Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, 09/03/2025. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome. Let's look at the wide.
Speaker 2:Let's get Can we pull
Speaker 3:it up?
Speaker 1:UltraDome on screen.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Dome. It's crust now. New you can't really
Speaker 2:see the troughs.
Speaker 1:But anyway
Speaker 2:We'll I'll
Speaker 1:we will be revealing more of the dome as we build it out. We continue to build out the temple Of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, today.
Speaker 2:Show off the truss a
Speaker 1:little bit. Show off the truss a little bit. Can do you have a camera? How are you going to show off the truss?
Speaker 2:Can't can't can't they see it?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, we have a big truss, and we're gonna hang some hang some lights from it and show people off. I think Jordy's gonna do some some pull ups
Speaker 2:or something. He's gonna climb. I don't know if we
Speaker 1:have the insurance for this, Jordy. This is very, very risky. Oh, there he is. You can see him in the background. Anyway, we're talking about Google today.
Speaker 1:We covered it a little bit on the show yesterday, but it made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. You'll love to see it when tech, businesses, companies that we love and feature every day on the show make
Speaker 2:You're gonna We're pushing them to rebrand it to the Sand Hill Journal.
Speaker 1:Yes. The Wall
Speaker 4:Street Journal.
Speaker 2:Is
Speaker 1:technology. Road Journal. Google dodges the worst penalties. Search giant can't pay for exclusivity, but it isn't forced to divest Chrome. So good luck if you're out there bidding for the Chrome browser.
Speaker 1:Google's holding on to it. I'm not selling. You're gonna have to drag me out of here saying Chrome at Google.
Speaker 2:Arvin just punched a hole through the Oh. So did Sam.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think a lot of those I mean, the post mortem on that is, like, all those companies were kind of trying to, like, mess with the legal case. Right? To just kinda
Speaker 2:be a thorn in Google's side. Is that is
Speaker 1:that basically the takeaway? Or do they actually wanna buy it or something? I it seemed like some sort
Speaker 2:of I I think a a lot of people would love to own Chrome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But also, a lot of people would love to just troll Google in
Speaker 4:Exactly.
Speaker 1:The midst of their high So high stakes case. Anyway, so yesterday, the news is Google wrapped up the case with the justice department and the result landed somewhere between nothing ever happens and we are so back, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Back, he says, I think we all owe Sundar an apology. Yes.
Speaker 1:Time to fill out the Sundar Pichai apology form. I was not familiar with your game, Sundar. You're an absolute dog. And Can we pull
Speaker 2:up the Sundar chart?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Do we have a Sundar graphic we can pull up? He has been looking fantastic. He has clearly been enjoying bulking season, and so we'll pull that up.
Speaker 1:So lots of pundit pundits have been bearish on Google for years now. I've I've probably issued a bearish proclamation at some point during the show, but it was it was easy to do. Right? Because they you know, the narrative was very clean. They failed to release a consumer LLM chat app as quickly as OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Not only did and the crazy thing is first mover advantage really, really mattered. First mover advantage did not matter in cloud. AWS came out first. GCP came out second. Azure third or second, third.
Speaker 1:We don't even know, and they're both huge businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very oligopolistic. Not true. Here we go.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Sundar. See it double. Sundar. We gotta get this revised. But he looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. He really has been hitting the gym. I'd love to see it. Anyway
Speaker 2:Really filling out the
Speaker 1:So first mover advantage really, really did matter in consumer. We've seen that with the amount of LLM queries from consumers. OpenAI is running away with it. Obviously, there are lots of other good businesses to build in AI. But in terms of consumer, even though Gemini, that app launched three months later to consumers, it wasn't fast enough.
Speaker 1:And it obviously was made like, it stung all the more because the transformer was invented at DeepMind at Google. So you have this narrative of, like, they can do science and they can do research, but can they do consumer products? Yeah. And and so OpenAI is running away with it. And it was very easy to be like, OpenAI is gonna disrupt Google.
Speaker 1:People are not gonna be searching on Google anymore, blah blah blah. And there's some still some good crack there's some good cases for cracks in the search business, I think. Semi analysis has laid out one that seems pretty reasonable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This case could have been a lot different if Yes. LLMs hadn't exploded.
Speaker 1:Yes. Totally. Totally. And so the interesting thing is, it's been very easy to write the the Google bear case. At the same time, Buco Capital bloke, friend of the show, has been, Google bull posting for a long time.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson has come out kind of pro Google, really outlining what's going on. We saw that that breakdown of the various parts of their business. And when you look at it that way, you're like, wait a minute. Okay. Like, couple trillion dollars.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're only the the Wall Street analyst that put this together, they were only valuing Google search at, like, 800 800,000,000,000. It was like, cloud was worth a ton. D mind was worth a ton. Waymo was worth over 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:So you
Speaker 1:add all YouTube, you add all these things up, and the the properties become very valuable. So when you look at it in its totality, all of a sudden, Google looks a lot more stable, where you could say, yeah, maybe search sells off a little bit over the next twenty years. Like, it's clearly extremely windy. And then simultaneously, like, YouTube gets even better because there's AI generated content. Have all the ability to generate AI video.
Speaker 1:And, like, there's just the whole new wave. Right? So there's a million different ways that they can play this, and Sundar's clearly an absolute dog and Absolutely. Never doubt him ever. So Never again.
Speaker 1:But the interesting thing that you mentioned, is that in an odd twist, the pressure from OpenAI and consumer AI chat interfaces potentially competing with traditional Google search might have sort of saved the search giant from more severe penalties. And Ben Gilbert of Acquired summed it up well. He said, the court recognized the advantage Google has in paying browsers for distribution but held off on banning it because of the new AI disruption threat that they face.
Speaker 2:I can read from the actual PDF from the case. The court well recognizes what is skewing a payment ban Is shooing. Ishooing. Ishooing. A payment A payment may mean for competition due to Google's massive financial advantage and its superior monetization distributors will be incentivized to stick with Google because it can pay more thus leaving in place the very forces that effectively have made the ecosystem exceptionally resistant to change in the space and early sorry.
Speaker 2:The money flowing into the space and how quickly it has arrived is astonishing. These companies already are in a better position both financially and technologically to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades except perhaps Microsoft. They also are moving toward monetization on commercial queries. These new realities give the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for disruption if superior products emerge. It also weighs on favor of caution before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.
Speaker 2:So for now, Google will be permitted to pay distributors for default placement. And if you've been living under a data center, that is making Google search the default in Safari on the iPhone. Yeah. There's other place Yeah. Placements as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a very a it's a very, like, online take almost. It's a very tech Silicon Valley take to see in a court document. Like, the context here is very fascinating to me. Like, lit written in this legal document is then venture funding in Internet search was considered Silicon Valley's biggest no fly zone.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, you can't raise money for something that's competitive with Internet search. Like, it's just not a thing. But today, it's
Speaker 2:not a you.com.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Trying to play in search. Founders coming on later today. Yep. They're now an enterprise AI company.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Okay. So Completely pull different. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Founders. They're using some of the same foundational Of
Speaker 1:Today, established technologies are making and start ups are receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to develop Gen AI products that pose a threat to the primacy of Internet, traditional Internet search. Interesting. Wouldn't it be wouldn't it be amazing if, like, the Apple Wallet, like, by default had just like a ramp card in it? They should just place for, like, default ramp in Apple? I feel like we should make this deal happen.
Speaker 2:Is the official part of business.
Speaker 1:But until that happens, go to ramp.com. Time is money saved though. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 5:All in
Speaker 2:one place. It's unbelievably good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other news I mean, just to give some extra context on the financial outcomes here. Tanay has been on the show, summed it up the financial results. Google stock is up 7%, and it's a big don't never say law of law of large numbers ever again to me. So you can pop 7% in a day off of one legal result.
Speaker 1:Apple stock is up 3%, representing $250,000,000,000 of added market cap, on the antitrust ruling that Google can continue to pay Apple but in a nonexclusive manner and won't need to divest Chrome, Android. So there are a bunch of good takes we're gonna go through, people who have been
Speaker 2:spending this way for the Apple Yes. Is up Yeah. Is they have 20,000,000,000 a year coming in from Google Yeah. That is effectively like one line of code.
Speaker 1:And it's, yeah, it's ultra profitable. It's incredible. Yeah. And it's something that, like when I was thinking about that going away, I was like, this is actually, like, material to the business. Like, it's a Apple's a huge business.
Speaker 1:But we I mean, we watched that Tim Cook interview from, what, a decade ago. And he was like, made 50,000,000,000 in revenue, 10,000,000,000 in profit. And now they're making, what, 5,000,000,000 a quarter from this, something like that. Like, this is a this is a serious amount of money. It's definitely like a a material piece of the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're they're sitting at a thirty six thirty six times
Speaker 1:earnings. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So They make a of hundreds. No. Just
Speaker 1:saying that the economic value Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like 500,000,000,000
Speaker 2:or something. Hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Crazy. Okay. So anyway, we're gonna run through Ben Thompson's take because he's been studying this for the entire journey and and for years. He I feel like he knows this stuff way better than we do. But I do have some questions that I wanna dig into.
Speaker 1:We can kinda debate this, Jordy. So And
Speaker 2:by the way, the the the chat was was concerned because John Exley was not in the chat. He's Oh, yeah. On a flight.
Speaker 1:Give us an update.
Speaker 2:But he got the flight WiFi. So he's locked in. So
Speaker 1:What an absolute job.
Speaker 2:And thank you to to all the brothers in the chat for for checking on brother John.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. It's great. So my question is we're gonna go through the timeline.
Speaker 1:Tyler Cosgrove has written out the full United States versus Google case timeline. We're gonna dig through. We're also gonna go through Ben Thompson's. But my question that I wanna answer is, what do these what do these pay for default deals look like going forward? Specifically, in artificial intelligence, there is going to be a particularly odd dynamic around how LLM queries route on the iPhone by default.
Speaker 1:Like, the last possible moment to start taking AI seriously and build, like, a serious AI foundation model lab, the the last moment that you could credibly do that, I feel like, or was earlier this year. Like, that was when the the the the last train left the station. And who was driving that train? Mark Zuckerberg. And what did he do?
Speaker 1:He went and tried to buy everything that was buyable and hire everyone who was hireable.
Speaker 2:That weren't viable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. And what he wound up with was not exactly a dream team. He didn't get Ilia. He didn't get Dario.
Speaker 1:He didn't get Demis. But he got a really solid crew. Right?
Speaker 2:And then some great business guys.
Speaker 1:Some great business guys, some great researchers. He also just filled out the the the researcher tiers. Like, he's got a ton of researchers.
Speaker 2:So I feel like He wasn't worried about salary caps.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Not at all. And so and and so we were debating yesterday whether Alex Wang was a good pickup for Mar Meta.
Speaker 1:And my conclusion is, like, he is the best possible option, and I think it'll pencil out. I think it'll be a good deal. It is a big acquisition, and it'll be interesting to see how we look on that in a decade. But I think the opportunity is so big, it makes sense. At the same time, like, what would Apple even do if they wanted to compete in AI?
Speaker 1:Like, everyone is taken off. All the all the pieces are off the board at this point. They don't have the DNA for mega acquisitions, so they're not gonna go and try and buy Anthropic. Like, that that's just not how they work. They don't like writing $100,000,000 checks for talent.
Speaker 1:Tim Cook only makes $74,600,000 a year. They're not gonna pay some AI researcher a $100,000,000. Yep. It's just not gonna happen. And so everyone else sort of has a dance partner at this point.
Speaker 1:Apple wouldn't just be, like, trying to turn the cruise ship that is Apple. They're building an entirely new cruise ship. It's just not gonna happen. So I don't think Apple is is going to try and build a serious frontier lab. I think they're gonna partner on this.
Speaker 1:And the question is, where does it leave them? They have something incredibly valuable. Do you know how many active iPhone users there are worldwide right now?
Speaker 2:One and a half billion.
Speaker 1:1,400,000,000. Isn't that a ton? That just I I feel like I was if I had to just guess, I'd be like
Speaker 2:Job's not finished.
Speaker 1:Truly. Truly. But but so like, that is incredibly valuable because just it's not just over a billion users. It's over a billion users that
Speaker 2:have That can charge $9.99 a month Yes. Forever randomly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's so many different monetization. But it's also it's like, it's it's the top 1,000,000,000 really, usually, like, basically of, like, earners because it's the most expensive phone usually. And so and they also have that button on the side that right now activates something that should feel like AI but is very clearly far from the frontier.
Speaker 1:And so the logical outcome feels like a partnership here, but what will the scale and structure of that partnership be? If OpenAI really nails agentic commerce, as semiannualysis suggests, it wouldn't be crazy for OpenAI to pay Apple billions of dollars to be the default. And so right now, we're thinking about if you push the Siri button, you trigger an LLM inference query that's very expensive. Every time I hit ChatGPT, it's a couple cents. If I do some crazy reasoning things, some deep research report, it might be a dollar.
Speaker 1:I don't even know. It is expensive. Right? If I'm sending off some agent to go and, like, research every single type
Speaker 2:10 You drained an aquifer somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's what it feels like. Right? It feels like every time you hit you hit a query, it's expensive.
Speaker 1:And so but that's gonna flip. And I think each query is actually gonna be monetizable, and they're all gonna be they're basically all gonna be profitable like Google searches. And so profitable, if every time someone hits an LLM, it's not a cost center, but it's actually a profit center, well then OpenAI can pay to get more search volume, some more query volume. And so that means that maybe OpenAI will wind up paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default. And, of course, they're gonna try and build their own device, there's a lot of other dynamics.
Speaker 1:But would they go with Gemini? Because they're already on Google for the search default. But would they go would they do that? Or or is that too is that never are they never gonna be able to compete there because Gemini is so deeply integrated with Android and the Android phones are are over here do kinda doing their own thing. So you can imagine
Speaker 2:And and over this year, there's been rumors bubbling up of Apple and conversations with Anthropic Yep. With ChatGPT Yep. With Gemini. Right? Yep.
Speaker 2:And a lot of these companies have been throwing around some very big numbers Yep. With with with Tim and the Apple team. And I think they had at least back then, they they seem to have some stickers.
Speaker 1:So right now, it feels like the Foundation Labs are going to Apple and saying, every time we run a query, it costs us 1¢, 10¢, a dollar, whatever. You gotta pay us to use our amazing intelligence.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To bring value to your users.
Speaker 1:But I think it might flip. And I think that the each query might actually be profitable just at the query level because there's going to be commerce that's triggered from those. So in the future, you'll pick up your phone, you'll press the button on the side, and you can instantly fire off a best in class OpenAI agent to do your bidding. So you'll say, order me some creatine, and it'll just go do it. And that will be valuable and that will actually drive that will be a profitable query.
Speaker 1:And so OpenAI could potentially be paying Apple for the right to do that. So Yeah. Right now, OpenAI OpenAI and Apple do have a partnership in place, but the reporting suggests that no money is directly changing hands. But I don't necessarily expect it to stay that way. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:What's your take? What how do you do do you think that this is reasonable that OpenAI could be paying Apple billions of dollars within the next, I don't know, five years? Or do you think it it it flips the other way and Apple is the one shelling out billions of dollars for access to frontier AI models from maybe Anthropic, maybe maybe OpenAI, maybe someone else?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, the people that are paying for ChatGPT today probably have a pretty insane overlap with iPhone customers. Like, it probably looks something Yeah. Like this.
Speaker 2:I I think that Sam recognizes I mean, every consumer tech entrepreneur has, like, realized how important it is to integrate at the hardware level. Right? This is why Zach is hell bent on winning in VR. Right? Because he's been sick of, like, being at the app layer.
Speaker 2:Totally. And I know that Sam, does not wanna be in that same you know, why would he pay billions for Johnny Ive and that team? Like, he he he he understands the importance of the hardware layer and certainly will recognize the leverage that Apple is gonna have over the entire ecosystem. I think the question is a lot of this just comes down to, in my view, are consumers gonna be paying for AI in the long run? I haven't been totally convinced that that that everyday American is gonna be spending certainly not $200 a month.
Speaker 2:I don't even know about $20 a month.
Speaker 5:I think it flips.
Speaker 2:Gonna it's gonna ultimately flip. And so I can see I can see there being a period where OpenAI is willing to pay to be like the default intelligence Yeah. Product within the Apple ecosystem. But again, there it is just gonna be a really it'll be it'll be an interesting dynamic and partnership. Right?
Speaker 2:Because Yeah. It's gonna it's so there's so much tension there because Apple is gonna wanna Yeah. Apple is already selling intelligence as a reason to upgrade the iPhone. Right? And they've gotten lawsuits over this because they sold Apple intelligence and then people are like, this isn't very smart at all.
Speaker 2:What did what did I just buy? Right? And so are they gonna be incentivized to say
Speaker 1:Even 70 IQ is a form of intelligence. It's just a low level of intelligence. Yes. They didn't say they didn't say Apple They did. High IQ intelligence.
Speaker 1:They didn't say Apple super intelligence. They just said Apple intelligence. It has some level of intelligence.
Speaker 2:Room Apple room temp.
Speaker 1:Room temp intelligence.
Speaker 2:Room temp. IApple.
Speaker 1:What do you think, Tyler? Do you think that OpenAI will be paying Apple? Or do you think Apple will be paying other Foundation Labs? Or or what where will the flow of money go in the next few years?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I don't really see it flipping very soon Mhmm. To where, like, prompts or or tokens are, like, actually super profitable. Mhmm. Because you need, like, both massive you need, like, way better capabilities and it needs to be way more efficient.
Speaker 5:Because, like, if you just have more capabilities, still, like, right now, most people are not paying for ChatGPT. They're just using the the, you know, free Sure.
Speaker 1:And Free tier.
Speaker 5:Which is, if you compare I mean Yeah. If you compare four o, like, look at, like, five months ago. If you compare four o to, like, o three
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It was, like, massive, you know, difference in people still weren't paying.
Speaker 1:In cost or in
Speaker 6:In
Speaker 5:In capability. Capabilities. Yeah. Yeah. And people still weren't paying.
Speaker 5:So you need to be, like, way better in order for people to actually start paying or you need to be way cheaper.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know if I agree with that. I I I feel like four o was definitely good enough. People were obsessed with it. People were like falling in love with it.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Even Meek Mill.
Speaker 1:Like, I understand
Speaker 2:Mill is defaulting.
Speaker 1:I as a power user like didn't get that much out of it. But
Speaker 5:Yeah. But I I I think you like, if you ask normal people what they think of, like, AI, they're like, oh, This is not gonna take my job at all. Yeah. When in reality, if you used, like, o three and they if they use o three every day, they if they were a power user, they'd be I think they'd be way more bullish on AI generally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I think that might be evidence that people like, I don't know, are are not
Speaker 2:I think I mean, one crazy dynamic is is Apple says I mean, if they were to do a deal with OpenAI
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They could just say like, great. Like, we're gonna we're gonna sign up every like, how many how many paying subs do you have? Great. We're gonna start heavily we if Apple just starts heavily pushing ChatGPT, they will by default get their 30% from the App Store. Right?
Speaker 2:But they could work out So like this could end up being like even if even if OpenAI is not directly paying
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Apple for it, it could end up generating
Speaker 1:I don't think it's enough.
Speaker 2:You don't think it's enough?
Speaker 1:I don't think it's enough money for the value that that it'll bring on. If it was actually integrated into, like, the Siri button at the low level, I can just press a button and say, order me creatine. Order me creatine, and it knows my address because it knows my home address from my contact in the Yeah. In there. It has my payment information saved.
Speaker 1:It does all of that. Like, I don't know if taking 30% of my ChatGPT subscription if I subscribe and if I subscribed on mobile, but really, most people are gonna subscribe on desktop and OpenAI is gonna be constantly being like, hey, go over here and like use a web view to like subscribe this way and stuff. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how it how it pencils out. I feel like there's gonna be some new deal that that that that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Someone's gonna someone's gonna pay. Someone's gonna bid. Someone's gonna pay out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Google team says, hey, we're already paying $2,020,000,000,000. Why don't we double it to be Gemini be the default?
Speaker 1:You imagine? I mean, if Gemini was the default on on on iPhone, that would be bizarre. But, I mean, it does kind of like it does kind of match with the with the search deal. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's read through Ben Thompson. Maybe we maybe we go through the the history first to get us up to speed, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Do you do you mind taking us through So
Speaker 1:this is The United States versus Google
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:Which started in 2020?
Speaker 5:2020. It starts in October 2020.
Speaker 1:So that's
Speaker 5:under Trump.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So yeah, I think let's just go over like kind of the central claim of the actual case first.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So basically that Google is violating the Antitrust Act It's of '19
Speaker 2:to think about and you know, before Donald Trump was a technology founder
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:With True Social, there was a time where he was beefing with big tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:So long ago.
Speaker 1:Instead of just competing.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks for getting us up on VHS. We needed this.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Only possible on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. Multi stream your VHS tapes and reach your audience wherever they are. Head over to Restream.
Speaker 2:It truly is. Technology is incredible.
Speaker 1:Yes. Also, yeah, continue.
Speaker 5:Okay. So Sherman Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. I also put some of the victims, previous victims of this act. You see Standard Oil. Oil.
Speaker 5:American Tobacco Company, U. S. Steel, AT
Speaker 2:and T. This is what broke up Bell Labs.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Probably set us back a couple decades.
Speaker 2:You know
Speaker 1:who founded Bell Labs? Pop quiz. Who founded Bell Labs?
Speaker 5:Wait. Is it like Oh, I don't know. Is it Claude Shannon? No.
Speaker 1:No. Who founded Bell Labs?
Speaker 5:Oh. Bell Labs? Alexander Graham Bell.
Speaker 1:Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah. No way.
Speaker 2:That's correct. Yep. Alexander Graham Bell started Bell Labs. Let's go. Original tech.
Speaker 2:We don't to name know company. I know. I was looking at
Speaker 1:the names.
Speaker 2:Standard Oil. American Tobacco, US Steel. What is the a in AT and T stand for?
Speaker 1:Is that America? American Technology and
Speaker 2:Let me ask Gemini. Okay. What does AT and
Speaker 1:T Okay. Anyway, continue. And then Microsoft, of course, it was a headache for Bill Gates for his entire career until he retired.
Speaker 2:Yep. Oh, that's so good. American Telephone and Telegraph. Oh, that's so good.
Speaker 1:When you pick a name like that and you actually you understand the job and you're just like, yeah, Standard Oil. I'm gonna standardize oil.
Speaker 2:I need a name for my telephone and telegraph company. What about American SPEAKER American SPEAKER Telephone and telegraph Founder.
Speaker 5:SPEAKER Okay.
Speaker 2:Anyway, sorry.
Speaker 5:SPEAKER So basically the claim is that they're legally monopolizing the search engine and the advertising markets, like in search. So they're locking up distribution. They're self reinforcing barriers to entry. They're And
Speaker 1:the evidence is that they've paid billions to Apple and other vendors.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Probably hundreds of billions at this point because it's been like 10,000,000,000 for decades. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So wow, they are up.
Speaker 5:So that is they filed the case, DOJ, in 2020.
Speaker 1:Wait. Should we start with the history of Google Search and Safari and then
Speaker 2:run Sure. Through
Speaker 1:That might be better.
Speaker 5:So, yeah. Okay. So Google Search and Safari. So 02/2002. 02/2002.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:Pre iPhone.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This is pre iPhone. This is just on Safari on the How? Guess the Mac or Yeah. Whatever it So Google is the default there.
Speaker 5:It's just like.
Speaker 1:They just, Apple just picked that
Speaker 5:because Yeah. It was the just the best thing. Just put it in. Yeah. There's no deal right
Speaker 2:Google's been the default search engine on Apple devices since 02/2002. Yep. And they, we don't know specifics. Most recently, it was $20,000,000,000 annually, but but it's been over twenty year partnership.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's a crazy it's crazy to go. I mean, Google was founded late September nineteen ninety eight. And then by 02/2002, you're the default on Apple like the previous era biggest compute computing company. I mean, I guess Apple wasn't like what it is today back in 02/2002, kind of pre iPhone. It was certainly not like the biggest company in the world, but still like
Speaker 2:Pre Tyler too. Yeah. Tyler's I
Speaker 1:mean Oh.
Speaker 5:02/2005.
Speaker 2:02/2005. Wow. Hey. If you wanna feel old, born in 02/2005.
Speaker 1:Born in 02/2005. Okay. So anyway, Sergey Brin, what does he do?
Speaker 5:So so 02/2005, Sergey Brin suggests suggests some kind of revenue share. They they always call it a revenue Just
Speaker 1:not out of goodness of his heart? What what is he thinking?
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 5:I I have to assume there's it's like there's some He's a He's seeing it on the horizon. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I like that he They always call it a revenue share. They don't They're not paying Sure.
Speaker 5:To be the default.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:They're just helping a brother out,
Speaker 1:you know?
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then, 2007 '7
Speaker 1:and wealth.
Speaker 5:Yeah. 02/2007, 02/2009, these are like the real negotiations. They're like, it's like Mhmm. Sergei Brin says like, oh, wanna do revenue share, but then when it comes down to it, he's like, well, you
Speaker 2:know, let's slow down. Let's push the brakes a
Speaker 5:little bit. The numbers are getting a little high. And then basically, the the actual like numbers are not public.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:They really only show up as a result of this case like Sure. Them being
Speaker 1:Oh, after the fact. We learned this through the case. We didn't know for years.
Speaker 5:So it's not really till 2021.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Like a full decade where people were like, yeah. Like Google's probably paying Apple something. But What what
Speaker 2:yeah. But hiding hiding a
Speaker 1:$30,000,000.
Speaker 2:$20,000,000,000 line item and you're
Speaker 1:You can do it if I I I believe the disclosure rules in SEC filings are something like if it's a if it's a if it's a division of the company that reports the CEO, then you have to break out the financials. This is like YouTube. This is the story of, like, AWS when we first got the AWS financials. So if it's just something like like, you know, it's some deal and it's just one deal like it's It's a deal. Not like it's not even a it's not even like a whole division of Very the
Speaker 2:It's a deal I did with Steve.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just like just like other Wait minute. Other income or something like that. Don't know.
Speaker 5:Okay. So
Speaker 2:Yes. So 2021, it's
Speaker 5:it's kind of revealed or or estimated at least that payments are around 20,000,000,000 a year. Yep. And then 2023, this is also a result of the case. Sure. Apple is, like, confirmed to to be taking thirty six percent one: of the the revenue from Safari that Google makes.
Speaker 1:Okay. No. So it's similar to their App Store revenue, little bit higher, 36%. SPEAKER Yeah. And that's probably how they got to the number.
Speaker 1:That's pretty crazy that Google's making $6,000,000,000 off of
Speaker 2:I never knew they got where they were getting 3036% for the big man. For
Speaker 1:the big man.
Speaker 2:For the big man. That's great.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then 2025
Speaker 2:We're like, we know you paid to be here but I'm gonna need a cut too. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:So let's go through
Speaker 5:the The case. The case.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Break it down.
Speaker 5:So September 2023
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is really the first like actual like trial. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:It's the bench trial. I don't really know what
Speaker 2:that is. But August 2024
Speaker 5:is is the actual like initial judgment. Okay. So this is Google is in fact violating antitrust. Yes. Like something needs to be done.
Speaker 5:We don't know what is to be done.
Speaker 1:Yes. But we're gonna do, but then we will eventually decide what the punishment is. Yeah. But they are guilty.
Speaker 5:They are guilty.
Speaker 1:They were found guilty.
Speaker 5:There's no results like
Speaker 2:what are they gonna do.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Yeah, they're guilty. And then it's
Speaker 2:not till April 2025, so
Speaker 5:this is five years after the Yep. It was actually filed. There's the remedies trial, I think that's what it's Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So figuring out
Speaker 5:the remedies. So this is like what is actually to be done. Sure. Now like we know that they're a monopoly.
Speaker 1:Man: Okay.
Speaker 5:Man: What do we do about
Speaker 2:it? Yep.
Speaker 5:And then it wasn't until I guess yesterday we
Speaker 1:found out
Speaker 5:what the verdict was.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:So I think we already went through some of the verdict. But it's that the judge denied the DOJ's request for a forced divestiture
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Of Chrome and Android. They ordered Google to end exclusive distribution agreements. So that's like I think we talked about this too with Apple. You can't, like, just it can't be exclusive to Apple, the, like, payments or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what does that mean in practice? It can't be exclusive. So they have to pay, like, Xiaomi or something? Are we talking about other phone manufacturers?
Speaker 1:Are we talking about other other search engines? Like, I know that it like like, it's not like if I go into my Safari settings, I I can't pick a Bing. Like I I I can still pick other things. It's just the default that that they're paying for. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Have to dig into that. Jordy, do do you wanna look that up or something?
Speaker 2:That's in Gemini.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool.
Speaker 5:I don't Yeah. It's kind of like legalese. And then the the Then there's mandating Google to share search index and and user Okay. Basically sharing data with So I
Speaker 2:don't the exclusives. So Google pays Mozilla. Yep. They Mozilla basically wouldn't survive without Google apparently. It's like a very significant amount of their revenue funny because Google obviously competes with
Speaker 1:On Chrome.
Speaker 2:With Chrome. And then they do this with device manufacturers like Samsung that just makes make, you know, continue to make Chrome and Google search pre installed
Speaker 5:Sure. The T Mobile.
Speaker 1:Okay. And then what's the last one? Search index, sharing of the search index and user interaction data with rivals. So was was that Bing?
Speaker 2:I guess? Yeah. So I guess this means these are basically direct quotes from the
Speaker 5:actual like file. Yeah. But I assume it means that they have to just share some of the like actual like
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Index data Okay. From like whatever PageRank is. They have to like put it out publicly.
Speaker 1:So we're hammer the chief product officer of Microsoft today about Bing and what this means. Because yeah, I mean there's gotta be a way to make money off this if you're Microsoft. This is the way to do it. Okay. Anyway, anything else from the history
Speaker 2:of So just to be clear, prevent exclusive contracts. So Google is barred from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts that give its search engine, Chrome, Google Assistant or Gemini app a monopoly position on a device. So basically, can't go to a smartphone manufacturer and say you just can't host any other
Speaker 1:Sure. Like In the chat, Paraclete says, Google's only gonna share their search data with other top three companies. It's still remaining a monopoly. Interesting. And people people enjoy the VHS.
Speaker 1:So thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 5:Also, so these rules also apply to like Gen AI stuff? Yep. This, all this also applies to Gemini if they wanna do the same, if they wanna lease it to Apple or whatever. Yep. All the same rules apply about
Speaker 1:If you've been enjoying the whiteboard segments, we are thinking about getting a smart whiteboard where we can put up a FigJam from Figma, of course, by Figma. Think bigger, build faster, so you can help design development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com. Let's run through Ben Thompson's take. So he kicks it off with Google's remedy decision.
Speaker 1:Alphabet Inc will be required to share online search data with rivals while avoiding harsher penalties, including the for sale. We know this. Google's statement was short and sweet. Earlier today, US court overseeing the DOJ's lawsuit over how we distribute search issued a decision on next steps. He the Google closes says, as always, we continuing to we're continuing to focus on what matters, building innovative products that people choose to love choose and love.
Speaker 2:It's a good line.
Speaker 1:That's a statement of a company that lost some battles but won the war, in my estimation, says Ben Thompson in in Strathecari, which you should go subscribe to. There are some cursory objections to judge Mehta's decision, but by and large, that statement exudes relief and rightfully so. The company that is truly breathing the com the company is truly breathing easier today, however, is Apple. Apple's actually breathing easier because they're getting that sweet, sweet,
Speaker 2:sweet Sweet.
Speaker 1:Sweet 36% off
Speaker 2:the top. Ninety 9 percent $2,020,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:The first set of remedies, were the ones that Google proposed and has already implemented, namely ending the exclusive agreements that were the foundation of judge Meta's original finding of liability. So let's see. I wanna know what these actual remedies are. Here we go. Again, this is literally illegal behavior.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:We should just highlight again. So Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Search, Chrome, Assist Yes. And Gemini. Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that conditions the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution preloading or placement of Google Search Chrome assist
Speaker 1:This is the bundling thing. So a lot of the antitrust cases hinge on bundling. You say, oh, you can't have the Play Store on your Android phone unless you're defaulting to search. Or you you have to have Chrome preinstalled if you want access to search. Like, all of that stuff is is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Seen as anticommitting.
Speaker 2:That's what Ben says. Again, this is literally illegal behavior, so ending it was the bare minimum. Yep. Antitrust precedent, however, dictates that Judge Meta go further, again, from the opinion. This is from Meta.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is good too. So they cannot enter or maintain an agreement that prohibits any partner, either Apple or Samsung, from simultaneously distributing any other search engine, browser, or Gen AI product. So you so Google can't go to someone and say and say, hey. You in order to have search as your default or Google search or whatever deal we're doing or whatever we're paying you, you can't have Anthropic preinstalled or you can't have Mozilla preinstalled. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can't choose Yeah. Can't be in the contract. And and that and that is illegal behavior, and so ending it is the bare minimum, says Ben Thompson. Antitrust precedent, however, dictates that judge Meta go further. Again, from the opinion, the question now is what to do about Google's violations precedent requires fashioning antitrust remedies that effectively pry open to competition a market that has been closed by a monopolist's illegal restraints.
Speaker 1:Denying the fruits of the violation is a valid objective, and so too is ensuring that anticompetitive behavior will not recur in the same or related ways. The court has broad discretion to impose remedies to accomplish those aims. Judge Mehta laid out four fruits of the violation. The court found that the agreements had four main anticompetitive effects. They, one, foreclosed a substantial portion of the relevant markets, thus impairing rivals opportunities to compete.
Speaker 1:Two, denied rivals access to user queries or scale, needed to effectively compete. Three, reduced the incentive to invest or innovate in search. And four, enabled Google to increase text ad prices without any meaningful competitive restraint, thereby allowing Google to earn monopoly profits to secure the next iteration of exclusive deals through higher revenue share payments. These effects did not persist independently. Together, they enabled Google to widen the moats and pull up drawbridges to ward off competition.
Speaker 1:Great analogy.
Speaker 2:Judge Meta attempts to address number two necessary scale by forcing Google to share various types of data including Google search index, but not the actual data from the web pages in the index or the output Mhmm. Google's page rank algorithm. Competitors, which explicitly include Gen AI providers, will get a one time snapshot, not an ongoing one, and only need to pay Google's marginal cost for providing the information. User click and query data showing what results users clicked on. Competitors will get this data at least twice, but the final number will be determined by the technical committee.
Speaker 2:The court will set up an oversee. Do you fully understand, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a very, very odd odd, like, change in in in remedy. Like, I I guess it, like, lets people catch up to where things are. I it it feels like the Remedy is like like, there has been this this unfair advantage for Google for years. We're letting everyone catch up, and then we're creating, like, a fair race.
Speaker 1:But we're restarting the race, and then everyone can go out and do whatever they want. But but we're not we're not permanently making Google share everything, but we're making a one time catch up of of, like, data, I guess. Is that what's going on? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Toss in some scraps of data.
Speaker 1:That's what it seems like. So, we'll continue with Ben Thompson. In addition, Google needs to make its web search results available via syndication at ordinary commercial terms for five years capped at 40% of an alternative search engine's annual queries. These are all worthwhile remedies. The problem, however, is that it is that that's it, the Google Patronage Network.
Speaker 1:So there there is a lot here, and and he does talk about Bing. I'm gonna work through the remaining fruits, three fruits backwards. First or fourth, judge Mehta decided that Google sharing user click data for ads was both a request too broad, and also the court didn't know what data needed to be disclosed, so that one was discarded. The third fruit, meanwhile, is getting a lot of attention because judge Metis said that basically no long that it basically no longer existed. Generative AI products are now a competitor to search and are getting plenty of funding.
Speaker 1:This is what we talked about earlier. Very interesting to see that there is a lot of competition there. In early twenty twenty three, when the new Bing with generative AI search OpenAI, Sam Altman told Ben Thompson, his retecary interview. I think it's fabulous for both of us. I think there's so much upside for both of us here.
Speaker 1:We're going to discover what these new models can do. But if we're sitting on a lethargic search monopoly and had to think about a world where this was going to be a real challenge to the way that monetization of this works and new ad units and maybe even temporary downward pressure, I would not feel great about that. Do you know what that lethargic search monopoly does feel great about? Being able to keep the fruits of its anticompetitive actions because OpenAI exists. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that leaves one point in the Apple connection. Judge Mehta admits that a ban on Google payments for search placement would have an impact on the market. The rationale for a payment plan Payment ban is straightforward. It would pry open the market to competition, and we talked about this a little bit earlier. And yet Judge Meta declined because of the harm ending payments would cause to recipients of those payments leading to a list of downstream effects.
Speaker 1:Quotes from the opinion, lost competition and innovation from small developers in the browser market, fewer products, and less product innovation from Apple. Apparently, they don't have enough money otherwise. That is a funny funny conclusion. Higher mobile phone prices and less innovative phone features. Judge Mehta further argued that the ultimate outcome would harm consumer welfare, and that was that.
Speaker 1:The entire section was, in fact, a total endorsement of the Google approach, Ben described in Friendly Google and Enemy Remedies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this this is great. The cleverness from Ben. The cleverness of Google strategy was their focus on making friends instead of enemies, thus motivating Apple in particular to not even try. Tech company particularly advertising based ones famously generate huge amounts of consumer surplus.
Speaker 2:Yes. Google makes a lot of money showing you ads. But even at a $300,000,000,000 plus run rate, the company is surely generating far more value for consumers than it is capturing. That is in itself some degree of defense for the company. I should note much of much as Standard Oil brought light to every level of society.
Speaker 2:What is notable about these contractual agreements though is how Google has been generating surplus for everyone else in the tech industry. Maybe this is a good thing. It's certainly good for Mozilla which gets around 80% of its revenue from its Google deal. It has been good for device makers commoditized by Android who have an opportunity for scraps of profit. It has certainly been profitable for Apple which has seen its high margin services revenue skyrocket.
Speaker 2:Thanks in part to the $20,000,000,000 per year of pure profit it gets from Google without needing to make any level of commensurate investment.
Speaker 1:So what Ben actually recommended
Speaker 2:And and one more line here from an old from from Judge Mehta. He says, the revenue share payment shaped the market for general search services in Google's favor. They provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything. They effectively make the ecosystem resistant to change. Yep.
Speaker 2:And their net effect is to basically freeze the ecosystem in place. Apple's like, why would like, we could compete in search but why would we if we can get 20,000,000,000 a year? And the device manufacturers, they say like, I mean, technically, they could create a new search engine or or new intelligence, but we could just get a revenue share from from Google.
Speaker 1:There was a I I feel like there was a dust up, back in the Steve Jobs era over Siri and whether Siri counted as a search engine and where the Siri project would go. Because at a certain point, search had become so well defined in terms of the technology that you need to actually build a search engine that Apple could do it, similar to training a foundation model now. Like, it's something that if you have the money and you have the talent, you can just do it. And there are a number of companies that have done it. The problem is the distribution.
Speaker 1:Like, there are other search engines out there, DuckDuckGo, but the the the problem is actually getting the aggregation of everyone actually showing up and getting the flywheel and getting the and and making it do make it making it a default. And Apple has the ability to make something a default, but you're basically paying them off to not go and build their own search engine. Yeah. And and, yeah, it's this like there's there's there's this tension. Anyway, Ben Thompson recommended that Judge Gupta do the following back when he was writing about this case earlier.
Speaker 1:Ben said, this is why, ultimately, I am comfortable with the implications of my framework and why I think the answer to the remedy question is an injunction against Google making any sort of payments or revenue share for search. If you're a monopoly, you don't get to extend your advantage with contracts, period. Now do most favored nation clauses. More broadly, we tend to think of monopolies as being mean. The problem with aggregators is that they have the temptation to be too nice.
Speaker 1:It has been very profitable to be Google's friend. I think consumers and Google are better off if the company has a few more enemies. So, basically, don't pay Apple at all. What will happen? Apple becomes an enemy.
Speaker 1:Apple partners up with a different search engine, builds their own, creates more competition. Maybe ad prices on Google go down. Maybe there's more consumer surplus. I think that's kind of what Ben's, you know, initial take was. But judge Mehta disagreed.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. I mean, it's interesting because if you take away you make it so that Google can pay
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For for search placements, Mozilla dies and then browsers become less competitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That is the that is the flip side of the coin, which is very interesting. But usually, would you would assume that it's the opposite. You would assume that, like, they are maintaining this monopoly, but in fact, they're kind of at least, they're they're maintaining their search monopoly, but then they're propping up an oligopoly in in browsing because they're like, oh, it's okay.
Speaker 1:Because the browsers are just a a window into the actual high profitable, highly profitable search results. So judge Meta disagreed because Google strategy sharing its monopoly profits was deemed too important to undo. Note the paradox. Judge Meta is implicitly admitting that as long as Google is able to pay for search placement, they will in fact continue to dominate search placement. After all, continued Google dominance is a prerequisite to Google money continuing to flow, thus avoiding the downstream effects judge Meta is concerned about.
Speaker 1:So he did allow for the fact that not banning payments might be a mistake.
Speaker 2:So he says, So for now Google will be permitted to pay distributors for default placement. There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work. Still, judges must be open to clarifying and reconsidering their decrees in light of changing or unchanging market realities. The court is thus prepared to revisit a payment ban or a lesser remedy if competition is not substantially restored through the remedies the court does impose.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation This is America. Your first framework for managing a complex pro.
Speaker 1:This
Speaker 2:is This is Vanta country.
Speaker 1:This is Vanta country. Annie says, b Nestle. Hire a French CEO. Act surprised that the Frenchman is having taboo, debaucherous relations on the job. Their president literally
Speaker 2:married his child.
Speaker 1:Oh, you haven't heard about this? So this was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and we didn't get to it. And then it was also in the Wall Street Journal today.
Speaker 2:Pull it up. Pull up the and
Speaker 1:we've gotta pull it up. So Nestle has fired their CEO following a probe of a romantic relationship with a subordinate.
Speaker 2:You can't even marry your childhood teacher in this No.
Speaker 1:You can. You you can. You can't have a romantic relationship with a subordinate if you are running Nestle. So Laurent Frisch Frischay. I I don't know how to pronounce the the x in that name, but Laurent is out after just a year at the top job of the food giant, which is trying to sell a number of underperforming businesses.
Speaker 1:They dismissed the CEO with immediate effect following an investigation into an undisclosed romantic relationship with a direct subordinate that breached the group's code of conduct. The Swiss maker of Nescafe coffee Purina Pet Food said Monday that its board had ordered the probe overseen by chairman Paul Bulk and lead independent director Pablo Isla Isla, with support of an independent outside counsel. This was a necessary decision decision. They said Nestle's values and governance are strong foundations of our company, and I thank Lauren for his years of service at Nestle. They didn't identify the employee in the relationship, but it's a dramatic shift in the top echelons of Nestle in little more than a year.
Speaker 1:He, this CEO, Laurent, had replaced CEO Mark Schneider in a bid to revive growth as the company grappled with sluggish sales. He was the first outsider to run Nestle since 1922. He was dismissed because he wasn't seen by his board of directors as a cultural fit. The new guy, Laurent, who just got fired, who had previously run businesses at Nestle in Europe and Latin America, took the helm of the company in September 2024, so less than a year or exactly a year. In July, the they they were reviewing some some underperforming brands.
Speaker 1:But let's see. Where where is it? The company has been so he isn't so basically, the he gets fired. And then today, he's in he's in the news again. Where is it?
Speaker 1:It's here, I think.
Speaker 2:Not again.
Speaker 1:He's in again with a detail. So an anonymous tip led to the fall of Nestle's CEO. Nestle's chief executive, Laurent Forshay, his downfall started with an anonymous tip to an internal hotline called Speak Up. Laurent was having an intimate relationship.
Speaker 2:This tip initially came through like last year or something. So it had been bubbling up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So he was having an intimate relationship with a marketing executive who reported to him, the tipster reported. The couple initially denied any relationship. It took two investigations, more hotline reports, and a letter to the Nestle chairman before the food company acted. He didn't request for he didn't respond to request for comment.
Speaker 2:Gabe Shocking. Sent a unhinged message in the chat. He says, who cares about this nonsense? The divorce rate is like fifty percent. Makes your brand more personable if your CEO is cheating on his brand.
Speaker 1:The real question that we need to dig into is how is Nestle gonna come back from this? They gotta get Gwyneth Paltrow or something to do some viral video.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Playbook now.
Speaker 1:So the executive's downfall throws Nestle into disarray after the company abruptly ousted its previous chief for underperformance.
Speaker 2:Mark says it's Lohrone. Lohrone.
Speaker 1:Lohrone.
Speaker 2:It's not L'oron.
Speaker 1:L'oron. L'oron. Thank you. L'oron. Wait.
Speaker 1:How do you pronounce Frechet? Is that is that am I close on that? I don't know. He was nest quickly he was nest quickly escorted out of the office. That's really good.
Speaker 1:I go. Oh, absolute great chatter. So, Lohl Laurent, was 60 is 63 years old and was at Nestle since 1986. He'd refocused the company on core brand.
Speaker 2:'86?
Speaker 1:'86. A forty year run. Almost Forty year run. Twenty years Twenty before four when he joined the company.
Speaker 2:Twenty twenty years before Tyler was born.
Speaker 1:Yes. Put everything in the context of I mean,
Speaker 2:it's important.
Speaker 1:Wow. So you're telling me that America was founded February before Tyler was born. Wow. Wow. So the French CEO slashed cost to reinvest in more promising products such as cold coffee and shored up Nestle's executive team at the company's headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva in Vive, Switzerland.
Speaker 1:I guess I'm probably mispronouncing that too. His Swiss successor, Philip Novrottle, faces the task of arresting a years long slide in the company shares and restoring calm after scandals, snafus, and executive departures.
Speaker 2:Anyway, there's more Well, speaking of corporate controversy, the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer are accused of paying star Kawhi Leonard $28,000,000 for a no show job as a way to circumvent the NBA salary cap according to a report by Pablo Torrey. Torrey? Torrey. Torrey laid out the alleged scandal on his program Pablo Torrey finds out earlier today. The show which features plenty of direct quotes from legal documents made the argument that Leonard was paid 28,000,000 through a company owned by Balmer to essentially do nothing.
Speaker 2:That's correct. Balmer is accused of using this agreement as a way to pay Leonard more than his contract which if true is a violation of NBA rules. The entire situation I thought
Speaker 1:I thought there was no tax on tips. I thought you could just tip a player if you really like them. And wouldn't that not count Yeah. From the salary cap?
Speaker 2:Should have just been tipping.
Speaker 1:I feel like you should have just been tipping.
Speaker 2:And that tip tip 28 mil to your favorite player on the team.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 2:Now that Why are the entire situation falls around a now bankrupt company called Aspiration
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Which is a tree planting service funded by Balmer. So I think tree planting feels like a little bit disingenuous. This was a I think it was a fintech company that that had sort of an eco angle
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To it that had been
Speaker 1:It would plant a tree every time you like saved a dollar on the app or
Speaker 2:something like that. Every time you Some flywheel. Something And like so yeah, Balmer had invested a lot of money in this company and yeah, they were effectively paying him as a spokesperson. But in the contract Mhmm. With Kawhi's one of Kawhi's entities stated that Leonard could decline to proceed with any action desired by the company.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So he could they could say like, hey, you wanna do this? And he could say, no, no thanks. And he would his contract was still valid. He wasn't wasn't violating anything.
Speaker 1:It is it is an odd choice. I feel like if you're Balmer and you're a multi billion I mean, he's one of the richest people in the world. Right? And your goal is to get someone who you're effectively doing business with on the court, he's a basketball player, your goal is to get him an extra $28,000,000, isn't there a better way to do that? Like, isn't there isn't there a way to, like, set up some fund that's, you know, you cut him in on and then you're actually, like, doing something economically valuable, like
Speaker 2:Go invest. Get into founders fund, growth fund.
Speaker 1:The the I mean, that that that's one option. But honestly, it's like, couldn't you just make some calls and get him more Super Bowl ads and get him more, like, ad deals? Like, just just make some calls and get it and get some, like, legitimate business. Like, it doesn't seem like that crazy of a number to try and pull together, Like, somewhat like, much more legitimately. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, are probably advertisers out there who would say, oh, yeah. Like, we'll we'll pay them a couple million dollars to be like our you know, the face of our brand.
Speaker 2:$2,028,000,000 is a lot, though, for a company that had only raised a couple $100,000,000?
Speaker 1:No. What I'm saying is is that, like I
Speaker 2:mean, the the question the question to me is like
Speaker 1:power at Microsoft to to say, hey. We're we're rolling out a new version of Excel, you're gonna be the face of the camera.
Speaker 2:The new Clippy is gonna Kawaii. Yeah. Awesome. Little Kawaii hanging out. I love it.
Speaker 2:Hanging out. Helping you and
Speaker 1:There's gotta be some other way
Speaker 2:to to help. The way is to actually make him an ambassador for the company. Like that that I don't think there's anything illegal about somebody, you know, a Yeah. A basketball player getting a major endorsement deal Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Outside of their team. Yeah. But I think that the thing that takes it off is, you know, really big number and then Yep. Not doing any not doing they they they weren't able to find any content that Mhmm. Kawhi was in related to Aspiration.
Speaker 2:So signing this big sort of like
Speaker 1:If you sign a deal with a company to promote them, you have to run ads for them. You have to tell the audience about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free.
Speaker 1:We're not
Speaker 2:always tell you.
Speaker 1:They're not paying us to to get around the podcast or salary cap. No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I read this and I just I was feeling so grateful that we don't have any salary caps in business.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. 100%.
Speaker 2:I mean, wouldn't we wouldn't have been able to retain time.
Speaker 1:Also I also don't know if I I I don't I don't know that I feel that this story is finished. It feels like it's viral, and there's some allegations. But I will be reserving my judgment until I hear Steve Balmer
Speaker 2:in quiet. Already responded. They said neither mister Balmer nor the Clippers Yep. Circumvented the salary cap Yeah. Or engaged in any misconduct related to aspiration.
Speaker 2:Any contrary assertion is provably false.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like an anonymous inside source from Pablo Torre founds out.
Speaker 2:I mean, I do care if you if you care about basketball Yeah. And you care about this if you're another team, are you not, like, deeply frustrated?
Speaker 1:If it's true, it might not be true. Yeah. Like, they he might have he might have been like, yeah. I had a deal. We signed the deal.
Speaker 1:It was 28,000,000. They did not. They were not very good at planting trees, and so they didn't pay me anything. And I didn't do any promotion for them. So, yes, there's technically a contract.
Speaker 2:There could not be a contract. Crazy because
Speaker 1:Could be this this anonymous source just saying, like, whatever.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's this is not an anonymous source.
Speaker 1:It's an inside source. Inside source.
Speaker 2:Mean, but he's like a a a capital j journo.
Speaker 1:Pablo Torre?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 5:okay. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, he he seems
Speaker 1:Is he athletic or something?
Speaker 2:Doing any legit journalism. Okay. But the funny thing is so Leonard
Speaker 1:It's not anonymous?
Speaker 2:Leonard joined the Clippers on three year, a $104,000,000 deal in 2019, re upped in 2021 for a 176,000,000
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then re upped again in 2024 for a three year, a $149,000,000 extension. And so the $28,000,000 is almost like a rounding error in in in all of this. I mean, it's a big number. But at the same time, like, would he not have joined the Clippers? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, would he would he have gone somewhere else if he hadn't gotten this
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I don't know. Yeah. Maybe maybe the nature of the salary cap is he like yeah. Like there there is more cap space at another at another
Speaker 2:NBA NBA fans in the chat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let
Speaker 2:Does me this piss you off Or is this fair game for Kawhi Leonard to be the face of the faceless face of aspiration? Yeah. Aspiration isn't even around anymore. They're they're chapter 11.
Speaker 1:There are plenty of space there are plenty of sports with no salary caps. Right? Where they can just spend as much as possible. Isn't f one kind of like that?
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe Kawhi just hates trees and wanted to put this put this company in the dirt.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, we have massive news from one of our sponsors, Shane Copeland, over at Polymarket. Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in The United States Of America by the CFTC. Congratulations to Shane.
Speaker 1:Founder. He has the eagle in his bio or in his name, Dag, and that is the most appropriate sound effect for today. Credit to the commission and staff for their impressive work. The process has been accomplished in record timing. Fantastic fantastic turn of events.
Speaker 1:What a story. What Mike Winner's there in the reply saying ban to approval in three and a half years is an absolute speedrun. Very, very difficult to to get new things done in the government generally. It's very tricky, and, they figured it out. So congrats to everyone over there.
Speaker 1:And if you're tracking if you're tracking any any news, head over to Polymarket to check it out. We we, of course, have Polymarket powering our ticker down there. Anyway, I want your review of the new Aston Martin Vanquish, particularly this one. This is your favorite colorway. Right?
Speaker 1:Green over tan?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So it's green over tan. It's finished in historic California sage over 21 inch liquid silver wheels that features a 5.2 liter v 12 twin turbo with 835 horsepower and 1,001 newton meters of torque.
Speaker 2:I absolutely love the Vanquish.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I think I wanna pick one up when they're half off
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Two years.
Speaker 1:You think there'll be a depreciation?
Speaker 2:I think this is like a half a million dollar car right Yeah. Feels like it's gonna be a quarter million dollar car a couple years.
Speaker 1:Well, why do you think yeah. Why do you think Aston Martins depreciate so much faster than Ferraris?
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:limited run nature? What's driving it?
Speaker 2:One big issue Yeah. Over the last few years has been the Lack of James Bond movies. Internal internal electronics Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Extremely dated.
Speaker 2:So until the last two years, they were extremely dated. You Is that buy
Speaker 1:true for Ferrari? Is Ferrari known for, like, amazing car play integrations?
Speaker 2:I mean, not not to the same degree. Mean, if you buy a 2021 Aston Martin Yeah. It feels like sitting in a car from like fifteen years ago. Yeah. And people just don't like that.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, I've looked at them and I'm like, if I'm driving this around LLA Can you
Speaker 1:just rip all that out and get one of those aftermarket things with, like, twin Yeah. You can. 12 That's 12 kinda inch subwoofers in the back. And
Speaker 2:It's kinda it's kinda janky.
Speaker 1:I think you'd put it on spinners and take it to the Pimp My Ride shop with exhibit and throw a throw a TV in the front. I don't know. Or or you could pull off the you know what the cops do where they put the full laptop next to them? Have you seen that? Where you pull up next to a police officer
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And they have the full laptop.
Speaker 2:And you're like, wait. You're pulling somebody over for using
Speaker 1:that Use their phone. And you're on your laptop.
Speaker 2:Oh. You're watching TBPM.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hypocritical, don't you think?
Speaker 2:Oh, well. But
Speaker 1:Yes. Why I think this Yeah. Why Why do
Speaker 2:you think this will change?
Speaker 1:Do they just meet too many at all or something?
Speaker 2:Lawrence Stroll Yeah. Is out to win in the category. He's taking it very seriously. They've they've upped their manufacturers like guarantees now. They've made it a much easier decision.
Speaker 2:We'll see we'll see how these do. I still think they lack the kind of like cult the scale of the cult following that that obviously Portia has. But I think in this case, I I like this colorway. I think green on green on tan, the meta. It's timeless, but I think the meta is is fading and brown on brown is
Speaker 1:Brown on brown. You well, you saw a brown on brown brown on brown Porsche at the at the gym yesterday.
Speaker 2:And I tried to buy
Speaker 1:jumped out of the car to go shake the person down and
Speaker 2:Tried to made it made it made a bid.
Speaker 1:You made a bid?
Speaker 2:Well, I just said, would you sell me your car?
Speaker 1:Wait. You said that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize. That's why you went out. Woman said no. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:But Brown and Brown.
Speaker 1:The most bullish catalyst for this vanquish going asymptotic and going into the stratosphere in terms of price, Aston Martin is, of course, partnered with public.com.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And so all the public.com fans, the investors who take it seriously because they have multi asset investing industry leading yields, trusted by millions, All the public.com fans will buy Aston Martins now.
Speaker 2:And Public is a sponsor of the US Open Yeah. And some tennis players.
Speaker 1:I think done us some ball Is Aston Martin paying Public to Woah. That's a good sound. Smell it.
Speaker 2:Oh. I don't think I don't think you're supposed it.
Speaker 1:You're definitely supposed to smell it. That's rule number one of opening a ball of tennis and tennis balls.
Speaker 2:You're gonna kill me, John? Anyways, these are fantastic.
Speaker 1:This is really
Speaker 2:We gotta get it. I mean, we Yeah. We almost have room for court here.
Speaker 1:Now now, are those actually tennis balls or could those be used for some of the less popular sports? The Padal and the and the Pickleball?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think I think it would be wrong to use these for anything but tennis.
Speaker 1:Do does Padal or Pickle have like this different ball?
Speaker 5:Pickleball does. Pickleball has a football played.
Speaker 2:What does Padel use?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Anyway, thank you to the public No.
Speaker 2:Padel Padel have have higher pressure, thicker foul, slightly larger size.
Speaker 1:Okay. Interesting. Well I'm
Speaker 2:sorry. Standard tennis balls are are Padel is smaller, I guess. Anyways
Speaker 1:Yes. Well, Klarna is going public. And Eli shows My friend Leo IPO. Himself. Oh, that's a good one.
Speaker 1:So there's interest in this IPO, but $35 seems like a lot to pay all at once. Would it be possible to split this up into four interest free payments? Of course.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, this is what my company this is what Basic Basic Capital is doing. They're basically
Speaker 1:Oh, they are.
Speaker 2:Leverage to the to the people Yeah. For your four zero one k.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Pay later. It's very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, we talked to Max Levchin at Affirm. We've talked to Sebastian and Klarna. And Affirm's doing very well, so that probably bodes well for Klarna going out. At the same time, it's oddly competitive. It it's kind of shocking to me that there's that there's such a duopoly here and and one company hasn't run away with it.
Speaker 1:Like, Shopify has really compounded and compounded and compounded and and really defeated a lot of the other ecommerce platforms. But in terms of the the payment processors, it's been much more oligopolistic. Maybe it's just because the the dynamic of the buyer wants to bid the two against each other. So, like, the Stripe Adyen dynamic kind of comes to Klarna and Affirm. But both really big companies will get to see the financials and and dig into Klarna as they go out.
Speaker 2:Klarna's total revenue in 2024 was 2,800,000,000.0. I'm like, okay. Firm's 2024 revenue was 2,300,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Wow. They're really close.
Speaker 2:Klarna made
Speaker 1:a very
Speaker 2:narrow profit in twenty twenty four, twenty one million dollars. 21,000,000? For You like that? That? Good.
Speaker 2:I'd love to see it. Yeah. And so, yeah, they've they've been cutting. But
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, credit to Clarna for for getting the scale while competing against Max Levchin.
Speaker 1:It is crazy.
Speaker 2:Not as like a night nightmare
Speaker 1:Wait. There's also nightmare competitor. There's also something very, very odd about the the Klarna and Adyen are both European companies. Correct? And they both compete with, like, Stripe and and Affirm, these, like, sort of PayPal mafia ask Silicon Valley firms that have been doing it the very Silicon Valley way.
Speaker 1:Like, there's this odd dynamic that's in both both companies.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. So one of the things cutting into Klarna's profitability is their just like credit losses. They lost half a billion dollars last year, which is more than they spent on sales and marketing.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And is that just because people sign up for Klarna? They do the buy now, pay later thing, and they just bail?
Speaker 2:Like, they buy a burrito and they say, so yeah.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense collections? I imagine it does, but eventually it doesn't get
Speaker 2:I blended. Think part of their value wasn't there part of their value prop is that it's not tied to your Okay.
Speaker 1:It's like completely optional to pay. Like, it has to hurt your credit score. Right? I imagine. Like, I I I I mean, maybe it goes into some sort of database, but the idea that you could just go around and use buy now, pay later willy nilly and never pay your later BART does not seem does not seem sustainable.
Speaker 1:Anyway, if you're looking to slice up a bunch of financial data, do it on Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data and analyst that works for you used by Princeton, BCG, and Zapier.
Speaker 2:Klarna, get on Julius before you go public.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Thank us later.
Speaker 1:For sure. Let's go to this tier list by Mert, helios.dev. He's been on the show. Good friend. He says a city tier list that will trigger everyone but is true.
Speaker 1:S tier is Moscow and Tokyo. A tier is NYC. B tier is Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Saint Petersburg, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, and Austin. C tier is Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, Chicago, and Rome. D tier is Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:Come on, Mert. You're doing us dirty here, Of course, agree.
Speaker 2:Think that I I think that LA is definitely a d tier city. I I love living in Los Angeles County Yeah. But the city the city itself is mid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should do a we should do our own tier list. Can you wipe that down, Tyler? And
Speaker 2:Yeah. Start working on a tier list.
Speaker 1:Just just draw up the the the s a b c d f and and we'll fill in them. We'll throw them out. This is so funny because one of the first replies, SF not even on the list is accurate. And SF is on the list in b tier reading comprehension. Not quite there, Sam.
Speaker 1:But good job. I like the
Speaker 2:But it I mean, putting Flagging five. Austin above places like Paris and Berlin It's a good mug. In LA. You did
Speaker 1:a really good job of like of like No.
Speaker 2:This is the perfect post.
Speaker 1:It is a great post.
Speaker 2:It's like you'll get people that agree and people that disagree and it's perfectly controversial.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I I got a text from a financial technology expert
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 2:says, most BNPL providers don't report to bureaus because the bureau systems haven't been able to use the data intelligently. They've tried to fix but they're a cluster f. So that's interesting. Clariant is like, hey, we got a lot of I mean, the the thing with that Clariant can obviously do is say, like, if if somebody buys a burrito and doesn't pay for it Yeah. They can just like not work with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So when you try and hit it the second time, you don't get a chance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'd say most consumers would be like, I want to keep having options.
Speaker 1:Options. I
Speaker 2:should probably pay it back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, there was a timeline was in turmoil, a little battle between the scrot goat and Nikita Beer. Very interesting. Nikita's having a hilarious time on X. I feel like
Speaker 2:It's not an absolute role. I'm so happy that I'm so happy that he he took
Speaker 1:It's really the best. It's just the best, like, narrative art
Speaker 2:for poster and residence? Yeah. But then gets to mold the platform.
Speaker 1:Totally. I mean, mean, I'm I I think I I I've been having a good time. I haven't noticed any, like, really negative changes. It seems like there's some intractable problems. Dude, it's
Speaker 2:great. Did you notice the changes they made on on video? Like, they totally updated the UI
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Video? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:With the buttons down at the bottom. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great. Let's do the tier list now.
Speaker 2:I feel like I got this This account though is rocking it, you know, actually adding followers now for getting in this war. Yeah. And this is Nikita's advice. Remember? He said if you're a tiny account on Twitter Yeah.
Speaker 2:The best thing you can do is go and pick a fight with the biggest account you can find.
Speaker 1:And that's exactly what this guy's doing. It's so good. So, yeah, Skrott Goat says, like, I have I have eight followers, and they're all bots. And and the algorithm's keeping my reach from being, like, you know, like, I'm not getting enough reach. The only way to get reach is via comments.
Speaker 1:Nine followers is a byproduct of no reach. And Nikita says, maybe the scrot goat is not the best name for your account. He's, no, man. Like, if anything, it's an all timer. People should follow it just for the name.
Speaker 1:And and it works. And the scrub coat said, the truth always wins. And Nikita Beer got 600 likes. And I checked the account. It had a couple 100 followers.
Speaker 1:So we might be looking at a future future hall of fame poster. Okay. Tyler, let's let's do the tier list. I wanna go first, and then you can you can do your tier list. Maybe we can just do a little line down the center.
Speaker 1:Can you do a line down the center? Like, after the city tier list, Like, a little bit farther. A little bit farther. So that we can put mine. Okay.
Speaker 1:So yeah. That's fine. So I'll I'll I'll start with f tier. I'll agree with Mert. I'll put London in f tier just like Mert did.
Speaker 1:And Mert also has Toronto and Brussels. He has it in d tier. I'll I'll leave Toronto and Brussels in f tier as well. So for me, I think we're good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so put Toronto and Brussels in f tier. And for then for LA
Speaker 2:Have you been to Toronto
Speaker 1:in Brussels? Terrible. Then Los Angeles, he put it in d tier. I'll actually go s tier. I love LA.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. I'll put LA there. Then in c tier, he has Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, and Rome. I would it's a little controversial. I would put those in f tier.
Speaker 1:So I'd put Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul. So Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, and Rome, all in f tier. Then for in b tier in in b tier, he put San Francisco and Austin. I'd put those in s tier. So put those up there.
Speaker 1:And then he put Dubai in b tier. This is gonna be a little controversial, but I would put Dubai in f tier. Yeah. He also put Hong Kong in b tier.
Speaker 2:Sensing a pattern.
Speaker 1:Think that's f tier. Let's put Hong Kong down there. And then also, Istanbul, I'd put that in f tier. And then New York City, he put it in a tier. I'd put it in s tier.
Speaker 1:And then also, I'd I'd also add, Phoenix in s tier and, Philadelphia. Just put Philly. And then, San Diego.
Speaker 2:I mean, have you been to San Diego?
Speaker 1:I I absolutely put in s tier. You do. Then Dallas. Let's put Dallas in s tier. And you got Chicago?
Speaker 1:Oh, you missed Chicago. Chicago's obviously s tier. Okay. Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're good. And then Moscow and Tokyo, he had them in s tier. Let's go d tier. Let's go d tier. D tier.
Speaker 1:No. No. Not f tier.
Speaker 2:D tier. Tyler, what are you doing? What are you doing?
Speaker 1:D tier, Moscow and Tokyo. We'll give him a bone. And so this is kind of like how I think of the city's tier list.
Speaker 2:Tell you, your view of the world, It's
Speaker 1:kind of my world view right now. And so yeah. I mean, can see some
Speaker 2:patterns You're probably the next time your port expires you probably won't even renew it. Right? Probably. What do I need a passport for? Why would I would I have a long list of s tier cities.
Speaker 1:I could be in Philly. I could be in Tokyo.
Speaker 2:Why would I go to
Speaker 1:Why would I go to London. London. Paris. Rome. And I could be in Baltimore.
Speaker 1:The London of of Pennsylvania. Wait. The London of the East. Baltimore, Maryland. Anyway, what about you, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Do you wanna do you wanna take a crack at it?
Speaker 2:I don't think I I don't think I can call outdo my dear list? I don't think I can I I don't think my my only controversial I mean, I don't
Speaker 1:wanna Oh, we got we got some questions in the chat? How are we feeling about Charlotte, North Carolina?
Speaker 2:Tier for sure.
Speaker 1:I think it's S tier. Yeah. Charlotte is probably S tier. It's part of the isn't it part of the research triangle? It's one of the greatest places to Orleans.
Speaker 1:How do we miss NOLA? Throw NOLA in the S tier. New Orleans is definitely s tier. Oh, Mark says it's not s tier. Maybe we gotta move it down to a tier.
Speaker 1:I don't know. NOLA is not that good.
Speaker 2:The the lonely lonely a tier city.
Speaker 1:Yeah. NOLA. Okay. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Good stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then Yeah. But I I also
Speaker 2:that that LA is s tier Yep. In the in that it's sunny We're here. Hundreds hundreds of days a year. Yeah. And it's absolutely stunning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but functionally, it's a terrible city.
Speaker 1:Here's a tough one. Where would you put Pyongyang? People love I
Speaker 2:love Pyongyang. I love Pyongyang Investment Fund.
Speaker 1:Yep. Highly authoritarian. Some people are into that these days. Limited food I don't think you could put Pyongyang in s tier.
Speaker 2:But I think it's definitely within the in the top.
Speaker 1:Do you remember when when 4chan tried to send Justin Bieber to Pyongyang? Do you see this? No. Oh, this is amazing. This is like one of the greatest like, the Internet does something funny.
Speaker 1:So Justin Bieber put up a poll on online saying, I will he would pick my next tour date. I'm going on a world tour. I'll let the fans vote. And if the fans vote for a particular city, I'll go to that city. And so, of course, the fans voted for North Korea.
Speaker 1:So you gotta go to North Korea. And it was like a classic lesson in like, do not let the internet decide anything.
Speaker 2:You could pick any You could
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could pick any city. A city. It'd suggest any city. And he was like, I'll go where the fans want me to go.
Speaker 1:Where do I have the most fans? Of course, the fans were like, go to North Korea. They had be like, I'm not going to North Korea. Anyway, thank you for doing the city tier list. Now, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 1:Search every byte serverless WePuffin. And full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. If you're
Speaker 2:You wanna be like cursor? You wanna be like Notion? Wanna be like linear?
Speaker 1:That can we pull that up again? I I Look at this website. This is honestly the biggest reason why I was excited to partner with them was you have to go to their website. It's so beautifully designed and it's so the layout is awesome. We And it's a Officially puffing.
Speaker 1:We're puffing, baby.
Speaker 2:And you should too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Go check out Turbo Puffer. Anyway, let's move on to another Nikita post.
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 1:Nikita says
Speaker 2:apparently gets a lot of DMs from people that gets their accounts suspended for spam. They say I wasn't spamming. I was just commenting the same thing on every post regardless of the context. Elizabeth Holmes says, dear Nikita, rumors swirl that my account's been hijacked for a crypto rug pull. Not true.
Speaker 2:It hasn't. Please don't suspend me unless I start chilling a coin for then it's surely compromised. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 2:We gotta know. We gotta know. I mean, there's she's mixing a lot of stuff in here.
Speaker 1:So my theory is that it's the husband. I don't think that I think it's hard to get access to a phone and post from prison. We should have Martin Screlly on again to discuss like the theories behind what's going on here.
Speaker 2:Because Could she could she get a printed out like, you know, could she get a 100 posts a day delivered to her that are just like Absolutely. Basically letters and then she could write back
Speaker 1:Replies? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Letters one by one.
Speaker 1:What are the time on here? Two hours ago, 08:45AM. It feels like it's too quick of a turnaround. At the same time, there have been reports of of, like, mob bosses, gang members in prison who get access to cell phones. They get smuggled in.
Speaker 1:I mean, all sorts of stuff gets smuggled into prisons. They're not the most secure places. They're designed to keep people in, not necessarily keep everything out. So they bribe someone. They get something in.
Speaker 1:And there was a case where, I believe in LA, there was a gang member who was calling hits on people from prison, like organizing crimes from inside the clink. So not very good. And, yes, SBF did do the pod from prison. I'm not sure how they did that. It might have been over the prison he
Speaker 2:was he got in trouble at the prison for doing that.
Speaker 1:But I don't actually know the rules. Like, are you allowed to do pods in prison over the cell phone? Like, I I don't can you record that? It feels like building I know that after you go to prison, you can't sell your life rights. Like, you can't make a bunch of money off of selling the rights to your movie or your book.
Speaker 1:Like, I I I think it just doesn't work like that. I actually don't know enough about it. We should we should dig in much more and do a whole deep dive. Tyler, did you have something else that
Speaker 5:you wanna do you wanna share on Peter or help? Thing.
Speaker 1:Because Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, he had a laptop.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. Full laptop? But was he posting too? Is he still posting?
Speaker 5:I
Speaker 1:I don't know. If he was, it it like, the the novelty kind of like wore off for sure. Either way, Elizabeth Holmes gotta clean up her SEO results. She's gotta get her brand mentioned in ChatGPT. No.
Speaker 1:She doesn't. But serious businesses do, and serious businesses need to use ProFound. You are serious mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. More important than ever in the age of agentic commerce, what's coming is a lot of consumers buying a lot of things through Right.
Speaker 2:Discovering, learning LLMs recommended.
Speaker 1:You need to know how you're showing up, and ProFound helps you do that. So You know
Speaker 2:This was this is crazy. Morning Brew Yes. Has some a highlight from The Athletic. Stream East, the world's largest illegal sports streaming platform shut down in a sting. They had 80 unauthorized domains, a 136,000,000 average monthly visits and 1,600,000,000 total visits in the last year.
Speaker 2:The digital equivalent of catching black
Speaker 1:Whoever writes for Morning Brew, fantastic. Fantastic
Speaker 2:crushing it. StreamEast was the bane of Dana White's UFC.
Speaker 7:I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Yep. So a lot
Speaker 1:of Sure.
Speaker 2:A lot of the pay per views were were streamed Yes. Over here. And this I I would assume that this platform alone you know, accounted for a billion plus of like lost revenue for the UFC. It's been operating for years. Anybody from anywhere in the world could just tune in and watch a pay per view.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think that this was like a game of whack a mole. Like they had all these different domains they'd be buying. Every every time they spin up a new domain, they have one getting shut down and and and people are just like, you know
Speaker 1:I wonder if they're this is this is oddly timed. Because if you think about it, like, what's what's coming in the next couple weeks that would be illegally streamed? That's not gonna be publicly streamed that everyone's gonna wanna watch. It's obviously the Antichrist lectures in San Francisco Peter Thiel's hosting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they shut that down. They shut down this because people were gonna go there with the phone and livestream it. But you know off the record. Right? What do think, Tyler?
Speaker 1:Would you be tuning in on Streamys, breaking the rules?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So like, I I personally have a I have a couple guys to there who are going, I have a plug, you know
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. My personal streaming. Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, so they're gonna, like, FaceTime you and you can just watch the
Speaker 2:Well, they'll just be sitting in their pocket.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I was trying to think of, like, like, why am I not familiar with this?
Speaker 1:Why am I this this is the first time I'm hearing about Stream East. It's because like, well, I don't watch sports at all. And I and I don't and I can't think of anything that I would want to watch that's behind I've never bought a pay per view in my life. I did the just
Speaker 2:reload off of Rob and Yep.
Speaker 1:I freeload off of you.
Speaker 2:Nice, dude. Nice. For
Speaker 1:sure. Nice. And and other than that, I mean, there other other was their entire business just like, UFC piracy? Like, what else
Speaker 2:No. It's all sports. Because there's people that don't have cable. Oh, you
Speaker 1:wanna be NFL? Yeah. Tyler, what
Speaker 2:are saying? Baseball. Yes. So, like, I've
Speaker 5:I also don't really watch sports, but at at school, in college, Stream East is like I mean, everyone knows Stream East. Like, that's like Really? Basically the default Wow. Rather than I mean, some people have like the cable equivalent or something. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, yeah, every UFC, every football game
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they were monetizing Thank you. Crazy. Right? Because they have a 136,000,000 visits. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Imagine how much sports betting sign ups they got.
Speaker 1:Can you pull a list of all your friends who are using Streamys so we can contact the authorities and and make sure that they
Speaker 2:Let's include them in the sting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's get they owe Dana White money and we're gonna collect. Okay? Let's make Or
Speaker 2:uncle Dana.
Speaker 1:You know, I have a funny story. I had a buddy in college who was very much into watching football, did not have cable. And he and I go over to his, like, Harvard dorm room, and he pulls up, a website. And he's like, I can watch sports on here. I can watch my Raiders, even though they're not even, like like, the Raiders game is so local to I guess they were in Oakland at the time that, like, even if you paid, you'd have to be on, like, the highest tier of NFL Sunday ticket to get access to a cross country game.
Speaker 1:Like, you could like, if you were if you were at school in Boston, you could get, like, Nessen, the local regional sports network, new New England sports network, and you could see the Patriots games. And then the local news channel or the local sports channel would show you, like, the local games. Like, you could probably see, like, the, I don't know, the New York what is it? The Giants. Like, they'd play, and, like, they'd be local, so they'd be played.
Speaker 1:You couldn't just go see the Raiders unless you paid the highest tier. Was really expensive. No one wanted to pay. And so he pull he gets out of his laptop. He pulls up this website.
Speaker 1:And he's like, I can watch the Raiders on this website. Do you know what website it was? Justin.tv.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and the it was the funniest thing because he he explains it to me. He's like, yeah. Anyone can go on Justin TV. This is pre Twitch.
Speaker 2:They're saying we should we should sit and harass Tyler's friends for for using Streamys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Can you
Speaker 2:Yeah, guys. No show tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Gonna be citizens arrest. Them? Tell them that we're hiring, like, tons of interns, and they pay really high. And, like, they gotta get out here. Just it's a one week in We'll arrest
Speaker 2:we'll do citizens arrest on the screen.
Speaker 1:Shut up.
Speaker 2:It's a board of Dana White.
Speaker 1:But so so so my buddy pulls up Justin TV and is like,
Speaker 2:Mark Mark in the chat says LeBron uses StreamEast. What? I guess he was was was he like I feel like I remember this. Was he like
Speaker 1:Oh, I've seen this. Well, a lot of people do this. Oh, f one was big on StreamEast. Yeah. That makes A lot of people do it just because it's a hassle to figure out how to do the pay how to how to pay.
Speaker 2:Trey says, I would never watch Streamys because then I wouldn't see the local ads. That's an upfront There we advertising industry. Thank you. Thank you, Trey.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Trey.
Speaker 2:Thank you for supporting big television advertising.
Speaker 1:So my buddy is watching Justin TV. Justin TV had all sorts of crazy because anyone could spin up a stream so people would do all sorts of crazy stuff. The gaming thing was the first intersection of like, oh, wow. This is legal and growing, and it's a niche that no one else is catering to. Like, g four TV existed, which was a TV channel just for video games.
Speaker 1:And it was like scripted content and talk shows and interview shows. They had a whole bunch of stuff, but but there wasn't that much video game content. So, like like, they eventually pivoted into Twitch and figured out that was the right thing. But before they pivoted, Justin TV was playing whack a mole with all the scammers, all the illegal streams, and it was like a huge hassle. And, of course, you get adult content and all sorts But the funny
Speaker 2:it's thing and it's a interesting challenge Yep. For a platform like that that's trying to bootstrap itself and get a lot of content and users because that's some of the most in demand content Totally. Is like an NFL game.
Speaker 1:Look at the visits on this. StreamEast had a 136,000,000 app visits.
Speaker 2:We gotta take we gotta knock out these these illegal streams.
Speaker 1:But Isn't that
Speaker 2:same time.
Speaker 1:Isn't that more than all of f one combined or something like that? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think they get Wasn't f
Speaker 1:one at like a 100,000,000 or something like that?
Speaker 2:No. They they get like a few million live viewers Yeah. In The US.
Speaker 1:And then a and then an incremental 100,000,000 on StreamEast. And so, yeah, they should be selling those ads. Hey. If you're putting your logo on a f one car, it's gonna be seen on StreamEast, so you gotta pay up. Anyway Wait.
Speaker 2:This should we should we pull up this video? This hot
Speaker 1:mic Yes. But I wanna I wanna close out. So I so my buddy is like Justin T. V. Is explaining to me.
Speaker 1:And he's like he describes it to me as like, there's just a guy named Justin, and he has a website where you can watch this stuff. And didn't have this conception. And it kind of was that way, but really, it's like there was a team behind it, and Emmett Sheer was there, and a bunch of
Speaker 2:other wasn't Justin and Emmett.
Speaker 1:No. At that point, they probably had 10 or 20 people. But there was this there was this moment in like 02/2007, 2008 where like people didn't realize that websites were companies that had organizations and stocks and like could become like massive like Facebook. Like like the the in 2005 when people were first introduced to Facebook, they were like, oh, it's like some kid at Harvard, like, put up a website.
Speaker 2:Justin was so early.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well Hey, Steve. If you're trying to build the next great streaming platform, do it legally and do it using linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 1:Start building on linear. Let's pull up the hot mic moment on CTV. First, truth zone. Is this real, or is this is this dubbed and faked? Like, this says this was picked up by Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:This seems crazy. I I would like to know if this is real, but let's play it, and then we'll decide if it's real.
Speaker 2:Yep. Bloomberg Confirmed. Okay. So this is Xi Jinping talking about Wait. We can't see the subtitles.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Start it over. Yeah. What are the subtitles?
Speaker 2:No. They're here. That. What's he saying? These days, 70 years old.
Speaker 2:Earlier people rarely lived, but these days, 70, you're still a child.
Speaker 1:You're still a child.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Putin speaks inaudible.
Speaker 2:In. How are they picking this up on this microphone? This is so rough. With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger and even achieve immortality. Immortality.
Speaker 1:Wow. Predictions are this century, there's a chance of living to a 150 years old. That is crazy.
Speaker 2:She is is he's like, I'm just getting started actually.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm down.
Speaker 5:Extremely bullish for a new limit, Jacob Kimmel.
Speaker 1:True. True. Extremely bullish. Speaking of old people, guess who the oldest billionaire in America is? His names or guess how old he is?
Speaker 1:The oldest billionaire in
Speaker 2:America. 94.
Speaker 1:You're ten years short. 100 and He turns up 104 in September. He founded the insurer, Mercury General, in 1961. His name is George Joseph. We gotta get a founder's episode on this guy if there isn't already one.
Speaker 1:That is an incredible run. 61. That's that's what? Fifty years before Tyler was born. The chat's calling it BT before Tyler.
Speaker 1:BT. BT. The the journal has a fun article deep diving all the biggest billionaires in America.
Speaker 2:He also has nontraditional background. He he actually got his bachelor's degree at Harvard.
Speaker 1:Youngest to oldest anonymized mostly. The Coke and Coke junior are 30. They're billionaires. Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift are under 40. While 86 of the billionaires are men, more than a 150 out of the thousand that the Wall Street Journal collected are women, including Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1:Mark Zuckerberg's in his forties, has a huge circle here on this graphic. Musk, Page, Brin, these guys are all top in the charts. Elon Musk is at 423,000,000,000. The next richest person, Jeff Bezos, is worth 283,000,000,000. Of course, 423,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:There's only 300,000,000 Americans. So that's enough to make every American a millionaire if he just gave his money away.
Speaker 2:That's how
Speaker 1:it It's way better for him to keep it because he gets to do all the cool stuff with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Illinois governor JB Pritzker and president Trump are among more than 360 billionaires who started with some inherited wealth.
Speaker 2:Just a bit.
Speaker 1:Jensen Wong's on here. Steve Ballmer's on here. He's he's almost 70. The Waltons are on here, and they're in their seventies. Milken's on here.
Speaker 1:He's almost 80. What a run to go to jail, come out, still hold on to a billion. Not bad. Larry Ellison's
Speaker 2:And a great conference.
Speaker 1:Geffen's on here. George Lucas is on here. It's a murderer's row. You love it. Rockefeller.
Speaker 1:There's still a Rockefeller. Who's alive? Who's Rockefeller?
Speaker 2:So did you did you cover this? Collectively, these people you were joking, but these people are worth 5,700,000,000,000.0. That's enough wealth to buy a Corvette Stingray convertible for every 65 plus US driver.
Speaker 1:Wait. Did you actually do this math?
Speaker 2:The 30
Speaker 1:The journal did this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's hilarious. So that that's 4,700,000,000,000.0. A four year Harvard tuition room and board for 1,000,000 students plus $10,000 annual stipend only $3,388 building.
Speaker 1:How much how much are they worth in total?
Speaker 2:5,700,000,000,000.0. I am deaf. Congratulations. One hurts. The stock in McDonald's, Delta Airlines, Ford, and Lululemon.
Speaker 2:There we go. And every every residential property in Chicago, 245,000,000,000 with 8,000,000,000 to spare. They own That was not that impressive.
Speaker 1:This is a weird stat from the journal. So so they collected they collected, what, A thousand 1,135 billionaires.
Speaker 2:So so I gotta put the stat in stats in the truth zone because if you tried to buy a Corvette Stingray for every 65 plus US
Speaker 1:Oh, it's driver
Speaker 2:gonna drive the market That price is gonna go way, way, way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're be so scarce.
Speaker 2:You're gonna you're gonna get to you're you're gonna hit real scarcity real real quick.
Speaker 1:You might be able to lease a Model three for everyone.
Speaker 2:But but this not like an incredibly like, you could get a Corvette for every American 65 plus, a four year degree for 1,000,000 students, you could buy McDonald's, Delta, Ford, and Lululemon and some property in Chicago and that's that's that's the journal saying like, look how much how much they have to spare. Mean, that Can that
Speaker 1:you imagine how long it would take to calculate all the sales tax for all those Corvette Stingray
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:even know
Speaker 2:think about it. Would be five minutes.
Speaker 1:I'd rather spend five minutes with numeral. Sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax and flights. In fact, it's the only way you could actually execute that deal to buy 300 But million Corvette this is a funny stat. So billionaires are everywhere.
Speaker 1:So they they they they track a thousand billionaires. Right? In The US, they own more than 3,000 homes. That's only three per person. I feel like that's not that many.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're a billionaire and a house is like $1,020,000,000
Speaker 2:Yeah. These must be residential properties, but still that seems extremely low.
Speaker 1:300 home yeah. It seems like the data was not, like, widely available. I feel like they must have like oh, that's only what they could like pull together.
Speaker 2:But there's a lot more homes. Home ownership. A lot of these billionaires
Speaker 1:homes just in Palo Alto.
Speaker 2:A lot of these only only a third of them inherited wealth, meaning that that the other 700 or so are not beating the American dream allegations. This is the real headline here. 700 billionaires in America are not beating the American dream allegations. They were born. They didn't inherit anything.
Speaker 2:And they created billions of dollars of wealth.
Speaker 1:They're not beating the allegation.
Speaker 2:They're not beating the allegation. They are living the American dream.
Speaker 5:They can't deny
Speaker 1:it. Started without inherited wealth.
Speaker 2:Nothing. Now they Gold's empire.
Speaker 1:Now they own not one, not two, but three homes on average. What's funny is I I feel like I heard this story about like Bill Gates owns like a thousand homes or something that or, like, all the land or whatever.
Speaker 2:I know. Know. Ken Griffithy owns 50 homes. You don't even have to be a bean air to be to be just collecting homes on the fly. Just browsing.
Speaker 1:I feel like I see a guy on Instagram every other day, buy a fourplex. Buy seven homes. Rent them out. Make a billion dollars.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming this is, like, residential, so it's not, like, units.
Speaker 1:It's like what they actually yeah. I have, one real estate developer billionaire would own more than 300 homes, you think. Isn't BlackRock counted? Don't black doesn't BlackRock own, like, a bajillion homes or something like that? Isn't that
Speaker 2:They own it. The conspiracy They own a 105% of all the homes in America.
Speaker 1:But that's that's just because they're counting the tents at Burning Man in Black Rock City as individual homes. If you take those out, I mean, like, you can't count a Black Rock tent as a Black Rock owned home because it's not really a permanent home. It doesn't make any sense. I don't get it. Also, underrated alpha.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to be the only billionaire in a state, you gotta go to Wyoming and Alaska because there's no billionaires with primary businesses in Wyoming and Alaska. Primary business? Primary businesses. So like, you know
Speaker 2:So just move your business there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, Alaska, it's it's just sitting there waiting. It is crazy that Wyoming, I feel like they're super like crypto friendly. You think there'd be somebody who like went and built some massive thing there but it hasn't happened. At least not yet.
Speaker 2:Jack on x said, Costco should get into web services. Kirkland Cloud would clean up.
Speaker 1:It really would. I would be repping Kirkland Cloud. We would build on
Speaker 2:Kirkland This is interesting. Schiel highlights German discount grocer, Lydall. Lydl? Lidl, l I d l.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Little Yeah. Sure. Lydl. Yeah. Built their own cloud infrastructure because of German data laws and now has a $2,000,000,000 revenue business selling it to others No way.
Speaker 2:A la AWS. Oh.
Speaker 1:It actually worked.
Speaker 2:If you're a retailer, get into cloud. Get into cloud.
Speaker 1:Costco should do Neo cloud. Buy buy GPUs, buy the bulk. Buy rack. Do you get this meme, the doctor strange tweet or how I learned to love the RT just after the just after the Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic. There's this meme of this woman looking at the screen and this is the this is the the what would I I missed
Speaker 2:I missed the original meme. Tyler, you were born Do you understand this meme?
Speaker 5:When it when it's the woman looking Yeah. Screen? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like
Speaker 1:Some Netflix documentary or Apple TV? Yeah.
Speaker 5:I never watched the show. But Me either.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I think it's like it's just like a boomer meme. It's like, oh, what it like the old woman is like doesn't understand the Wow.
Speaker 1:Meme.
Speaker 2:We are boomers because we don't understand the boomer meme. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a meta boomer take. I don't know. It's a boomerang.
Speaker 2:Comes right back.
Speaker 5:It's always like her looking at the screen.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh, what what do they mean by this?
Speaker 1:I'm curious to know what the actual show is because it like, the original photo of that meme, it looked it looked cinematic. It looked interesting. And, course, I have to watch 100% of the movies around here since Jordy isn't lifting his weight. Anyway, do you see this interaction between Daniel Tenriro and Rune? Lair.
Speaker 1:Do you think this is real? So Daniel says hedge fund guys are so much more fun to spend time with than tech guys, rigorous, irreverent, and don't have their heads up, their own butts. And Rune says, bro tweeted this five minutes after we got done hanging out. And do you think it's real? Do you think it do you think this actually happened?
Speaker 1:He's trolling Rune or do think this is just completely random? Rune's just like taking the opportunity I to
Speaker 2:think Rune is in SF and I think I think Daniel is in York City.
Speaker 1:Rune's been on a little trip. He was in LA briefly. I didn't get a chance to meet up with him, but I do wanna hang out with him soon.
Speaker 2:Hedge fund guys are serious guys.
Speaker 1:Serious? That's what he was saying. He's saying irreverent. That's the opposite of serious.
Speaker 2:No. They're serious about making money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:More serious than venture capital.
Speaker 1:This is the the what? Jeremy Giffon take that that investors are more interesting than founders? The the fox and the hedgehog thing. Right?
Speaker 4:The
Speaker 2:Is that a public take?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was at the founders it was at the founders event with David Center. Yeah. Which I don't know if that was ever streamed or released. So maybe it's not.
Speaker 1:But you're leaked. Sorry, bro.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah. Founders that are the average founder that is incredibly locked in knows a lot about their business and their market Yep. Not a lot about other things.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:What is the it's it's
Speaker 2:more difficult to be a a a generational investor Yeah. You know, only knowing about it super narrow.
Speaker 1:It's like the fox and the hedgehog. Right? That's the that that's the analogy. The fox knows a little bit about a lot of different things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.
Speaker 1:That's like the mind what's it called? Like the mindset. The what what was it called? Like the I don't know. Framework.
Speaker 1:The mental model. The mental model that you
Speaker 2:will talk about. Like sort of spiky intelligence.
Speaker 1:The hedgehog? That that completely blows up the metaphor because the metaphor is that the hedgehog only knows one thing. It it, in fact, does not have spiky intelligence. Oh, I I guess it does. You know, you're right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Spiky intelligence because it's actually better now. That's fantastic. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need to expand on the fox and the hedgehog metaphor for sure. Anyway, thin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking in g two. You want some spiky intelligence? Spike that intelligence right into your customer service organization.
Speaker 2:Smart.
Speaker 1:It's the Very smart. Best place to spike the intelligence. Do it. Spike the football
Speaker 2:after you. Do it.
Speaker 1:Bring AI enabled Do it. Service to your organization.
Speaker 2:Vittorio says, incredible white pill. Scientists just mapped how aging rewires our genes. They found universal switches that control decline. Basically, aging is a coordinated epigenetic drift of which we now have the atlas. We will solve aging in our life.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe Putin and Xi Jinping were They
Speaker 2:said, okay, just pub yeah. Just yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They probably follow Vittorio. And they were and and, like, right before that clip started, they were like, oh, did you see what Vittorio posted? And then they're like, yeah. We're gonna live to one fifty. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Victoria is like the best. And that's where I got my news from.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just a couple seventy two year bros following Victoria.
Speaker 1:I like to think that they both both Putin and Xi Jinping have a non on x through VPNs that they just scroll the timeline like the rest of us.
Speaker 2:I can see it.
Speaker 1:It's possible.
Speaker 2:It is funny if you assume that that organ trend you know, if they assume that organ transplants are the solution to immortality, why are they assuming, like, one fifty is the cap?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is by that point, you're so such a mix of different parts, it's not really you anymore?
Speaker 1:Well, you're a ship of Theseus.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's the ship
Speaker 1:of Theseus. You've been You
Speaker 2:have no original parts anymore. Yeah. So you're like entirely
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the classic classic question. If you if you swap out everything but your brain, it feels like it's still you.
Speaker 2:Isn't there crazy isn't there crazy stories around like heart transplants like changing
Speaker 1:Your soul?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Your personality.
Speaker 1:Really? No way. I had no idea. I haven't seen that. What do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 5:Well, I mean, you're already a super enthusiast because like your sales guy
Speaker 1:Oh, true.
Speaker 5:True. I I think it's more likely that Xi Jinping, Putin were have been watching Dorcasch Yes. And saw the Jacob Kimlop.
Speaker 1:That's probably true. Yeah. That's probably true. Yeah. So, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised since Door Keshe is, like, the foremost interview scholar on China right now.
Speaker 2:No. I'm being serious.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. A 100 Like Yeah. That makes sense. And apparently, podcasts are booming there.
Speaker 1:Did you see that post about how, like like China seems to be going through some sort of like boom of translated American podcast content that's doing very well there. So stay tuned.
Speaker 2:I'm Gemini. Idea that a heart transplant can change a person's personality is fascinating and controversial. Mhmm. The medical community broadly says that that personality, these sort of psychological changes that happen after a heart surgery are due to trauma and side effects from the medication.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But there's more speculative ideas around how potentially memories are stored in places other than the brain. Mhmm. And so and and what happens, there's there's there's people that report like personality changes that mirror the donors.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The person that that that the original person's heart gets transferred into the new host and then and then the new host starts being being and acting more like the original donor, which is crazy.
Speaker 1:That is actually crazy.
Speaker 2:So anybody in the chat Big gift to if you've had a heart transplant.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should get our hearts swapped. Like Face Off, which I have a movie you haven't seen, I know. But in the movie Face Off, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta take their faces off and swap faces because of some convoluted thing where one of them is a criminal and one of them is a hardened criminal who has some information about where a bomb will go off or something like that. And then the special agent needs to go undercover as the criminal. And so they swap faces.
Speaker 1:And then they of course, the actors just play each other. And then they go on
Speaker 2:a I don't know what art If if we did a heart swap, it would just be We It'd just be more golden retriever mode activation. I don't know if I don't know how much it would do. Do you wanna do you wanna kick off this article about Open
Speaker 1:I would rather tell you the full plot of FaceOff, actually.
Speaker 2:Okay. Tell it to me. I'll be listening.
Speaker 1:Okay. Perfect. So FBI special agent Sean Archer survives an assassination attempt by Castor Troy, a terrorist for hire, but the bullet kills his son, Michael. Archer then engages in an extended vendetta against Troy. It culminates six years later in his team ambushing Troy who is with his younger brother and accomplice.
Speaker 1:Polu? Polux? On a remote desert airstrip, Troy goads Archer by saying he knows of a bomb that is located somewhere in Los Angeles and is set to explode in a in a few days. I was correct about the bomb. Before Archer can learn more, Troy is knocked unconscious and falls into a coma.
Speaker 1:Pillow pillow Palux? I need to figure out how to how to pronounce that. The guy in custody affirms that the bomb is real but refuses to reveal its act its its location. In secret, Archer reluctantly undergoes a highly experimental face transplant procedure by knocked by doctor Malcolm Walsh to take on Castor Troy's face, voice, and appearance. Archer as Troy is taken to the same high security prison where Paloo is being held in order to obtain information on the bomb's location.
Speaker 1:Troy
Speaker 2:I got some visuals for you,
Speaker 1:John. Oh, you got it? Yeah. This is great. Troy unexpectedly awakens from his coma and discovers that his face is missing.
Speaker 1:He calls his gang and they force doctor Walsh to translate transplant Archer's face onto him. Meanwhile, Archer successfully learns the bomb's location from Paloo before being informed that he has a visitor. Anticipating a reunion with his colleague and return to his normal life, Archer instead instead finds Troy wearing his face upon revealing he has murdered everyone else who knows about the face transplant. Troy gleefully informs Archer that he looks forward to running his FBI career and ravishing his wife. That's a great film.
Speaker 1:It's a classic '90s. Is it '90s? When did this come out? 1997 Thriller. You gotta watch it.
Speaker 1:It's the best.
Speaker 2:I'll add it to my list.
Speaker 1:You should. You should. For for when the Singularity hits. Do we have the Singularity tracker up and running yet? Or is it working, Tyler?
Speaker 1:What do we got? Yeah. How many days until
Speaker 2:Right now, it's at three forty four. Can you
Speaker 1:Three hundred and forty four days? Three hundred and forty four days until what? What are we saying? Until AGI?
Speaker 5:Till AGI. I Until Singularity? Yeah. She need a
Speaker 2:light on We can't really
Speaker 5:see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need a light. Need a light on that. But we got a ticker. We got a a an analog date tracker.
Speaker 1:We will be tracking the amount of days until the singularity. Sam Altman said that the singularity is just a few thousand days away. Wasn't that what he said? How did Sam Altman exactly describe the few thousand days? He said, superintelligence is a few thousand days away.
Speaker 1:Superintelligent AI. So that's ASI. So AGI is here, essentially. Let's see. Thousand days.
Speaker 1:So super intelligence is a few thousand days away. According to Sam Altman, Tyler Cosgrove has a much shorter timeline apparently, just three hundred days. We're we're booting up for a ASI in in three hundred days. Yeah. We gotta do better on the lighting here.
Speaker 1:We're getting some crazy reflections in that thing. Maybe we need to take off the front, you know, take off the glass so we can just see it fully. But anyway, what realistically, how how many days do you think should go on there, Tyler? Timeline to ASI. It's super intelligent.
Speaker 1:Sam Altman puts it a few thousand days. I count a few as three. A few as three. A couple is two. What's a few is three.
Speaker 1:What do you think a few means? Do you think a few could be four?
Speaker 2:How many
Speaker 1:is a few?
Speaker 2:I would I would maybe put
Speaker 1:More than
Speaker 2:two at
Speaker 1:a hand. But less than a significant amount. A couple often implies two. A few usually starts at three or more, which can extend to small indeterminate quality that is not many. The exact number depends heavily on the context of what is being discussed.
Speaker 1:So could have you
Speaker 2:Max Max is saying it feels feels pretty gentle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is a gentle singularity for sure. I was gonna say three thousand days, which is ten years. Right? Three thousand three sixty five?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've I've updated my
Speaker 1:wow. No. Ultra bearish.
Speaker 2:Short everything.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's how many years is that? 09/1999 divided by three sixty five? That is two hundred and seventy three years away. You gotta be more optimistic than that, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Should we do the Ollie I the Ollie g. Somebody asked Ollie g how many days until the singularity 09/1999
Speaker 1:I I realistically, I'm at I'm at six thousand days. I'm on Kurzweil timelines. Kurzweil timelines put us at May maybe even more, honestly. Maybe maybe maybe seven thousand days. Did you put it in
Speaker 2:GTA terms? Like, is that GTA
Speaker 1:GTA seven or seven probably. So I'm on 2045 ASI Kurzweil timelines. I remain unchanged by any developments essentially. So 2045 ASI arrives. It's the singularity.
Speaker 1:And so I'm around seven thousand days. Sam Almond said a few thousand. Is seven a few? I don't know. We'll decide.
Speaker 1:But Tyler, feel free to feel free to update that to whatever you think is the correct estimate for when ASI arrives. Jordi, you've gone from not AGI pilled to extremely AGI pilled back to, you know, top signal, Maxxer, extremely AGI not pilled. How are you feeling about the progress towards superintelligence? Think I we're a few thousand days away.
Speaker 2:I think there's only I think there's only it feels like there's there's this very small number of people that that have any like real sense of of the truth and they're all extremely conflicted. They all have no incentive to tell you that it's they have an incentive to be like, try to be a little realistic about it, but they have no incentive to say, you know, we're we're ten years away or or Yeah. It just all feels
Speaker 1:But you specifically don't have Foundation Model Lab Bags. You have adio.com or adio bags, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Obviously, Adio has their own timelines. But what are your timelines?
Speaker 2:My I don't even know if it's the right I I think Are you
Speaker 1:over under my estimate of seven thousand days until super intelligence? And a singularity, me and Ray Kurzweil riding together,
Speaker 2:Are you earlier self reinforcing
Speaker 1:Full on, super intelligent, smarter than everyone, can do any job, can do anything.
Speaker 2:Can make itself smarter.
Speaker 1:Yes. And it's just like, it's a thing that just runs, One shots anything, full self reinforcing. Who knows? Maybe it goes to war. Maybe it just leaves.
Speaker 1:But it is fully
Speaker 2:Definitely more than a decade out.
Speaker 1:Yep. So over 3,000 for sure. And That's the low end of Sam Altman's prediction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just I still find it hard to believe entirely.
Speaker 1:So maybe never. Maybe infinite days. You could be in the nine million nine hundred ninety nine thousand
Speaker 2:I could be the ninety nine million nine ninety nine nine If 90
Speaker 1:it happens
Speaker 2:nine nine ninety nine
Speaker 1:thousand So this is the updated take, actually, some of the AI pill people. They will say, it either happens very soon or it doesn't happen at all. Which is kind of a funny way to frame it. But if you put it in those terms, if it happens, ten years, twenty years, thirty years? What are you feeling?
Speaker 2:I just I just feel like it'll end up being I I I think we're going to continue to get more and more advanced capabilities. But I I don't I just believe that even the even the smartest people in the room like, clearly, we're getting machines that are just more intelligent and capable in many ways Yeah. Than humans. Yeah. But you can take you can take and and and and I just sort of disagree with like the ramp that will come from that.
Speaker 2:Right? Because if you took if you took, you know, a thousand of the smartest people in the world and put them in a room and you say solve world hunger or like, get us to Mars.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, they're not gonna do it and it doesn't work. Like, it's not gonna happen in a year. Yep. Like, if you take a really smart group of people like with SpaceX and you say, get to Mars, say like, great. Well, we're gonna work on this for decades.
Speaker 2:Decades. Right? Yep. So I I I just I disagree with or I don't believe in in this
Speaker 1:Yep. Fast takeoff.
Speaker 2:Don't believe in the fast takeoff.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:I believe that like machines will continue to get smarter and smarter and more capable
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And more valuable to humanity. But I but I don't believe in in a in a fast takeoff.
Speaker 1:It is somewhat of an abstraction of that philosophical question of like, can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Like, can can a human create something that's smarter than a human in every way? Like, how would that work? There is an there is sort of like a fundamental philosophical question.
Speaker 2:Like, raw intelligence is rarely the bottleneck for
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Progress.
Speaker 1:That's a very good point. Yeah. I don't know. I I still I still am rooting for the Terminator outcome where super intelligence comes around 2045, we go to war, and the indomitable human spirit wins out and we kill all the robots and we win. I think that would be the most exciting outcome.
Speaker 2:That'd be fun.
Speaker 1:Because you it would be so unifying
Speaker 2:to humanity to have
Speaker 1:a common enemy, the clanker.
Speaker 2:Humanity needs a a true common enemy.
Speaker 1:Exactly. There's so much infighting.
Speaker 2:Americans don't wanna I wanna manifest like an alien race that wants to destroy us, but it'd be good for the world. We could stop Fantastic. We we we could Yeah. Ignore all politics Yeah. And just focus on
Speaker 1:Imagine the dream team of survival. Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, all the all your boys working together to shoot the clankers. It'd be great. It'd be amazing. And and the funny thing is that the doomers will come to you and they'll say A uniform that just
Speaker 2:sends human race.
Speaker 1:Haven't you seen the term haven't you seen the Terminator? That's what's gonna happen if we create AI. We're gonna get the Terminator outcome. Well, I've seen Terminator. I know you haven't.
Speaker 1:But I've seen Terminator. What happens in Terminator? Who wins at the end of Terminator? The humans. The humans win at the end of That's the that's the conclusion of the movie.
Speaker 1:They fight and the humans win. And so if we get the Terminator outcome, that means we win. That means we win. And that's gonna be a lot of fun. So tool up.
Speaker 1:Get the guns. Get ready to fight the clankers. We're going to war. But not for the next two decades. It's gonna be two decades of enterprise SaaS.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be decades of shareholder Get value accrual. And it's gonna be two years of delightful rest on an Eight Sleep. Get a Pod five, five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Here we go. I've been 84
Speaker 1:not my dot best. Com. And I got My best. A 90 so please
Speaker 2:play You're on a roll. You. Congratulations, John.
Speaker 1:I am on a roll. I love to see you is win. On a roll. Microsoft. Microsoft has been on a roll.
Speaker 4:A run.
Speaker 1:We have the chief product officer of Microsoft joining us Final TBN Ultra The
Speaker 2:final boss of product people.
Speaker 1:This is the true gatekeeper to our plan to bring back Clippy. Yep. So we will welcome the CPO. Welcome to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:I think we can hear you. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. Microsoft.
Speaker 7:So just so you know. I said there's many bosses, but Clippy is the ultimate boss.
Speaker 1:Yes. Clippy is the ultimate boss. Has Clippy actually been thrown around as an idea? It feels like more and more, you know, nagged companies like, the huge companies are starting to have a little bit more fun every once in a while. It is a bit of a wild I've seen some, like, throwback Microsoft merch that's gotten out.
Speaker 1:Is there any serious discussion in internally to think about reviving Clippy? I feel like it would be so much fun.
Speaker 7:Dude, I I I'm with you. I feel like, unironically, Clippy was just, like, early. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. The original concept
Speaker 2:It was early and right.
Speaker 1:In in in interface. Interface. Anyway, would you mind introducing yourself and give us a little bit of an overview of, like, what your day to day actually looks like? It's such a huge organization. There's so much to do, but I'd love to have, a little bit more context on what you oversee and what your role actually looks like.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Let me give you the load on me. I I I've been at Microsoft for two years. I'm the chief product officer for AI at work. So focused on kind of, like, how do you make work great again
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:With AI. And if I and before that, I was at Robinhood. And before that, I was at Google for many years. But I think the steel thread through all of this for me has been, like, the way I think about this, bringing near future science fiction and putting it in product.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And making sure that billions of people have it. So I did that with Google search. And then I founded this area called Google Lens, with, you know, the way the camera turns into a search engine. And of course, Robin Hood for first time investors. And at Microsoft, my focus has been and our team's focus has been we have hundreds of millions of professionals.
Speaker 7:We've got to make work not just about doing more, but about being better. So I mean, copilot work, what are the agents that you get for work today? You get a badge and a PC? Should you get a team of agents?
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the trade off of, put a chat box? Obviously, Microsoft has fantastic access, exclusive access to GPT-five, the, you know, frontier level capabilities. There but there's a trade off from the product perspective. Put the chat box next to it, which is almost just one level away from just having two tabs open next to each other and and having gpt5in chat.com over here versus do the hard work of have the product teams go and dig into how do we add AI functionality into every subtool. If you're in Excel, how do you create, you know, smarter functions within the cells as opposed to just a sidebar, which has kind of been the status quo for a lot of AI at work projects broadly?
Speaker 7:Totally. And I think this is the I mean, the answer is yes is yes and. Right? In some sense, like, look, every shift that I've been through three of these, I worked at Akamai, like, twenty years ago and the Internet was like a a thing was going to be a thing. And then, you know, I was obviously, mobile and Telar with Google and now with Microsoft with AI.
Speaker 7:The first wave of all of
Speaker 2:these things is just that AI. Right?
Speaker 7:Like Yeah. Put chat next to it, put bring some intelligence to it. And it's no different from, you know, the first wave of mobile apps where, like, desktop form factor, like, shrunk into the mobile screen form factor, or the first websites actually were, like, scanned brochures, which are PDFs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? In the back in the day, folks. And I think now, I feel like one of the that's why you see if they're crossing the street saying, oh, let's let's add AI to it. But I think the yes then comes from two things. One is you wanna make sure that when there's a natural way, because of the natural language interface, you're actually asking AI to do a lot more higher order things.
Speaker 7:Right? Instead of this fine grain manipulation of, like, oh, let's go through 2,200 menus and remember the magic incantation. Like, you wanna kind of say, hey, do it for me. Right? So there's a bunch of things where chat is the right answer.
Speaker 7:But then there are other things where if you're an Excel bro, like, wanna be in the in your ID. Right? Yeah. And get get your, you know, get your get the assistance right where you are. So meeting you where where you are.
Speaker 7:So if you saw last two weeks ago, we talked about and we announced the equals copilot. But that's like, it'd be hello world of, like, what we are thinking of and say, how do we actually right now, in Teams or in your meeting, how do you have assistance?
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 7:Along with the chatbot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. From a from a product perspective, there's something very interesting going on where I mean, Microsoft kind of coined the term or the definition of, like, being a platform where, the companies that built on top of Windows created more value than Microsoft captured. And it was like the classic example of of a technology platform driving, like, incredible value. There's something potentially, at least, that we've been tracking where we've talked to, what, three or four different companies that are building AI add ons to Excel.
Speaker 2:Or re or trying to rebuild it
Speaker 1:Or trying rebuild it. But a lot of times, it's actually integrated into Excel. Yeah. And there's one frame where, okay, those companies are gonna get steamrolled by Excel and the team there. There's the other frame, which is
Speaker 2:We said it, not you.
Speaker 1:Well, there I mean, that that's a risk that I'm sure every investor in those companies is discussing. But then there's another frame where Excel becomes a platform, like Windows became a platform, and there is a robust ecosystem of apps and services on top, some of those that are complementary to Copilot functionality, some of those that are competitive. So I guess the question is like, is Excel becoming a platform? And do you see like, how do you message around the openness of the Excel platform? Are you trying to take learnings from the openness of the Microsoft ecosystem and bring that into the developer communications on top of Excel?
Speaker 1:Or is there a different strategy at play?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I think, you know, look, super sharp point. And I I think in the in the fullness of time, Office as a whole has always been a platform. Right? If you look at, like, Word, Excel, PowerPoint
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Actually, Outlook plug ins, Teams, has a very healthy, like, bot ecosystem. So the platform play is always been kind of at the center of it. And it's the question though is there are certain it's a you're keeping the user in mind. Are there things that are much more intuitive and needed to be part of the product? And are there things that are kind of like, let's say you're doing something very specific for accounting.
Speaker 7:It is absolutely the right thing for that to be a plug in and add in versus doing something horizontal that should really be a feature of the product. So that's the way it's we we are thinking about it.
Speaker 1:Have you thought any at all about how AI can supercharge the way people use LinkedIn? I imagine that there's a lot of I I that might be a completely separate world from what you're doing. But I it does seem like something that that in the future, people have been people have been out there for so long. I need a personal CRM. I need some sort of thing on top of my LinkedIn connections to remind me.
Speaker 1:And you get those like on every social app, you get the reminder, hey, it's somebody's birthday. You should write them a note. But with AI, you could imagine so much more power there to say, I'm trying to sell this particular thing. I'm hiring for this particular thing. And having GPT5 go and crawl all the profiles, put together something for you, Have you thought about anything that's happening over in the LinkedIn world, or is that just kind of out of your purview?
Speaker 7:It's you know, we we Ryan and I talk all the time, and he's actually, like, much more front and center on the office world now. So I think the the thing that's interesting there is that a lot of these ideas were just, like, unfundable or bad ideas before because it didn't have enough tokens. So my favorite thing to say is, like, take take all these, like, ideas people thought were, like, really bad. So for example, like, I'd have, like, a whole bunch of people pitch back in Google the whole alerting, oh, would it be great if you could kind of, like, ongoing, do, like, event discovery? I'm into this favorite like, my favorite band is this obscure thing and, like, you know, wouldn't it be great if I knew something about, like
Speaker 1:I think we have
Speaker 7:some I
Speaker 1:think we're having some technical difficulties.
Speaker 7:Actually. Sorry.
Speaker 1:I I I I think we're having some technical difficulties here. Can you hear us okay?
Speaker 7:I'm I can hear you guys fine.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 1:think you're cutting out. Let let let's move on to
Speaker 7:I didn't say anything controversial.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's not that. I think I think it's the the the backbone Internet infrastructure in this company in this country that's that's controversial. What what about Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would Yeah. I guess, like, my my biggest thing that I'd I'd be curious to get your insight on is is are there like how many businesses in the in the Microsoft ecosystem have just totally opted out of AI that are not that are not responding to upsells, that are just not interested. Maybe they have employees that are kind of using various AI tools themselves. But I I would have to imagine it's like a very, very large percentage of companies within
Speaker 7:Off country, I think it's in fact, we've we've had, like, more than 90% of Fortune 500 using some form of, like, you know, Copilot, AI products. We have, like, 100,000,000 customers that have just we've just crossed 100,000,000 across commercial and consumer on Copilot usage. The thing that's actually interesting that I see is maybe a variant of what you're asking, which is, you know, like, there's one extreme. There's a set of folks who are just leaning much. The posture is much more proactive, I would say, and kind of, like, in the game, getting the arena, building stuff.
Speaker 7:It's not just about, oh, like, there's an off the shelf thing. This is a chatbot that I'll buy and see who who uses it in my company. So that set of firms, in fact, like, we've started calling them frontier firms. Right? These guys are, like, out there starting to kind of, like, invest both build and buy and partner.
Speaker 7:And we are starting to see, oh, those folks actually get a lot more out of AI. So for example, like, one example for me is, like, you guys are using the reasoning models. So when you if you step back and think, you know, the where we are in AI, the first version of AI, it's just be more about, like, next token prediction and, like, chatbot. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But the next really real big unlock came in January and February around that time when the reasoning made models came online.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's when we saw a very clear shift. There's certain companies that just jumped in and said, all these things that we couldn't do six months ago or one year ago, let's try them now.
Speaker 1:Has that been
Speaker 7:affecting Including Microsoft, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Has that been affecting gross margins? We saw in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that Notion obviously sells a few competitors to Microsoft products, saw gross margins drop from 90% to something like 80%. I was talking to Ivan. He said it actually wasn't even that bad, but there was some sort of an impact.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you can upsell against that. But how is the economic trade off? How are you thinking about that with selling? Obviously, people want frontier level intelligence, but they're it might change the economic equation. Are you seeing anything that indicates that going forward, the fundamental gravity of the economic equation might be different?
Speaker 7:I mean, look, look, Jay. I think it's going to be proportional in the sense that, like, I was joking with someone saying, like, you know, using g p d five thinking, like, in your product is like taking a flying car to a grocery store, right, or o three pro or whatever. Yeah. Like, so some sense, you do have to be judy. It's no longer about, like,
Speaker 2:just being a rapper around the model.
Speaker 7:Sure. Yes. The model is eating the product. Right? Absolutely.
Speaker 7:So that's, I think, one thing. Both these statements seemingly contradictory are true, and we're seeing that. On one hand, the model is eating the product. What do I mean by that? Like, you know, internally, even us, we spend a bunch of time trying to solve what I call the six finger problem.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Right? Like, remember two years ago when DALL E three came out
Speaker 1:and, like,
Speaker 7:each other humans, it would be like six fingers and five, like, 18 toes or what have you. And there's a whole bunch of startups that said, we'll solve that. Right? And a whole bunch of product teams inside Microsoft too saying, oh, we'll just, like, figure out how to solve the six finger problem. Metaphorically speaking, six months later, the model of a GP four o came out and, like, you know, there's no there's no longer a six finger problem.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, hallucinations one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hallucinations seem to be at an all time Exactly. Like, the models are getting way more
Speaker 2:There's been a lot of reports of of consumers developing like friend like relationships with various LLMs. Do you have is there any evidence that that employees at companies are are developing real relationships with with AI in the way that some people on on Reddit have developed relationships with models like four o?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I I think we've made the product the choices that kinda squarely put AI and Microsoft as tools. Right? Yeah. And even even these tools, they can be agentic tools, meaning they can be working for you in background.
Speaker 7:You have a natural language interface to it. But there is this is the this is not an accident building. We have to make intentional choices. In fact, I I I call it term called neural software, meaning that it's not software as usual. In fact, Steve Snoskin, I had a spat on Twitter about it.
Speaker 1:Saying,
Speaker 7:like, because for me, the way I think about this is look, yes, it is software. As engineers, we all know that. It's like stochastic models and it's like, you know, you you peel a a few layers, it's all software. But it is probabilistic, and there are three things that are really important going on here. And we like, as builders, I I feel like we got to pay attention to it.
Speaker 7:Number one is the natural language interface. Right? It just has this human like anthropomorphic interface. So when four o gets replaced by five, like, you're like, you're not like, oh, my cheese or this menu item moved. They're like, who fired my, you know, like, chefs.
Speaker 7:Right? So I think it that is a point, whether it work or in in personal life. But I think the second thing that we are underestimating, and we certainly see that inside, is the way we are building products and releasing them is changing. Like, previously, we'd say, oh, yeah. Like, 02/2001 to 02/2002.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, the software is updated, release notes, change log. But now it's just like you're you would have to kind of slow roll out. You have to kind of do evals and benchmarks on how the interaction works, not just the accuracy of things. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then the third the third thing I'm seeing, at least, like and this one's a hard one to kind of, like, track. We're still trying to figure out what that means is the composition of the team. Right? Like, in the past, it'd be like, oh, you had engineers, you, you know, your desk, your test, your product, your UX.
Speaker 7:It's all a blur. Right? It's so much. And, like, you have a bunch of generalists, you have the model with blurs. Right?
Speaker 7:And then you have go to market. Like, that's the new triangle that that we are seeing.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a fun puzzle to solve. Thank you for hopping on the stream. This is great. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:And just let let everybody know internally that we're we're we're riding
Speaker 1:with the XL bros and Clippy. Yes.
Speaker 2:We're riding with Clippy.
Speaker 1:For sure. Thank you.
Speaker 2:We would love to help relaunch Clippy Yeah. Given the opportunity. Be our last Thank you so much. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for coming on soon. Have a great rest of your day. In the meantime, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Nick, did you see this post by Nick Dobos, OpenAI cackling right now today? So OpenAI acquired Statsig. We talked about this yesterday. But he's he's sharing a photo of Anthropic and telemetry services for data usage.
Speaker 1:Cloud Code connects from users' machines to the Statsig service to log operational metrics as latency, reliability, and usage patterns. And so is what saying like they're going to rug Anthropic by buying their telemetry, like their logging service? Like is this monopolistic market? Can Anthropic not just use another company or product? I I I don't this doesn't quite like sit with me as like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like they totally owned Anthropic. It's like, yeah, they bought a company that Anthropic uses. Like, the the Anthropic would probably keep using that. Maybe they'll re platform. I I don't know.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I do wonder curious if if Statsig is going to remain an independent brand or just be rolled under OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a bunch of companies that use Statsig. I'm just looking at the website. Yeah. EA, Microsoft, Atlassian, Bloomberg,
Speaker 1:use it? You said EAs use it?
Speaker 2:Just kidding. Tyler, do you think this is do you think that that
Speaker 1:What are they what are
Speaker 2:the EAs
Speaker 1:using stats sig dropping shrimp welfare?
Speaker 2:I frankly, I don't know what stats sig really does. So I I have no like,
Speaker 5:it seems like yeah. Anthropic can
Speaker 1:just Why don't you know what it does? It's no more complicated than Palantir. It's equivalent it's equivalent to oh, we got r for rock dropping massive alpha on Mistral. Mistral is closing $14,000,000,000. Blue passed the initial target of $9,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:I assume that's market cap. The rumors about Apple's acquisition were fake. That seems right.
Speaker 2:That always seemed fake. I mean, in what world was France gonna let their national AI champion be?
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Is this real?
Speaker 1:This hello, hello, breaking Apple and Google have reached a deal to have Gemini power a new Siri platform as per Bloomberg? Let's pull that up because that's literally my prediction today. Did I just not read Bloomberg?
Speaker 2:This rumored for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is it actually Okay.
Speaker 2:Woah. Woah. Woah. Got
Speaker 1:Either I'm gonna look extremely dumb or extremely smart. Let's read this.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this Okay.
Speaker 1:Apple plans AI powered search tool for Siri to rival OpenAI perplexity. Apple is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence web powered search tool next year, stepping up competition. I'm gonna put this in the chat, or should I put it in the tab? The company is working on a new system, World Knowledge Answers, that will be integrated into the Siri voice assistant according to people with knowledge of the man of the matter. And wait.
Speaker 1:Who are they? So it's Google. Okay. Apple is aiming to release the service described by some executives as an
Speaker 2:answer The news breaking right now is crazy. So American Eagle just beat earnings up another 20% after hours.
Speaker 1:Also, moment of silence for Figma. They missed earnings. Very sad to see that. But never bet against our boy, Dylan Field. Another team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone is ripping. American Eagle. Wait. I wonder if they actually beat earnings because of that Sydney Sweeney thing.
Speaker 1:Like, we were talking about the value that she brought to that brand. It probably was like a She $100,000,000 in market should have gotten like a $50,000,000 payday. Like, it really did change the the trajectory of the of the business. Yeah. I mean Sweeney XA ideal incoming.
Speaker 1:Regalve is a golden poster in the show.
Speaker 2:Raghav is on a tear.
Speaker 1:Thank you for what you do, Raghav. This is
Speaker 2:American American Eagle's still down 30% in the last twelve months Mhmm. 20% year to date. So Sweeney really was the turnaround.
Speaker 1:Sydney bottom ticket? Hopefully, she got some shit.
Speaker 2:She basically She might have bought it.
Speaker 1:The underlying technology enabling the new Siri could come in part from Alphabet Google Alphabet Inc's Google, Apple's longtime partner in Internet search. The company's reached a formal agreement this week for Apple to help evaluate and test a Google developed AI model to help power the voice assistant. So very interesting. I would imagine Apple has to pay Google for this version of just an answer engine because the answer engine is not gonna be directly monetized, But Google has to be working on agentic commerce, agentic ads in the LLM results. It seems so obvious.
Speaker 1:I I feel like this is gonna flip at some point. But I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Apple's new search experience will include an interface that makes Yes.
Speaker 2:So this is So does how is Google gonna feel about this giving them
Speaker 1:Why? What what's wrong with this?
Speaker 2:They're building something that is that is a a they're building an AI powered web search tool for Siri.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're building software because they're a software company and they're selling it to the hardware company or they're partnering with the hardware company.
Speaker 2:So you think Apple's saying, you're gonna keep paying us 20,000,000,000 and we're gonna compete with you?
Speaker 1:How are they competing? What what what no. This is them not this is them saying, we're not getting into foundation models. We're not gonna do our own our own I know, we're gonna use Gemini.
Speaker 2:Oh, they're saying, okay. I missed the part.
Speaker 1:No. So today, Siri can answer basic Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta we gotta Instead of The companies reached Apple and Alphabet reached a formal agreement for Apple to evaluate and test a Google developed AI model to help power the voice assistant.
Speaker 1:Yes. So so what like what like, this is I mean, it's a formal agreement Yes. To evaluate and test it. So like, we're still like years away from anything happening here. Like I like, the next iPhone event is like next week.
Speaker 1:And, like, they're not gonna roll out a Google partner. I I imagine they don't roll out a Google partnership. This feels like something that they're gonna be working in over time. I don't know. May maybe they will.
Speaker 1:But either way
Speaker 2:So Apple is rebuilding Siri around three core components. A planner, the search systems for the web and devices, and a summarizer. The planner interprets voice or text input and decides how to respond. The search system scans the web or user data, and the summarizer pulls it all together into an answer. And Apple has recently leaning toward a custom built Google Gemini model for the summarizer.
Speaker 2:It would run on Apple's own private cloud computer computing servers.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be important.
Speaker 2:Search Giant already delivered the technology to Apple and both companies are now collaborating on fine tuning and testing it. So Yep.
Speaker 1:Apple has been
Speaker 2:recently Does say that Apple considered acquiring Perplexity to enhance the search features in Siri. I mean, Perplexity is the the big
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Perplexity sits on top of other foundation models. So Yep. Like, it doesn't it doesn't fully solve Apple's problem all the way to the root of the stack, in in my opinion. So somewhat makes sense that they would the the the the the secret sauce that Perplexity builds is something that Apple's, like, capable of instantiating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What'd got
Speaker 5:there, sir? So I'm reading the article. It says Google was not initially the front runner for the Siri project. Anthropic had been in the lead for the deal. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:But then their price was too high.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Anthropic demanded a high price for using its technology, more than 1,500,000,000.0 a year, and Google was open to more favorable financial terms. So the the end result is that we should expect that Apple pays Google less than 1,500,000,000.0 per year to vend Gemini models into Siri, essentially. And I feel like as soon as Gemini has ads in the results or monetized commerce in the results
Speaker 2:And Apple can take a cut of that.
Speaker 1:Apple should wanna take a cut of that. And so it feels like this this this this economic flow is gonna reverse at some point. I don't know. May maybe it doesn't. Maybe maybe inference is really remains really expensive and the and the I mean, this is never really pencils out or something.
Speaker 1:But this feels like something that that would flow the other direction at some point.
Speaker 2:They're gatekeeper. They're gonna they're gonna take
Speaker 1:the cut.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, OpenAI is now in the league of actually, like, they are are they're they're they're very much in the mag mag seven league
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:In terms of competing competing. I mean, this in a world where Apple device users are just pushed into using new new effectively. This is a Google product. Right? That will be powered by still powered by Google Search and and theoretically built into the existing Google Ads engine.
Speaker 2:I would not bet against OpenAI in any way, but certainly this is some real competition more so than just a net new Gemini app that people are
Speaker 1:I guess the question is, what is the value of this particular knowledge engine? Right? Isn't that what isn't that how they're characterizing it? Like, the the what's it called? They
Speaker 2:World Answers. So to me, this is starting with something that's just like, hey, what are some things I can do for fun when in New York? And it's like, you should
Speaker 1:World's Answers, is that related to World Liberty Financial or World Coin, the orb scanner? Potentially both. Potentially both. The Keiretsu. Put them all together.
Speaker 1:No. World Knowledge Answers, that feels like something that you can call us.
Speaker 2:High value searches.
Speaker 1:Yes. Not highly monetizable.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so maybe there's some bifurcation where the user activity, when they want world knowledge answers, that is a cost center. And when you wanna do agentic commerce and shopping, that's monetizable.
Speaker 2:But And both. Companies want both types of searches because
Speaker 1:I would assume consumers would assume. Would assume that what like, the world knowledge answer, what headphones should I buy? That's a question that I would want the new Siri to answer. More data. And then I would want it to buy buy them for me.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 2:More data. Hello. In the chat says, more data for Google. Let's give it up for Google. They are just I don't know for Google.
Speaker 2:Data world champions.
Speaker 1:It is it is wild. People yeah. This is this is not on many people's bingo cards early earlier.
Speaker 2:Of course, it was Well, Alphabets. Probably on Mark Gurman's.
Speaker 1:Up. Everyone's everyone's ripping. The Mag seven remains undefeated. Anyway, speaking of Mag seven, let's go to Lulu Maservi's breakdown of the Tesla master plans. V she's highlighting v two and v four, and she calls it founder writing versus committee writing.
Speaker 1:And if you look and we touched on this yesterday. If you look at the way the the the first two master plans are written, it really does feel like Elon just tapped it out on the phone almost. Like, couple bullet points here and there. There's one chart in there. Then when Master Plan v three comes out, it's this 40 page PDF with a bunch of charts.
Speaker 1:Maybe he was involved, but the latest version does feel very dry. And Christian Kyle had a very good reply. He just replied with the Em dash because, of course, the Tesla Master Plan v four had 14 Em dashes in it. It's a lot of em dashes at a time when the em dash is highly controversial. I was I was thinking about the em dash.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to create an em dash. Like, I don't have the button on my keyboard. I have a minus sign, and I have an underscore.
Speaker 2:All you have to do is hit the the dash button twice and
Speaker 1:Minus minus, and then space, and it
Speaker 2:turns into a and it turns it into a
Speaker 1:I never learned how to
Speaker 5:do You can also do shift
Speaker 2:poor, and then you were too
Speaker 1:rich. I was too poor, and then I was too rich to use the Emdash. I'm not kidding. I've never I like, you can look at any of my writing in any of the scripts I've written or blog posts. Like, I just have never used the Emdash.
Speaker 1:I don't know
Speaker 4:why.
Speaker 2:I was pretty devastated by by Chad GPT just
Speaker 1:Stealing it.
Speaker 2:Stealing it.
Speaker 1:You were a big Emdash guy before?
Speaker 2:It's just it's very functional.
Speaker 1:I'm just all about the comma. Like, why do you ever need an EmDash when you can just use a comma? You know, like so in the Tesla thing, how we develop and use autonomy
Speaker 2:It's more than
Speaker 1:EmDash for John.
Speaker 2:And It's a statement.
Speaker 1:Why just use a comma. I I don't know. I don't understand. Do you Tyler, do you understand why the m dash is valuable at all? We should just destroy it.
Speaker 1:We should just get rid of it. I don't think it makes any sense.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, there's some, like, stylistic value.
Speaker 1:What is the stylistic value?
Speaker 2:Just looks nice or something? Looks maxing. You're writing.
Speaker 1:Aura farming, the em dash? I just don't like it. It doesn't have spaces around it. Like, the the comma is just so much cleaner. Use a comma.
Speaker 1:Use a period. Use a space. It just we like, did Shakespeare write em dashes? Let's figure that out.
Speaker 5:I think so.
Speaker 1:Who is the
Speaker 2:first person to really dominate the em dash? I see it in I see it all over the
Speaker 1:place now. I see it I see it in the I mean, it's in is it in the journal, usually? I don't know. I don't see a lot of it in the journal. No?
Speaker 2:Okay. But if it's not in
Speaker 1:the If it's journal not in the journal
Speaker 7:be in your
Speaker 1:should get out of the training data.
Speaker 2:Some of the most well known users of the EmDash. I asked Gemini because I I just feel like Oh. That's James Joyce. Oh, okay. Emily Dickinson.
Speaker 1:M dash.
Speaker 2:Vladimir Nobukov. Nobukov. The master of style. Nobukov used the m dash to create a specific kind of voice and pacing.
Speaker 1:No. Shakespeare did not use the em dash. Does the Bible Woah. Does the Bible
Speaker 2:JK Rowling has been a notable user of the em dash. Maybe she is an AI that traveled back in time
Speaker 1:To bring Harry Potter forward? Bring the
Speaker 2:chosen one.
Speaker 1:Does does the em dash occur in the Bible? No. The Bible, at least in its early printings and manuscripts, did not use em dashes. Ancient texts, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament were originally written without punctuation at all.
Speaker 2:Not in the Bible.
Speaker 1:This is hilarious. So Chatuchitebetj says, no. Em dash. The Bible at least did not use em dashes. The the Greek New Testament were originally written without punctuation at all.
Speaker 1:Em dash. Just continuous script. Breaks, pauses, and emphasis were conveyed by spacing, rhythm, or oral tradition. Modern editions, some nineteenth and twentieth century English Bibles, especially in America, started using dashes to mark sudden breaks or interruptions in thought. But this is a modern editorial choice, not a part of the original text or the earliest print traditions.
Speaker 1:So the em dash is relatively recent punctuation invention. I think we gotta return. We gotta get rid of the em dash. Destroy the em dash. I'm sick of hearing it.
Speaker 1:Take it out of your writing. Instead, get on Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to get Bezalel
Speaker 2:Alex Conrad went viral yesterday. He shared a screenshot from Bloomberg. Airwon, the Colt Los Angeles grocery chain is opening its first New York City tonic bar inside a private West Village Padel Club.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And he said, None of these words appear in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go. Related to the Bible. This is the is the Erwan thing in New York that Emily Sundberg broke. Very excited. Very excited.
Speaker 1:Did you see that Josh Kushner was at the US Open and
Speaker 2:He's so famous.
Speaker 1:So recognizable they didn't need to give him a little Chiron, a little lower third. They had to explain who Adam Silver was.
Speaker 2:A man that needs
Speaker 1:who is who is Adam Silver again? He's like a sports guy? Adam I
Speaker 2:don't know if you're serious.
Speaker 1:He's the commissioner of the NBA. What's the NBA?
Speaker 2:That's the guy that What's said
Speaker 1:the NBA?
Speaker 2:Get ready to learn Chinese.
Speaker 1:The NBA is the National Basketball Association. So what is is that a sport? What is basketball? Basketball. Basketball is a dynamic team sport where two teams of five players try to score points by shooting a ball through an opponent's hoop.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so so the guy on the left, apparently, he he I guess, he runs a company that where people they have teams where they they have five players each, and they they try and throw a ball through a a hoop. Okay. So there's there's Adam Silver, that that the basketball guy. Then there's Josh Kushner.
Speaker 1:Everyone knows Josh Kushner. Then there's Bob Iger. Who is Bob Iger? Who is Bob Iger? Okay.
Speaker 1:Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney. What is Disney? What is Disney? Disney is a global American mass media and entertainment conglomerate known for its family friendly content and and and content and services, including theme parks. What what is a theme park?
Speaker 1:A theme park a theme park is an amusement park. Oh, oh, it's an amusement park, but it has a unifying setting or idea.
Speaker 2:It's like theme has somewhat of a theme to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. The theme park.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:So anyway, I think we cracked it. So obviously, everyone knows Josh Kushner, Thrive Capital. But Adam Silver
Speaker 2:It's good to know
Speaker 1:about he you made his money in like, with some game where you throw basketball through the hoop. Then Made his Bob money goals. Bob Iger does he's a media guy, I guess. Yep. Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm I'm glad that they put their names there because otherwise, it would be lost. I'd be lost. Anyway, Robin Hood, former guest on the show Vlad Tenev, said investing for a living could replace labor in a post AI world. Will Brown, quote, post it, gets 1.3 k likes. Says Roblox CEO David Bazooki has said that gaming for a living could replace labor in a post AI world.
Speaker 2:Podcast hosts John Kugen and Jordi and Jordi Hayes say that podcasting for a living could replace labor in a post AI world.
Speaker 1:I I you know what I would hope replaces labor in a post AI world? Pull ups and pushing. Wandering. Just going from wander to wandering.
Speaker 2:Finding your happy place.
Speaker 1:Finding your happy place. Booking wanders with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home,
Speaker 2:but better. Better.
Speaker 1:And in just six thousand days, you'll be able to just spend all of your time wandering around, hopefully. Hopefully. Last post before we go into our next guest. They are in the restream waiting room. They're about to come into the TV Pan Ultradome.
Speaker 2:Get that gong ready, Joe.
Speaker 1:Would you buy Ilya Zutzkever merch? Alps has printed Ilya's head on a hat and also on a mouse. Went mega viral at two point six k likes. People are excited.
Speaker 2:I mean, the mouse looks clean. The mouse
Speaker 1:Oh, looks Ilya, you Tyler, you've said that Ilya is like the best aura farmer of all time, something like that?
Speaker 5:He's a goated aura farmer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, he but I feel like in terms of his aura farmer
Speaker 2:Explain that like like I'm a 100 years old.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I would argue that his aura farming strategy is do nothing, win.
Speaker 5:I think that is an example of war farming. It's like it's kind of like a like a nonchalance, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He has a certain je ne sais quoi. We He has a Yeah.
Speaker 2:Don't nonchalant for nonchalant with Elliot. That's my
Speaker 1:You don't nonchalant Don't do it, dude.
Speaker 2:Don't do it. Will not post up like this.
Speaker 1:He will out nonchalant you for sure. For sure. You'll get roasted. Don't even try it. Also, don't go fundraise Ilya.
Speaker 1:Fundraise with our next guest Ilya Orafarm Richard from u.com. Oh, you did? No. Oh, I thought it was news. Anyway, we got our next guest in the Restream waiting room coming into the TVP and UltraDome.
Speaker 2:Welcome.
Speaker 1:We got Richard from u.com. How are you doing?
Speaker 8:Very well. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Doing fantastic. It's a wonderful day. We're having a great time. What's new in your world? Give us the news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Any big numbers? It's yeah.
Speaker 8:We just raised a $100,000,000 at 1,500,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:Boom. When did you start the company again?
Speaker 8:In 2020. Overnight success.
Speaker 1:Nothing like
Speaker 2:a five year overnight success. Love it. Give us give us an update. You were on the show was it I'm forgetting. Was it maybe three months ago at this point?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Main main thing since then is we kept growing more and more aggressively. Like, we have over a billion API calls a month now. There are not many other startups.
Speaker 8:In fact, I can't think of any other startup at that scale now. And these API calls give search results for both people directly, but also for LMs. Like, the way we search is gonna change. Right? So you have this whole Google thing that's unfolding now, but that's kind of the the last, you know, sort of past of of searching.
Speaker 8:Now people are going to search more and more through the LMs, and LMs can search hundreds of times and then summarize all of that content for you. Right? So it's a whole new world, and we're building composable infrastructure layers for companies and startups, massive consumer companies like DoctorGo and also enterprise companies like Harvey and Windsurf. The NIH is a customer, view.com, Telegraph, like, lots of different organizations both for the APIs, but then also we build end to end solutions. Because not every company is ready to just, like, take in an API and may have an epic AI transformation.
Speaker 8:So we're doing both of those together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When when did you realize that that it made sense to combine those efforts? I'm I'm sure early on companies, like, may maybe the maybe the, you know, actually building out these that this infrastructure for companies was not something that you were selling, and then you realized, like, hey. We in in order to actually unlock the value of our product, we need it. We need to kinda, like, hand deliver some of these features.
Speaker 8:That's right. Yeah. For the last couple of years, we were the most accurate answer engine in the world. But normal consumers, they care more about marketing and and fun ads and stuff like that and designs. But companies kept coming to us and be like, we did a benchmark.
Speaker 8:You are the most accurate. We need that. You know, there are hedge funds, the NIH, like, journalists, like, that really care about accuracy. And so they were like, we want the technology, but we don't necessarily want it on you.com. We want it inside our own products, in our own websites, in our own apps, and so on.
Speaker 8:And so at some point, there's so much market pull there for the technology that we said, let's build out a proper sales team that's really go to market with those APIs and an enterprise context.
Speaker 1:Give us your reaction to the Google News today. They beat the charges almost. I mean, they were found guilty, but then the remediation Awesome battles they won
Speaker 2:the war.
Speaker 1:You're obviously an expert in this category. Walk us through how you process the news.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I think overall, it goes in the right direction in terms of giving some more access to certain companies for the index and some of their data. At the same time, you know, we're a start up still. And by the time this gets really implemented, you know, they're probably gonna try to appeal it, and so on. It's got take another We were really
Speaker 1:struggling to understand what giving the search index one time and then on ongoing basis means.
Speaker 2:And it's only, like, some percentage of the data based Yeah. They're giving you data based on some percentage of your queries?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you explain, like, what exactly is available? Can I just go get this data? Canyou.com go get this data? Can anyone get this data?
Speaker 1:Like, what does it actually take? Or is this just, like, Microsoft Bing and the other, like, DuckDuckGo, like, the big competitors? Are they named? Like, how does this actually work?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So no one fully knows yet. Right? There's, like, recommendations from judge and then, like, so there's, like, a ton of meta within e h, not, you know,
Speaker 2:not meta. But
Speaker 1:With inside we're dealing. It was an ETM.
Speaker 8:But, like, my hunch is the one the most extreme scenario here would be, like, they have a full on API the way u.com right now sells it, right, which could be good for some people. My hunch is they're gonna try to drag your feet as much as possible on that for as long as possible because that is very much core IP for them. Mhmm. And then they're also going to realize that the index, the way it used to be built, was for people to decide which of Template links to click on. Our index now is looking very different.
Speaker 8:Sure. It can go deeper. It can crawl more. It has these decomposable components, and it actually gives you much more content per link back rather than just a short snippet the way, like, the Google search results would. And so by the time this all comes out and this might become available maybe as an API, it'll probably be somewhat outdated for the use cases LMs need.
Speaker 1:Do we need an API here? I feel like if I have an AI agent that has a browser, the browser can go to Google and search for me and then scrape the results. Like, is not the the front end the API? Like, does Google have a, like, a blocker on this? Like, can OpenAI not just Google things?
Speaker 1:Like, cert their employees can Google things, I imagine. But can they not, like, resell that to me in their chat app? Like, what's the dynamic there?
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's in a really interesting world, actually. You know, there are not many real web indices out there, and you have a lot of startups, including some of our competitors, who essentially just do what you described
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Through so called SERP APIs and proxy networks, where you have your phone, you have your smart TV
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And you install some app, and that app then has some SDK installed somewhere where if you're not using your phone or your TV, it becomes an IP ad. Interesting. And then pretends to be a user Yeah. Goes scrapes the content from a search query Exactly. Then it back to centralized IP Wow.
Speaker 8:And then folks sell search results
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:But they're really Google results.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Literally biggest competitors in the consumer space are just really fast at scraping Google results and then connecting it to an LM and doing all of that. It's it's hilarious. Yeah. Now the problem with that is that, a, if you're a bigger company, like OpenAI or or Facebook Meta, like, they wouldn't wanna send all of their data and all their queries to Google.
Speaker 8:Right? They're literally trying to compete with them. So that's not an ideal setting. Two, it doesn't really scale, like because Google can and does shut down these proxy networks all the time, and they try to block it and have captchas and all of that. And then three, as it you know, as you go through someone's random phone and maybe they did click on something, now it's really slow, and there's slow response times.
Speaker 8:And so where we actually have benchmarks that we can, you know, back up, we can go on u.com and find them. Like, we are super fast, and we're more accurate than Google serve APIs, and that is very unique in the market.
Speaker 1:What about this news? It just broke that Apple will be potentially partnering with Google to have Siri powered by some sort of version of Gemini. Was that on your bingo card? Was that expected? Does that seem like a reasonable kind of end state of the market dynamic.
Speaker 1:I was I was talking about this earlier.
Speaker 2:Feels very Yeah. Something that feels like it'd be on your on like Yeah. Your forecast given that you guys are helping a lot of companies build these sort of like knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, if you're if you're in, like, business one zero one going to Silicon Valley, you would say that, like, the ability to search and get great results is valuable. Therefore, Apple would be paying Google for search results. But in fact, the money flows the other direction because the search because Google's making $60,000,000,000 a year or whatever off of Safari search results. And so how do you see the relationship and the economic flow changing there?
Speaker 1:I think the news report was that Anthropic wanted $1,500,000,000 and Apple said that's too much. We're going with Google, and Google will be getting less than $1,500,000,000 maybe from Apple for the rights to use the LLMs. What yeah. What's your take on all that?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So a couple different angles here. So one, it's surprising that Apple cannot do it themselves still. Like, it's kinda crazy and surprising. They're, like, you know, trillions of dollars worth and and somehow are not able to execute on this themselves.
Speaker 8:The second thing and, you know, they have great privacy at Apple, but then, you know, they partner with companies that have a different stance on privacy. So there's, like, interesting complexities there. The second thing is that, indeed, you know, one of the biggest changes also of the of the ruling today was that Apple is will continue to be allowed to take the 20,000,000,000 to not build their own search index. Right? So that's that's a really interesting part of the ruling too.
Speaker 8:Google is allowed to still pay Apple $20,000,000,000 a year to stay the default. So that is is a really important piece of this whole situation because defaults are very strong. I I don't know where I read this, but, like, 80% of all iPhone users never change a single setting. Maybe not your viewers, but many normal iPhone users, they don't change any setting ever. So if you're default, you'll be on there forever.
Speaker 1:I wonder how I I I mean, I imagine
Speaker 2:No settings. For me.
Speaker 1:Don't don't need I don't need to adjust the volume. I'll never adjust the brightness of my screen. Not a single setting. No. I imagine that it's like deeper
Speaker 4:in the settings,
Speaker 2:of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is hilarious. Anyway, do you have anything else? We're No. It's
Speaker 2:couple just other people in the for happy to to hear about your your progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Congratulations. This is awesome.
Speaker 5:Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 8:I I Yeah. Is my favorite new pun, unicorn.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:Unicorn. Unicorn. Fantastic. Well, yeah. Tremendous.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest
Speaker 1:of your day.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Our
Speaker 1:next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. We got Pablo from Happy Robot, and I think we got some more news. Let me put my pack in here so I can get ready. Let's bring in
Speaker 5:Pablo. Pablo,
Speaker 1:how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are things?
Speaker 2:Can you hear us? Are the robots happy? Are they sad? Are they gonna turn into Terminators? What's the plan?
Speaker 2:Can you hear us? Can you hear us?
Speaker 6:Sorry, guys. I was No worries. We're good. Probably what you can, be live. We're we're
Speaker 1:we're gonna work on this.
Speaker 2:You're like, oh, that's back me. To you.
Speaker 1:But thanks so much for hopping on. Give us the update. Give us the news. What's latest?
Speaker 6:We just raised our Sears v 44 mil. Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 2:44. Great number. Great number.
Speaker 1:Take us through the story of the company. What unlocked this fundraising round? What are the biggest drivers of growth for the business?
Speaker 6:Yeah. To set the scene a little bit for the for the audience, we're building the AI workforce for an entire industry for supply chain.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:There's a lot of work that is very repetitive and manual in that industry. Kudos, and and take my my hat off to all of those folks who are running those operations every day so that you guys can have, like, very cool ramp, TPPN pad on your Yeah. Doorstep every time you order on Amazon or any other platform. Right? So we are powering those operations so that we take away the work out of work.
Speaker 6:We're trying to Mhmm. Lift off the the the mundane and repetitive tasks from those folks running operations in supply chain and logistics so that they can focus on the more strategic and higher value tasks. We started over a year and a half ago, raised our series a last summer on announced December, raised a 15 mil from from Andreessen Horowitz. Now we announced our our b with based in and follow on from other folks like y c and s s and z. Very excited to,
Speaker 1:to be
Speaker 2:here. Yes.
Speaker 1:Is it fair
Speaker 2:to characterize
Speaker 1:this as, like, AI ERP? Like, like, how much of this is, like, like, you know, some sort of, like, point solution within the supply chain and operations stack versus, like, system of record?
Speaker 6:We're really building that system of record, that layer of interaction, we call it. So we define it as a layer of interaction, layer of, of connectivity, if you will, that sits on top of the actual data that already exists today. You can have a a transportation management system, a a warehouse management system, an ERP. If you're talking about the shippers and distributors, today we serve multiple verticals within supply chain. Shippers is one.
Speaker 6:Freight brokers is another one. Ocean carriers is another one. Right? But but right on. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, this is exactly what we're doing. We're building that layer of interaction so that users don't have to go and look for that little detail on the TMS. Where the shit where the hell is my load? Right? Where is my truck today?
Speaker 6:Oh, let me just look it up on this messy UI from the '90 from the eighties. You know
Speaker 1:what mean?
Speaker 6:Instead, they just go and chat with their data. And not only that, an AI also is exposed to the customers, to the vendors that are calling in every day. We're automating over a million phone calls every week with our customers. We serve eight of the top 10,000,000
Speaker 2:phone calls.
Speaker 6:It's a Lot of lot of a lot of emails as well. Ultimately, our customers come to us. Customers like DHL Mhmm. Or Uber Freight come to us to automate what their team doesn't wanna do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the split going Sorry. How yeah. Have you have you guys had a had a more enter you know, working with Uber Freight, DHLs? Are you taking more enterprise focus?
Speaker 2:Because I know there's a long tail of players in in logistics and and and supply chain broadly. But but are are you focusing there or going upmarket?
Speaker 6:Fully focused on on
Speaker 8:enterprise. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We're very lucky to have been able to to cater to these enterprises from very early on. ThingAI has unlocked that capability in startups. Maybe ten years ago, it was harder to tap into the enterprises. Today, they just understand that they don't have the AI capabilities themselves, so they're just looking at it at whoever is tempted or or willing to go into that space. We were early on in in the space of supply chain and logistics, and we've kind of defined that category for AI agents in this space.
Speaker 6:So they they really don't have anyone else to go to. They just come to to us as a trusted partner, and that's really what our customers are looking for. They're looking for a for a for an AI partner, really.
Speaker 1:You're based in San Francisco? Yeah. Fantastic. Because there's this big German company that's been in this space forever, and I can't wait to just like fully put them out of business and just make America dominant in enterprise resource planning. Let's make it happen.
Speaker 1:Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This what were you doing before this, out of curiosity?
Speaker 6:I was doing my PhD in, actually, Germany.
Speaker 1:I was in No way. For a while.
Speaker 6:I'm Spanish, though. All three founders are one of my cofounders is my brother who wants they've known for a while, and the other one is my best buddy from college from from Spain. We studied in Madrid. Yeah, But, no. The the company is is based out of SF.
Speaker 6:We have offices in Madrid as well. Oh, yeah. Opening up in in Chicago and office now because of all the freight and logistics that happens.
Speaker 1:Maybe you gotta take the fight to Germany. You gotta you gotta invade Germany.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 6:go to
Speaker 1:big boys. The big boys.
Speaker 2:I love it. Couple couple brothers armed with with $44,000,000 ready to do some international business.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 6:I'm already there.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining. Congrats Appreciate on on all the progress.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you'll be back on soon given the the past couple raises. I'm I'm sure you'll you'll you'll be
Speaker 6:I'm excited. Let's do it. Let's pound for that. Appreciate
Speaker 1:it. Awesome. We will talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Great chatting, Pablo.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room already. We'll bring in Will from Exa with another massive fundraising rally. We can do the honors on this one, Jordy. Let's bring Will in from the restream waiting room into the TVP at Ultradome. Welcome to the stream, Will.
Speaker 1:How you doing? How's your day?
Speaker 4:Hello. How you doing?
Speaker 1:What you got?
Speaker 2:What are where where are you sitting right now? Looks like you're on a train.
Speaker 4:I'm in a phone booth within our office.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool. We need some of these. Looked like it was like some type of like tractor or something.
Speaker 1:This is the this is the the physical instantiation of the lock the great lock in of Yes. Of September to December. Yes. Locked in booth. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:You've clearly been locked in. What's the news?
Speaker 4:Yeah. The big big day today. We just raised a series we just announced our series b. 85.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Couldn't hear you. Just couldn't hear you.
Speaker 1:Couldn't hear you. Oh, yeah. Peter Fenton. That's exciting. What's it like working with him?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, he's a legend. He, he's super experienced. He's taken seven companies to IPO. He really he just honestly, his vision for Ekso was just like match or exceeded ours.
Speaker 4:And so that was really exciting to work with a VC who just like saw what we saw and saw how big this company can get. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, so he's joined the board. Had you worked with him before or is this new?
Speaker 2:No. No. I just met
Speaker 4:him like a month ago, a month and a ago.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fast friends
Speaker 1:and partners. So, yeah. Take us through the the story of the business. I mean, only a couple years old, well on your way to an overnight success. I think if we check-in with you any decade, it would be pretty clear that you're an overnight success.
Speaker 1:But, take us through the history of the company, where you are now, kind of what what what's what's been the key growth driver?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we actually started 2021, so summer twenty twenty one. This is way before Chash B. T.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And the idea was, you know, at the time, g b three had recently come out. Mhmm. And it was, like, this magical thing that could understand, like, a whole paragraph of text. Mhmm. And then at the same time, there was Google, which felt like it hadn't changed in a decade.
Speaker 2:So the idea was what if we could build
Speaker 4:a search engine that was as smart as g b three? Something like fully understand the understood the web and fully understand your query and get you, like, way better results than Google. And that's how we started. Mhmm. So not necessarily a search engine for AI.
Speaker 4:It was more like a search engine for nerds because we were building it for ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then when Chat with Tea came out a couple years later, it turned out that, like, the search engine we're building for ourselves for nerds is actually perfect for AIs because AIs and nerds are very similar. Mhmm. But, yeah, I mean, it basically, we had to go build a search engine from scratch for years. It was really hard. So we did you know, we bought a GPU a million dollar GPU cluster after YC.
Speaker 4:We trained, you know, a ton of different models, tried to dump ton of different transform architectures until we had, a new type of search engine.
Speaker 1:So so the so the GPUs are trained to actually so you're not doing you're not doing crawling on GPUs. Right? That's like traditional CPU workloads. Right?
Speaker 4:That's right. Probably our CPU Clouds. Batch processing, and then we train models on our GPUs.
Speaker 1:Okay. And and what yeah. What there's been a ton of news today in the search engine world with the Google News. Like, what what what's been your interpretation of it?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much like, what's crazy about AI is very exciting, but then search for AI is, like, now the most exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 4:I think everyone's realizing that, like, sure, like, we want smarter and smarter LLMs, but, we want more knowledgeable LMs. Like, we wanna connect our LMs to, like, the best data in the And search is, like, basically, the most important tool to connect your LM to. And so yeah. I mean, that's pretty exciting. The does Google News, like, for example, like, yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, they're sharing their data has one thing about the search space is everything is very counterintuitive. So for example, like, if everyone now has access to Google's data, people are less incentivized to build new search engines, which is interesting. So there's all there's all sorts of counterintuitive, like, things in the search space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what so yeah. What what how how does that shape, like, your strategy? Because it feels like right now Google is not only, the the they they have the search monopoly. They were kind of, like, you know, found guilty of that.
Speaker 1:The remedies are not, exactly putting them on the back foot. The stock's up 8% today, and it feels like they're partnering even they're going even deeper with Apple, potentially. The Bloomberg reporting that just came out is that there are rumors that Apple will be partnering with Gemini to test out if Siri can be powered by Gemini, which is obviously built on top of the Google crawler and Google search index. And so is the future for you look like a really long tail of, you know, tons of businesses that need to use some sort some form of, like, best in class search, and they can't go to Google for, for a particular reason, like, an API level because Google doesn't wanna sell that as a product, and you're there to sell that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's exactly right. Like, a big difference between us and Google is that Google is not trying to be search infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:They're trying to be a platform. Like, they want people to go to Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, but we are uniquely trying to be search infrastructure.
Speaker 2:So we
Speaker 4:want a long tail of companies, like every company to be able to have the highest quality search inside their applications. Yeah. And so that makes us very unique. Like, when we said we were a search engine for AIs, like, a couple years ago
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In no one really got what that means, but I think that world has really played out where now we have, you know, thousands of companies using Exa, powering all sorts of applications, whether internal or external Yeah. With high quality search. And and like you said, like, Google doesn't, like, is not doing that. Like, they're not gonna have an API because
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of searches that are valuable in the context of specific applications that are actually not even that valuable to Google. Right? Like
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:In like, when you're trying to retrieve information that you can then take action on, that's not necessarily something that Google is, like, act you know, able to run a bunch of great ads against. Yeah. Is right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's right. And the the business model determines based what you're saying is business model determines, like, how the search feels or how the algorithm works. And so, for example, like, Google's really bad at recruiting. Like, you can't use Google to find, like, give me all the engineers in San Francisco who have, like, a PhD in machine learning and get a list of those things.
Speaker 4:Like, why isn't Google good at that? Well, it it doesn't make them more ad revenue. Whereas we're very good at that because, all sorts of customers' AI applications want that high quality knowledge. And so, like, you're the the end user you're selling to, like, really determines the search algorithm, which which also makes us very unique.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is the value of actually training a model? I feel like there's enough of a business. I don't know if now is the best time for this for that particular business. But but, like, just being the best web scraper index, you have the all the every single web page perfectly indexed in a database that people can query.
Speaker 1:That feels like a valuable product in and
Speaker 2:of itself.
Speaker 1:And then someone else brings their foundation model to bear on top of your search index, and you're a partner to the big labs that train the big models. Why are you training your own model?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, well, the easy part is actually gathering all the data. I mean, it's hard that you need, like, crazy, scale infrastructure, but
Speaker 2:it's Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's an engineering problem. Once you gather all the, you know, trillions of pages, the hard part is how do you filter those trillion pages to the right 10 or a 100 pages in real time. And that's where all the secret sauce is. And so, like, we train our own embed we we train embedding models because
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 4:We see that as the, like, the the way to get the highest quality search. Like, how do you get, like, perfect search over the world's information? You need to train all these, like, crazy neural, models, which is in contrast to the old world, which is, like, Google, for example, mostly uses, like, keyword based method. Obviously, they use
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:A mix of things, but, like, we we're very bitter lesson pilled at Exa, and so we believe if you have the right, you know, training dataset and, like, feedback signal, you can get an extremely good search engine for the thing you're training for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That means
Speaker 4:it is our approach.
Speaker 1:When you say you're bitter lesson pilled, I feel like that's rough because, like, who's more bitter lesson pilled than Google? Like, they have the most data, the most compute, deep mind, and all this other stuff. Like like, what is the can you walk me through, like, the counter positioning against against, like, Google's, like, business here? I I the the the whole, like, Google will do it is, like, a complete trite over I don't believe in it. I I'm bullish on you.
Speaker 1:You know? But, like, there is something weird about the like, what you just said in that I would expect Google to be able to move off of keyword pretty quickly, at least from a technology perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, there are two things.
Speaker 4:So one, it actually is kinda hard for, for a giant ship to switch to a different algorithm.
Speaker 2:That's Yeah. That's fair.
Speaker 5:They have
Speaker 4:that works really well.
Speaker 1:People it's
Speaker 4:it's very reliable, and there are lot of benefits to the keywords we're talking.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so it's it's it's hard. You know, you have a lot people at the organization who are, like, been there for decades who are, like, have a certain thing. You have all sorts of, like, advertisements that are connected to the keywords actually. So, like,
Speaker 1:the Sure.
Speaker 4:But and the I think the the more important thing is that it comes back to the the way the revenue model. So they are serving humans with ads. And so to like and by the way, Google is fantastic at that. Like, Google has built an amazing consumer search engine for humans to make money from ads and, and optimize for what humans click on. But that's not what AI applications want.
Speaker 4:So a critical part point of Exa is that, like, are optimizing for a different thing than Google. Google is optimizing for humans and clicks and ads. We are optimizing for AIs and AI applications and, like, all these complex searches that this new AI world makes. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So that
Speaker 4:that explains, like, e even if we both have a ton of compute, we'll build very different search algorithms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does seem like with the, what what is it, AI search overviews, like, have, at least anecdotally, been hallucinating like crazy. So they definitely have some gaps to bridge between, like, some phenomenal stuff going on in Gemini and some frontier level, like, reasoning models and then some very reliable Google search results. And then the the AI search overviews, still, they haven't fully solved the hallucination problem and some grounding in truth there. Obviously, a problem
Speaker 2:they're working on. You guys competewithwithyou.com? We just had Victor on? Richard on? Is it is that is that or is it is it it's not a lot not a lot
Speaker 1:of If people I see him, it's on-site.
Speaker 2:Well, it gets funny if you both announcing fundraisers today. May I don't know if that was Yeah. Yeah. Granted. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I I mean, they they mentioned that they do search, they also do AI agents. So, like, we are definitely, like, in a similar space. I would say, like, the the space is very hot. Yeah. Like, the market Yeah.
Speaker 4:Everyone realizing the market is massive.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so, like, you know, I welcome other players there. I think, you know, we've been doing this for many years.
Speaker 2:You welcome them, but you encourage them to take the full Memorial Day or Labor Day weekend off. You said Yeah. Yeah. You guys should Yeah. Do that.
Speaker 2:It's a hot space. It's gonna be a long road. Just take the full three day vacation Yeah. While we grind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Last question for me. You bought a GPU cluster.
Speaker 1:That can mean a million different things. What does that mean? Do you own the land? Do you own the data center? Do you own the cards?
Speaker 1:Do you own a space within Azure? Like, there's so many different are you partnered with the Neo Cloud? Like, what can you tell me about what it means to actually own or manage a GPU cluster? What are the best practices? Like, actually works.
Speaker 1:You're down dealing with depreciation. There's so much going on. Love to just learn more about, like, owning and managing a GPU cluster as a startup, not as some hyperscaler.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. So in terms of, like, getting GPUs, like, there are couple options. Like, you could spin up on demand clusters Yep. Which is more expensive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:But if if your workloads are, like, very, like, spiky, then that makes sense. But for us, we're good doing constant research. So we want something that we're, like, constantly using, gets, like, know, 80% utilization. When you start to have that kind of utilization, then you wanna get, like, either reserved or your own cluster.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And, you know, do do the math and, like, you know, it it often makes sense to buy your own cluster if you're crazy enough to, like, set it up. If you have the, you know, if you have the expertise to set it up and and, you could customize in all your all different ways. And so, yeah, we kinda went that route. Also, it's just freaking badass and, like, we know we're gonna get bigger and we wanna have experience, like, building clusters. I would say, like, we're
Speaker 1:not So you have servers, like, in your office? Like, the cluster exists physically? Okay. Because, like, George Hotts literally has, like, server racks in his Common AI spot in in San Diego, and it's, like, the craziest thing you've ever seen. Then Nat Friedman, when he was doing NFTG, they spun up the Andromeda cluster.
Speaker 1:And that was more, like, in partnership with someone else, which made a lot more sense because, like, why do you have to learn how power routes necessarily? Like, that's not necessarily the differentiator.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we don't well, we're not big enough yet. Or our previous one was big enough where we had to buy the land or buy the data center. Yeah. We have a part of the data center.
Speaker 4:But as we expand, at some point, we'll have our own
Speaker 5:dudes.
Speaker 2:I see land on your horizon, Will.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think you gotta vertically integrate. You gotta buy oil and gas tract. You gotta buy the the natural gas resources in the ground. Buy the sand that you can turn into silicon, Fab your own chips.
Speaker 1:Design your own chips. You gotta be vertically integrated. It's the only way to win.
Speaker 4:From sand to search.
Speaker 1:Exactly. From sand
Speaker 2:to That's a great that's a great line.
Speaker 1:Print it. Put an iron t shirt.
Speaker 2:Give them a I've I've seen enough. Give them 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Give them 10,000,000,000. Thank you so much for hopping on. Jordy, you got anything else?
Speaker 2:No. That's great. Awesome awesome progress.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:For breaking it down for us.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Have a great one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Bye. Cheers. Our next guest, Charlie from Orchard Robotics, is in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring in Charlie from Orchard dot a o.
Speaker 2:Charlie Charlie Charlie. Orchard Orchard dot a A teal fellow Cornell dropout.
Speaker 1:Wow. A wild flush. How are doing, Charlie?
Speaker 2:Charlie, it's great to have you in the UltraDome.
Speaker 3:Great to be on the, the temple of technology, the capital of capital of this.
Speaker 1:Welcome. There
Speaker 2:we go. There we go.
Speaker 1:What else can we do? Can we play a soundboard for you? Can we ring this gong for you? Do you have anything for
Speaker 2:be an honor to us.
Speaker 1:Give us something.
Speaker 3:So today, we announced our $22,000,000 series a led by Playa Capital and Shine.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:So excited to finally have us out there. We've been growing the team a bunch. We've been scaling up our technology into a bunch of new farms. It's really been an exciting time these last couple of months.
Speaker 2:Thank you for making cool looking robots. We gotta we gotta pull this. We gotta we'll have the team pull
Speaker 1:up the picture. Pull up the landing page. I wanna look through this. Also, thank you for making a company with a name that directly translates to what you do. Orchard dot It's a farming company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic. And I love your background, by the way. How did you get into this? Did you just, like, do a market map and figure out there's opportunity in farming, or did you have some background?
Speaker 1:How'd you like that?
Speaker 3:My my grandparents were actually apple farmers, and my parents took agriculture before they immigrated to The US. I grew up in Virginia, gone to robotics early on, built my first robot when I was, like, seven years old, trained my first ML model in middle school. Yeah. I ended up to school to study CS and mechanical engineering, and this was kinda during the COVID use. And, people love you to know this, but Cornell is actually the number one agriculture school in the nation.
Speaker 3:And we have anchors of that
Speaker 2:robot, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a beautiful robot.
Speaker 2:You made a beautiful robot.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you. It's, our our our our amazing team made that. But, it's it's been a pretty long journey the past three years to get to this point, actually. And, you know, the first iteration of this was actually this huge six foot tall autonomous rover that I built in my dorm room.
Speaker 3:And then we realized, wait a minute. You know, you don't really need a rover. You can just have a camera because you have tractors that go through the farms all day already. Mhmm. But, really, I was talking to I think, you know, when I first started the company, I talked to, like, a 100 different farmers.
Speaker 3:Just drove around Upstate New York, talked to everyone I could, and basically learned that, you know, here in The US, even on the largest commercial farms, like, these farmers are relying on very, very small amounts of data to make every decision. So, you know, say an apple farmer is gonna send their 10 best workers out to the fields for entire week to count in size fruit on trees, And maybe, know, four hundred man hours, they get to 500 trees. Seems like a lot until you realize there's 5,000,000 trees in the farm. And that sample size is what they use to make every decision across their entire company, which is kind of insane to think about. But, you know, we're helping them get the data.
Speaker 2:Started are are you starting with with counting, which sounds simple, but
Speaker 3:So we we can do a lot of things. We started with thing. Now we can count and size, measure color, measure grade, detect disease, measure growth rate, inventories of plants. Basically tell a farmer everything they wanna know that can be, you know, gleaned from visual information out in the fields, which is, you know, pretty much all of the important information that they've, you know, been lacking for these last couple of decades.
Speaker 1:Get nerd out with me for
Speaker 2:a second
Speaker 1:on the hardware. I see a bunch of different lenses and cameras on here. I imagine that that you're driving right by a tree. There's gonna be apples that are obscured by leaves. You need high definition, some four k, eight k, some zoomed in, some zoomed out?
Speaker 1:Like, what's the optic stack that gets you enough resolution or data to actually determine, you know, is this an Apple or is this Apple healthy? Like, walk me through that decision.
Speaker 3:Yeah. True. We have four lenses on each of our cameras, and they're basically two stereo pairs.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We use stereo vision. They're RGB cameras. They're pretty much off the shelf cameras. Camera technology is really good in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The real magic is in the machine learning models that we run on the edge. So we have some state of the art multi object detection tracking models that we run on a separate cameras. We have NVIDIA Jets and Orin inside every single one of them that run these models at the edge. And we can basically do things like, you know, of the 100 images we take every single second, we can tell, you know, even through occlusion through, you know, things like leaves, blocking fruit, or fruit that are, you know, as small as five millimeters, we can actually size. You actually hit the nail on the head.
Speaker 3:We have a really wide angle lens and a really narrow angle lens, and that lets, you know, do things like zoom in to see very, very small things, but also things like a, you know, 12 foot tall tree from three or four feet away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Being a farmer and just refreshing your dashboard and seeing that you have a bountiful harvest must must must hit extremely hard. How do you how do you how do you sell robots? Are are you like I imagine if this is replacing the need to send 100, you know, hundreds of people or a bunch of people into the field to, like, physically count fruit, it's it can pay itself back fairly quickly. But what what's the what's the business model?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we actually charge a per acre per year subscription fee.
Speaker 3:So it's it's similar to SaaS pricing where it scales a on the number of acres they use it on. We since the hardware is so, you know, relatively inexpensive, we actually don't even charge for the hardware. It's it's it's, you know, boxed in with the subscription fee. So it's really easy and not capital intensive for a farmer to, you know, try on a couple 100 acres and scale into thousands or tens of thousands of acres.
Speaker 1:Are those LED lights on the sides of the robot?
Speaker 3:They are. Yeah. They're LED strobe lights. So even at night, we we can offer
Speaker 1:Oh, and you and you only strobe them when you're taking a picture with the cameras to save energy? Yep. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:All of the cameras
Speaker 3:are powered. So we we actually can power them off of any 12 volt power source. So we, you know, we have farmers that actually plug them into, like, the, the 12 volt sockets, the car jacks, like, on your car. We have, you know, like, people who use external batteries. You know, you can wire it into, like, you know, the the the car battery of any tractor or ATV.
Speaker 3:It's
Speaker 1:really versatile. What's the what's the refresh rate on the flashing on the strobes? Are you doing, like, one per second or something?
Speaker 3:It's it's more it depends, but it's more than 15 times a second computers.
Speaker 1:15 times a second, you're flashing LED lights. Is this going to make squirrels go insane?
Speaker 2:Hopefully, the squirrels aren't awake at
Speaker 3:night. Problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go to sleep, squirrels. Yeah. We're doing
Speaker 1:We're farming out here. Farming. Get out of here. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's a pest control.
Speaker 1:We talked to the laser weeder guy and, maybe there's a pest control angle where maybe you can also
Speaker 2:Do you have a lot of VCs or play on you you to Oh, pick a different yeah.
Speaker 3:It actually, it's it's a it's a good point that you brought up because, you know, we started this company back in March 2022. And it was actually I think it was around the time that, like, the whole American dynamism thing Yeah.
Speaker 2:They were like, please make weapons.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 2:Make weapons. I'll give you a 100,000,000.
Speaker 1:Put a gun on it.
Speaker 3:I I I remember actually when I when I met my first, like, VC ever, they were like, oh, you should pivot into crypto. Like, that that was the because this was March 2022. It was before everything came, you know, tumbling down. And, know, you we were like, no. I don't really want any crypto.
Speaker 3:I I think, you know, this is my life's work. I'm gonna do this for the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. And, you know, I think over the last year or so, there's been kind of this rise in, you know, robotics and American dynamism and, you know, like, manufacturing, all these, like, industry things. And, you know, suddenly, you know, agriculture and ag tech is sexy now. And, you know, it's been you know, when we went out to raise this last round, it was, I'd say, a bit I wouldn't say easy.
Speaker 3:Nothing's ever easy. But, you know, it was it was a lot better than, you know, when we were raising our first two rounds.
Speaker 1:You could've gone into beans. Do you remember beans?
Speaker 3:Beans. Hey. You know, I I've actually heard that coffee beans are are pretty big market out
Speaker 1:of Hawaii. I'm talking about the crypto project beans. I don't know if you're
Speaker 2:familiar with
Speaker 1:this, but it was popular on Twitter for, like, you know, right around that time, right about when you would have been print pivoting from agriculture themed robotics into agriculture themed crypto. It was a very popular crypto app where you would put your the whole thing was like staking coins, but the metaphor was like you stake your beans and your beans harvest and they yield and stuff. And then there were tons of people that all of a sudden, they put in like a thousand dollars. And then they like, the the harvest came and they were worth like a million dollars on paper. But then the the thing got hacked and so they lost all their money.
Speaker 1:It was a
Speaker 2:wild I'm glad I'm glad you you tripled down.
Speaker 1:Seems like you did something much more value creative.
Speaker 2:And it it feels like I have to imagine this is, like, already helping solve labor shortages with farms. And and the same thing that, you know, when people sell in AI to the enterprise, they're saying we're freeing up people's time to do higher leverage work. And like Oh, no. Counting doing doing doing this stuff, you know, you're sure just sort of like getting the state of things by by understanding like crop yields and things like that. And then I I imagine this is freeing up labor to like actually take action to increase Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yields and fight off, pests and things like that that that, actually impact the bottom line.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, the big thing is, you know, not only is it freeing up labor from, you know, having to go out and do this counting and sampling work, but perhaps the the the more important thing that's actually being, you know, done in the immediate ROI a lot of our farmers can see is actually a reduction in labor costs and profit puts. Because right now, what you know, this is a bit of a simplification, but what happens across a lot of these farms is that, you know, a farmer who's managing millions of trees and thousands of acres might go out and say, hey. You know, this is, one, you know, 50 acre plot of land. I'm going to do the exact same thing to every one of the 50,000 trees in this 50 acre plot of land.
Speaker 3:When in reality, half the trees might only need half the amount of, you know, pests they're pruning or, you know, fertilizers, you know, whatever it is they might be applying or doing to those trees. So it's very one size fits all. And, you know, we can tell these farmers things like, hey. Wait a minute. In this half of this block, it only needs, you know, half the amount of pruning.
Speaker 3:You only need to send half the amount of workers into that half, and suddenly you're saving 25% of labor cost in that block. So, you know, that's probably one of the first big things that a lot of our customers notice when they use our technology. It's just this, you know, ability to see where you need more of something and where you need less of something else. And you can see pretty immediate labor and cost savings just from that alone. But, you know, in in the long run, we have this, I guess, this conception of what we call, like, an AI farmer, which is that if we can see, you know, tens or hundreds or, you know, like, billions of of trees across their entire life cycles across multiple seasons, we can start training large embedding models in all of this data that can basically farm or know how to farm better than any human ever could because it has so much experience.
Speaker 3:And, you know, from there, it's like, what can we do with that? Right? We get down to the tree level and, like, prescribe, you know, individual recommendations to what every single plant in a farm needs. And that's super exciting to me. I think that's ultimately where, you know, a lot of this technology is gonna go over the next couple of
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:I'm incredibly bullish on you and Orchard.
Speaker 1:Extremely bullish for Eirwan too. Yeah. Very exciting. Thanks so much for hopping.
Speaker 2:Congrats, Charlie. It's, it's great to to get the story, and, I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We're excited for Amazing.
Speaker 3:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 2:Send me send your address too.
Speaker 3:I'll DM. Yeah. Alright. I'll send you an orchard hat, yeah, in exchange for
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Disney We're gonna need a robot to count and make sure nobody's overdosing on caffeine in the studio. That's that's the problem we have. We'll talk
Speaker 1:to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great talking.
Speaker 1:Happy to see you guys. Yesterday. What a legend. His product's called Fruit Scope. And we gotta
Speaker 2:talk Three about 60.
Speaker 1:Scopes. Three sixty no scopes. A Call of Duty movie is officially in the works. This could be the second movie that Jordy sees in his entire life after Borat. Borat will be the first
Speaker 3:Thank you. Is that
Speaker 1:Would you see the Call of Duty movie? So Paramount also has the rights to expand Call of Duty into a multi into a universe of multiple films and TV shows.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't just watch it. I would study.
Speaker 1:Sit down and listen. I would
Speaker 2:sit Study it.
Speaker 1:And listen to the Call of Duty movie. The Call of Duty movie seems like a no brainer. Seems awesome. Doddford, a great YouTube creator, says, the sensible thing to do would be adapting black ops or modern warfare. Instead, I fear they'll do a Minecraft movie esque comedy with trick shots and noob tubes.
Speaker 1:What do you think? Do you think they're gonna go slapstick comedy, lighter, PG 13, jokey for kids? Or do you think they will actually try to make it like Black Hawk Down, gritty, serious? Like, you know
Speaker 2:Brain rot or
Speaker 1:I think I don't think they're gonna go comedy. Think Yeah. They're gonna go I oh, wait. Jordy saw Mountain Head. Daniel's correcting me.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:I did and I So
Speaker 1:this will be the third movie.
Speaker 2:I felt like I needed to give a review. Yeah. I'll watch. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:But we'll have to give a review of the Call of Duty movie, obviously. Everyone will demand it.
Speaker 2:And listen.
Speaker 1:Well Very exciting. Well, we gotta
Speaker 2:hop to get over onto Substack.
Speaker 1:We gotta hop on with Philadelphia.
Speaker 2:That's right. No. But we actually are gonna do a live over on Substack
Speaker 1:right now. You can go watch us on Substack. You might already be watching on Substack. We're gonna be live with Emily Sundberg, t
Speaker 2:b p x Love you. We'll t see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Have a great evening. Goodbye. Cheers.