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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, 01/14/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a smoke grenade, and it's not a sponsored smoke grenade.
Speaker 1:We should have put a brand on there. You should. Throw that smoke grenade, Jordy. Let's check out the new graphics.
Speaker 2:Oh, you wanna see it again?
Speaker 1:I wanna see going. I wanna see a smoke. Throwing smoke. Ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Save. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:That doesn't work very well.
Speaker 3:Well But
Speaker 1:you know about Ramp. You also know about Microsoft who's making some waves because they jumped they were on True Social scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on? Now, of course, they were talking to the North Trump administration.
Speaker 4:Have you
Speaker 2:ever scrolled True Social, by the way?
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:It's like five five ads for every one post.
Speaker 1:The ads are crazy. And they're crazy. They're crazy. Crazy. The ads are like are like, are you a real patriot?
Speaker 1:Yes or no? And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next, like, next phase of the funnel. And then they'll just be like, glad to hear it, Patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like, actually, 100.
Speaker 1:And they're like, 200 it is. Okay. This is clear I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons. Well, they have
Speaker 2:truth social they have a truth social ETF now.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? What what's in the truth social ETF?
Speaker 2:Invest in the Patriot economy.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the go building everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everything for Multiproduct.
Speaker 1:Build nuclear power plants too now? What?
Speaker 2:I'm sure they are.
Speaker 1:What a time to be alive. Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today. Let's
Speaker 2:Chess the
Speaker 1:linear it's the system for modern software development. Linear's building is a purpose built tool for planning and building products and we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's chess day.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:We have Adjee from Robinhood, now Aetherflux. He's the founder and CEO of that company. Spaceman. Space Data Centers. Gabriel From Noise.
Speaker 2:Alfred. Alfred from Listen Labs. And of course, capping it off with
Speaker 1:Mark Benioff. Is the lightning round somehow sound theme? We got Noise Labs and then Listen Labs. We need signal. We need the the founder of signal on the show.
Speaker 2:Moxie, Marlin Spike. Well, actually, I I Moxie is gonna come on the show.
Speaker 1:Today? He's
Speaker 2:got a note. So so
Speaker 1:We got noise on the show. We need signal.
Speaker 2:But he has a new I love the new Focus LLM Fantastic. Called Confer.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 2:We're gonna get him on the show
Speaker 1:to talk Yeah. About No. I I I I'm a huge fan of Moxie, Marlin Spike. And I'm excited to to hear that he's coming on the show. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 1:They got stocks, options, cryptos, bonds, treasuries, and more with all amazing customer service. So Microsoft about? I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers, increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He he and and the key the key line in here is really just that he says, he you know, he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly, he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first, and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't, quote, pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills.
Speaker 1:There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. You know, the the the new technology came out. Everyone was there's a lot of excitement in '23, '24. In '25, things got serious. The numbers got really big.
Speaker 1:The impacts got big, and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up.
Speaker 2:And one of the challenges is the early AI generated videos were pretty bad. Mhmm. And so people were like, these are bad. My power bill is going up. I don't like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the point?
Speaker 2:Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting
Speaker 1:They're really good.
Speaker 2:Right. So I think people might start saying, hey.
Speaker 1:It's totally worth it. It's actually It's totally worth it. It.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saw those those four cats on the boat that was
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 4:Pull it
Speaker 2:up, Tyler.
Speaker 1:We gotta see that. Find the four cats. Okay. Okay. We'll will get Continue.
Speaker 1:At some point. I did see a an AI video of people racing full full 18 wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there be real races with with
Speaker 2:Yeah. This video.
Speaker 1:Rigs.
Speaker 2:See, I think most people would see this Yeah. And say, can we get some sound? There's
Speaker 1:yeah. There's no amount of of power bills.
Speaker 2:It's pretty fun. Okay. Turn it off. Turn off the sound. But anyways, I
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's worth it.
Speaker 2:Worth it every
Speaker 1:penny. Clearly. Yeah. Yeah. You see that in your in your, yeah.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 2:I think most people would see their power bill ticking up Yeah. And realize that they're getting this content for free. Yeah. They they gotta pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the the power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in '26. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. There were a number of just it sound seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys, and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:We actually we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it. We just circle circle it around, and we'd actually don't dump it out and waste it. And so you're just like Yeah. Why would we waste over? And then we're like, but what about the power?
Speaker 1:Like, no. As soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. Like, we trans we we we use the power to generate, and then we need more power. So the power thing stuck around. There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up.
Speaker 1:The one shotting stories were very harrowing, and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails, went GPT psychosis. Like, that one felt real. But it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The whole time, it seemed like, look. These labs are as soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow.
Speaker 1:And so if you're 20 prompts deep
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It'll just run an extra query and say, does this seem crazy? Like, does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay. Let's shut it down. Like, it was pretty simple, and you could solve it just in software.
Speaker 1:And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one Claude code prompt for all I know. Yeah. You you can you can make the change to the app.
Speaker 1:And I actually noticed this. The Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like, if you're if you're chatting with Claude and having it do, I wanted it to pull the market caps for every single one of our sponsors, and I was a couple prompts deep. And it was just like, this is you maxed out the context window. You gotta start a new chat, which is sort of annoying.
Speaker 2:But What was the market cap?
Speaker 1:Over 5,000,000,000,000. Let's go. We have
Speaker 2:some breaking
Speaker 1:news today. But TVPN sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously, Gemini is a big piece of that. But but we do have some we do have some very large companies supporting the show, and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money like Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:Hey, one day, maybe it's a $10,000,000,000,000 company. Maybe it's the entire I
Speaker 2:could see it. Cap. Could see it.
Speaker 1:So the power one was tricky because with power, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers, and then you just see demand is increasing, Supply is staying flat as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When when demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices. They increase.
Speaker 1:This is basic supply and demand. Yes. We can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, hey.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be online in end of the decade.
Speaker 2:End of the decade.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernour from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are
Speaker 2:They're trying to go critical this year. Yeah. That just means think of it as testing.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's still years away. And so and then solar panels. Solar panels, we can deploy those, but that's still slow, and that doesn't solve the baseload power. What if you wanna use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2AM when the sun isn't shining?
Speaker 1:Of course, you can do it somewhere else. But but it it doesn't solve. It's not a panacea. And so you gotta build more power infrastructure. That takes time, and I don't think very many Americans care about what the the the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035 if just last month they saw their power bill go up by 20%.
Speaker 1:Yep. They're like, this is hitting my pocketbook today, and I'm upset. So Bloomberg reported that a reported a 267 wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So, basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way, although it's there's a huge
Speaker 2:amount of
Speaker 1:variation. And it's now even even if you're, you know, like like, even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center build out. So there's $64,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers, if have have very real reasons to push back. Right? It it's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, this doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's
Speaker 1:jobs that come. I'm kind of I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I I want one. There's empty buildings up
Speaker 2:the road. Joke about moving the show to Abilene. That would be good. But but, yeah, it's a very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built, and suddenly you're gonna be able to go walk.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, could be a football fan. Yeah. But even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're just like, I That's so true. Have all the product. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Big thing. It's like, power bill goes up, you know, what what do you get in return? Nothing. Aura. Aura.
Speaker 2:A nice view. A nice view. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a data center appreciator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So $64,000,000,000 in data center projects are currently held up, and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up.
Speaker 1:Now there's a couple other reasons. Some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard. I just don't want a big white square building.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should maybe it should have some
Speaker 2:Cathedral.
Speaker 1:Aesthetics, put some windows on it.
Speaker 2:Token cathedral.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know how big that that feels like a less less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the the beauty of the community, the natural the natural beauty of whatever they have and the fact that it feels like homes and it feels like it feels like, yes, there's a there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in the data center. You'll never go in. They don't do tours.
Speaker 1:There's no reason for you
Speaker 2:to go is local jobs and it's a it's a it's a product for the community.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least it has a brand and you know, okay. Well, I can get something there. It does something to me.
Speaker 1:Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else. So, interestingly, the anti AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan.
Speaker 1:Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts, the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board a bipartisan issue. And, you know, tech has obviously been worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans more in the more recent history.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But now they're facing
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just a you're these are Luddites, blah blah blah. Yeah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive?
Speaker 2:Why do I want this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially because, like, it's gonna get built somewhere.
Speaker 1:It might it might as well not be in my neighborhood.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's very it's it's the easiest NIMBY NIMBY argument to make. Yeah. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're gonna talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually.
Speaker 1:I think it's a very good move. Now to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the clean tariff, clean transition tariff, where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers. And Amazon, pays a surplus above electricity costs already, but Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement. Like, it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:And they've actually put face to the program with Brad Smith, who's the president and the vice chair of Microsoft, giving quotes, laying out a five point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water too, that they wanna be net zero on the water that they use. In fact, I think Microsoft's
Speaker 2:plan That's such a that's such a
Speaker 1:It's a lamp. It's a lamp. Yeah. It should it should be a lamp. But it's still good to just say, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, if that was the talking point that you were gonna hit me with, we're we already got it sorted. Yeah. Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think, completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050, they want to be so carbon negative that they will that as a company, since the dawn of Microsoft in the seventies, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company, which is interesting. But so Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers.
Speaker 1:Now a true free marketer is probably against this. Why is one watt of electricity more expensive for one person or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're, you know, building the next and you're curing cancer
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a a value judgment on, a particular use of a public good? Most public goods, you know, like, the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance or whether you're driving
Speaker 2:Zach Myers says it would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center. Used water?
Speaker 1:Somehow, I I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is is drinkable.
Speaker 2:Well, of course, you can just filter it. You can filter it again. And it'll be good to go.
Speaker 1:The liquid death. So the the the diehard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues, let prices rise, and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally. But there are political realities, and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things.
Speaker 1:Even if you're just going with natural gas, it takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point, you buy all of the natural gas turbines, and then you need to be build more turbine factories. That's why boom, supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point, you know, you have to build more factories to build more factories, and it does get slow.
Speaker 1:And then there's also a CapEx consideration because if you're a if you're an electric if you're a a power company and you say, oh, great. The rates are going up. There's a data center in my area. They're gonna buy a ton of electricity. I gotta bring a new power plant online.
Speaker 1:That's great. And then you go to your team, and you're like, okay. We need to put up how much money, and where is that money coming from? And we gotta pay for yeah. We're gonna finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front, and it's gonna hurt either interest payments on that.
Speaker 1:We're not gonna we're not gonna be making money from this new power plant for a while, so we have to pay the interest. So we have to raise prices. So then prices do go up even if they are responding as fast as they can. So so there's a there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech company, I think, will be saying, hey. Look.
Speaker 1:We want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up ramp up capacity, and so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully, you can pass those the those that revenue on into bringing up capacity. So I think overall, Brad Brad Smith is playing the game on the field. And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers.
Speaker 1:Electricity represents 40% of data center op OpEx. About $7.07 and a half million dollars annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so energy is an is a significant line item. I think, like, 3,000,000,000 a year in electricity, something like that.
Speaker 1:That's very rough. I probably gotta go to semi analysis for the real number, but this is back of the envelope stuff. But, again, 3,000,000,000 in energy costs for 245,000,000,000 in revenue. Microsoft's gonna be okay. Yep.
Speaker 1:If they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio, they were talking about a billion dollars of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a, you know, a major rethink on the company. It's but it is a big step towards towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of of higher energy prices.
Speaker 2:Satya is simply the GOAT. He's my GOAT.
Speaker 1:He does he does appear to be the GOAT. Play that GOAT noise while I tell everyone about AppLovehittin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 2:No. I think it's I think it's super smart. Yeah. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. He's putting pressure on everyone. Right? Credit card stuff, data center stuff, we'll see more of this and, yeah, being the first mover ultimately. Only the first mover, the one that sort of like says like, hey, yeah, we're excited about this Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is the one that gets any credit, right? Yeah. Amazon doing this, it's it they don't they're not gonna get credit for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where it it this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on the entire on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a as a as a broad, like, unenforced. It won't be a a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political realities necessitate it. But the but the first mover gets the compressed cycle, which is It is it is from truth social to corporate concession. Like that is the era we are.
Speaker 2:The pipeline.
Speaker 1:Tyler, what what was your reaction to this news? You you you're in favor of of data center subsidies. Right? Like you want data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to have
Speaker 2:Government backed data centers Yes. Electrical subsidies.
Speaker 1:You gotta feed Claude.
Speaker 6:Mean, I I just think, like, is kind of disappointing because it it just it it's telling me that, like, if you imagine we have, like, a real free market
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:There should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. Yep. And that's obviously not happening because energy price would be going down. Yep. They're going up.
Speaker 6:Yep. So it's like, this is just like this is telling me that in the future, we're not gonna build nearly as much energy power as we want Yes. Or at least on any kind of like short term scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does feel I I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is is at least in the short term much more zero sum than people thought. It's there's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity, and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But it's in the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want, which is why I was I was a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not and not be unaffordable because people do want to to to scroll Instagram reels, they wanna watch AI slop, and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of Instagram reels.
Speaker 2:Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200,000,000 at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. It seems like as part of that, TSMC will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting.
Speaker 1:And and they are basing their design for this off of a Costco warehouses, Nick, here. The render here is is very sci fi. I I've seen I've seen renders of their facility in Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that some of that aesthetic to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Arizona. Seems seems pretty cool.
Speaker 2:This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard Mhmm. Candidate for governor in Michigan. He says, this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a data center company, 11,200,000.0 total.
Speaker 2:This is what big tech is doing in Michigan. So anyways, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like, stop the AI data center or it was stop the data center build out.
Speaker 2:And that's when you knew you had to drop out. I was like, right,
Speaker 1:this place is not fit. Yeah. Oregon rejection. You gotta go back, take the take the fight to them, put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center in
Speaker 6:Sub to those data centers.
Speaker 1:Tear down the stadium.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So just just some context on that last exchange, Matthew Zaitlin at Heatmap says Mhmm. I think this is shared as an example of big tech doing a bad thing, but I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre.
Speaker 1:So paying over 10 x the price.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, who who knows? I mean, they could easily be paying a premium because of this land specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some some land maxers are going out and just buying up why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes
Speaker 1:to I wonder and they'll how real this text message is. Because I get a lot of spam Text messages for business financing. Oh, we'll invest in your company. You just you just get, like, random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out, like, random numbers just for price discovery, to sort of, like, aggregate some sort of, you know, metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out.
Speaker 1:Like, if this person had said yes, what's the problem
Speaker 2:with you? Spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke. She immediately texted me and said Yeah. This isn't you. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh interesting kind
Speaker 2:of like loop to get somebody and and to I I imagine send send me a thousand dollars so I can get a new phone.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:Do you remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you wanna get steaks?
Speaker 2:What? That's the spam.
Speaker 1:Was the best spam ever.
Speaker 2:It said let's get steak tonight.
Speaker 1:Let's get steak tonight? I mean Sure. Just a yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Did you respond and just say I'm in? No. I just posted it. I I should've responded. Missed missed opportunity to to make a new friend.
Speaker 1:Well, now is a great time to tell you about our newest sponsor, Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. They're building the foundation for AI Let's go. Guys, we are very excited to be partnered with Cisco.
Speaker 2:It's truly an honor.
Speaker 1:It is. It is.
Speaker 2:Truly an honor.
Speaker 1:In other news, the stock market is down. The Dow falls weighed down by JPMorgan. Not good not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JPMorgan, and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Headline prices rose 2.7 from a year earlier, 2.7% according to the CPI.
Speaker 1:This was in line with expectations in November's rate core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate. Now, overall, what things doing wait. Wait. Wait. What did they say here?
Speaker 1:I don't have this. JPMorgan earnings investment fees both fall off. JPMorgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal to take over the Apple card credit card program Yep. And surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money.
Speaker 1:Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of The US economy and consumer. From Jamie Dimon, he said consumers have money. There are still jobs even though it's weakened a little bit, he said on a call with analysts. Saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram reels the other day. Was fantastic.
Speaker 1:In other news, the there's more details about that Apple Card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up. Behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs, after two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time will see Goldman replaced by JPMorgan on Apple's credit card. Before we read through this, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:So in early December, a long delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Executives If
Speaker 2:you don't know David Solomon
Speaker 1:You probably know him because
Speaker 2:he's DJ. D Soul.
Speaker 1:DJ D Soul. But he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program, and it's roughly $20,000,000,000 in balances. But the talks had stalled Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. You're moving too slow. JPMorgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they'd secured a discount on the balances, we talked about this, where normally, these balances, they trade at a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case, they were JPMorgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case there were higher than expected defaults.
Speaker 1:Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable. Some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Diamond and Solomon got on a call on December 8, according to people familiar with the matter. They discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon, people said. Just before the New Year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week confirming The Wall Street Journal's earlier report.
Speaker 1:A little patting on the back for The Wall Street Journal. I'm getting the scoop. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JPMorgan is adding the flashy program to its credit card lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card.
Speaker 1:Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses, a chapter it is hoping to forget. Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often, and few buyers few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control, including with its credit card. Before launching the program in 02/2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over.
Speaker 1:Interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal. Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal. To begin with, Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers, American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays, and Santander, as well as tiny fintechs. Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over.
Speaker 1:But it didn't go that way, and they landed with JPMorgan. So very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about Labelbox delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. A box. Get a label box.
Speaker 1:A label box. Moving on. OpenAI is going to be running another Super Bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:Why don't we We need to watch
Speaker 1:last year's ad, react to that, and see what we think will change, what will stay the same, what will they do. The artificial intelligence company behind the popular ChatGPT tool is set to broadcast a sixty second commercial during NBC's broadcast.
Speaker 2:Alright. With sound. With sound.
Speaker 1:Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing expensive marketing offensive, which began last year with its first Super Bowl commercial. Sound. Into. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. We the production team is telling us, unfortunately, we do not have the technology to play sound on a video.
Speaker 1:Let's work on that.
Speaker 2:But it's if I remember the song correctly, it's like like something like that.
Speaker 1:Is it is it a is it a licensed song? Because you were thinking that they should they should license Creed's Can You Take Me Higher for this next one. Right? Yes. That was what you thought?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Can you take me higher? And it's like, to a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan. Oh, we got it?
Speaker 1:These guys. Look at these guys. Technology. AGI is here. Okay.
Speaker 1:So there's this someone throwing a spear. We create fire, then the wheel, then the wheel with spokes, then the horse.
Speaker 2:The horse Created the horse.
Speaker 1:Wheel. Man created We created horse and corn. We created corn. Maybe they should use a corn song. Freak on a leash.
Speaker 1:That's the song they should license. And a and and a nod to corn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like, it is it is a very well done piece. So you go inside the skeleton, build the seven forty seven, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news, that's us.
Speaker 1:They go to the moon, somewhat equally important, create the Internet, and then you start talking to the computer.
Speaker 7:What bird
Speaker 5:is this?
Speaker 1:And now, the bird. Got
Speaker 7:AI. What do you wanna create next?
Speaker 1:And then you get the blue chat gpt dot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so I I love I love this. Yeah. It was just not necessarily I
Speaker 1:didn't need a Super Bowl ad for me. Yeah. I need a Super Bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd. Right? The people who are are are maybe on the fence about AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of, like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever. And this is like this this has the vibe of Apple. This has Yeah. It it has a lot of throwback stuff.
Speaker 1:It it feels like high technology. It feels techie, elite. Yeah. It's very, very cool. It's It feels refined.
Speaker 2:It's possible at the time they were like, look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super Bowl ad. Yeah. Let's just let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a certain
Speaker 2:But this year, I expect it to be much more pragmatic.
Speaker 1:About what you can use to to do something.
Speaker 2:Exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Where it integrates into their life. Right.
Speaker 1:And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like, there's been OpenAI videos about ChatuchipiT helping you cook dinner. And I actually got an odd email from a friend all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing. And then he was calling out the Chattypi T video on food being like, I don't like this because it's it's taking away the one thing I like as a human. And
Speaker 2:actually had a funny thing using an LLM to to for for a pancake recipe week. And it completely the pancakes really did not work. Because it's it's it's basically taking the average of all pancakes.
Speaker 1:You mean a mid pancake.
Speaker 2:It's just made the most like runny mid pancakes really bad. Interesting. I I I I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the like anything on the it's probably too early for commerce side.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. You could see some of that. Mhmm. Maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow.
Speaker 2:You could imagine like when Yeah. You know, maybe this
Speaker 1:When? Is he gonna be like, gamble?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. But I was gonna be like ask like talk like like chat with chat chat like, tell ChatGPT you wanna I I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, will it it could they're like, they could sort of launch like ChatGPT sports or something where, you know, you're like, the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the Super Bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players. You're going to pull up statistics. You're gonna be able to understand the the the add more context to your experience of Super Bowl watching. Even, like, oftentimes, if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad, and I'll, you know, go and go to Google and say, well, what are the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time? And I'll wind up on some listicle.
Speaker 1:And Chattypedia, of course, can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, show me the best show me the best Super Bowl ads from tech companies back in the .com boom. I wanna know about those. Yeah. And you can go anywhere.
Speaker 1:And that is the magic of Chattypie T. There's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with Chattypie T Health.
Speaker 2:I wonder if they'll do anything on the with the new Disney integration. Like, they wanted to spark, like, another Studio Ghibli moment That would be really IP is coming online. Yeah. Originally, they said something in January, so maybe the timing lines up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That would be really wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You get Darth Vader in there or something or mean,
Speaker 2:there's lot of characters to choose. Lot of characters. Yeah. Was saying like, try to try to use the Super Bowl ad to prompt people to make
Speaker 1:Go to go to ChatGPT and Turn turn yourself Turn your Super Bowl party into That Disney theme would be very good. Yeah. Surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be would be good. They've sort of shied away for a
Speaker 2:Scarlett Johansson. Maybe they can bring her back in the bowl.
Speaker 1:Reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic.
Speaker 2:But I expect that this will be the AI Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:You think there'll be even more ads?
Speaker 2:I'm sure there will.
Speaker 1:So for context, tech companies across Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity collectively spent 333,000,000 on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in The United States just last year, and that was up 43% from the prior year according to estimates from an ad tracker, iSpot. They also shelled out 426,000,000 on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear? That's I would not expect that.
Speaker 1:I would expect the the digital to have been really, really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear. But I guess they've
Speaker 2:been Wait. Are they talking about, like, streaming ads?
Speaker 1:Maybe. It's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume is Facebook. Google Ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA, and college sports games with ads for its clawed chatbot.
Speaker 1:It shelled out an estimated 16 and a half million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025. Despite boasting a base of over 800,000,000 weekly users, OpenAI is and that is such a Dude, scale
Speaker 2:they can not where they've got it. To download this app.
Speaker 1:What do you mean?
Speaker 2:Like, they they really can't. I mean, they're not in the top 25 apps.
Speaker 1:Wait. Which one?
Speaker 2:Claude.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, you're talking Claude. I I so sorry. Sorry. That 800,000,000 weekly active users is for OpenAI for chat.
Speaker 2:No. Know. But I know. Yes. I know.
Speaker 2:So they spent they've been spending money all over
Speaker 1:NFPA. The know Claude is not at the top of the app store charts? It's because if you generate a deep research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes.
Speaker 1:And as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it, and they don't recommend it to their friends. So if you're listening, Anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to deep research reports.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just think how do they figure out how to get it? How do they figure out how to become a real player in consumer? Because clearly, they want to. Otherwise, they wouldn't be spending that money.
Speaker 1:I mean, they need hooks. They they they you you need you need some viral flywheel. Like so the the the ChatGPT number, 800,000,000 weekly active users, that feels woefully out of date. It feels like they were well over a billion, and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a in a key moment. And now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers.
Speaker 1:But I I definitely think that they're beyond that. This this number is very stale. Like, we got this 800,000,000 weekly number months and months ago, and it must have grown. Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points.
Speaker 1:Claude, as an independent app, doesn't really have that. Also, I think just on a product sense, ChatGPT, I do think that the holidays were successful. And it was not discussed on X, the tech elite and the tech like anyone who's like in tech was focused on Claude code. They were doing vibe coding projects. They had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with like the hottest new coding agent.
Speaker 1:So people weren't people were people knew that ChatGPT could do images. But right before the holiday started, ChatGPT launched the image tab. And if you go to the image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box. They have preloaded have you seen these? Like, it it will it will show you, like, retro anime.
Speaker 1:Like, it will
Speaker 2:show Oh, you woah.
Speaker 1:It will show you, like, ideas. Like, turn yourself into a bobblehead. Turn yourself into a sugar cookie or a fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so it's taking the work out of someone. Like, most people in tech, an image model comes out, Studio Ghibli thing happens, everyone's like, what's the prompt?
Speaker 1:Okay. Were like, it's too
Speaker 2:much to ask people to have an idea.
Speaker 1:It is. We need
Speaker 2:to give them the idea, and we need to make the image for them.
Speaker 1:It it actually is too much.
Speaker 2:It actually is. And then eventually, when when you have your Yes. When you have your little sweet pea Yes. Whatever they're calling their Yes. New device it will just be generating images on the fly based on your day.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:And then eventually, you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, I mean, just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT images tab is, I think, an important just growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them, and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared it in iMessage or in a or in a group chat, and that would onboard more people. And those sorts of viral loops, they they feel like, oh, the the tech is so magical.
Speaker 1:It just should it should just grow organically. But Yeah. It it already grew organically. Like, the organic growth is is has was a billion people. Now how do you get the next billion?
Speaker 1:Well, you probably have to do some growth hacking and a product like images and chatty p t with Disney characters and and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet, where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then and then hook in, and we can collaborate. And I send you a link, then you install Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the tough thing is, like, if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then you don't have image generation at all Yeah. At what point, why why don't they just even if that's not a priority for them
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It still feels like a product that consumers really
Speaker 1:want Yeah.
Speaker 2:In their daily driver. Yeah. And so at some point, they may have to capitulate that.
Speaker 1:The I mean, I I don't know if they care about the the the app race at all, consumer app race. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding, and that's been
Speaker 2:I know. I know. But they say that, like, all I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer Yep. But you they run billboard ads all over LA.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're spending a lot of money on television. Yeah. And so you kinda need to, like, make up your mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't really advertise in NFL and NBA. Mean, I guess enterprise buyers ad you know, watch those shows. So 16,000,000, maybe it's worth it. But but but I agree with you generally.
Speaker 2:Their ad campaigns have been great. Yeah. That's it. And maybe they just wanna Yeah. Rub it in rub it in the face of the other labs.
Speaker 2:They're also going public, so they want Mhmm. They they developing like real name recognition broadly I think is important. But
Speaker 1:I mean, in theory, if they if they host if they if they Claude code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and, you know, set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. And so you should be able to do that from the app. Like, Code if I if I ask Cloud Code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key, and then it will be able to generate images for me. Correct?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It would ask you to like, you would have to go generate the API key and stuff. Yeah. But that's actually I'm I'll try that right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What happens if you just ask Claude Code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something? Like, how does it actually work through solving that? At some point, it should prompt you to at least make maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use, and and at least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But The Wall Street Journal continues, and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. One change the world, raise money, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Selling to selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says The Wall Street Journal. Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI for tasks previously performed by humans, and executives have articulated plans
Speaker 2:Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology?
Speaker 1:Half of US adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence according to a spring survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago.
Speaker 2:Only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry.
Speaker 1:Skill issue. Just be in the 10%. Right, Tyler? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation drawing parallels between This
Speaker 2:would this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And say and just we'll compare the two of you guys and this can this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 6:It could probably do a pretty good job. Because it's I mean, it can already do like a talking head if you just image of me. And then the voice you can clone.
Speaker 2:I know. But I don't think it would have your takes.
Speaker 1:I don't think it would have your takes.
Speaker 2:Just say like Or your or Dwarkesh or
Speaker 1:Even say, I'm sorry. That's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion. While OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb, More recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips.
Speaker 1:Which way will OpenAI go in the new Super Bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot with a camera using the the app probably on the phone. Yeah. But we'll see.
Speaker 1:In its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Yeah. Why would you why would you wanna run an ad saying that this strategy anchored by the
Speaker 2:Super Bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat. Don't worry about us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How about a Super Bowl ad?
Speaker 2:We hear you. We hear that you're concerned.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just just just
Speaker 2:Your concerns are
Speaker 1:massive superbowl act warranted. Our PDOM is actually really low relative to the true risk. We we think that the PDOM should be low. Everyone's like, what are they talking about?
Speaker 2:5% chance of annihilation by end of year.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're running the Super Bowl, you gotta get on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. I wanna be able to watch the Super Bowl on LinkedIn. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com, and I know the folks who have the rights to to the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:Sajid really should push to get LinkedIn the streaming rights.
Speaker 1:For sure. Be a game changer.
Speaker 2:For the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today designed for you. Personal intelligence, they're calling it. Personal intelligence draws insights from across your Google apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below.
Speaker 1:They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to prevent to provide relevant responses, but today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of personal intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search, and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it planning. Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. It'll know that I went to Austria and and recommend a different city maybe.
Speaker 1:Shopping. Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards, look at your to do list. Privacy is central to personal intelligence, how you connect other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default.
Speaker 1:You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at any time. Personal intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That's me. So I gotta turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing I I imagine that I will not be able to link multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail, and then I have a work Gmail.
Speaker 1:And then I'd sort of want to integrate my old work Gmails that I think I have access to still, because that says a lot about me, even though I'm not using that stuff anymore, and I'm not actioning those emails. I could see that being important in terms of, like, building out a
Speaker 2:sick of switching between constantly switching between calendars and Chrome Yep. And having your personal calendar Yeah. Calendar. Get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some of them have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the LLMs have surprised me by I'll ask a question and it'll just be like, and here's the context for TBPN. Here's the TBPN angle. I'm like, oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you, or, like, you figured that out somehow, or, like, yeah, you did something.
Speaker 1:Don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits. I know ChatGPT introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago, and it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but it it I I never became, like, a daily active user of Pulse.
Speaker 1:The the interesting question is, like, yeah, is it is it data source problem? Is it an architectural problem? Or is it an actual, like, model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data?
Speaker 1:Or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your all of your information. I was using the new Salesforce Slack bot that we're gonna talk to Mark Benioff about at 2PM. And it was remarkably useful in Slack because I I'm not on Slack a lot. And so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months. And I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to Slackbot and say, hey.
Speaker 1:Like, catch me up. Like, what's been happening in Slack in this Slack workspace? And it did a good job summarizing all the different key things, where I was mentioned, what was relevant to me. I did prod it on what anthropic model it's using exactly, and it's not using the latest and greatest, 4.5. It was using, I think, 3.5.
Speaker 1:It didn't seem aware of the latest models. And also, it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to to to act as, a full fledged LLM. You couldn't just ask it things. It was it was very confined to Slack.
Speaker 1:But within that domain, it was pretty useful. And it and it did help me, like, sort of get to, like, inbox zero in just, like, a couple minutes because I was able to scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels, instead of clicking through them, scanning, reading the threads, going down the it was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I am waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying a new LLM that's hot because, like, having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like, waiting for that lock in moment. Don't think it's really you have some forced lock in where a company is saying, like, we use this LLM.
Speaker 1:Or or, I mean, vice versa where, you know, they're just it's just like, yeah, in the course of my day, use five different LLMs. Like, on my phone, use Apple Intelligence, and that's routing to Gemini. And then I log in to Slack, and that's using the Anthropic APIs. But it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other. Like, it's all it's all fine, they're and they and they work.
Speaker 1:They they're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is is is summarizing some of the some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into, you know, Nano Banana. You can have, you know, more suggested images.
Speaker 1:Hey. Do you wanna touch this photo up? Do you wanna create some sort of holiday card? Like, what Chattypu T ultimately wound up doing with images?
Speaker 2:Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every photo I've ever taken.
Speaker 1:Set the GPUs on fire, for sure. Yep. Before we move on, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 2:New York Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year, 2026, maybe the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news, for, those of you listening. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic are going public. They talk about, Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says, we're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest.
Speaker 2:In two decades, I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful, said Jeremy Abelson, an investor at Irving Investors. Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we haven't we've never seen before ever. I think everybody's excited to just get into these s ones. I expect them to be extremely impressive
Speaker 1:There was a ton of buzz. But There's been a number of reports about, like, how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing. We're we're about to find out the real details. Yeah. It's gonna be exciting times.
Speaker 1:Exciting times.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we'll we'll see. All all the the geopolitical chaos, you know, even even this this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today, all this stuff is gonna play into whether or not Mhmm. Whether or not the window stays stays open.
Speaker 1:Yep. Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2:Saks Fifth Ave. Oh. Neiman Marcus Bergdorf Goodman filed for bankruptcy guy?
Speaker 1:You shop at Saks Fifth Avenue? Have
Speaker 2:you shop at Saks Fifth Avenue? I've never been
Speaker 4:a Department store guy?
Speaker 2:Department store guy. Okay. Ever.
Speaker 1:You go straight to the Chromeheart store. You're you're the guy in line outside Supreme.
Speaker 2:Go direct. And they
Speaker 1:they don't sell Supreme and Saks. Right? Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt. The hypebeast move on.
Speaker 2:Chrome. Zero Chrome. Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday Mhmm. Crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, affraying relationship with vendors and lagging sales. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores once landmarks that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raymundon, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Saks Global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman, who in 2024 orchestrated a $2,700,000,000 acquisition by Saks of the Neiman Marcus Group, which owns Bergdorf Goodman.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Saks said it had secured roughly 1,750,000,000 to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Sacks said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year, and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors, and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help sewer the company including Darcy Penich, former president of Bergdorf Goodman as president and chief commercial officer. This is a defining moment for Saks Global and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future. This is this is good messaging.
Speaker 2:Trump was messaging around the supreme court ruling. He said, if they rule against us, we're screwed. He just was like, if they if if they rule against the tariffs, we're screwed.
Speaker 1:We're cooked. We're chopped and we're cooked. Some ridiculous things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I feel like these stores are, if anything, just nostalgic. Yeah. Right? It it really feels like an end of of of an era.
Speaker 2:Essence, obviously, went bankrupt earlier this year. In this case, in that case, too, founders are gonna are gonna actually maintain control, so we'll see how they navigate through. But again, I just wonder, you know, as these stores shut down, like who who can even fill these spaces? They're big. Like, there's just not Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's not companies that wanna come in and occupy Yeah. A bunch of this a bunch of this real estate.
Speaker 1:Gotta get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like, there there Yeah.
Speaker 2:You seen a bit
Speaker 1:more durable about the mall that you go to for there's restaurants. There's a movie theater. There's a coffee shop, book
Speaker 2:a room.
Speaker 1:Escape room, probably. Laser tag, VR, maybe maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants, the Apple store, and there's electronics. And then there are a few. There's a Louis Vuitton store, a Coach store, a Bottega store.
Speaker 1:And those brands want to own the entire retail experience, I think, more now. I don't Yeah. Sure. I'm But it seems like as much as we joke about like the Supreme store having lines out front, like there isn't there is a deliberate strategy to that. Like, you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store.
Speaker 1:So these, like, aggregator retail stores seem to be having a lot of
Speaker 2:trouble. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not good. Well, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Larry Ellison is being profiled in Vulture for New York Magazine. It's a very long profile that we should read through.
Speaker 1:First,
Speaker 4:we
Speaker 1:should debate this story that we almost got to from Reddit yesterday. Are there any real candy innovations right now? R r slash candy, which I didn't know existed. Hey, everyone. I'm curious to hear your perspective as candy lovers.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like there's any real innovation happening in candy right now? Are there any sweets, brands, or flavors that are new? Someone's been reading zero to one. The stagnation stagnation theory has come to the candy industry.
Speaker 6:We're seeing progress in the world of bits, less so in the world of
Speaker 1:Candy. Sugars. Yeah. Of candy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Some people did make the good point that, yes, there has been a phenomenal breakout success in the candy industry. Do you know what I'm talking about, Jordy? No. There's one really big winner recently, and it is Nerds Gummy Clusters. These Nerds Gummy Clusters, I don't know where this got buried in this.
Speaker 1:This went this went very viral, I guess. But Nerds was a brand of candy that had been around for a long time and was doing, I think, fine, sort of like, you know, stagnant revenue. And then they came up with this way to create, like have you ever had Nerds? You familiar with this?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like this, like, grainy, like, sand texture or something. I don't know. It's like a bunch of little pellets, and it's sort of like
Speaker 2:Are you mansplaining Nerds
Speaker 1:to the sort of like hard to I don't know. It it's not it's not that accessible. It's like you either dump it all in your mouth and then you just give a tunnel. It's not a great user experience. It's a little outdated.
Speaker 3:Really?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:They I I thought it was fantastic growing up.
Speaker 1:You did? Yeah. Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 2:Nerd ropes too?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So basically, what they did with the Nerd rope, they they cut it up into these little clusters, and this product has been selling fantastically well and has done very, very well. And there were also some yeah. There there's a bunch of people chiming in in the comments.
Speaker 1:Peelers, gummy mangoes. There's a whole bunch of stuff. There were even some companies that did, like, sugar free candies that I think have done well. There's been a number of sort of new new startups. There really isn't like a David's protein bar type of breakout success in candy that I'm familiar with.
Speaker 1:Are are you
Speaker 2:I love I love candy. I just assume that it all wants to kill me. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1:Bring me the poison.
Speaker 2:Bring me the poison. What was your favorite candy growing up? I
Speaker 1:don't know. That's a tough one. Maybe Starburst, Skittles, the classics. Oh, wow. Is there anything else?
Speaker 1:What what
Speaker 2:Hot tamales.
Speaker 1:Hot tamales. Okay. Tyler? What candy do
Speaker 7:More of
Speaker 6:a chocolate guy.
Speaker 1:Chocolate guy.
Speaker 2:I don't really like many I find.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. I I I don't know. I pick up candy from time to time at the airport something.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. If we're getting on a plane, I like to have some candy hanging around. But, you know, the Nerds gummy clusters, I've had those on plane flights a few times. But good to see that the candy community is coming out in full force in in support of candy innovation.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:I went and found this original post on r slash candy.
Speaker 1:You did. And What did they say?
Speaker 2:The post seems written by ChatGPT, EmDashes, all all of it. Yeah, basically, everybody's just nostalgia maxing.
Speaker 1:What are they most nostalgic for? What do they like?
Speaker 2:Just saying they like the old school stuff, Willy Wonka candy.
Speaker 1:Does a Reese's peanut butter cup count as a candy, or is that a chocolate?
Speaker 6:I think of chocolate as a Like subcategory? Than candy.
Speaker 5:Oh.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't Like, don't
Speaker 6:Halloween candy. I gotta buy Halloween candy. Okay.
Speaker 1:Snickers came in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Snickers Snickers counts. That's good. It's also an ingredient that you could use.
Speaker 1:Like, you wouldn't say, like, a chocolate cake is candy. There's something about the size
Speaker 2:Producer Ben wants a protein Twix. That could
Speaker 1:That would be surprising That'd
Speaker 2:be pretty good.
Speaker 1:If if that revitalizes the the candy industry. Anyway, let's move on to this story about David Allison, the the Sun King of Hollywood. Before we read through this, we'll tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
Speaker 1:So, with help from his billionaire father Larry, David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie Flyboys had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars has had abruptly checked into the hospital. What? On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone.
Speaker 1:I was terrified when the phone rang, and it was Larry Ellison, Devlin said. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the nineteen nineties. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. Wow. What a run.
Speaker 1:Six. But he struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War one fighter pilots. Then in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college aged son named David who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60,000,000, and Skydance was listed as a producer.
Speaker 1:David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie who can't shoot straight. Come on, Eddie. Can we try
Speaker 2:to find
Speaker 1:climactic fight scene. Can we try
Speaker 2:to find Eddie in Flyboys?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's find a let's find a David Ellison hype reel or maybe just the trailer. And do you see the photo that Vulture chose for this is sort of a collage, a rendition of David Ellison, but, you know, they put him in the royal oak right there in the photo. You'll love to see it. So, Devlin, let's yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I I haven't I actually haven't seen this movie. Came back. We had no idea what to expect.
Speaker 1:Franco. Maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend. Nothing in common. Can accept. Join us.
Speaker 1:I wanted to learn to fly. Oh, that's a cool shot. Gentlemen, you
Speaker 7:have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom.
Speaker 3:Captain tell
Speaker 2:you I think that's David.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 7:Oh, really?
Speaker 5:Six weeks.
Speaker 2:Guy sure knows how to make friends.
Speaker 7:All these friends are there.
Speaker 4:This is your quarters. French is sure put on a nice war.
Speaker 1:That's him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 3:Got any objection to move on.
Speaker 1:Let's go. It's luck to rub your head.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't do that if
Speaker 1:I were you.
Speaker 8:Sorry, fellas. This room's reserved for killers.
Speaker 2:What's up there, killer?
Speaker 1:Going to war in two days. You worried I
Speaker 2:definitely saw this this big as a kid because I just love I love playing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Will he be back by lunch? There he is. We'll be back by lunch. This is a pretty sweet movie for about 2,001.
Speaker 2:Worth the 60,000,000. They underpaid. They underpaid. Going anywhere. Are they missing a zero?
Speaker 2:Seems like a $600,000,000 movie. A zero.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna turn this into a cult classic for for fans of of enterprise databases. If you're if you're a fan of of hyperscale and data center build out and data center construction like the rest of us
Speaker 2:gotta be watching Flyboys.
Speaker 1:You gotta be a Flyboys guy. You gotta get the original Flyboys merch. You gotta get the DVD copies. You gotta start collecting this stuff.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Devlin. He thought Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money.
Speaker 2:He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. Sick. He was however concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait. Woah.
Speaker 2:Woah. Big deal. Reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation. Doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm. Wow.
Speaker 2:Damn.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:This is bullish. Yeah. This is bullish. He he he was so upset about losing that he went he was hospitalized.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:You think he's gonna lose Warner Brothers?
Speaker 1:Maybe not.
Speaker 2:I think this I is a guy you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is good. Okay.
Speaker 2:He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money. Wow. He was upset about letting his father down. Told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of Oh. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison's family's adventures in Hollywood.
Speaker 2:After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun, Maverick Crazy. And Mission Impossible series along with a number of largely forgettable movies.
Speaker 1:Have you seen Top Gun?
Speaker 2:Yes. Sick.
Speaker 1:Have you seen Top Gun Maverick? No. It's good. It's it's it's not as iconic as the first one, but it is a great ride. What about Mission Impossible?
Speaker 1:There's like seven movies in the series. Have you seen any of them?
Speaker 4:No. The first one's great.
Speaker 2:No. He was in other words a producer much like many others in in town. Then last year, David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and a company more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellison's set their sights on an even bigger prize, Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial, let's give it up for the millennials, to control a major Hollywood studio.
Speaker 2:While running Skydance, built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire building streak in line with his father, is currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world. Mhmm. It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past twenty years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth 18,000,000,000 and couldn't afford Paramount, was valued at 22,000,000,000. By last year, the 6,000,000,000 Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent Wow.
Speaker 2:Which briefly peaked and his fortune which brief briefly peaked in September at close to 400,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oracle, Larry's company is the is the world's most boring tech giant. Disagree. It's fascinating company. It's it's it's one of the most exciting
Speaker 1:to me. Tell that to Chase Lockmiller Crusoe. Okay? We'll we'll see who's boring then.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll see how boring Oracle is when we talk about Abilene, Texas. Go to Abilene, Texas and tell me that Oracle's boring. Yep. Come on. Who's writing this?
Speaker 1:Who's who's writing this?
Speaker 2:But Larry had long harbored more globe spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus. What? That's so sad. Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98% of a Hawaiian island in an entity called Octopus Holdings LP.
Speaker 2:P. In the past year, Oracle has become central to the AI boom providing back end computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build LLMs in September after Oracle reported a potential windfall
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Of AI infused revenue. Its stock shot up so much that Larry's net worth increased by 89,000,000,000 in a single day.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:That still was such a
Speaker 1:Fifth wild moment. 15 Paramounts. Yeah. Basically, you get 15 Paramounts in one day and you're like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll take 10% of the gain from this day and buy them
Speaker 2:a new studio. Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David's ownership of one and perhaps two major studios as well as one and perhaps two major news network networks. Paramount owns CBS and Warner owns CNN has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs. Murdochs.
Speaker 2:Wow. What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate individually and together will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens, and the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David's mother when he was young, and the two became close only as David grew older, and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father's opposite, shy and competent, not a bombastic, world conquering visionary. David's ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes, but the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater, if he can pull it off.
Speaker 1:Here, I'll continue, but first, I'll tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. So last month, the Warner board spurned the Ellisons and Paramount's offer and agreed to sell its movie and TV studio to the HBO Max and the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. Yeah. The true streaming octopus is forming under Netflix's reign.
Speaker 1:The Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Brothers, including its cable networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Brothers shareholders to accept Paramount's offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Glad to be in the media business covering this because it's certainly entertaining. Of course, thanks to Dylan Byers over at Puck for putting this on my radar by posting it on X.
Speaker 1:The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Brothers is in fact critical to Paramount's survival. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry's leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he's up to the task. David's mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen and obviously his dad. Those guys are ruthless killers, single-minded people with a different DNA, a former Skydance employee who worked closely with David said on the record.
Speaker 1:A former Skydance employee said, David is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he's not that. He's not the ruthless killer. He's not the Steve Jobs, the David Geffen. He's something else entirely. During the Warner Brothers auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors.
Speaker 1:These were the code names. Netflix was noble. Comcast was charm. Paramount was given the name Prince. Interesting.
Speaker 1:One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story, how a battle for an intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family. He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator two, Judgment Day as a child. The fate of humanity was at stake, but what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. It's emotional. It's a great movie.
Speaker 1:Terminator two, have you seen it? No. Brutal. It's like one of the greatest movies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I watch it. So good.
Speaker 1:It's so
Speaker 2:Is is that what I should add?
Speaker 1:You should. You should. And truthfully, you can watch Terminator two without watching Terminator one. They have very different vibes, very different pacings. You should watch both, but Terminator two is just a fantastic movie.
Speaker 1:It's so, so good. And there's iconic, like, memes and GIFs that I feel like you should know. I'll be back.
Speaker 2:You know? Okay. So Zarr and some of the chat actually put together
Speaker 1:What'd they put?
Speaker 2:A film list for me.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. Thank They
Speaker 2:sent it to my DMs. Thank you. Interstellar, Heat, Inception, Shawshank, Steve Jobs, American Hustle, Silver Lining Playbook Yeah. Almost Famous, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Sting.
Speaker 2:The issue is these are so there's so many movies you could easily be messing with me and just sprinkle in like 10 that are just like really bad.
Speaker 1:Movie ever.
Speaker 5:And I'm
Speaker 2:like, well, boys said I had to
Speaker 1:watch watched Sheeshly. I think that's notoriously one of the worst movies.
Speaker 2:There's there's a lot there's a lot here. It's three three pages of movies. So Mhmm. I promise I will do my best to watch all these. It may take me multiple decades
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:At my current pace. Yeah. But I'll work down I'll work down the list.
Speaker 1:Well, so at the end of Terminator two, David Ellison's sitting in the theater where Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to spoil the story, but Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy, and the eight year old David Ellison starts to cry. Wow. Larry wasn't around much when David was a kid, one of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at nine months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island.
Speaker 1:And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Louis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. Wow. What a crazy thing. Why did you adopt this nine month old kid just to dunk on him? This is so so bad.
Speaker 1:But, clearly, it lit a fire, in Larry, and he went on to build one of the greatest tech companies in history.
Speaker 2:Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting. Right? You wanna, you know, you know actually. But Hardcore Parenting.
Speaker 2:It's like wake up every morning, tell your children you never amount to anything. Crazy.
Speaker 1:As a result, Larry likes to say that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success, and colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry's seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. I'm not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this, Larry later said, but it certainly worked. Wow. That's crazy. David's mother, Barbara Booth, was an or was Oracle's tenth employee.
Speaker 1:He hired his mom when he needed a tenth employee. And Larry's third wife oh, David's mother. Sorry. He Larry hired David's mother, Barbara Booth. They they divorced shortly after David's third birthday and right after his sister, Megan, was born.
Speaker 1:When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him. I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another. What is it? Larry said.
Speaker 1:He spent
Speaker 2:Crazy life.
Speaker 1:Obligatory weekends with the kids and seemed to only realize later that a family was something he wanted. One night
Speaker 2:Guy doesn't understand love, but has been is on his fifth marriage. Something. He's like, I just I just need to get my wrapped
Speaker 1:Marriage. Yeah. Just need to get married. Larry called Booth to say he was lonely. You're never alone because you have the kids.
Speaker 1:You always have a body, Larry said. I'm here by I'm here all by myself. David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes, and David's ideal day as a as a child was to watch the Star Wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back to back. I did the exact same thing when I was a kid.
Speaker 1:It was fantastic. I had star the Star Wars trilogy on VHS was one of my prized possessions. Quickly, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputer for training and inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. It wasn't until David became a teenager that he and Larry started taking flying lessons together that they grew close, eventually staging mock dog fights over the Pacific.
Speaker 1:These guys are dogfighting each other. This is insane.
Speaker 2:Yes. I bond with your son.
Speaker 1:Yes. As a matter of fact, I do have that dog in me. I I literally dogfight with my dad in planes that we fly over the Pacific. David went on to compete as an aerobatic pilot whipping barrel rolls flying at 300 miles an hour, just 15 feet above the ground and pulling off his signature move, the Devilator. He has a signature move.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. After graduating from high school in 2001, David went to Pepperdine University as a prospective business major. He hated it, and he transferred to film school at USC. He commuted from the beach in Malibu where he lived in one of the many homes Larry had purchased there on a $65,000,000 buying spree. His neighbors included Jennifer Aniston, who is renting one of Larry's other houses.
Speaker 1:For a senior thesis, David wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called When All Else Fails, in which he plays a billionaire son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. That's an interesting frame for a plot. His girlfriend at the time who was a diabetic played the part. According to people who worked on the production, David was respectful and eager to learn if a bit oblivious to the ways in which he wasn't making an ordinary student film. The budget was close to $100,000 and he shot part of it in one of his father's giant homes in the Bay Area.
Speaker 1:When they ran out of film, David offered to fly his plane to Los Angeles to pick some up. Instead of graduating, David left USC to film Flyboys. He worked with an acting coach to prepare, but his performance didn't do any favors to a mediocre script. David spent the next several years going to auditions and landed a few more roles from Devlin, the Flyboys producer. He played a bumbling assistant to a corrupt mayor on a TNT show and a shirtless drug addict who punches an FBI agent before leaping from the 2nd Floor of a motel in a TV movie.
Speaker 1:His most significant screen time came in a raunchy 2009 comedy called Hole in One in which he plays
Speaker 2:John, have you seen this?
Speaker 1:No. I haven't. Should I have? Do you expect me to see every movie? I haven't seen every movie.
Speaker 1:He plays a he plays the owner of a golf apparel company, and there's a picture of him here in in a sort of golf polo, whose partner loses a bet that leads two nefarious plastic surgeons to give him breast implants, sending David's character on a quest to drum up enough money to help him get them removed. What a wacky plot. Only in 2009 are you making movies like that? That is wild. He delivers one of his first lines in the movie after a woman takes off her shirt.
Speaker 1:That was pimp. He says, wow. That is a phrase straight out of 2009. No one uses those words anymore. That slang has fully died.
Speaker 1:His acting career more or less came to an end a few years later after he wrote a script called Northern Lights about a pilot friend of his who had died. Taylor Lautner signed on to play the lead, but dropped out after finding David had written a role for himself. Rough.
Speaker 2:What what did Taylor have against David?
Speaker 1:I guess he was like, don't wanna act with him or something. Or I don't wanna be in I I mean, you know, it's like in f one, there's always like the who is this person? Do they deserve the seat? Or, you know, are they there for the because they just have the money. And so, you know, you you sign up for this.
Speaker 1:You've you're in this role. The movie bombs, and it's seen as, you know, a black mark on your IMDb resume, I suppose. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanna stay in the business, he needed to think more like his father. David wanted to be an actor. And when that didn't work, he was like, if I'm not gonna be on screen, I'm gonna be the biggest guy in the room. A person Love it. Who knew him at the time told me, the writer of this vulture piece.
Speaker 1:Larry's friend David Geffen introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar, which was cofounded by Steve Jobs, who was Larry's best friend. Brittenham helped David make a business plan for building a production company and learn to navigate the web of agencies, producers, and studios in Hollywood. David wanted Skydance to make the type of movies he loved, movies with explosions.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Finally.
Speaker 1:Like, the last the last Hollywood producer understands how to get me in the theater.
Speaker 2:You know how Truth has their ETFs, their Patriot ETFs. I think they gotta get Paramount Paramount's
Speaker 1:Oh, Guidance Star Wars in movies. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because this movie studio They like to close. Committed to explosions. Explosions, very American. Yes. Something there.
Speaker 1:So Andy Kessler was an investor who worked with David to raise money for Skydance early on. And they had a rule. They said, he swore to me, no rom coms, No touchy feely emotional Oscar bait. Just explosions. But funding the Hollywood dreams of the 25 year old failed actor son of one of the world's richest men was a tough sell to investors.
Speaker 1:Will people show up to these movies? And Larry ultimately made the point moot in 2010. He stepped in to provide almost all of the initial a $150,000,000 David was trying to raise according to multiple people with knowledge of the company's finances. Their timing was good. The late aughts Hollywood was roiled by the financial crisis, and Paramount, the studio behind The Godfather and Titanic, was struggling movie was the struggling moviemaking arm of the Redstone family's Viacom cable TV empire.
Speaker 1:Deutsche Bank had bailed on an agreement to fund Paramount's movies, and the studio needed cash. When Larry's funding for Skydance came through, David signed a deal to co finance Paramount's movies, which meant he would help fund production in exchange for a share of the profits. David had initially considered partnering with Relativity Media, which would later collapsed in a fiery bankruptcy. While co financiers often get stuck funding risky projects, Paramount's desperate state opened the door for David to negotiate his involvement in some of the studio's biggest franchises like Star Trek and Mission Impossible. The first feature film, David Bach, a Cohen Brothers remake of the western True Grit.
Speaker 1:I've seen that. It's a great movie. Have you seen it? Nope. No.
Speaker 1:Went on to make $2,250,000,000, but they couldn't get a dime out of Jordy Hayes apparently. And it earned 10 Oscar nominations, but couldn't get Jordy to throw it on streaming on one random Sunday night. His sister, Megan, followed him into the industry co financing True Grit and launching her own company, Annapurna Pictures. Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Annapurna has been on a run. I think they also have an interactive division. Well, although that might not be related. I'm not sure. Skydance thesis, according to a person that worked closely with David, was that Hollywood wasn't prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition.
Speaker 1:Plenty of dumb money came into town, but producers and talent mostly viewed it as something to take advantage of. Money in Hollywood is not appropriate appreciated, the person said. This was an opportunity to reverse that to make Hollywood treat money with respect. We gotta respect the dollar
Speaker 2:in Hollywood. Nicolas Cage. It was was one of the worst.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He famously said, I do not chuckle when I get a big check. I have respect for the dollar.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Dave Cage. Nicolas Cage. Shortly after signing the deal with Paramount in 2009, a person who knew David then said that he had declared, quote, we are going to buy Paramount one day. He called his shot in 2009. Well, here he is.
Speaker 1:He did it. David proved to be a savvy enough operator negotiating better terms with Paramount when his deal came up for renewal and working hard to pick up the quirks of a job that involved everything from managing the egos of talent to negotiating debt facilities with JPMorgan. He would sometimes tell colleagues about an instructive conversation he'd had years earlier about running a company in Hollywood. At the premiere of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, he walked up to congratulate David Geffen, who had produced the movie through his company DreamWorks. As David told it, Geffen shook his hand.
Speaker 1:Steve is getting paid. Tom is getting paid. How much do you think DreamWorks is getting paid? Geffen said. He held his hand up in the shape of a zero.
Speaker 1:DreamWorks was making a relative pittance on the movie, an early lesson in the confusing economics of the business, where a poorly structured deal could mean even a hit might generate little for the company that produced it. It was always in the back of David's mind. On Minority Report, everybody got paid except for DreamWorks, a former Skydance executive said. Have you seen Minority Report? That is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Speaker 1:It is a fascinating, fascinating movie. It is amazing.
Speaker 2:It's not on the list.
Speaker 1:Sci fi?
Speaker 2:It's not on the list that the chat made.
Speaker 1:Add it to the list. Add it to the list. Minority Report is fantastic. Really great vision of what the future of VR and augmented reality could look like. Has a whole bunch of other interesting sci fi elements.
Speaker 1:Tom Cruise obviously puts off a puts on a masterful performance. But the the interactive how they interact with computer technology is is remarkable in that. Anyway, let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 2:Okay. I think we're running out of time. Yeah. Chesky is gonna join in a second. Yes.
Speaker 2:It's Chesky. There is some funny dialogue happening. I'll fill you in. The CalSheet market, will Elon win his case against OpenAI? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Was at a 36% chance this morning.
Speaker 1:Right. What's it doing now?
Speaker 2:He asked, what are the odds looking like? They responded. Now, Elon is posting, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war.
Speaker 1:Elon said that? He just posted Oh my god.
Speaker 2:Insane. Score's
Speaker 1:shirt. Well, we have Brian Chesky, the cofounder and CEO of Airbnb in the Restream waiting room. We're bringing him to the TV at Ultrasound. Brian, great to see you again. How are you doing?
Speaker 8:Hey, guys. Good to see you. Thank you for having me back on.
Speaker 1:Of course. You're welcome anytime. It's great to be here with you. First, kick us off with the news. You've been acquiring talent, building the roster.
Speaker 1:You have a new CTO. How did it come about? Yeah. Big pick. Tell me about this person.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So, like, know, obviously, a couple of years ago, I started asking around like who are some of the best leaders in AI and I started meeting people. One of the names that came up over and over was this guy named Ahmed Aldal, and he was head of generative AI at Meta. We met and I just was completely blown away by him. Not only was he at Meta and he essentially created, led the team that created the LAMA models, been downloaded a billion times.
Speaker 8:There's been over 60,000 derivative models. But he was also at Apple. He actually joined Apple at a college, worked on the original iPhone in 2005, led a lot of the multi touch technology. He led the autonomous technology group that was the self driving car project at Apple. So, he was somebody at the frontier.
Speaker 8:He really understood both frontier technology, but he also understood that Apple design craft, which I think Airbnb also is really passionate about. We just really hit it off, became friends and as my current CTO, we were talking about handing the baton to somebody we thought, Amit, it would be really great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about design in the era of generative AI? These apps are amazing and the models. You see the benchmarks, you use the models, and it's magical. It's like, you know, we created fire.
Speaker 1:And then one rough edge, one button that doesn't quite work the way you expected it. I was lamenting the fact that I was using Claude, and I couldn't get a deep research report to read it out loud to me. That feature is in one app, and there's different features there. How do
Speaker 2:you Yeah. It feels it feels very notable that even in all the leading LLMs, there's still so many rough edges in A the
Speaker 1:little low hanging.
Speaker 2:And part of that is like a new product paradigm. We're figuring out what the edges are. Maybe
Speaker 8:there's all sorts of metaphors. I remember when I was a kid, I think I got a compact computer and I was running MS DOS. We're more in the MS DOS phase of AI. Not to belittle the interfaces, but the chatbot is not the end state interface. The current chatbot is not the end state interface for AI.
Speaker 8:I mean, about your phone and your app. Do you want to chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to do most of the functions? The answer is no. So, I think the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual.
Speaker 8:Most people aren't completely text based. Do think there's been a It's like we've been iterating the engine of the car, but we haven't really redesigned the car. So, the chatbot is really a pre AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. So, I think what we're trying to do is think through where can we take this interface? What is the multi touch reference for an age of AI?
Speaker 8:We're not going to do this overnight. Not going be the only company doing this, but I really think the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. If you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So, I totally agree with you. I think the other thing I'd say is I'm on the board of Y Combinator and I think the last I checked, 87% of their companies are enterprise companies per batch.
Speaker 1:Wow. People aren't I know.
Speaker 2:We we we go and we meet with every batch and to have them on the show, and we're always trying, hey, every we want every consumer company to come on because they're oftentimes yeah. Oftentimes, they give you and the interesting Yeah. Thing is all of them all all these founders started doing consumer businesses. You asked them, they're doing Minecraft Yeah, servers and flipping sneakers and stuff. So, they actually have some consumer DNA, but they end up
Speaker 8:And so, you're bringing up a really good point. I joined Y Combinator in 2009, and that was not like two years after the iPhone was introduced. Almost every startup was a consumer company, and enterprise is awesome. I think it makes complete sense why AI is starting with enterprise because the models are not cheap to run. You can basically vertically integrate any business and completely automate the workflow.
Speaker 8:It's going to revolutionize how we do work. But the point is that the biggest prize is consumer because that is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people. I think a lot of people are a little bit a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to go into consumer. That's the biggest thing we've heard. They're afraid.
Speaker 8:Partly they're worried that OpenAI or Google are going to essentially eat their lunch and vertically integrate. The other concern is consumer is just hard. It's a little bit more of a hitstrism business. Distribution is a little more mature because of the App Store. There's not really new distribution channels the same way.
Speaker 8:At the same time, we are in the midst of a revolution, and more than just a couple of chatbots have to be the way that you interface with the world. Also, this might be self serving to say, but I also believe this independently, I don't think we're going to use just one agent. We don't have just one person in our life. Don't think we're going have just one agent in our life. I don't think we'll use thousands, but I think there is going to be some level of specialization that's going to help.
Speaker 8:There's going to be too much specialization where I wouldn't download that agent or use that agent, but I think even if you want a meta orchestrator, whether it's Claude or Gemini or Chachi B. T, specialization is going to help even within consumers. So we want to do some really cool stuff within traveling and living.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What advice do you give to the 13% of Y Combinator founders that are going after consumer at least for now or at least in at this moment? Is it, hey, keep your burn really low, run a ton of experiments, stick it out? Because it feels like part of the reason why 87% wind up in enterprise is because businesses are just throwing money at them. They're saying, yeah, you're doing consumer, but if you come solve this one really small problem for me and build this API for me, I'll give you a contract.
Speaker 1:I'll be your first customer. It's very easy to get the money flowing on the business side potentially. But what how can you actually make it as a consumer founder when there is a big prize but it might be a harder road?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So many thoughts here. I mean, one of the things that Paul Graham taught us and Gary Tan teaches, which I think is very effective, is use otherwise commoner companies as your early adopters. Hence why a lot of companies go into enterprise. If you have an artist company, don't go to Boeing to try to use your service, go to a young startup and work your way up to the large companies.
Speaker 8:They've developed this incredible ecosystem where thousands of companies are adopting each other's tools and they bootstrap each other. That's actually been part of the explanation for why Y has so successfully created so many enterprise companies. But when I was in Y Combinator, we got everyone to use Airbnb. So, other words, we have a huge alumni network. I would tell people that are going into consumer, number one, don't be afraid to do AI consumer.
Speaker 8:It might fail, but investors aren't going to hold it against you that a startup failed. A founder who's failed is more fundable the next time than someone who's never started unless they really blew it. Yeah. Because you have experience. I think that's what's so great about this.
Speaker 8:Number two, you got a lot of early adopters within Y Combinator who are normal people too. They have daily life. I would agree to keep your burn rate low. I would pick a niche. I wouldn't pick a niche that's too narrow.
Speaker 8:So, maybe AI to do something incredibly narrow is going to get really, really difficult for somebody to want to change their workflow and behavior. Just think about all the parts of daily life that are annoying. Maybe pay attention to your sister, your significant other, your children, whoever's in your life and just look at their life and ask how could their daily life be a little bit easier? I would just go for By the way, App Store is mature. That's a little bit of an issue.
Speaker 8:At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are AI apps. If something is truly great and truly breakthrough, people will seek it out. I do think my prediction is that AI is going to revolutionize consumer applications in the coming years. They might not be apps. They might become agents.
Speaker 8:Agents might be the new apps. We have to figure out what that means. What's a new platform paradigm? It's probably agents not apps, but we'll see. But ultimately, I think that's the big takeaway here.
Speaker 8:So, what we're going to do is we want to really innovate on the consumer experience. We want to interface on like what does consumer interface look like in the age of AI? And I think they should evolve past the current design paradigm and we'll see where it goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would be I'm not expecting to open the Airbnb app and see a blank text box purely. No. Like, there's so much more that you can do. Have you thought more about Airbnb app is unique, I think, because it's not this reactive people are opening it 10 times a day.
Speaker 1:There is an intention. And there's probably a lot of value in understanding, Okay, this person, they like to travel around the holidays. They're opening the app in October. Let's think that through. Agents and LLMs can probably work through a customer's history, their preferences, just do better recommendations, what you're servicing them.
Speaker 1:How much have you thought about being proactive about reaching the customer with something that's more tailored? What's been working? Where do you see it going?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So many things. One of the other problems with consumer, just to keep coming back to it, is there's a business model challenge. These models are not cheap. So, there's probably one of three ways you can make money in consumer.
Speaker 8:You can put ads in your chatbot, you can pay a subscription, or you can do essentially transactions. Well, Airbnb luckily has the business model. We have transactions, and our transactions are pretty high dollar transactions. So, we actually have the really the business model going for us. We also have a lot of data.
Speaker 8:We do about 50,000,000,000 searches a year on Airbnb. That's nothing compared to Google, but 50,000,000,000. So, that's that number of times somebody's typing in something into an Airbnb search box. So, we actually do have quite a bit of data about people, their preferences, and we can bring it in. And part of what we want to do is if the interface is a little more chat like, again, be per se a chatbot exactly like OpenAI, but if it's a little more of a turn by turn chat like connection, you're going to get a lot more information from people.
Speaker 8:I think the one benefit of the current chatbots are they have memory. So, you're putting a lot of context in the window. I think memory, by the way, is something I think we're going to want to technically innovate on because the chatbots still are stateless. So, essentially the prompt is putting in this obviously a lot of your memory. I do think there's going to be an area around how can everybody understand people's preferences, learn more about you, understand what you care about, and just be really thoughtful.
Speaker 8:Like, what's your bucket list? Who are you traveling with? One of the other things that we can be really good at is the majority of trips have multiple people. Most chatbots are single player mode. They have collaborative tools, but most people are not chatting with multiple people.
Speaker 8:Most people on Airbnb are searching for an Airbnb with multiple other people. I think another thing we really want to do is really be great at understanding two people, they have totally different preferences, how do we help them figure out the right choices for them? A lot of collaboration tools I think are to be really important. But I think at our heart, we want to do is really build out these robust profiles, deeply understand people, and give them what they want in the real world.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the challenges of generative AI imagery in Airbnb listings? Listings. I I can can imagine imagine there's there's sort of a risk of, what is it called, catfishing where someone Yep. Takes a photo. It is their house, but they said, hey.
Speaker 1:Like,
Speaker 2:patch up the
Speaker 1:walls and, you know, may let's let's change the lighting and make it look a little bit warmer, a little bit nicer. And there's probably a little bit of that, that's fine. You know, if you took it on a phone, you want it to look nice, but you want it to represent the actual experience. How are you thinking about the challenges with that?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, like, it's really interesting, Ray. Like, I don't know. I saw on Twitter yesterday, like, the Stranger Things where like you can turn your face into someone
Speaker 1:Yeah. Else's
Speaker 8:And so what this really means is that like know your customer authentication. A lot of it is like you know, you do a selfie and an ID or you do a video. A lot of this stuff now AI can get around. We should go remember AI stands for artificial. We're now starting to live in a world where if you see in a screen, it might be artificial.
Speaker 8:I think authentication is going to be critical, and one of the best authentications is in the real world. We're going to be pretty soon living in a world where you don't know something's real unless you've seen it in the real world unless One we have example of the way Airbnb can solve this, for example, is we do have a network of professional photographers, over 5,000 around the world. In fact, we built an on demand professional photography network before Uber even launched where you hit a button and the photographer shows up and takes photos to your home. An advantage of that is those photos are by Airbnb and so if we took them, a customer would know those are authenticated photos from us. That's just an example of something that is possible.
Speaker 8:But I do think solving this, is this real, is this authenticated is really important. So we're gonna have to have something. We're gonna have to have technology solutions for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's your latest thinking on integrating Airbnb with various LLMs? How are these conversations going? Into commerce? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What kind
Speaker 8:of I'm interested. I think last time I was on, I said they weren't ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:My view, we chose not to launch with ChatGPT. They launched with Expedia and Booking. The reason why wasn't like I was a huge fan of that project and gave Sam some advice on it and stuff, and I think it's awesome. I would love to show up on ChatGPT. I would love to show up on Gemini.
Speaker 8:I'd love to show up on Claude. I don't Here's the thing, I don't want to be the first, I want to be the best. We want to have the best integration, not the first integration. There are some limitations. 90% of people booking Airbnb send a message to a host ahead of time.
Speaker 8:You have to have a verified ID. There's just some things we need in integration for Airbnb to have a really good integration, we'd love that. By the way, the traffic coming from ChatGPT converts higher on Airbnb to a booking than the traffic coming from Google search. So actually And various
Speaker 2:like e commerce brands have been reporting this too. Like the traffic is super high intent because people are informed.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I get this question is asked to me often as an existential thing. As in, are you going partner with them or not, and are they going to kill you and there's going to be no app in the future? My answer is there probably are no apps at some point in the future. They're probably agents.
Speaker 8:There's probably some platform like paradigm. We're probably designing agents. I don't know for sure, but I think that we're going to exist on those platforms, but I also think specialization is going to matter. I don't think there's just going to be a few chatbots and they do everything and you are separated from every application. That's going to be true of some apps, And that's gonna be true if you need like maybe a commodity.
Speaker 8:But there are gonna still be reasons to work with different agents or different applications. I think some specialization will make a difference.
Speaker 1:What are the big What is your suit for?
Speaker 2:One sec. One thing I appreciate about your framing of like, we don't wanna be first, we wanna be the best Yeah. Is because I think other CEOs in travel that are not tapped into Silicon Valley that aren't on the board of Y Combinator Mhmm. Feel this pressure to be like, I have to prove that I'm like at least trying to be AI native, whereas I feel like you don't have any, there's no ego around, like, can we build great products with AI? It's simply like, yeah, we're going to, but I don't to prove it by rushing into something.
Speaker 8:I I appreciate you saying that. I remember when the metaverse launched, I had somebody who didn't on my team that
Speaker 2:the idea of the metaverse?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're sorry. When yes. When it was announced, Mark Zuckerberg Sure.
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 1:They're like, what's
Speaker 8:our metaverse strategy? I remember other companies are like, we have to have a metaverse strategy. It's like that is definitely what someone usually would say if they're not really steeped into it. I think it's important that you do something really, really well, but I don't think you want to be first to signal we care about AI. That's vanity.
Speaker 8:You don't need to do that. So, when it's ready, we'll do something great and we want to add value to customers. That's all that really matters.
Speaker 2:If you were running Apple, what would your AI strategy be? It's a big question.
Speaker 8:Oh, wow. I would I I would say that the devices should be completely built from the ground up AI native, AI first, probably not even AI first, AGI first. We should ask ourselves, what is it going to look like in a few years? It's probably going to be fully agentic. These devices are going be able to work while you sleep and you should work backwards from that.
Speaker 8:These devices and the paradigms haven't changed since the advent of AI. These are pre AI devices running AI. So my question is, what would it look like if you designed it from the ground up knowing what we know today? It would probably look pretty different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So less Genmoji, more actual hardware. More hardware.
Speaker 8:We are in the midst of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want be like saying what everyone already knows.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But here's what I do want to say.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Like, the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on Chatuchu Boutique a lot. We're on Gemini. We're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person, they're doing unique things, workflows.
Speaker 8:The average person is still mostly living the life they lived three years ago using the same devices, but the world hasn't finally made the shift yet. It hasn't finally made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed. Daily life doesn't change until the devices have changed, the operating systems have changed, apps become agents, and we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world, and we're not using chatbots, at least not today's chatbots. Are We still living in the DOS era of AI, and we need to move into the multi touch era.
Speaker 1:Chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend free weights? What is the secret to those arms?
Speaker 8:Thank you very much. So well well, first of all, like, genetically, I've better arms than shoulders or chest. That's just one thing. I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back, legs, chest, shoulders, arms.
Speaker 8:I now do arms with shoulders. I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. Maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by a hammer strength cable with a rope or a rope or a v bar. And then triceps, always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher depending Okay. What we all call
Speaker 1:That's a good one. I like to
Speaker 8:call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You know there's heavy metal
Speaker 2:don't know how to name exercises is like that.
Speaker 1:We we don't. The world's become soft. It really has the best the best name.
Speaker 8:I do think I do think generally if you're like under 40, for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells. You know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints, but I still try to put in free weights.
Speaker 1:Are you using any AI in the gym? Are there are you tracking movements or or and asking questions? Nutrition
Speaker 8:and Nutrition. I have a Okay. I have a trainer. Mhmm. He was a former mister universe.
Speaker 8:He competed in mister Olympia. So, he I let that I let him do that. He is he is he is But I My diet and my supplements are very much like I put everything into AI. Yeah. And I get like I do I do things.
Speaker 8:I don't know if it sounds eccentric, but like I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF, and you can put the PDF in a chatbot. It'll tell you to analyze it, and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. I don't go out enough, so I don't need more vitamin D.
Speaker 8:The blood work said that, so I take a vitamin D supplement.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 8:Because I'm not I'm, like, inside working a lot. So stuff Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have you been surprised seeing the explosion of peptides? I wouldn't have imagined a world where, you know, people are clamoring to do like actual Injections. Injections. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And given Yeah. Given how popular it was, I mean, it's in the bodybuilding world, there was always like a divide between how hardcore you were which was like, are you natural or are you gonna
Speaker 8:Are you natty or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Natty or not. And now, nobody's natty anymore seemingly. No
Speaker 8:one's natty. I'm not surprised. I'm surprised actually a little bit how much the tech communities embrace fitness. When I came to Silicon Valley, I was slightly self conscious about wearing long sleeve shirts because I thought if I wear short sleeve shirts, people think I'm a miha and therefore an idiot. People just didn't really lift weights in 2007, 2008.
Speaker 8:I really think that everyone's come around probably to just the science that nutrition and weightlifting is good, it's good for longevity, it's good for your mind, you'll live longer, you'll feel better. Honestly, weightlifting is far superior to cardio. You should do both. The weightlifting is far superior. It increases bone density.
Speaker 8:It's just if you can only do one thing, should do weightlifting. I'm really excited to see people actually embracing this. One of the things I learned about bodybuilding that I think is very much consistent with Silicon Valley is I was like one hundred and twenty pounds in high school. I played hockey. I remember I broke my leg.
Speaker 8:I had to do physical therapy. Through my physical therapy, I said, I want to learn about my body. There wasn't a lot of information on the Internet, I'd go to the Barnes and Noble and read as many books as possible. I learned some about bodybuilding. That was if I can change my body, I can change my life.
Speaker 8:It was about control. It's about this idea that you don't get in shape in one workout. It's 1% a day. Frankly, those are the lessons I learned with Silicon Valley. It's not about one idea, it's about grinding every single day, year after year with consistency.
Speaker 8:Overnight successes take thousands of days actually, typically. I think there's a lot of lessons from bodybuilding that I brought to Silicon Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, 100%. Yeah. It's it's a really important frame of mind and we appreciate you sharing
Speaker 2:all of that with us.
Speaker 1:We know so we gotta get up and get them out here.
Speaker 2:Oh, hard stop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But thank you so much for taking time for one more
Speaker 8:I hope to be back soon guys. Thank you for having
Speaker 6:me Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Great to
Speaker 1:see appreciate having you on the show.
Speaker 2:Talk
Speaker 1:to soon, Brian. Have a good rest of your day. Bye. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Wanted to ask him about Super Bowl ads Oh, specifically like how how they're thinking about I I know they've run an ad in the past Yeah. That they they haven't been a Position. Annual spender on that front.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Well, they do those annual showcases sort of like the WWDC style. You wouldn't expect it from Airbnb because they're not necessarily introducing like a new iPhone. But Brian's been very outspoken about putting the whole team on an annual cadence, a rhythm of releasing all of the information, packing Yeah. Packaging everything up, getting everyone to, you know, rush towards one deadline.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting way to run the business.
Speaker 2:We got cut off on The Sun King of Hollywood
Speaker 1:We did.
Speaker 2:About David Ellison and Vulture.
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I encourage you to go read it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You should go read it. It's a very long piece. It goes on and on
Speaker 2:and on. But So many great stories.
Speaker 1:You should go check it out in Vulture.
Speaker 2:I'm glad that we know that the the father and son are dogfighting together.
Speaker 1:I mean, some great some great writing from Reeves over at Vulture.
Speaker 2:Matthew Go check it out. But first,
Speaker 1:before we go into that, let me tell you about Graphite. Dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes, trademarking himself. He's trademarked. The actor plans to use trademarks of himself saying, alright, alright, alright, and staring at a camera to combat AI fakes.
Speaker 1:And the print headline is actor is not alright with AI fakes. I love it. Over the past year over the past several months, the Interstellar and Magic Mike star has had has had eight trademark applications approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office featuring him starring, smiling, and talking. His attorney said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey's voice or likeness without permission, an increasingly common concern for performers. Maybe we'll have to get a trademark on.
Speaker 1:You're watching TBPN, so we will get paid when someone generates a deep fake of us. The trademarks include a seven second clip of the Oscar winner standing on a porch, a three second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree and an audio an audio of him saying, alright. Alright. Alright. His famous line from the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, which I know you haven't seen, but I don't think I've seen Dazed and Confused either.
Speaker 1:Tyler, have you seen Dazed and Confused?
Speaker 6:No.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just a little bit before all of our times. Maybe we gotta lock in and watch that. Is there anything else in this, Matthew McConaughey piece? What else is he doing here?
Speaker 2:He says my team and I wanna know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it's because I approved and signed off on Yeah. We want to create a clear, perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution Mhmm. The norm in an AI world. So, lawyers lawyers finding a way.
Speaker 1:Well, if you do pay Matthew McConaughey like Salesforce has for an advertisement and you wanna run it on connected TV on streaming TV, you gotta go to vibe.co where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is interesting. Yeah. I It doesn't seem like they're gonna trademark this and then go to Chattypete and say like, hey, you wanna license my likeness? It feels like he realizes the value of like doing a handful of big deals with a Salesforce Sure. And probably wants to keep keep doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'd be interesting to see if every all talent needs to go and and File trademarks? Certain
Speaker 1:at a certain level. I wonder what he's what what his total all in cost for all of those trademarks is. It's not super cheap to file a trademark. We've done it. You know, it's not nothing.
Speaker 1:It's not it's not a billion dollars. But what did what did Rune say? He replied to the deciphering of the the Rune elves vague post. Rune said the elves have left for Valinor. And Boaz Barak says, our internal models are so good they can decipher Rune's posts.
Speaker 1:Says Boaz, is a computer scientist at Harvard and OpenAI. And Rune says, after a vague post gains a certain level of mystique, I lose the ability to correct misconceptions. I'll let them have it. And Branny Girl says, I was just made aware of John's theory that you were literally just watching Lord of the Rings and live tweeting. No one no one looked to see if he had tweeted, you know, Gandalf has reached the Shire.
Speaker 1:The the fireworks have started in the Shire. They're having breakfast in the Shire. No one no one checked on that. So maybe that's the
Speaker 6:next one. Speaking of OpenAI, have some breaking news. They partnered with Cerebras. Oh, yeah. So there's a 750 megawatts worth of, like, capacity over
Speaker 1:Woah. In three Oh.
Speaker 2:Three That's a big
Speaker 1:oh, no. That is massive news. Is massive news. Well deserving of the flash bang. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it seems like Cerebras is on an absolute tear post croc deal. There are there are a ton of rumors swirling out about financings and and IPOs, and it seems like they're in a great great place. Do we know anything more about the partnership between OpenAI and Cerebras?
Speaker 2:It's in the journal. Okay. Multi billion dollar agreement.
Speaker 6:I think $10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:10,000,000,000?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Through 2028.
Speaker 1:Wow. So That's very exciting. I'm very interested to see how they how they integrate it. Are they running four o on it? Are they
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I assume I mean, it's definitely I mean, not definitely, but I would be very surprised if it's going to anything besides just like inference. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. But but what are they inferencing? Because they also do Sora video generation. That's a different model that might need different silicon at a certain point. OpenAI is working with Broadcom on custom chips.
Speaker 1:They're co developing stuff with NVIDIA. They're working with AMD. There might be an Intel deal at some point. Who knows? Like, they they they obviously they use every part of the semiconductor supply chain.
Speaker 1:And, and how Cerebras fits in. It doesn't feel like it's just like, oh, OpenAI now runs everything on Cerebras. It's probably a particular piece of the model architecture or a particular model. Maybe when you go to a deep research report or do some reasoning, it needs to be faster. I'm I'm not exactly sure where they would be taking advantage of it, but it is exciting for them.
Speaker 1:I don't know. That's certainly certainly
Speaker 2:Freebris raising one on 22,000,000,000 is the rumor. They're doing the meme. Yeah. Remember the meme 2021? It was like the classic round was like one on 20.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And but they're, of course, doing it at
Speaker 1:At a p m. And also, I mean, good news for the the OpenAI folks, you know, they have the 1,400,000,000,000.0 in deals. So they do another 10,000,000,000 deal, it's just 1.41. And at that point, you just round out. It still rounds down to 1.4.
Speaker 1:So you're still good.
Speaker 2:Nobody's worried.
Speaker 1:It's a rounding error. It's a literal rounding error. Yep. You're you're you're good at this point.
Speaker 2:Plant says every guest on CNBC is like, yeah, we are concerned with the end of the global order and death of US institutions, but we are looking forward to double digit EPS growth this year, so we want to remain focused on that.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Real.
Speaker 1:So it's a tough time to be navigating politics and business. But we're we're having fun in the trenches.
Speaker 2:We we already covered this one earlier. What are the odds looking like on will Elon win his case against OpenAI? Yes. Calshi says 36% chance.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams actually build, create, code back prototypes and apps.
Speaker 2:Tyler was joking around earlier. He was saying, I'm gonna move to Oakland Oh, yeah? And become a resident with a chance of being a juror in the trial.
Speaker 1:I feel like there's a there's a plot of a movie with that where, you know, I I you you try, you know, that if you really are a a crazy corrupt lawyer, you try and get a plant on the jury. They're making an open AI movie. Maybe they should make a second movie about this, the the story of Tyler sneaking his way on the jury. And and and the whole time, you're just like you're just like, look, guys. We gotta we we we gotta settle this in a way that maximizes the total amount of compute in The United States and ultimately delivers AGI as fast as possible.
Speaker 1:And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Someone's guilty here. Skilled AI has
Speaker 2:Well, okay. So through this or market is market is low volume. Okay. It's now up to 57% chance.
Speaker 1:That Elon wins? Yes. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:What's at stake? What like, if if Elon Musk wins, what does that do? Is that just a settlement? Is that just some monetary penalties? Does Elon have the state have the chance of getting equity in OpenAI?
Speaker 1:Because at at a certain point, if you convert it to a for profit and you can just have a settlement where he gets 10,000,000,000 in stock, it doesn't really change the structure. He doesn't get a board seat. That's kind of a kind of a nonissue, even if he wins. But then there could be the nuclear option where he wins and he and he gets control and gets a board seat or gets a majority stake. I mean, if you run back the clock and you look at how much he donated, if you if you weight ownership by nonprofit donations, which is a crazy thing to do.
Speaker 1:That's I don't think on the table. You you would wind up with a very, very different control structure. But it is it is an exciting time, and I'm sure the court reporting will be fascinating. I wonder if there will be cameras in the courtroom and if we'll get more testimonies
Speaker 2:every somebody sketching. Right?
Speaker 1:Maybe. Yeah. We might just get the the the court the court
Speaker 2:Is it have we figured out why they still do sketching?
Speaker 1:It is fascinating. I think
Speaker 2:Is it just for fun?
Speaker 1:I think it's just it has aura. It has it has motion. Like, there's nothing
Speaker 2:I love how the person sketching can just have so much ability to make the person look cool or really
Speaker 1:a photographer does too.
Speaker 2:Photographer does not as much leeway
Speaker 1:your nose and then you look like a fool or they can catch you from a really great angle with perfect lighting, you look like a hero. They can frame things up.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying, if Tyler was The sketch artist is a lot. Be mocking Yeah. And it'd be hard to catch him Yeah. Whacking.
Speaker 1:Well, didn't they do that with SPF?
Speaker 6:That is an all time
Speaker 2:that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's they just gave him the GigaChad filter on
Speaker 2:Maybe that's because let's pull up this courtroom sketch.
Speaker 1:Yes. We have our next guest
Speaker 2:in the Oh, we do. Waiting room. That's probably more important.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Gusto first. It's the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium
Speaker 2:are just not allowed. That makes sense. But but I'm saying why don't we like, is that not a rule that we could at one point say like, okay, we can have one camera in the court?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe there's a lobbying group. Maybe there's a union. It's just the way people like it. Big sketch, big pencil, big colored pencil.
Speaker 1:Well, we have our next guest. Welcome to the stream, Madhu. How are you? How are you?
Speaker 4:Gentlemen, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Oh, you gave us a preview of the wrist, Jack. What's on the wrist today?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. I I figured this was gonna happen. The liquid And FP Journa today.
Speaker 1:Woah. There we go. That is beautiful. Fantastic.
Speaker 4:And what's behind the t 30?
Speaker 1:T 30. Very nice. And what's behind you? The liquid nitrogen. You're doing serious business.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I got a I got a few tanks of liquid nitrogen behind me Okay. Which were actually, like, making a ton of ruckus a couple of minutes ago.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? And I'm
Speaker 4:I'm I'm glad they're not anymore. Yeah. They were, like, hissing and making all kinds of noise.
Speaker 1:So so you're you're fully funded. You have a lab. You have a team. You're building. What are you building?
Speaker 1:What's the first product? And I'm sure I'd love to go into the far future, talk about data centers in space. And then I also wanna go back and talk about your career at Robinhood since this is the first time on the show.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's been a long time coming.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 4:has. So, yeah. What are we what are we doing here? So Yeah. Start out by telling you guys about AetherFlex.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The mission of the company is to build a power grid in space. Mhmm. And the core idea behind this Mhmm. When I started a little less than two years ago now, was that collecting electrical power or collecting power in orbit was this like really special and important energy source that had not really been thought of as such.
Speaker 4:And the reason is because if you place things in the right orbits, they're gonna be illuminated by the sun. The solar panels are nearly continuously.
Speaker 1:This is sunsink. Right? We learned this term yesterday. Yeah. Scott Nolan.
Speaker 1:Sun sync.
Speaker 4:Or the more specific one is called dawn dusk orbit Oh. Which is also sometimes called the terminator orbit.
Speaker 1:Oh, terminator orbit. Like that. We were talking about terminator two earlier on the show. The terminator orbit. The terminator orbit sounds like the one I wanna be in.
Speaker 1:So what yeah. What is special about the terminator orbit, and then how does that lead into the whole strategy for the business?
Speaker 4:The thing that's cool about it is is that it's always facing the sun, or nearly always facing the sun. Mhmm. So if if this is the Earth, right, and and the camera is the sun Mhmm. Then it sort of follows this orbit.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:If that makes sense. So it's kinda passing over sunrise and passing over sunset always.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. Got it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And the benefit of this is is if you take a solar panel, which is the cheapest form of energy as we know it today on Earth, problem is it's not terribly useful because it's very intermittent. It produces peak power for an hour or two in the middle of the day. If you take those same or very similar panels and you put them in orbit, they're gonna be producing power twenty four seven at nearly peak power.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So you just get so much more energy production out of effectively the same panels.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And also, lower earth orbit is actually kind of an interesting place to build electronics applications. Mhmm. So I started the company out with the goal of making energy and space a commercial business. And a little bit more on that, the idea was that the reason space isn't a bigger part of people's lives day to day is because it's like for for the large part of history, but mostly a government thing. Right?
Speaker 4:Where it's in one shape or form funded by the government or there's government pricing that kind of drives what the activity there is. But if you can find new ways for people to actually make money doing it, then you'll attract more young people to want to pursue those careers, and you'll just make space a more commercially relevant part of day to day life. Mhmm. So if the applications of space today are like earth imaging, telecommunications, defense, and Internet, what's that next thing? And my thesis was that energy would be the next thing.
Speaker 4:A little analogy to the past company that I I started. Yeah. The core idea when we started Robinhood was that if you thought of mobile as a platform, it was like back in 2012, 2013 era, then the applications that were built on top of it were like photo sharing, maps Mhmm. Email, you know, like, they were mostly digital services like that. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And the thesis that we had was that the next industry to sort of natively exist on this platform was gonna be financial services. And that's Robinhood. And the idea here is is that low Earth orbit is a platform Yeah. And that energy is the next vertical of the economy that's gonna natively exist there.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Much of the energy do you think will stay in space, just be routed around? Obviously, there's new narratives about what you can do in space with data centers and whatnot. But versus beam the the energy collected on the solar panel down to Earth via a laser or something like that. I've seen there's reflect orbital that's just doing mirrors.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of people that have said, hey. There's cheap and abundant solar up there twenty four seven in these orbits. Let's get it down to Earth. Where how are you thinking about where the power should be used?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, I think our our view on it is is we wanna have electrical power in orbit. Okay. And you can use that for two applications. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You can kind of think of the two applications that we're building Mhmm. As almost like appliances that you plug into this newfangled energy grid. Mhmm. And the first one is actually getting they're doing sub sub component assembly, like, right next to me, right over there. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So behind this this this container is our clean room, which kinda goes on for a long ways back there where the first satellite that's going to space is hanging out right now.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 4:So that first thing is basically the appliance that plugs into the energy grid
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And then beams power down to places where there's no power grid. Mhmm. So the use for this is gonna be places like DOD applications. Excuse me. Excuse me.
Speaker 4:Department of War.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Department of War. Applications. DOW.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Where there's no energy grid, where you can basically provide resilient, useful power Mhmm. Where there's a contested environment and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The other application is is rather than beaming the power down to the ground and doing things like powering artificial intelligence data centers, the more natural thing to do is cut out all those energy losses and take the chips and put them directly in orbit. Yep. Because they don't actually in the grand scheme of things, they're not the things that are the heaviest part of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So that's the galactic brain, and that's actually where a lot of our efforts are right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's exciting. I remember when we first talked about this, like, years ago thinking, you know, the natural reaction was gonna be, oh, what does this finance guy know about space? If there you know, if there's like, the math is so important. And if you get one number wrong in the spreadsheet, maybe the the economics don't work, and it's ten years out instead of two years out.
Speaker 1:But of course, you have a you have a math background. So I know you did the math. I know you crunched the numbers. But I'm interested to know how did you actually crunch the numbers to understand that now is the right time with the amount of funding you're going to bring in to the orbital launch cost, to the value of what you're doing up there, to the materials, how much a solar panel cost. There's all these different variables.
Speaker 1:They all have to synthesize into something that eventually makes profit within somewhat of a venture timeline, I imagine. Actual process? Were you talking to a team? Were you in an Excel sheet? Were you just asking an LLM to sort it out for you?
Speaker 1:Like, how did you do the back of the envelope to know that now is the right time that the economics can actually make sense on a reasonable timeline?
Speaker 4:Well, I did what any rationally minded person would do, is I made a big old spreadsheet.
Speaker 1:There we go. I'm terrible with spreadsheets. Uh-uh. I love it.
Speaker 4:In all in all seriousness, though Yeah. Like, I I kind of make this joke with people sometimes. When I started doing this, for all intents and purposes, I was a finance bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You could make the argument that was arguably perhaps the archetype of the finance bro in some ways. Yeah. But in in all seriousness, like, you know, I was approaching this as a novice, as a student of the field.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And the cool thing about this is is that artificial intelligence has made the learning curve dramatically, dramatically, you know, easier to cross. Mhmm. Because the hardest thing about physics I remember, because I studied physics and math in college, was you'd sometimes get like a textbook and you're trying to like learn a new subject. You end up sometimes just getting stuck in the first chapter of it because you don't know the formalism. You're you have to in order to learn these things, have to learn them in the language that they're written, obviously.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But the difference is now you can just ask questions as you understand them, and, you know, artificial intelligence will kind of meet you there. So it's been a huge accelerant in learning Mhmm. Sort of the ins and outs of doing it. But beyond that, look, we're a team of, like, 30 people.
Speaker 4:We've got optics experts. We've got folks from JPL. We've got folks from SpaceX. We've got folks from the what's it called? Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 4:we've done pretty deep foundational work in understanding kinda how all the components work together, what the economics of them are, asking questions like, what is the raw cost of this? Right? What is the cost to buy a component versus what's the cost to manufacture it from raw ingredients? You know, and if you see the delta in any one of these things being too big, you kinda know you have to ask the question why. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But to kinda answer the question that you started out with, right, the goal from the beginning was how do we down cost this down? How do we make this as close to the sort of theoretical minimum cost? And if we do that, does this make sense? Does this make sense at bigger scale? And I think that there's a path to doing that, But you the cool thing about it is the path starts with actually showing that you can do this.
Speaker 4:So and by the way, you guys should come out when we do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're
Speaker 4:gonna have a demonstration this summer ideally because we have two satellites going up that are actually gonna beam power down from space. So we're gonna have a something between a scientific conference Yeah. And like a mini Burning Man in the desert Yeah. Where we'll where we'll show what this looks like in
Speaker 1:real life. Yeah. Remarkable speed. I feel like the modern space company, Varda, did a little bit of this where it's like, if you're gonna be taken seriously as a space company, you gotta get up into space quickly, start get up there, get the experience, do something, iterate, start the process instead of, you know, 10 of, oh, yeah. We're gonna go one day, but it's gotta be the perfect system.
Speaker 1:You know, Varda went up and back, and I think there were a whole bunch of chaos that happened in space, but they've learned a lot, and it obviously improved the second, third. And then already, the Varda launches have become kind of old news. Oh, yeah. No. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess they're up and back again. That happened, and it just becomes part of the business. So I I I love that you're moving so quickly there. Talk to
Speaker 4:me about were inspirational for me in that regard. Like, I talked to I talked to Will Brewey
Speaker 1:at Yeah.
Speaker 4:In the early days. I once called him my space Sherpa. And I think for that exact reason, I think they went from concept to real thing in space. Doesn't have to be perfect. Doesn't have to be the exact version of the thing that you're gonna be doing forever and ever.
Speaker 4:But, like, you're much better off just demonstrating it
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:In year one, year two, year three rather than waiting ten years because the odds that the thing doesn't work are still pretty high. Yeah. You might as well get it out of the way early.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta blow some stuff up if you're working in the aerospace industry broadly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You gotta be comfortable make you gotta be comfortable, like, having stuff not work and Yeah. Iterating from
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What kind of weird groups are coming out of the woodwork to try to help, try to get you guys to help them do data center stuff in space? Because there's a lot of different types of groups that seem like they have an incentive to just do something like a space data center just to just for narrative purposes. Right? Mhmm. I mean, this whole thing heated up because you had a handful of SpaceX investors really start to get excited about it.
Speaker 2:But I imagine you've got some kind of strange pitches because like you guys are working on this problem broadly and people are like, hey, do you have power? I wanna put some chips up.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're cooking some stuff. Stay tuned on that.
Speaker 2:We got
Speaker 4:some Stay tuned. Some good stuff we're cooking up. I will say, though, I think the credit for this goes to Bezos, who was looking just, like, very professorial in that talk that he gave last fall, where he was like, data centers in space might happen in the twenty thirties, and then just everybody in the world was like, no. We're actually gonna do this in the next five years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I will say though that there is something kinda interesting to this point, which is that I think a lot of the people in the space industry see this data centers in space concept as one of the first novel ways to make money in space in kind I of a long would say in in about a decade. And I think that that that's an important point and, like, wanted to kind of pause on for a second because the reason space isn't a bigger part of our lives is because we haven't really figured out how to, like, justify people working on it in mass numbers, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Starlink has been a big a big part of Starlink, feel like, is the best example of like, hey, if you just build the capability of going up and down a lot, then you can build a lot of other capabilities, telecom being one of them. One thing I'm curious about is how has it been like building and running this company versus Robinhood? You've sort of like done the meme of like make your money in finance and then work on the thing that like you really wanna work on. Of course, I'm sure you really wanted to work on on Robinhood as well.
Speaker 2:But is it like con you know, at the same time, like you have so much to prove. Right? Like you needed you wanna you wanna do something at Robinhood scale or bigger. Right? Which is a high bar.
Speaker 2:But then at the same time, there's maybe more, I would hope, like some element of like even just like calmness because Mhmm. You're like it's not so existential as I feel like early companies are where it's like I need to I just need to like I need to make something in this world. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. A couple of thoughts on this. It kinda kinda hit the nail on the head. This is something that I think about pretty often. Because at the on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kinda my happy place, so I do like that a lot.
Speaker 4:At the same time, it's, like, kind of a brutal reminder of, like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard. Because you have all the problems of, like, a small company, in my case, all over again, right, where you've got, like you've got an you know, a a function within your organization where there's, like, one person working. Right? And that person, for whatever reason, leaves.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? And then you're like, well, gotta rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, yep, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter, and then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's gonna do the thing. So in many ways, it's like it's really hard.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. It's like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You get you get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then you if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more and and pushing yourself even further.
Speaker 4:I also did do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point. Right? I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, that's this is, like, new company on absolute hard mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, there just is the reality that in enterprise software, you can get a customer to pay you pretty quickly if you build something that works in in hard tech and anything that requires government approval or real science and r and d.
Speaker 1:Like, the money is just gonna be further down the road, and so that's gonna require Yeah. More risk. That's just a fact.
Speaker 2:When people talk about progress in space or really any human Mhmm. Domain, there's this general sentiment that, okay, this thing this thing that we wanna do is really hard, but robots will be able to do it in like a few years. Mhmm. So and and you're you're looking a little concerned, which is why I wanted to ask. What about the process so far?
Speaker 2:I'm sure you've been pitched by various robotics companies that wanna help speed up processes internally or or help with the work that you're doing. Is there anything that that's really adding a lot of value today And
Speaker 3:There's not
Speaker 1:a lot of
Speaker 4:robotics going on here. No.
Speaker 2:This is like pretty figured.
Speaker 1:Like Just fire up
Speaker 4:the welder. Not to say it's not to say that that's not gonna happen. By the way, there is a welder, I think, either in the corner or it got moved back to my garage.
Speaker 1:Have you picked up any new skills? Can you use a blowtorch now? Are you are you are you learning this stuff? Or I mean, imagine you have a team, but every once in a while, you know, you wanna take the you wanna take the crane for a spin.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you gotta do it yourself. Exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm really good at opening boxes.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go. That's good.
Speaker 4:I joke around with the team about this sometimes. I'm like, yeah. I left a software company to start a hardware company, but somehow I ended up with a job that's emails and spreadsheets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 4:No. But it is fun because I do get to I mean, my background is in physics, so I get to think about the actual physics of it pretty often. But we have a team of people that's actually doing assembly and doing a lot of the hardware design, but I get to live vicariously through them. Yeah. And I can't I can't show you this right now, but literally there is assembly happening, like, and off.
Speaker 4:You'll see people walking behind me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I see them.
Speaker 4:Because they're, like, carrying boxes and stuff in
Speaker 1:there Yeah.
Speaker 4:For for the first satellite that goes up.
Speaker 1:Yep. When we watch tours of Abilene, Texas and see data centers, there are a lot of people buzzing around. It feels like, you know, even if you just get an off the shelf like NVL 72, NVIDIA rack, there's people that are maybe doing wiring or dealing with cooling issues or a variety of things, a chip that's, you know, died and you need to replace it. That all feels really hard to do in space. I heard one pitch that was sort of making the case that wafer scale compute could be more popular in space because you want the entire model on one chip that's just in one satellite.
Speaker 1:You don't wanna put a NVL 72 up into space or whole rack. You're just gonna have more problems in space. And so it's gonna live on one sort of complete system. We asked the CEO of Cerebras if this is in his forecast, he said, no. I'm I'm not really interested in in the next three to five years.
Speaker 1:And then he went and did a $10,000,000,000 deal with OpenAI. So, he he kinda denied that that was on the road map. But what do you think the shape of, like, the compute workload or the compute hardware that you will eventually put into space or or any company would put into space? What what will be the norms? What will be the, you know, the the the full like, we we have we very much coalesced around, like, one rack.
Speaker 1:And AMD and NVIDIA, they all work within rack scale architectures. What will be the equivalent on a satellite bus that is compatible with a Starship or a SpaceX rocket? Like, what what will the shape of the compute stack be in space?
Speaker 4:Yeah. The way that I think about it is in terms of the workloads and the energy draw or said workloads.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And there's versions of this in the future that are more ambitious, right, where you say, we'll get to much, much bigger scale integrated power levels per satellite.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But I think the from my perspective, the right starting point is to say, what can you do right now in terms of satellite size, power envelope per satellite, and can you solve meaningful problems with that? Right? Because if you're trying to do something brand new like this, you wanna you wanna you wanna sort of like you wanna have a conscious approach to how you take on risk
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Technical risk more specifically. And if your idea is predicated on making something that's like, you know, the size of 10 football fields on day one, you might wanna see if there's a way to do it much smaller at like satellite sizes that are commonplace. Mhmm. So the the thought process is is that we'll start out in the next eighteen or next twelve to eighteen months or so with demonstration missions
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Culminating in a first of its kind satellite from us that has, let's say, the 10 to 20 kilowatt electrical power drop that powers a set of eight to 10 interconnected GPUs that can host a model and do inference on it. So inference, I think, is the primary initial use case for this. There's the idea of, like, could you do training with this, or could you do stuff that requires massive interconnectivity? Mhmm. And it's possible, I think.
Speaker 4:I think the orbital mechanics of it might be challenging if you're trying to connect a 100,000 GPUs together. Yeah. But you don't wanna start there because it's it's kinda interesting because we kinda ran into the same problem when we were working on power beaming from space, where the old versions of that concept called for one gigantic satellite that would beam power down with microwaves. And it it a byproduct of the frequency of light and the aperture sizes that you would need, that thing called for, like, satellites that are, like, one to five kilometers in diameter. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, that's too much. Like, if you if your demo mission is a kilometer wide satellite in space, let me give you a little hint. You're probably not gonna get funded for that. Like, there's there's probably not funding out there Mhmm. To, like, spend a billion dollars on something that may or may not work for the first time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Are you are are you how
Speaker 4:I think about it too.
Speaker 1:Feeling any any pushback yet or pushback coming on the horizon around, like, space junk, blotting out the sun? It it's annoying when I'm stargazing. Is that something we need to worry about? Is that something you should be worried about even if the worries are unfounded, you need to get out ahead of from messaging perspective, like how a lot of the AI data centers probably should have been talking about recycling water a year ago. So that never became an issue.
Speaker 1:It did, and then it got debunked, but it still was something that, you know, took over the news cycle for a few days at least.
Speaker 4:No. I think it's a good point. So on space junk in general, I think a couple of things. You have to look at space and realize that it's gonna get commercialized.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And that might happen this year. It might happen five years from now. It might happen ten years from now. But I think that there is an inevitability that as humans exhaust or really push the the boundaries on, like, the resources on planet Earth
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That we're gonna look to space to do more stuff there. So I think my starting point is there's going the civilization that we wanna build has a massive footprint in orbit. And so the question is is how do you design these satellites, and how do you design these mega constellations that are you know, I hope in the next ten years putting gigawatts or more power up so that actually works and doesn't create massive problems with things like the Kessler syndrome. And we think about that from the beginning. We think about the sort of component choices that we have to make sure that as we're deorbiting them that they're made with components that can demise on reentry.
Speaker 4:And there's a lot of work that's actually going into this already to make sure that, you know, there's this what's it called? Where you could basically disambiguate the space that your satellites are in. That being said, there is space junk out there. There's actually a lot of effort to sort of identify where it is, to track it, and to do orbital maneuvers to make sure that you can protect your spacecraft against it. I appreciate really big.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sorry, Brody. Any plans to go to space yourself? Oh, yeah. Blue Origin?
Speaker 2:It's it's gotta be a little bit weird, like, working on something. It's like working on, a restaurant, but you never actually go there, you know?
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. Jared Isaacman's been. He's running. I feel I feel very confident with him at helm at NASA's given that he's been to the the thing that he's in charge of. We gotta get you out there.
Speaker 1:What's the plan?
Speaker 4:He's a good dude. He seems very fit too. Seems like he's like seems like he's he's he was able to survive that and had the build for I gotta tell you guys to make
Speaker 7:a total honest
Speaker 2:fit because he's been to Leah.
Speaker 1:Space. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Oh, you think the space did the fitness for him? Yeah. In that case, count me
Speaker 2:in.
Speaker 1:It's it's a miracle up there. That's funny. One last Oh, yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 4:In all seriousness on this one, can you imagine how upset your stomach would be in the space? Like, can you imagine the pressure changes and, ugh.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be So that's
Speaker 4:my reaction.
Speaker 2:You're gonna you're gonna let the data centers.
Speaker 1:Okay. Last question. Centers. The the Chevy Corvette z r one x just posted a zero to 60 time of one point six eight seconds. It goes, quarter mile time of 8.675.
Speaker 1:Can we call it a supercar? Is America back in the supercar game? What's your take on the z r
Speaker 2:one x?
Speaker 4:I think so. But I'll I'll say this. Mhmm. I don't think people give a shit about that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:I think what people care about is is the car fun to drive, and what they should do is they should make that thing with a manual.
Speaker 1:Oh. I
Speaker 2:think that's You guys
Speaker 4:know I love cars.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 2:That's a good take.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sort of a a Chevy Corvette ST would be the move. Something like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. That Corvette's really cool. It's based on a or they it was, like, inspired by the '4 five eight Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to like about it. They set the the the speed record for American cars. I really like how they have the the Chevy executives driving it on the track, setting the records, the employees themselves. They don't just hire some I think that's really cool.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's equivalent of, like, sending an Aetherflux employee to space. You know? It's like, it's a little bit of a gimmick, but it just feels like, oh, they really take seriously.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's gimmick at all. It's, like, way cooler to be like, okay.
Speaker 3:Don't want
Speaker 2:to Yeah.
Speaker 1:What did say?
Speaker 4:If they wanna do a gimmick, you know what would be a really good one? Put a manual in
Speaker 1:that thing. There we go. Back to the manual. Yes. 100%.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. Do you
Speaker 2:see any predictions around, yeah, just just cars, supercars with manual transmissions? It feels like there's certainly a lot of enthusiast interest, but it's it it feels like potentially one of those things where, the TAM is actually just like, you take like people that will buy a supercar and then like people that will buy a manual supercar because you get into this, you start running this calculation of like, okay, I'm getting this car and then and then I'm on a hill in San Francisco. Maybe I'm Sam Altman, I'm I pull up on a hill and maybe I drive stick but I'm in a $4,000,000 car and it's starting to slide back. Sam
Speaker 1:Altman stalls f one on on Gary Street or something. Headlines.
Speaker 2:But I the the thing that I am bullish on is more analog controls in cars. Yeah. Anybody that's owned a Ferrari loves the the how the buttons get all sticky. I
Speaker 4:may or may not have been dealing with some sticky buttons this morning. No.
Speaker 1:It's brutal.
Speaker 2:Sticky the sticky button thing is is truly so funny. They're like, yeah. Like, we made these and all after a few years, everything is gonna feel like a kid was eating candy in the car. And if you wanna replace it, it's gonna be Yeah.
Speaker 4:You go to turn the volume knob, and, like, the volume knob, like,
Speaker 2:comes off on your hand, you're like,
Speaker 4:this is disgusting. Disgusting. I gotta tell you guys, like Yeah. The fact that there are not too many manuals that are being made today, it it, like and I love cars. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It it just takes people like me out of it. Right? I'm just like, if you make a manual, I'm in. But otherwise, there's plenty of cool cars out there.
Speaker 2:Well, one exciting one exciting thing that that I've been thinking about is I feel like in fifteen years from now, it is not unreasonable to imagine that it is illegal to drive a car yourself on the roads. Like, some point, autonomous vehicles will become so safe and driving a car yourself is so dangerous as it, you know, one of the the number one causes of, know, motor vehicle accidents being the number one causes of death, that car manufacturers will start making insane enthusiast cars that are effectively track only because you have some percentage of the population that's just like, they're not buying a nine eleven to like use as a daily. They're like, I love cars. I'm gonna get this, you know, something like they're they're making, a w one track only edition. Right?
Speaker 2:And I could see, like, track only cars having, like, a real renaissance.
Speaker 1:That'd be interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That kind of stuff is happening already, but I will tell you this. While such a thing might happen in California, Florida man will never stand for that.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 4:There will like, Texas will never stand for that. Yeah. There are parts of this country that simply will not.
Speaker 2:From their cold,
Speaker 1:dead hands, for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 4:But, like, Florida man's not down with that.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I just feel like I I I see it, but at the same time, eventually, you know, these
Speaker 1:The safety the safety data is gonna be overwhelming for perfect self driving cars in a decade. Like, they're just never gonna
Speaker 2:get It will literally be like moms against self driving, but they're talking about, like, driving Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But but the it's so dystopian though. Yeah. Right? It's so dystopian.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying I'm excited about it.
Speaker 4:Because because cars also I mean, if I'm gonna wax bullet, like, you're first
Speaker 7:thing on cars.
Speaker 4:Like, cars are really important. They represent freedom in my opinion. Right? They represent the idea of, like, being able to have the the freedom to, you know, explore the world, the geography of the of the landscape, of everything around us. Right?
Speaker 4:It's a feeling of, like, the wind in your hair, the the way the steering wheel feels in your hands when you go over a patch of road. Right? Like, the way all these things feel, like, it's not just about transportation. It's not just about the feeling of power. For me, I think it is, like, the embodiment of freedom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 4:And the idea of, like, going through a sort of, like, technological course and a course of human history where we make that freedom illegal, man, that's I find that to be super dystopian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's hope it doesn't happen. You can still ride a horse around if you want on many streets.
Speaker 2:We might see a resurgence in Yeah.
Speaker 1:Horseback horse.
Speaker 2:Stay with the People are like, I wanna live within horseback distance of my office.
Speaker 1:Give that horse a manual.
Speaker 4:But I don't think I don't think this is gonna happen. I don't think this is gonna happen in the next ten years.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:You know? Okay. Back on
Speaker 1:and we'll and we'll we'll see what happens. We'll check-in a decade. We'll check-in next month when there's some amazing California there's
Speaker 2:there's some like mileage tax that they're working on where you'll be allocated like a certain number of miles and pass that point. I know. Pass that point is like you're gonna pay Yeah. Acura Domo.
Speaker 4:Leave it to California to come up with all these brilliant ideas.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come
Speaker 2:Great to hang out
Speaker 1:with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Come back on. It's good to hang out, boys. As you have these launches, announcements
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Always welcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:We'll have you guys out too.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. Eleven Labs, build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.
Speaker 1:See, we have some we have a small piece of news and we'll bring in our next guest. CBS is preparing a new segment called Whiskey Friday.
Speaker 2:Whiskey Friday.
Speaker 1:Dacopo Dacopo deal. I can't pronounce the last name. Some staff were only first made aware of it because they encountered CBS testing set designs of the Faux Stott bar.
Speaker 2:Brought to you by
Speaker 1:Jack Daniels.
Speaker 2:Jack Daniels.
Speaker 1:They saw Cheeky Pint.
Speaker 2:Cheeky Pint.
Speaker 1:And they were like, we gotta have a Cheeky Pint at CBS.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cheeky Pint. Great concept. Yep. They got the faux bar.
Speaker 1:Whiskey Fridays.
Speaker 2:Hanging out. It's casual. But they're not drinking. So what if you did cheeky pint Oh. With whiskey?
Speaker 1:Wait. Is this a this cannot be a real photo. This is it has to be fake. Update. Here's what it may Okay.
Speaker 1:Look Because that makes no sense to just put a news desk in that type of set. Anyway, we'll have to tune in. We'll have to give it our review. But until
Speaker 2:Wait. One more Friday comes out. We'll review this second post. Because we were just talking about cars. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This post here from CDTV, The Goose says, remember when Quavo flexed driving 60 miles per hour? I go a mile a minute, skirt.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's actually quite slow on most freeways. For the speed limit 65 and most people are going 85, 60 might be time to speed it up, Quavo. Let's step it up. Let's step on the gas.
Speaker 1:Let's get you into a z r one x. Oh, boy. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Gabe, from Noise. He's the CEO, and we got some fantastic news. Thank you for waiting.
Speaker 2:On the show.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Welcome to the see
Speaker 2:you, dude.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 7:Absolute pleasure, gentlemen. It's great to be here.
Speaker 3:First time on the
Speaker 1:show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Noise.
Speaker 2:And get the Gong ready.
Speaker 1:I will I will warm up the Gong.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So my name is Gabe. I'm one of the cofounders of Noise. We started this project maybe at the 2025 when we started building it, but the idea is to build this trading platform for relevance. Right?
Speaker 7:So can we give users the ability to long or short trends, brands, ideas, and have these markets kind of be rooted to, social data in a way. So, you know, when you combine the trading activity and you combine the kinds of things you're seeing on Twitter or TikTok or Reddit, you kind of end up with this, objective measure of cultural relevance for different types of brands or trends. And for many reasons, we think that's extremely important for where the world is at today, but maybe we can jump into those that you guys think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe yeah. Maybe an example. So, like, we when we started covering LaBubu, we were like, this must mean it's about to be over. And I think it was.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot of the stock at least has Yeah. Sold off a lot. In that situation, there's a public company associated with the product. Just track. So that that You
Speaker 1:can track one trends, but, yeah. Walk me through more of how you pull out signal from all the noise around a brand. There's so many different data points that you can use to
Speaker 2:is a good example. Trends, in an era where people are spending more time in apps, more time in in all these like social relevancy, how much something is being talked about
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Is, there's less signal there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the process like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So Google Trends is you know, if you were to look at a market on noise, let's say it's Claude Code or it's Labubu, you would see something structurally similar to Google Trends.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:The problem with that is, you know, like, 20% of the information that is going into Google Trends is what actually matters in today's world, right, which Jordi was saying. You're seeing things on TikTok, on Instagram, on on Twitter. So the Lugru one's interesting. We basically, we partnered with Kaido first. So they were doing this already for the crypto industry specifically.
Speaker 7:So they're building social graphs on Twitter, and they were able to tell you, you know, how much relevance does Polymarket have versus CallSheet in that industry? How much relevance does, you know, AI compared to DeFi have? And then you can see kind of how that relevance changes over time. What we care most about is kind of the market component of it, which is, you know, it's great. Like, you can get a snapshot of where attention is today.
Speaker 7:Know, can you really trust it? That's that's something to discuss as well. But we wanna use markets to have kind of this forward looking nature and help, basically, all these different types of industries make decisions based off of trends and resource allocation. Right? So where are trends going to go in the future?
Speaker 7:Where is relevance going to shift? We're talking about movie theaters. Are we talking about you know, is Claude? Is anthropic still gonna be as important as it is today in the AI industry in '20 the 2026? These are all, like, extremely interesting questions.
Speaker 7:Right? So yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're pulling if you're if you're using signal from social and and these markets get to some amount of scale, there will become an incentive for, market participants to try to game it. Right? I can think of somebody spinning up a bot farm and and talking about Lububu millions and millions of times in a inorganic way. Have you guys thought about, like, parsing through all the noise and trying to find, like, real signal?
Speaker 7:Yeah. For sure. It's a good question. It's often, one of the number one questions we get. But we pull from a variety of sources.
Speaker 7:And I'd also add that the relevance on noise is very much market based. So it satisfies the criteria of any other market, which is if the relevance of, let's say, Claude or movie theaters or peptides is gonna go up, it's because people are inherently putting capital behind those positions. Right? They're longing it. And those are good questions, but I think the best question that we could try to answer right now is, is social media data alone today a good measure of relevance, a good measure of understanding the shared interest of the world?
Speaker 7:Our bet is that, you know, markets are probably the best coordination mechanism for these kinds of questions, and we just need markets to be a little better about reading where genuine interests are and where those trends are than social media data alone. So is it a solved problem? No. We'll continue to basically build in that direction, but it's definitely interesting.
Speaker 2:What what are some rising trends that you guys are thinking about building markets around for this year specifically?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I really indie rock music, I think Yeah. People aren't really noticing this, but it's it's been on the rise for the last eighteen months. My prediction is this is coinciding with this return to empty in person meta. Indie rock music is probably the best kind of music for
Speaker 2:that. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So that's one. We see ClawdCode. I think one of the interesting things is with noises, you kinda get to see where echo chambers are breaking. Right? Because ClawdCode was kind of this thing in Silicon Valley that took over the entire timeline, and everybody assumed, you know, nobody's using Chat2PT at this point, that these OpenAI products are basically in the dust.
Speaker 7:But the things that we were seeing is the engagement and and the kinds of interest that people have in Chat2PT is still higher than Claude no matter what. So when you actually compare these things side by side at a very global level, it's interesting to see where these trends are actually at.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. How do you think about relevancy to particular sub communities or niches? Because we were reading this piece in Vulture about David Allison. And we were joking that they were saying that Oracle is this sleepy, no name company that makes a lot of money, but it's not known or it's not popular.
Speaker 1:And in us, it was like in the headlines all last year. We were following it very closely. We know everything about the about the company. And so but but at the same time, understand where the Vulture writer is is talking about in the sense that like Oracle is not a company that
Speaker 2:They're like Oracle the sailboat company?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like if you stop someone on the street, they might not be talking about Oracle where they might know about Labooboo. So how do you think about someone's stock rising relative just to their niche?
Speaker 7:Yeah. One of the most interesting things that we found when we launched our beta Mhmm. In summer of last year was that people were kind of you know, we kept seeing maybe 40 of the users that we had invited onto the platform using it every single day. Every single day. Consistent time patterns.
Speaker 7:And we were like, yeah, why the hell are you using this so much? Right? So we're trying to talk to these people, and part of it was they were they wanted these niche trends to be part of their daily news cycle. Right? They wanted to see how the relevance is changing based off things that they really cared about.
Speaker 7:And mind you, we're talking about some projects in in the crypto industry that people don't really know. Your audience probably doesn't even know exist.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it was about kind of engaging with other people who are also interested in those things or have differing opinions about those things And basically, creating communities around these niche trends. So, yes, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:More interests are becoming niche over time. Yeah. But still, the echo chambers and seeing where you're actually at is is something crazy.
Speaker 1:We love we we love it. Echo.
Speaker 2:Love echo chambers. We celebrate echo chambers.
Speaker 1:Let's Give me the lead. Who led the round? How much did you raise?
Speaker 7:Paradigm, 7,100,000.0.
Speaker 2:Great hit with authority. With authority. Congratulations. Thank you so
Speaker 7:much for
Speaker 1:coming on
Speaker 2:the show. Great great to finally have you on the show, Gabe.
Speaker 1:Great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Excited to Cheers, guys. Excited to track noise on noise Yeah. In the near future.
Speaker 1:We will talk to soon.
Speaker 2:Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Bye. Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. We have Alfred back on the show for the second time from Listen Labs. He's the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. Welcome back.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? You so much.
Speaker 5:I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:I'm excited Welcome to be back.
Speaker 2:I love the energy. We're fired up. Yes. Fired up. And we got a we got a special we got a Oh, mean, quick.
Speaker 2:Reintroduce yourself to people that missed the first appearance, and then we'll get into the special deliveries that you got for us.
Speaker 5:Amazing. Yes. So I'm Alfred. I'm the CEO of Listen Labs. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:What we do at Listen is an AI that speaks to thousands of people Mhmm. And tells you what they want and why, and this helps you develop better products or fix your marketing campaigns. And what you have in the room with you is some incredible products that have been developed using Lissa. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. So take us
Speaker 7:through What what
Speaker 1:what is this? How are you involved? What happened with this crazy Did you
Speaker 2:want John to Who wear
Speaker 1:are you talking to? You didn't talk to me about
Speaker 3:this, but
Speaker 1:somebody's
Speaker 5:gonna Are you gonna have
Speaker 2:put them on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who's happening
Speaker 2:with that?
Speaker 5:You know, products are all about finding the right audience. Right. And so these are shorts from Shubbies, which has been one of our early customers.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 5:they use listen to test their prints, test their fitting, and, actually, one of them, they developed a a new entire new product line for kids Mhmm. Kids shorts where they used to listen to interview hundreds of kids, and they figured out, like, the liner in the shorts they had previously were very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 5:cool. Maybe something for you to wear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very, very fascinating. What so
Speaker 5:Maybe ten
Speaker 2:years ago. What what are some of the challenges with consumer brands when it comes to under, like really understanding your customers? Because I think with know, with with a SaaS company, early stage SaaS company, you can almost you can just talk to all your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can actually get
Speaker 2:them. Many because there's Yeah. Maybe you have
Speaker 1:And there's probably a power law where there's one customer who's providing 80% of your revenue in the first couple
Speaker 2:of whereas with consumer brands, you go talk to 20 customers Yep. And then, like, you could get, like Like, 20 different answers. Terrible signal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you just happen to to pick incorrectly.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, like, you in the olden days, you were stuck in this paradigm between you could use a survey, but then you would get a ton of people not really paying attention.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And they would answer your your questions, but you wouldn't get, like, rich deep insights. You could then have one on one interviews, but as you said, if you have thousands of customers, it's really hard to do them at scale. And so with Listen, you get the best of both worlds where you have an AI talk to all of your customers, and then you can figure out the nuances, like which segments work, which don't. And people are much more honest talking to an AI than talking to a person. It's something that we found out.
Speaker 5:So you get kind of their feedback is more driven to how they actually will behave in the future.
Speaker 2:I have a company that that I'm gonna email and tell them to use ListenLabs. I don't know them at all. It's this company. They make sound machines for kids. Oh.
Speaker 2:And I've had multiple of them. I don't know why I've had multiple of them because both of them, when you're trying to adjust if you just like touch the thing in the wrong way, it triggers like a motion thing and it just starts playing music. Like, it literally I went I was e I I was messaging Quietly trying to I I I felt bad. I was messaging the the support Yeah. After a week ago saying like Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Please let the CEO know that your product makes bedtime worse.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:no. A disaster. And I will buy another I will buy another one
Speaker 1:As soon as you fix it.
Speaker 2:But you need to fix it. I I'll give you the I'll give you the third chance. Yeah. And that that just seems like incident where they ship the product and then they're it sells well because it's in demand, but they're not actually paying attention to like how people experience.
Speaker 1:Do do you feel like you're able to pull out that emotional response from like, you you interview a 100 people, they're all like, yeah, it's okay. And then there's that one person that clearly found a fatal flaw with the product is animated about it. They're aggressive. They're emotional. Maybe they're screaming at the AI.
Speaker 1:Maybe they're being rude. You censor the expletives, but you know that there's emotion there that's valuable. Good good on you. And and you're able to give that more weight. Like, do you think about balancing out all the different the different emotions that come through in responses?
Speaker 1:Because sometimes they can get collapsed in AI models.
Speaker 5:Totally. Yeah. I mean, the CEO of Sweetgreen, I think, was on the on TPPN talking about this, how, like, surveys missed the outliers. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's the protein ball that they developed using lesson. But, like, the the other methods of collecting feedback miss the kind of the crucial piece of feedback that really matter.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And it's often about, like, one or two or or a couple of people that are part of your segment that will drive most of your revenue, and they will be much more animated and care much more. And so the AI is able to detect kind of their emotional the way they show up emotionally as well as kind of the nuances of how they answer the question. We have something called response quality. So the AI can rank how well this person kind of answers the question and how much they know about their product.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So it's able to kind of surface those outliers to you Yeah. And then, like, give you actionable recommendations.
Speaker 2:What is the actual workflow like in general in order to actually start talking with customers through Listen? I imagine it's also different with like a kid's product line with Chubbies. Like how do you actually facilitate getting a parent to allow their their kid to talk to a robot? I'm very curious.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Of course, you need the parental consent, but it's essentially four steps. So you start by asking your question, and which could be, you know, SaaS tools also use it like Replit. Mhmm. So they could ask how how should we what should we change in our product if you compare us to Lovable?
Speaker 5:And then Listen will go and recruit that audience for you. So we'll find Replit users as well as lovable users, and we have 30,000,000 people in our database. So we could find, like, pretty nuanced recruits. And then listen. We'll go and have video calls with them where they could potentially also share their screen.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So we can have thousands of those video calls, and then the AI will kind of analyze those and give you recommendations of what to do. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Take me back. We didn't really talk about your your your earlier career or the first time you were on the show. B Fake Image app, what was the story there? How did you just build it? How did you scale it?
Speaker 1:What was the value prop, and how did you wind up selling it too?
Speaker 5:Yeah. For sure. So we we my co founder and I, we built this AI consumer app, which was essentially kind of Ghiblify. You could Ghiblify yourself. You could do this Okay.
Speaker 5:Kind of image prompts Image transcription. It's able to
Speaker 1:transfer almost.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. And the real use case was creating Tinder profile pictures,
Speaker 1:of course.
Speaker 5:And so it, like, blew up on Reddit. We were on the front page of Reddit, and we had 20,000 downloads
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 5:In one day. And that was the inspiration behind Listen because we had these many users, and we were experimenting with LLMs at the time and thought it would be interesting to let an AI talk to our users. Mhmm. And it turned out to be really useful. So we're like, why are we making this shitty app?
Speaker 5:Like, let's just sell this thing. And and then we actually ended up in this limbo state where it did work for us, but still took us eighteen months of, like, making the product perfect before it became useful. And that's something I've learned that, like, being early looks the same as being wrong. Mhmm. And a lot of people we talked to told us they've already built the product that we were building, and it didn't work.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And so we had so much rejection. But now since we launched nine months ago and when I was last on TBPN Yeah. We've grown our revenue 15 x. We interviewed a million people.
Speaker 5:Let's go. Raised a 100,000,000 in Telco now, so let's go.
Speaker 2:There we go. Congratulations.
Speaker 5:I'm still trying to get used to the of, you know, Swedish. I'm I'm trying to amp it up, but
Speaker 2:No. I mean, this is night this is night and day from the last time. You're fired up. I love it. It's great.
Speaker 2:What's what what's next? Just just scaling on the on the customer side, hiring?
Speaker 1:The whole five Fortune 500. You them all.
Speaker 5:That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:Google, Nestle, Skims, Microsoft. There's a couple
Speaker 5:We have a list going after 500 companies, one at a time. But we have like, hiring is the number one priority, and we're trying to do these tricks to stand out. We did the the billboard. I don't know if you saw that where we had you know, and one one thing we've learned learned is that there's so many companies growing really fast, raising a ton of money, and so you just gotta communicate your culture
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And get people excited to join. And so we made this billboard that had just black text on on white where that led to a puzzle, an engineering puzzle, and that made it much more attractive for folks to, like, kinda join the team because they realized we're a team of, like, competitive programmers and and puzzle hunters overall.
Speaker 2:Puzzle hunters. Love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mike Isaac in the New York Times wrote a whole piece about how, like, how obscure billboards are in San Francisco. It's like a few people talking to each other, very in group, but I love when people do fun stuff with billboards.
Speaker 2:Gotta stand
Speaker 1:up. It's always great. Gotta
Speaker 2:stand up.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:So great to have you back on. I'm sure you will be back on this year with the amount of momentum you guys have looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And yeah. Enjoy this week. Thanks for this protein max bowl. We'll we'll split it. We can each still get like 50 grams of protein.
Speaker 2:Plenty. That's plenty.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Have a good rest
Speaker 1:of your day.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. TJ Parker asked a question.
Speaker 1:He said, why are there not a 100 times more weird consumer AI things going on? Nikita Beer answered. He said, hold that thought until Dom Hoffman launches. And Dom, quote tweeted and just said, sup. Of course, Dom is the creator of Vine.
Speaker 1:And his company is
Speaker 2:called Sup.
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:No. But it was a it was a good response. Dom created Vine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And in a number of other things. A fantastic creator on the Internet has has created a bunch of like fun moments on the Internet. I've been following his career for a long time. I enjoyed Vine.
Speaker 1:Were you ever on Vine?
Speaker 2:I was on it, but I never I never like fell in love
Speaker 1:with I created the Schizo added on Vine. No, not really. But I I was actually experimenting with the Vine format very seriously, and I would do these like hyper lapses and infinite loops. You could do this this fun format where you would take a little, like, basically an image as you went around your house. And if you ended at the start, it would be an endless loop.
Speaker 1:And Vine was very good about endlessly looping videos. So you could do all these cool, fun things with it. I had a lot of fun with that format. It was great.
Speaker 2:Did you see that Havana Syndrome is real?
Speaker 1:Apparently. This is crazy.
Speaker 2:No. Smith says Havana Syndrome was real and we got the device that causes it. Conspiracy theory that turned out true. A number of months ago, The US captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana syndrome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Havana syndrome Let's see.
Speaker 1:Disputed medical conditions starting in 2016 in about a dozen overseas locations. US and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months, including disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia, and headaches. Havana syndrome is not officially recognized as a disease by the medical community, but apparently there is reporting in CNN now that there's a device
Speaker 2:Well, have been a bunch of real investigations into because it's happening all over the world. People are like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel terrible? I'm hearing things. I have a headache.
Speaker 2:I can't balance. And so this was just a great mystery.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:CNN now reports the device linked to it was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration and DOD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits into just a backpack Mhmm. Which is scary.
Speaker 1:Will a defense tech startup build one and go through Y Combinator? Who knows? Stay tuned. We might see someone commercialize this technology any day now. Tyler, here's
Speaker 6:I wanna see someone if they're billing it, want them to use it on themselves like big Adler at Pilgrim. Oh, yeah. Cuts his leg up. Yeah. That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Prove that
Speaker 3:it works.
Speaker 6:He shoots the VC with things.
Speaker 1:Just kidding. Oh, I'm so dizzy. I gotta write you a term sheet. Al's says that jobs exist because important people want to have large pyramids of people reporting to them even if the pyramids do nothing useful. AI will not change this.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Fake jobs. In other jobs news, there's an opinion here. Our brightest minds are disappearing into finance, management consulting, and corporate law. And Is this one of like marinetti list.
Speaker 1:Are using our best minds to allocate resources optimally. How terrible. Of course, we love finance, management consulting and And corporate law. These are all valuable pieces of the economy. Are important.
Speaker 2:New research.
Speaker 1:Salesforce who we have the CEO of joining us right now. Mark Benioff is in the restream waiting room, and we will bring him in to the CBP in Ultradown. Mark, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:He's back.
Speaker 3:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Back for round two. I prepared for this interview. Prepared for this bad. I went No.
Speaker 2:We loved it. We loved it. I I will say it was one of the most fun Highlighting conversations we've had all last year. It was amazing. Wow.
Speaker 3:Really? No. Yeah. Well, then you guys are just not having enough fun in your whole life. I'm your biggest fun.
Speaker 1:Here here it comes. Here it comes.
Speaker 2:The Don't yourself short.
Speaker 1:The bogging starts. But I prepared for this interview by going to Slackbot, now powered by Anthropic. And I asked, what is the single best Metallica song? It said MasterOfPuppets. Agree or disagree?
Speaker 3:Okay, guys. I know that you are this isn't at the tip of your tongue, so I was ready. And I was gonna flip it for your partner so you can he can get all the the words because, you know, we had some issues last time.
Speaker 2:We did have some issues. The details. Are you gonna are you Are about to say you gonna give us Yes.
Speaker 3:Name your tune.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:It was not a great moment for your show.
Speaker 2:It was a rough moment. It was a rough moment.
Speaker 1:It was rough.
Speaker 2:You gonna sign that? Are you gonna sign that and send it to us so we can hang it in the rafters?
Speaker 3:I'm not. It's mine. You can get your own. Metallica.com. We run it actually on sales.com.
Speaker 3:No way. You can get to your Metallica album on there and all the other good stuff that you need to kind
Speaker 2:of Okay. So I'm gonna I'm gonna give the I'm gonna give my Mhmm. Recap of John using Slackbot Yeah. This morning. Sure.
Speaker 2:Okay. He this was an ASI moment
Speaker 1:Okay. For John. Okay.
Speaker 2:He was
Speaker 1:like I was very pleased with it.
Speaker 2:John we do the show all day long. There's a lot going on in Slack, and so catching up is tough. Yeah. This absolutely nailed the summary.
Speaker 1:It did.
Speaker 2:Immediately found something that was, like, very actually interesting Yeah. Important. And we're like, woah, we missed that.
Speaker 1:I probably, truthfully, had about, like, 200 notifications across 15 different channels as they build up. And I it basically put together a deep research report of every little item, picked it out, when am I mentioned, and it was exactly what I wanted to catch up. And then I went to it and I asked, okay. Clear all of the notifications. It couldn't do it, but it gave me the shortcut shift escape, and it didn't it in two seconds.
Speaker 1:So I was very satisfied. How has the response been from your customers?
Speaker 3:First of all, well, there's the response of my customer right there. I would say, I'm so excited that we could finally get this out of the shop and into people's hands. I've been using it myself for months. Yeah. It's completely changed my life.
Speaker 3:I think it will change your life. I think it'll change your show. I think it's gonna make everything better. Because, you know, we we've we've talked a long time about prompt engineering in AI. You know, when you're writing your prompt, you're kind of coming up with your question.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Now you really see the power of context engineering. That is, it's looking at all the data about your show and everything you guys have ever said. It can even read your DMs. And then it's coming in and it's saying, hey, right here, this is what you need to ask Marc Benioff this question.
Speaker 3:This is gonna this is the zinger for him. Yeah. And that's the prompt you could give it, which is, hey, based on everything we know about Marc, everything that's ever happened in the show, everything that's happening inside Slack now, plus everything that Anthropic knows, everything that everyone knows, what's the zinger for Mark? And then it's gonna come up with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about the the tone and the speed. I noticed that it responds like an LLM. It's giving me a few paragraphs. It's not acting like a person who might respond with on it and then, okay, here's what I found.
Speaker 1:And then it's like six different messages. Do you is that intentional? Do you like the the the tune, or do you see it evolving to your style over time? Where does all this go in terms of the the flavor of Slackbot's personality powered by
Speaker 3:product? Is really different than our last interview. We're going deep in product. Okay. So number one We
Speaker 2:love it.
Speaker 3:Number one, every company is gonna have a customer agent and an employee agent. And that's why we've been working on AgentForce, to build the orchestration layer, the observability layer so that companies can get out there with their agents. And that's what I've been so excited about. Then all the apps. Like, Slack is only one app we make.
Speaker 3:We have a whole bunch of apps like Tableau, our Sales Cloud, our Service Cloud, Marketing, Commerce, and and on and on and on. We have a whole family of apps that help you run your business. And then a huge set of data capabilities, including Informatica, MuleSoft, our data three sixty layer Mhmm. That let you federate and integrate your data, which means that it's gonna find all the data in your company and bring it together. Now, what you're not seeing yet in Slackbot, but what I have
Speaker 2:is that
Speaker 3:you just you just hit a button and it connects to all your Google sources also. Mhmm. And it connects to all
Speaker 2:your yourself. This is a fast takeoff scenario and you're like, we're keeping this for ourselves. Can't let Well, it
Speaker 3:I might like, I was at a conference for the last two days, really cool conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:I live in Hawaii, so I popped over to Honolulu. And it was called the Honolulu Defense Forum, and there's so many of my customers there. It was really cool. But I didn't have time to get briefed on all these customers. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I'm doing the briefing myself. I just say to Slackbot, in real time, I'm meeting with this customer. Mhmm. Tell me everything about the customer. And it's not just getting the experience from the public web
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But it's also then looking at all my proprietary databases and saying, boom. Here you go, Mark. You're ready. Mhmm. And the prioritization I I think you gotta have a great experience.
Speaker 3:I wanna hear your exact feedback after you kind of get into it for a few days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well
Speaker 3:because it's it's changed how I work. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I had a I had a great experience. I didn't feel like I needed a smarter model. It did seem like I was on Claude three, not four, five, which I've used and is great for
Speaker 3:some You wanna know why you feel that way?
Speaker 1:Why yeah. Why?
Speaker 3:You're getting the data from Slack. Mhmm. You have so much data about your business or what, you know, your show, your everyone. Mhmm. That you that's what you've been missing in all of your prompts.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're when you go on Anthropic or you go on Gemini or OpenAI or whatever you use Yeah. You know, it doesn't know anything about you. It doesn't have your context. It doesn't have your data.
Speaker 3:Yep. And that's what I mean context engineering. Yeah. It knows you now. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It really does. It knows so much about you, your company, everything you guys have done, what you've built, this great show you have. Yeah. And now it's able to really tell you. And you should like ask it like, hey, what are the three things we should do to, you know, increase viewership?
Speaker 3:What are we gonna what should we be doing to, you know, increase our revenue, make us more profitable? What is my prioritization for the week? Try it like Yeah. Because it knows so much about your company now because of the huge investment you've made in Slack Mhmm. You're gonna get a great outcome.
Speaker 3:I'm really confident. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen some of the videos that mister beast has been doing, Uh-huh. But he is really in it to win it on this and he runs, you know, his whole company
Speaker 2:People talk about mister beast like a like he's this consumer guy, but this guy loves enterprise software. He's an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 3:Oh, he's amazing. The first time I ever talked to him was couple years ago. He goes, I am gonna be like Steve Jobs. Yeah. I am gonna be like Larry Ellison.
Speaker 3:I'm I'm like, what? He's like, yeah. I wanna be one of the great entrepreneurs of all time. Mhmm. So he really has a mental model.
Speaker 3:It's super unusual. Well, he runs his whole companies on Slack. Yeah. So now he has the ability to kind of get to a new level by bringing AI in. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because when you take AI, data, and the app together as you see, you get a tremendous outcome. AI by itself, the models, great, fantastic. But they're commodities at this point. We all know that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The datasets, those are commodities on the consumer side, but not your dataset.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The only one who
Speaker 3:has your dataset is you. And then three, the app. You've chosen Slack. Thank you for that. And so now you put one, two and three together and bam, you are ready to roll.
Speaker 3:You know? You can now with one eye open.
Speaker 1:There we go. Alright. Give us a Super Bowl preview. What what's what's been exciting in the past that you've done? What do you wanna do in the future with the
Speaker 2:Super your most memorable Super Bowl? Yeah. Let's start there.
Speaker 3:I think there is gonna be some pretty cool stuff coming from us for the Super Bowl. I'm not gonna give you all the secrets.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I may have already given you some of the secrets.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:But I don't think I can give you any more of the secrets because it is gonna be astonishing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What we're doing and everything that we just talked about somehow serendipitously maybe you guys already know. Yeah. You know? But everything that we just talked about, take all of that and make it into a Super Bowl ad over the last ten minutes, and I think you're gonna have something astonishing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what do you think about model pickers selecting the model that I wanna use? How much of that should live with the end user? I go to Slackbot and say, hey. I wanna use Opus or I wanna use four or five versus your team deciding what makes sense for that overall, you know, infrastructure that you've built.
Speaker 1:And then it's below the surface and I don't really care as a as a user.
Speaker 3:Well, you're already using a whole synthesis of models. Okay. Because Salesforce have make we make a lot of our own models.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:We use we use all the all the major vendors.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we bring it all together to get what you need to be successful. We don't want you to have to worry about that. Mhmm. We we wanna just deliver a great I want you hit Slackbot Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it just says, boom. Here we go. And I don't want you to have to think about those things. I wanna make it just great, a great experience. And I wanna help you grow your business.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, I wanna help you grow your customers. I wanna help you service them. I wanna help you make your employees more productive. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That that's what I'm excited about.
Speaker 2:You guys have insane scale. As you look across the the the yeah. To to put it to put it lightly.
Speaker 3:It is it is crazy.
Speaker 2:But specifically, have you been surprised by any industries that are resistant to AI? Like dish blanket saying like, yeah, we're
Speaker 3:so much dark things to AI that it freaks everybody out. I mean, I mean, how do you how dark do you wanna go? Like, we can go we were
Speaker 2:talking was the journal had a statistic earlier. They said only ten percent of adults are excited about AI.
Speaker 3:I don't think that's as dark as I would go. I would say the rate of suicide that I saw with kids this year because of AI, that was the one of the worst things I've seen in my life. It was very reminiscent of kind of what we saw with social media Mhmm. Kind of this unregulated technology dramatically impacting the families in the most horrible way possible. I watched an episode on sixty Minutes a few weeks ago on character AI Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I could not believe what I was watching. Mhmm. And I think that that dark part of AI, the unregulated AI, because we know AI is kind of, you know, it's inaccurate, it's, you know, it's very kind of unwieldy. We don't know how these models work. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And to see how it was working with these children and then the kids ended up taking their lives. That's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Mhmm. So that's the darkest part of AI. And I think we have to be careful.
Speaker 3:You know, tech companies hate regulation. They hate it. You hear that all the time. Except for one regulation they love, section two thirty. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which means that those companies are not held accountable for those suicides. Mhmm. So those social media companies or in this case now the AI companies, that's not they basically say, oh, we're protected by section two thirty. We're a platform company. They they will quickly run to that regulation.
Speaker 3:But the reality is is highly unregulated in every other area. So this is kind of a moment. I'm sorry. I'm am I going too dark? No.
Speaker 3:No. It's fine.
Speaker 2:You said No. We we have these kind of conversations. We've talked about all this stuff. Yeah. And in general, I I wrote I wrote about this in our newsletter last week Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is that why would the why would the average the the the all the interviews that all the lab CEOs have done have just resurfaced over the last couple years. Mhmm. Maybe they did the interview five, six years ago talking about how the classic line from Sam is, know, AI will lead to the end of the world, but there's gonna be a lot of great companies created in the meantime. Mhmm. And so when people I saw that exact video yesterday, had a 100,000 likes on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Right? So like, that is everyday people just seeing this and being like, okay, I like, they maybe like ChatGPT Mhmm. But they're like, I I like my job more Mhmm. Or I like, you know, living in this world and being a human.
Speaker 2:So I think we have a there's a real like narrative problem with the industry right now, and it's gonna be And look, tough to
Speaker 1:and if
Speaker 3:we're not about protecting our children, what are we about? Mhmm. So let's just start there. And because we now have evidence of what happens when it's fully unregulated, And because we have the evidence of this huge, horrible situation
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We have to take action. And I think some countries, you know, have taken a lot of action, especially when it comes to things like social media. You know? Mhmm. If you're in Singapore, you can't use social media if you're under 16 years old.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So it's like, it it it will eventually get taken care of. But we live in, you know, in in our world here in The United States, we're we're very much like, oh, don't regulate technology because we gotta keep the innovation going at all costs. We gotta keep the growth happening at all costs. And
Speaker 2:I Yeah. So what's the real solution? What's the real solution?
Speaker 3:I get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What what like, what what's a pragmatic approach here? Because when at at same time, LLMs can have some negative externalities. We've talked about the example of, like, you know, if if grocery stores were invented last year, all the headlines would be like, this guy just went insane in a grocery store, and that would be a huge story.
Speaker 2:Right? Or like, this person was murdered in a grocery store. That stuff happens, but like we don't it doesn't get written about
Speaker 1:So because of
Speaker 2:the every day. It's not because of the grocery stores.
Speaker 1:It's just because
Speaker 2:And at the same time, AI from an education standpoint, all the focus is on people like not writing essays anymore, but there and there's very little writing on like, hey, this you know, a 15 year old might like teach themselves like physics through using an LLM and maybe that's amazing. Right? So it's like cuts both ways.
Speaker 3:Well, I own a media company too, not as exciting as yours. It's called Time. Mhmm. And in my little media company, we're held responsible for the content that we write and what we say. Oh, by the way, you are too.
Speaker 3:Yes. But in the case of this technology providers, they are not. Mhmm. So I think step one is, let's just hold people accountable. Let's reshape.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Reform. Revise section two thirty, and let's make let's make it let's try to save as many lives as we can by doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who who are you looking to in terms of leading the messaging around around AI safety? Do you like Dario Oh, I'm turning
Speaker 3:it over to you right now.
Speaker 1:Is this us or is it Dario?
Speaker 3:I'm passing this over to you guys.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, you
Speaker 3:guys can make this part of your narrative and take it forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. What what about in in the workplace? Have you had to contend internally with the idea of someone confiding in, as silly as it sounds, confiding in Slackbot about a problem that they're having with in an HR context and how that might be a new territory, a new surface area for you to deal with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need to talk about Slackbot safety.
Speaker 1:I mean, it it it sounds silly, but, really, if somebody goes and and they're like, you know, my my boss said he's gonna fire me next week. I'm overstressed. I'm I'm thinking of doing something crazy. You're in this bizarre scenario for the first time in perhaps your entire career.
Speaker 3:We are. And I think in two areas. First of all, as I mentioned, every company is gonna have a customer agent, and you've seen, like, there's 10 since we've spoken, like, ten, twenty, 30,000 companies, I don't even know what the exact number is today, of companies deploying AgentForce Yeah. For their customers. And we've seen these amazing agents emerge like Olive at the, you know, Williams Sonoma site, or we're gonna see one emerge next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos called EVA.
Speaker 3:And every cost company has an agent to work with their customers to make them more successful. And when we deploy those agents, we have a tremendous architecture to create the guardrails to help prevent crazy things happening. You know, we don't want you know, we've seen this where customers try to come along and have kind of cybersex experience, you know, with these agents on these websites like, no. That's not gonna happen, you know, the Williams Sonoma site. Or you're that's not what we're gonna use the turkey baster here for.
Speaker 3:Okay? So we we have a whole different approach.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 3:And so that level of guardrails is super critical. And on the employee side, we we're doing exactly the same thing. We have to kind of, you know, put those tools together and work with our partners, but also do a lot of deep engineering work to make it as as great as we can. And that core platform, AgentForce, has all of those capabilities built in.
Speaker 1:Okay. On on the employment side, has AI rethought your thinking about employment planning, how many people you need hire, the scope of the organization. Has it been a roller coaster or do you feel like you've been on one trajectory or the trajectory has changed? How you've been processing just AI making your employees more effective potentially?
Speaker 3:Yeah. What a great question. I would say that we have about 80,000 employees now and we'll do a little over 41,000,000,000 this year in revenue. We're now the number one enterprise software. We're the number one enterprise software company.
Speaker 3:In AI, we just passed 11,100,000,000,000.0 tokens.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Are are you surprised that companies are not getting valued on token generation yet? They're such big numbers, you know. We we
Speaker 3:I am. I think I mean, we're probably number one or number two on the token side. That's probably has to do with our relationship with Bilbo Baggins. But otherwise, we've got this figured out. Okay.
Speaker 3:I would say what we have to do when we think about employment to get back to your core question. I've changed the employ mix. I this year, we hired more than 20% more account executives. There still needs to be people like me and you Yeah. Who go meet with our customers to really explain all of the intricacies and nuances of the technology.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of false narratives and people play in the market and saying things about AI that are not true, especially in regards to the enterprise. And we have to go explain it and talk to it and build the relationship and show them and prototype and deploy. And so those people are more valuable than ever and more important than ever to us. Yeah. On the engineering side, I've held my engineering headcount mostly flat this Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Year because I've gotten so much productivity increase. I probably have about 15,000 engineers, and they're more productive than ever. I'm so proud of them. Look at what we just delivered for you guys. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 3:they're like doing great, and we need to go go even farther. Yeah. But you mentioned Anthropic. You know, we own about 1% of Anthropic. I would say that, you know, those coding tools, you mentioned Cloud Code, other things, Cursor, we use that inside.
Speaker 3:We do things to have a more efficient, more productive engineering organization. And we turns out we've reduced the number of CEOs to one because of Slackbot. We can do more because we can deploy that AI technology, the CEO also.
Speaker 1:Did I mean, you've spent your entire career in technology. Did this did the chat GPT moment, did the AI boom? Would were you expecting it, or did it hit you like a flashbang? Was it just was it just a bit just a massive flashbang Flashbang. That just hit you like a ton bricks?
Speaker 3:Hit me like a ton
Speaker 1:of bricks.
Speaker 3:I would say
Speaker 1:have a five. Ten
Speaker 3:years ago, I had the nastiest dream about AI, and so I started a whole AI initiative at Salesforce called Einstein. Okay. And we became the number one enterprise AI. Yeah. And so we were building models, doing these things, making all that happen.
Speaker 3:I always believed that this time would happen, but it was more about predictive AI and machine learning and machine intelligence and these kinds of things. And it was you know, we still use all that, by the way, to make this work. Mhmm. And then, when the large language model emerged and prompt engineering emerged. And by the way, you may or may not know, but I'll give a little credit to my engineering team because they deserve it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But prompt engineering actually emerged out of Salesforce research. And
Speaker 1:then all
Speaker 3:of these companies have new companies came along to say, we're just gonna focus on the large language model. And it's been a huge incredible success story.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I am just so impressed with what's happened in the last three years, but it's just another core part of our infrastructure now. And I think you see that in Slackbot. So Yeah. Getting back to Slackbot, it was just a seamless upgrade for you today.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:You have Slack. Yeah. We added Slackbot. When we added Slackbot, we added all the AI and all the data capability. And now, actually, in the new version of Slack, you're gonna see a lot of new CRM capabilities as well.
Speaker 3:You'll be able to manage your customer's information without even having to go to Salesforce. You will be able to manage your service organization. But here's the secret. Salesforce is behind the scene doing all of it.
Speaker 1:Let's
Speaker 3:go. And at some point, if you wanna upgrade to the bigger, more advanced adult versions of all those things, you'll be able to do that too.
Speaker 1:Okay. I I wanna talk about that because we've we've talked to a lot of companies where they they have a single product. They're a point solution, but because of AI, they're able to add on other surface area. Everyone's bleeding into everyone else's territory. Everyone's expanding right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is it like running an organization where you might have two products that are now bleeding into each other? And, I do you have to go and play tiebreaker a lot? Do you have a pattern for this? Like, how do you how do you work through all that?
Speaker 3:I love it. I I think everyone should, you know, innovate and create and compete with each other, especially inside the company. Yeah. Some people stay in their lane, some people don't. I'm not gonna interfere with that.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You know, we have these tremendous leaders like running Slack or Mhmm. Our sales product. Our sales and service product are $10,000,000,000 products each. Are the some of the largest products in the software industry.
Speaker 3:Let's go. And the new versions are incredible Yeah. But the new versions are all Slackbot first and you haven't seen them yet. But if you wanna get a demo later or after the show, you'll see Slackbot and Slack sitting on top of Salesforce and that boom, you can have all this incredible productivity. But it's the lineage of Salesforce coming forward into the present moment reality of these unbelievable new advancements in AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that is what I've been working on. So a Slackbot first world, the ability for every company to have a customer agent, an employee agent, the agent force layer, the all these incredible app family of applications we have. We just bought a company called Informatica, by the way, for, like, $9,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:And it was kind of an incredible acquisition. Alright. Well, there we go. But I love I always love the company. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But, you know, they've done things in their new technology that for AI, if you don't have your data right, you don't have your AI right. Remember, the reason why Slackbot is working is we have all your data in there normalized. And so it's able to take all your data and give you really cool answers. Well, every company needs to normalize their data, so that's why we bought Informatica. Everybody needs to integrate it together.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And then you have to go and connect to all the other data sources in the enterprise, like Snowflake or Databricks or BigQuery or Redshift or even IBM mainframes. We call that zero copy. So our system goes out, grabs all that data in all these other places, brings it together like it is for you already in Slack, and then everything sits on top of it and you get this really powerful AI experience. So that's what's going on.
Speaker 3:That's what's exciting for me every single day.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about m and a. You talked about Informatica. There's, you know, the SaaSpocalypse has been widely reported. I'm sure you look at some charts and get a little get a little
Speaker 3:not look at the charts. I can't figure them out. I mean, our revenue and profitability and cash flow go up and then the the stock is all over the place because people think there's some weird end of SaaS. But I would just ask you guys, did did did Slack become a lot more valuable for you today or less?
Speaker 1:Way more.
Speaker 2:Way more. Of course. Way more. I'm Way talking about you looking for value. You've done some a ton of m and a.
Speaker 2:Like, you must look around at at companies that you feel like are oversold. I
Speaker 3:think there's a lot of incredible opportunities right now in the market. Mhmm. And you you if you were not looking at look, we do about 15 or 16,000,000,000 in positive cash flow a year. We're use that. We're gonna buy back some stock.
Speaker 3:We're gonna do some dividend action too. Fantastic. Know? But what else are we gonna do with our cash? I think we should buy some companies also, you know?
Speaker 3:Because I love organic innovation, but I love inorganic innovation too. I bought about a 100 companies. Hundreds
Speaker 2:give us a give us a a three minute m and a master class. There's a lot of companies whose market caps have inflated. They've got a bunch of cash on their balance sheet. They're, you know, 1% of the size of Salesforce, but maybe they're starting to think about m and a. What have you learned about how to do it well in a few minutes?
Speaker 1:And this is the last question.
Speaker 3:You gotta you have to innovate. Innovation is our core one of our core values. What are our core values? Trust, customer success, innovation, and quality sustainability. Those are our five core values.
Speaker 3:We can talk about any of those. But when we talk about innovation, we talk about organic and inorganic innovation. Right? Organic is those 15,000 engineers making Slackbot. It's a 100% organic.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But then well, actually, but it's not because we bought Slack. Remember five years ago when I bought Slack? Because I love Slack. I thought they did such a great job.
Speaker 3:I thought it was a one time trade. I don't think anything was gonna replace it. And I thought I could make it a lot better.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I thought I could put it on top of all of our products. I thought it could be a user interface for the future. I thought AI would be incredibly benefited by the data inside Slack. We just proved that to you with Slack bot.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we bought Slack. Well, it was a huge purchase at the time, one of the biggest ever in the software industry that goes like $25,000,000,000. Yeah. Our biggest. But guess what?
Speaker 3:The value that is provided now, it's, you know, it's not a sub billion dollar company like when we bought it. It's a multi billion dollar company. I think it's like almost $3,000,000,000 or more. I don't have the exact number in front of me. But you can just go, wow.
Speaker 3:This is like incredible, the value that Salesforce and Slack together provide. Mhmm. And that's what I'm looking for. Or Informatica plus Salesforce together or MuleSoft, I mentioned. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We bought it when it was a $300,000,000, you know, revenue company and, you know, now it's a huge multibillion dollar software engine as well. So we have so many of those and our job is to buy them and make them work. Not all of them are gonna work. Acquisitions are very risky. You gotta be really careful, you know.
Speaker 3:And then you can have it all worked out and it still doesn't work out. But it's worth it to take the risk because innovation is risky. And organic and inorganic innovation, you have to do both.
Speaker 2:And What is a good what is a good hit rate? What what is a good hit rate at at scale? You said you bought something around a 100 companies. But first, it when you're talking, like, with your m and a team, like, how often are you okay with them just, you know, and and the company just swinging and missing?
Speaker 3:I have such a cool team there because not only do they that do that, they also run a $5,000,000,000 investment fund. You know, we have invested in so many amazing companies and taken so many amazing companies public. We just sold Wiz that we helped start to Google. Yeah. We took we helped grow Snowflake and took it public and made one I think we've made a billion and a half dollars on that.
Speaker 3:I think we made a billion and a dollars on Wiz. We're just think we have, you know, about, you know, a point of anthropic, which is a few billion dollars or so. Fantastic. I you know, it was started, you know, when it was a tiny company. So we love investing, number one.
Speaker 3:We love buying things, and we think all of that is innovation.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 3:And it's all in one big innovation bucket. And I'm, you know but we're trying to do something that others have not done is we're trying to innovate in the enterprise at scale. Yeah. And that is the hard thing because, look, as I said, we have 80,000 people and more than 41,000,000,000, and we're just starting gonna start our next fiscal year out on February 1. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it's gonna be a it's gonna be a massive year bigger than that. So Well, that's I'm like going, woah, these numbers are huge, but I've got a huge dream. I'm trying to go as fast as possible, you know, to a 100,000,000,000 in revenue, but while maintaining this incredible profit. Oh, we're one of the most profitable enterprise software companies too. We're delivering more than 34% margin
Speaker 2:this year. Have I have one last question. Coming on Last question. Are dreams an underrated are dreams an underrated source of business alpha? You said you said you had a had a had almost a nightmare about AI and that started Einstein.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or do you look for signal in your dreams?
Speaker 3:I I pay attention to my dreams. I pay attention to my my visions, my insights. And, you know, Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pod of dolphins outside the the coast of Hawaii where I live. Yeah. And I was in about a 100 dolphins and I was one with the pod.
Speaker 3:And when I was one with the pod, all of a sudden in my mind, I saw this vision of what Salesforce could look like and I
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 3:Came into Larry Ellison and I said, hey, think I'm gonna quit my job. And he gave me $2,000,000 and we started Salesforce and that was that. That was twenty six years ago.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story with us. Thank you, Dolphins. Thank you, Dolphins. Thank you to the Dolphins.
Speaker 1:It's got the sound. The sound is amazing. Look at that.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dolphins.
Speaker 1:Thank you for coming on the show. Talk to you soon. Have a great weekend. Goodbye. Super
Speaker 2:fun. The Chad's calling him the Steve Jobs of AI. Indeed. He's a strong candidate.
Speaker 1:Strong candidate.
Speaker 2:Always great to chat
Speaker 1:What a great with Mark. Hanging out with Mark.
Speaker 2:What else we got?
Speaker 1:There's there's a few posts. There's some breaking news. Andre has been on a following spree on X. This is why you come to this show. He followed Jacob Rintimaki, friend of the show.
Speaker 1:He followed Eric Gleimann, the CEO of Ramp. Andre is making the rounds. And Jacob Rintimaki says, you know, I still think it's funny that the guy who ran Tesla's full self full self driving program, his name is Carpath e. It's a good it's a good nominative determinism for
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:Path. It's always there.
Speaker 1:Although he's working on education now. So we're gonna have to rework the the nominative determinism to figure out how that works. In other FSD news, Tesla says Elon says Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14. It will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter. So February 13, you go and you buy the full self driving.
Speaker 1:It's a one time purchase. Then he's going he's going, subscriber mode. Probably good for
Speaker 2:the somebody here is, in Google saying just searching. I'm a kitty cat. Where is my owner? My bowl is empty. AI overview pops up.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you are very hungry and miss your owner. Since you can't find your owner right now, you might want to meow loudly near their usual spots to get their attention. Check the common areas of your home like the living room or their bedroom in case they're sleeping or relaxing elsewhere. I'm really glad that the AI overview and Gemini powering it are are It's open to all species.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's not it's not humanist. It's not focused on humans exclusively. It's it embraces the the kitty cat inside of all
Speaker 2:of us, I suppose.
Speaker 1:I started saying yes to all the apps that can track me prompts. The Internet is now noticeably better with more relevant and less spammy ads. Apple did us all a disservice and misplaced emphasis on privacy. He says, get into the targeted advertising flow. You wanna see good stuff?
Speaker 1:Hit yes on this app can track me. Let them target you with the best possible ads.
Speaker 2:Well, of targeting, Hermes is allegedly stalking their clients. A Glitz investigation has revealed that Hermes employees are Googling clients' home addresses to determine whether they have a prestigious enough address to be deemed worthy of a Birkin or a Kelly. Interesting. Hermes is also allegedly scrutinizing clients' social media accounts and the content they post. After a quota bag is purchased, they continue to monitor for resale activity which if detected results in immediate blacklist for the Yeah.
Speaker 2:Surprises there.
Speaker 1:I think OpenAI should do this with their device. And they sell those? They should they should sell, you know, you know, there's a quota, there's an allocation, we'll try and get you in. No problem. We're really not using ChatGPT all that much, and the questions you ask aren't that interesting.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I don't think we're gonna be able to get one for you. I know, by the way, you know, AirPods, we were debating, is the OpenAI device gonna cost a $100, 300? I think they gotta do, like, 30 k. I think it's gotta be like 30 g's. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gotta be a Add
Speaker 2:a zero. Why not? Add a couple zeros. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Add a couple zeros. And then the sweet tea. Make it a huge hassle. Make it, oh, well, how many ChatGPT pro subscriptions have you bought for your friends and family? Much How money have you spent with us?
Speaker 1:What's what's your purchase history with us before we get you one of these devices? You need to make it elite. This is the key Have you ever to winning and consumer electronics.
Speaker 2:Have you ever churned from ChatGPT? Yeah. Well, you're going to the back of list.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. What was going on in in November? We see that you you you tested Claude. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're not getting the device. You're not getting the what's it called? Sweet pea? Sweet pea is a
Speaker 2:Ben Mullen at the New York Times says, what AI generated PR pitches are doing to reporter inboxes everywhere is a catastrophe. It's brutal. You're absolutely right. It says Lulu. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is crazy because the the challenge is, they can like it it used to be Mhmm. You know
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From our side
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even even maybe a year ago, like if someone was like, really enjoyed this segment where you were talking about this this that Totally. And that would like actually seem like they Totally. Watched it and now you can just easily get that from Gemini or wherever. So it's a disaster. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But fortunately, Nick is there just chopping down, dodging PR lasers. Maybe
Speaker 1:the last piece of news, Mike Krueger, the co founder of Instagram, who joined Anthropic two years ago as chief product officer. He's changing roles to co lead an internal incubator dubbed
Speaker 2:I like Labs this.
Speaker 1:Team. I could see him cooking up some really cool stuff. He, of course, in between Instagram and Anthropic, worked on a news application called Artifact that was sort of a precursor to Pulse. It was it was at it was, like, almost at the perfect time, but AI wasn't quite there. And I could see him doing something really interesting.
Speaker 1:Obviously, he's good at going to from zero to one in the consumer application. If there's some new surface area for, you know, an AI tool, an app, I I wouldn't bet against him. So congrats to him on the new role.
Speaker 2:One final post
Speaker 1:on the show.
Speaker 2:Freya says, so fascinated by this product and it is in some type of booking. Looks like it's in the booking.comworld.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it's a get $500 if it rains on three days of your nine day trip Mhmm. For only $26. So we're bringing gambling. This feels like a pretty Remarkable. Straightforward
Speaker 6:This is just company. Right?
Speaker 1:It's climate insurance.
Speaker 2:Not really. Mean Climate insurance.
Speaker 1:He was selling to farmers, but, yeah, it is Yeah. This sort of weather close. Weather future is an insure crop insurance has existed for a long time. And, yeah, this does make sense. But are we getting out of here?
Speaker 1:The bomb has been planted. Thank you for watching TBPN today. We had a lot of fun with you. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 2:We actually do it. Please actually. Leave
Speaker 1:us drop your email at t b p n dot com. We have our daily newsletter. Thank you to our sponsors and thank you to our production team and Tyler for hanging out with us here today.
Speaker 2:In the studio. Tomorrow. We really can't wait.
Speaker 1:We can't wait. 11AM Pacific. We'll be
Speaker 2:here Back. Live. More great guests. Goodbye. See you guys soon.