Like Toy Story was about toys. It wasn't replacing actors with CGI. And so there's like less of a conflict there. So if you're doing some sort of story that could not be told without AI and it's handled the right way, like, you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there and maybe you don't jump straight to like, you were expecting Tom Cruise but it's just an AI version of Tom Cruise.
Speaker 1:Like, that's probably going to be pretty poorly received.
Speaker 12:I mean, you're speaking my language. So like, I'm going to just slightly explain what I'm working on so it kind of relates to this.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 12:So we're we're we're at Pickford. We're building we showed experience last week over at Sony which was basically a detective series where where the audience could interact with it in real time because the AI was writing the show as it goes. Okay? So literally impossible without the technology. Okay?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So this is one where my colleagues in the in the filmmaking and AI spaces, talk about, well, what's more exciting is not just, hey, let's make an AI movie. What can AI do to juice up the the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before? Yeah. Not not a cost thing, like a possibility thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Right? And so when you have a series like what we're trying to build, which is interactive, which can only be done because of live prompting audiences in theaters on phones, now you've driven the experience to the theater, which we're going to, self plug, do at Alamo Drafthouses around the country this year. Now, we're not gonna, doubt we're gonna generate $30,000,000, like you said, to Right. As be a big hit. But Yeah.
Speaker 12:You know, we've proven at least in our small sample sizes that we can provide an in theater communal entertaining experience
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Be interactive, be consequential as a paid ticket even, and we're using AI tech and it's just like, it's entertaining. Yeah. Animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very very like, it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Sure. But at the end of the day, we are entertaining and that's what we are in the industry first and foremost. All the tech aside and all the business side, that's what we're here to do. Right?
Speaker 12:If we're not entertaining, classic, you know, Russell Crowe, are you not entertained? What are we even doing here? Yeah. So that's that's where I look at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very The
Speaker 1:personalization stuff is is super interesting. Had a I had a funny experience maybe twenty years ago or so. Was I was I I grew up in Pasadena and I was watching this movie in Pasadena. It's Kill Bill, Tarantino. Nice.
Speaker 12:Love it.
Speaker 1:And I'm watching and the bride pulls up in this yellow truck and across the bottom white text pops up and it says, this scene takes place in Pasadena, California. And I was like, this is so weird. Like, did I buy the the localized version of Passed this in pack. It just happens to take place in Pasadena. But you could imagine a horror film that takes place in like any town USA that like uses your, you know, geolocation to make it more customized to you.
Speaker 1:It feels more scary because you're like, oh, this could be happening right outside my window. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could instantiate like little personalizations that you could in a You
Speaker 2:know, if you needed a scene of a car like driving past like welcome to end of town USA, generate it with the Google Map.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like on the fly potentially. Not for every place. But but yeah, there will be I I imagine that like whatever breaks through will be newer and weirder and break boundaries and won't be a clone of of the things that we love like Star Wars because we have Star Wars. We don't need AI version of Star Wars.
Speaker 1:We need something entirely new and creative.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I completely agree. I completely agree. So it's like I I have this thing where I say like AI is not going to game us out Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones. Like, we're not it's not gonna that.
Speaker 12:Like AI can do things really fast and can fill buckets really quick. Yeah. It was like you're trying to fill content on your feed. Really great at that. Yeah.
Speaker 12:So it's not going to do that. So on the high end art side, the great artist will probably incorporate some little bit AI, but it's not going to end to end that thing. A little
Speaker 1:green screen.
Speaker 12:Then on kind of your side with customization, I really do think that's I'm self selfishly, I do think that's the play because AI is really good at speed and optimization and it's really hard to do customization without speed and optimization. So now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage, which is the sloppiness that we're getting to. Okay? Not only on your side with the Pasadena example, which I think is an amazing amazing example of customization for possibilities. It got me thinking about it, actually.
Speaker 12:I also think it's about consequentiality, which means that did you feel like you impacted it? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like, did you feel like while you're watching the movie, did you do something? Does it maybe it's an I thing, maybe it's a saying thing. Can you feel like you're part of it? And I do think that the young generations, the Gen Zers, the Ayers, and everything, they're already growing up with, like, a parasocial relationship to their content. Sure.
Speaker 12:Okay? End to end. Right? And that may be also why these movies are getting successful because they're like they feel like they have a relationship with the creator and they feel like, you know, we're gonna go. But to feel like they have an impact in their content, I think that's where the blue sky is.
Speaker 12:That's where I feel it's coming from and that's where I'm trying to get to myself, my work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary.
Speaker 12:I think you can pause it
Speaker 2:and No. Pause and if I pause, you you sense it and you just tone it down a notch.
Speaker 1:Oh. Gets less less scary.
Speaker 2:And if you let it play just like a nature document. I mean I mean you could have a movie that you
Speaker 1:have a separate volume button for like I want g rated p p because
Speaker 2:I don't wanna get spooked. I don't wanna get too spooked.
Speaker 1:I somehow think that would break the break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun. Lots of new Well,
Speaker 2:thank you so much. Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love to talk more.
Speaker 12:Happy to. Looking forward to it guys.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. We have some more updates from Sam Sulak. He says Hollywood isn't losing, it's teaming up.
Speaker 1:YouTube creators are no longer outsiders. They're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube. Now the best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters.
Speaker 1:Wise words. Wise words. He also weighed in on Nice words
Speaker 2:from him.
Speaker 1:On startup tattoos. We have another one here, Sam Sulik Hot Take. This is a whole format now. The Sam Sulik Hot Take is going viral in his young LA tank top here. You don't need to get your Startup logo tattooed even if you were an early employee.
Speaker 1:You do not need to work twenty four seven. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues. Fun times.
Speaker 1:Also Sam Soulek's very first post on X. 5,000 likes, 260,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:Catfish.
Speaker 2:Check this thing out.
Speaker 1:Looking good.
Speaker 2:Should get that back guest. People ask us.
Speaker 1:Yes. This would be a
Speaker 2:good guest. Hands down. Sam Yeah. Sulek on AI. I
Speaker 1:really enjoyed a
Speaker 2:100 the build out capability of He's
Speaker 1:been working on a build out for years. He's going fantastic. Some of these AI CEOs could learn a little thing or two from him.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1:Build out yourself before you build out that data center. Approval rating will be
Speaker 2:lot higher. Build out.
Speaker 1:You're worried about the wrong You're
Speaker 2:worried about the you're worried about the energy bottleneck? You should be worried about a protein bottleneck.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Own energy. Protein shortages. Protein is the energy of your muscles. Well, can close with Will Menidas.
Speaker 1:He says, I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five year run-in Techno Capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery. Well, he's bullish.
Speaker 1:He's
Speaker 10:That's an
Speaker 2:interesting extremely bullish recently.
Speaker 4:He's on
Speaker 2:Rich, don't know if that's bullish or.
Speaker 1:It him being bullish? Bearish. If he's bearish, he should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:Who knows? Do your own research. Make your own decisions. Just do it on public. Adam Faiz also hired a sketch artist for a party.
Speaker 1:He said I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have been now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead. I thought this was very, very cool, wildly different and like all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're they're physical pieces of art, they could also be replicated for the partygoers. Very very cool analog.
Speaker 1:This is why vinyl records are at an all time high. There's demand for both the content barbell
Speaker 2:This is very cool.
Speaker 1:The slop and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artist from Adam Faiz. Very very cool.
Speaker 2:I had the pleasure of running into Adam on the street
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You did. Last week when I was getting coffee. I ran up to him with my camera and I said, hey, sir. What do you do for a living?
Speaker 1:What do you do for a living?
Speaker 2:Was he amused? Mildly.
Speaker 1:That's what you aim for.
Speaker 2:I was more amused by my own bit.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Oh, last thing. Arena Magazine. Arena Magazine is dropping issue number zero zero eight at sea. They're covering deep sea mining, shipbuilding, undersea cables, maritime autonomy autonomy, island building, American sea power, and so much more.
Speaker 1:Best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand. Shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out. Arena Mag. One of our favorites You can subscribe to get the issue at arenamag.com.
Speaker 1:We love the folks over there. So much more to talk about but we will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week and It's June. Leave us five stars.
Speaker 1:It's June.
Speaker 2:Did you see that, John? Yeah. It's June 1.
Speaker 1:What was surprising about that? We said that on the intro.
Speaker 2:I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it.
Speaker 1:It's June. It's June. Another month.
Speaker 2:Time flies.
Speaker 1:Another month. Well And your podcast. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for their newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you
Speaker 2:It's been an honor. Tomorrow. Bye. Flashbang.