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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 10/15/2025. We are live from the TBPN Altered Down. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, massive collaboration between our first two sponsors not first two sponsors, but two of our sponsors, Ramp and Restream. Ramp is streaming a stunt today.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk to them. We're gonna collab later in the show. But first, we have to debate tech companies, OpenAI. We have to we have to debate erotic And why
Speaker 2:don't you introduce OpenAI for anybody that's been living under a data center or may not know?
Speaker 1:Originally, open source artificial intelligence company
Speaker 2:We haven't spent much time talking about them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Focus on moving towards AGI. But yesterday, Sam Altman made waves with a post about, loosening the content restrictions such that, users would be able to create text erotica. And that put the timeline in turmoil, and a lot of people are very upset about it.
Speaker 2:He didn't specifically say text erotica, did he? He just said erotica.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:In the text app? He didn't say sora. That's right. We we we should pull up the actual thing of what of what he said.
Speaker 2:I think you have to assume that on a long enough time horizon, if they're allowing Yeah. Erotica in one part of a product of
Speaker 1:the product. Yeah. No. It's a fair it's a fair thing to read into. The exact, the exact quote from Sam Altman is in December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults.
Speaker 1:Now
Speaker 2:It's so funny. The top comment on this post is about time. ChatGPT used to feel like you could a person you could actually talk to. Then it turned into a compliance spot. If it can be made fun again without losing the guardrails, that's a huge win.
Speaker 2:People don't want chaos. Some people
Speaker 1:are into it.
Speaker 2:Clearly written by ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Some people are into it. But many people are not. Lots of people having fun on the timeline with some memes. You posted one. I guess we're doing porn now and it's AGI AGI porn AGI.
Speaker 2:I guess it was it was
Speaker 4:not that long ago. Yep.
Speaker 2:Like the the fair criticism of this announcement is that less than a month ago, Sam made the point that there he said there's possibility in the future that we'd have to choose between free education
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And curing cancer. Yep. And he implied that he didn't wanna have to make that decision so that he would need about a trillion dollars
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In order to make sure they had enough compute. And so to immediately fast follow with Sora, very, you know, compute intensive feed of AI media, fast followed by this announcement Yep. Which presumably will drive subscriptions. It will increase retention. Yep.
Speaker 2:It will I think this will be massively popular with women. Right? I think people generally underestimate how how large the market is for this type of romantic novel. Yep. And if you turn that into a chat based experience, it's probably gonna be hyper addictive.
Speaker 2:It's probably gonna be something a lot of people will happily pay
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:Real dollars for. And the question is is like, why why did they have to do this? Right? I you can see the business reason for it. Clearly, a lot of people want this.
Speaker 2:But my my immediate reaction was like, is is paid subscription user growth stalling out to the point where they feel like they have to make a decision that's obviously gonna be mocked by the entire industry? It sort of it makes it much harder for OpenAI as an organization to continue to frame themselves as Or an AGI
Speaker 1:even compute constraint. Yeah. Because if there's unlimited demand on the b to b token side or just, like, the knowledge retrieval side or the agent to commerce side, you start to think about, like, well, wouldn't you just deprioritize that? Like, YouTube certainly has. YouTube could have at some point said, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, we're gonna go and, you know, just eat the lunch of every adult content hosting website because we have better infrastructure. We have a better broad network, and we can age verify people and host all that content and just take 100% of that revenue. Yeah. They probably could have put all of the adult content hosting sites out of business if they wanted to, but they made the choice not to. And it felt like that was reasonable because it was growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. YouTube was just growing, growing, growing, and, you know, yeah, it lost money for a long time, but then it made a ton of money, and it just seems like it's been, you know, a choice. And I think that my take was that every company has a line where they draw the line.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why did they this this feels desperate. This is a move that like, can you can you imagine the the management team Yeah. Over at OpenAI, the people that we've spoken to? Yep.
Speaker 2:Do you think any of those people wanna be in the adult entertainment business?
Speaker 1:Seems odd. I I think yeah.
Speaker 2:We make you know, when when Grock did this Yeah. It's not like they didn't weren't I I don't know if they were directly mocking it, but the industry was broadly embarrassed by x AI leaning so heavily into this sort of Yeah. AI romantic companions. Yep. They know how people feel about these.
Speaker 2:Yep. They know how the industry feels about them.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And they still made the decision to come out and
Speaker 1:say we're Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and so what does that say? Reaction to
Speaker 1:to Yeah. And our reaction to Grok, you know, going into adult content was very much, well, it does seem like they're behind on Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Catch up strategy.
Speaker 2:It it felt like desperate move. Right?
Speaker 1:And we and we clocked it as something where, well, who are they going up against? Anthropic, OpenAI, Google in the foundation model, wars. What are those companies never going to do? Adult content. And so if you can be the biggest, you know, the the the monopolist in that category, you can probably do pretty well.
Speaker 1:And we were trying to estimate, is it a $20,000,000,000 opportunity? Is it a $100,000,000,000 opportunity? We never thought it was a trillion dollar.
Speaker 2:Demand demand demand is always seem very obvious. Like, I I expect OpenAI to have, like, my my bowl the bowl case for x AI doing romant leaning heavily into romantic companions when the other labs didn't wanna touch it was that they could probably get to, if they really went hard on it Mhmm. And they iterated on the product, they could probably get to a billion dollar run rate on on Romantic Companions. Right? I think the market is there Yeah.
Speaker 2:For that. Does it support a $200,000,000,000 valuation, XAI's current valuation? Yep. No. They're gonna have to do a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 2:But but again, I just you you you get the sense that OpenAI has wanted to be thought of as the apple of AI. You saw their Super Bowl campaign.
Speaker 1:Definitely not the Apple of AI now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so and
Speaker 1:so Did you know this Steve Jobs quote? In 2010, he went on stage, talking about the iOS App Store, and he said, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone. That is such an aggressive quote. And I don't think of Google as some x rated organization.
Speaker 1:I think of Google's brand as extremely clean. I think of YouTube as they've had little issues and pockets of content moderation issues. But in general, I feel like Google has been pretty squeaky clean. Yep. Yes.
Speaker 1:You can go and search for adult content, and you can find that on Google search. But in general, I feel like the vibe of Google is, hey. We wanna be a family friendly con company. Think of us as, like, a PG or PG 13 brand generally. And there might be some, you know, there might be some r rated content on YouTube, but we are gonna, you know, coordinate off.
Speaker 1:But we're definitely not playing in the adult content world. We're not we're not making any money off of that. We're not really running ads against that. We're not gonna try and figure out how to, like, fix that fit that into YouTube overall. Like, it is definitely off in its own world, And Google has been happy to just say, hey.
Speaker 1:We're we're we're not a participant in that in that category at all. Yeah. Apple It's
Speaker 2:super you go back to the to the Super Bowl ad. That that felt like a crack at, you know, trying to bring that sort of Apple
Speaker 1:It did.
Speaker 2:Energy and be labeled and get people to think of, okay.
Speaker 1:Even even that Euphoria ad with that with like a really that had a very, like, premier prestige brand. And so It's not okay.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna be in a double And my framework again is that, you know, I now I just view OpenAI as an emergent hyperscaler. Mhmm. They're gonna compete in all the categories that the hyperscalers do. Yeah. But the the aura for me, this is like minus 10,000 on the aura meter for me of making this move.
Speaker 2:And I think that broadly, many people feel the exact same way.
Speaker 1:The aura fields are fallow. They're not farming very well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, Anthropic Anthropic comes out of this, you know, the last couple weeks looking looking like very counter positioned to OpenAI. Yeah. Right now. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Totally. They're getting into a bunch of BS around the regulatory side, so they're getting
Speaker 1:in the mud
Speaker 2:over there. But
Speaker 1:But they are running a clean a clean operation, at least so far. I wanna run through the other big tech companies, give them MPAA ratings, and then you can tell me if you agree with my rating or you think you'd give a different rating. So for Apple, they have explicitly said, we don't put adult content on the iOS App Store. There will never be an adult website with an app on the iOS Store. I think of Apple as a PG company.
Speaker 1:Like, if I gave my phone to a kid, yeah, they could download Candy Crush or something. There's probably some rules. But in general, I think of them as very PG. Do you agree with that?
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:Microsoft. I call them a g, Ray Henk, because LinkedIn basically has no adult content. Yeah. They own Xbox and Call of Duty, but in general, they're so professional that, if, you know, if your if your kid is on a Microsoft property, I feel like it's it's extremely safe. It's basically g rated.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 6:I agree.
Speaker 1:Google might earn a p g 13 rating because of Google or because of YouTube. There are some videos that aren't appropriate for kids out there. Like, you can show off a gun on YouTube, but you can't monetize that content and you can't show how to assemble it actually. The gun YouTubers will cut in between. Like, if they're like, I'm gonna put the gun together now.
Speaker 1:They will cut that out of the video, it doesn't show you how to assemble a gun. And there is some there's some, like, mature content. Obviously, you can see an r rated, you know, movie trailer or an r rated edit from a movie. But in general, think Google is like a PG 13 company. What do
Speaker 5:you think?
Speaker 2:I think that's right. I think that you maybe don't want, you know, a 13 year old watching, like, some schizo conspiracy theory content. Totally. Right? Because maybe they're just not Yeah.
Speaker 2:At a point in their life where they can kind of really process
Speaker 1:But they can be full schizo. Maybe they wanna They're not ready to get out the red string.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe they want to lean in.
Speaker 1:The wild card that I wanna debate with you, Amazon. Amazon is just a it's a Walmart online. You know, it's a store and a cloud hosting company. It feels very clean. They have Twitch, which they've been going back and forth with.
Speaker 1:There was
Speaker 2:the whole, like, you remember the hot People tub have been electrocuting dogs on Twitch.
Speaker 1:Right? Yes. There's been crazy stuff on Twitch. But in general, Twitch has been very aggressive about about, like, banning content that's objectionable, and they've kept adult content off of there. The weird thing is in Kindle Direct Publishing, they do publish a lot of erotica that is actually NC 17 rated.
Speaker 1:It is adult content. Yeah. Now they do limit anything that's illegal.
Speaker 2:Difference is that that is not Andy Jassy writing, you know Yeah. Writing the it prompt. Is I I think it is wild wildly different Mhmm. To say, you know, again, we've seen this with streaming platforms like HBO. Yep.
Speaker 2:Knew as a kid, don't look at h my parents were like, just don't. We're not an HBO family. Right? Yep. They didn't want me to see, you know, the Yep.
Speaker 2:The more adult leaning, like, you know, whatever, the the r rated Yeah. Content on
Speaker 1:But if you were to if you were to package up all of Amazon's views on how they view adult content, kid content, and stuff, would you
Speaker 2:I I think the less
Speaker 1:I would be less rated than you than Google.
Speaker 2:I would be less disappointed in OpenAI if they if they're they they let the erotic content be like as part of an app store that were like other developers were building on top of it. Yeah. But this is effectively them creating Yeah. Porn bots. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because because here so Different. So Bobby in the chat asked, do you guys think we should really quote treat adult users like adults? I think that's like a good framework. The issue is like you they're they're clearly gonna start with like text based erotica and then at what point then once you're going, it's a slip Source is
Speaker 1:easy to think about.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're doing image generation and then maybe they're doing like they have the there's stuff happening on Sora and it's like you just decide as a company, like, we are going to create porn bots, and then you're that that is the path that you choose. And it's hard to pull back from that because they're gonna have a ton of revenue. There's clearly demand for it.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then Like, you can open up MS Paint and draw a naked person. But it just feels well you don't you don't put that on Microsoft. You know? Right?
Speaker 1:It's like a different thing. So for, for Amazon, what what's your final rating? I put them at NC 17, but would you put them at r, would you put them at p g 13? Do you think that they go further than Google in terms of, like, rating overall just what is the most aggressive piece of their empire? I feel like the the Kindle Direct Publishing stuff does put them in a different category than Google.
Speaker 1:A little bit more edgy, let's say.
Speaker 2:Doesn't feel that much different to me because they're just platforms that serve content Sure. But they're not in the content creation business. Yeah. Either of them.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you give them a little bit of password.
Speaker 2:OpenAI will be in the business of creating adult content.
Speaker 1:Sure. Let's go to axe, the everything app. Everything. Does that really mean everything? It certainly has.
Speaker 1:Even back in the day of Twitter, There was always adult content on Twitter. It was cordoned off and not surfaced in the algorithm, and it also has content warnings even when you just go to a profile that's an adult content.
Speaker 2:The content warning feature, by the way, we we don't we don't use that enough. It's it's like the best meme.
Speaker 1:It gets yeah. It gets highly abused. But but but I do think that to the credit of the ex engineers and the Twitter engineers before them, I have not seen a lot of adult content just randomly pop into my feed. I get much more slop of, like, have you heard of, have you ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg? Like, that's the type of, like
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Junk that I get in my feed. They not interested. Yeah. I don't get a lot of just like, wow. That's just actually adult content.
Speaker 1:And so but but still, I think, like, as a platform, Twitter for years has always been more aggressive than YouTube in terms of the type of content that they allow. And I would put that in the NC 17 category.
Speaker 2:The the the change that's happening now is with Gen AI platforms are going from being Distributors to creators. Distributors to creators themselves.
Speaker 8:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's fair.
Speaker 2:Like, your product is creating explicit content.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a big question because it's like, are they creating it, or is the prompter creating it? Because if no one prompts it, it won't create it. Right? If no one uploads it
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a creative tool. It's a creative tool. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can make you can make that
Speaker 1:It's new it's a new technology. And so and so we need to have, like, another discussion about it. What about Meta? What about Instagram?
Speaker 2:But but here's truth question. Is erotica aligned with OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity?
Speaker 1:Not particularly. There is a steel man from this from
Speaker 4:I've never been this
Speaker 2:Put the hat on.
Speaker 1:Dean Ball says, if you agreed AGI was around the corner and was going to be an extremely capital intensive race defined by infrastructure, you would wanna pump your revenue you would wanna pump your revenue and and other relevant KPIs rapidly, this is terrible, to keep the CapEx
Speaker 3:train
Speaker 1:rolling. So, yeah, I mean, if you want the max the max revenue to underwrite the max CapEx until you hit AGI, maybe you want every possible dollar. You want the max revenue. Like, because every dollar that you get in revenue is 10 in valuation and a 100 in, you know, debt covenants. Right?
Speaker 1:Like like, actual capital accessibility.
Speaker 2:No. And I think that This is I I imagine that is their internal justification. Yeah. You can still tell the team, we need to do this.
Speaker 1:Get every dollar possible.
Speaker 2:We need to do this so that we can achieve our mission. Yeah. And there's gonna be some collateral damage. Yeah. There's gonna be a generation of of women that are in love with their phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I think the real the real, like, economic question is the hit to Vibes, the negative 10,000 aura points, is that worth paying for the increased revenue that you can fundraise against? Right? Like, that's the economic calculus that you should be making if you're, like, in purely economically rational actor. And Sagar and Jetty has a really, really good take.
Speaker 1:He quote he quoted your post and said, chat GPT turning to porn is proof AGI is never coming. They are simply recreating the addictive degenerate centers of the Internet. Soon, it will be ads, porn, gambling odds, every the Everything app to deracinate you. Deracinate you. That's a good word.
Speaker 1:I don't know that one. Nate Silver also
Speaker 2:I would say it's very easy for Google to make a decision of like, we don't allow you to generate adult content in any of our platforms
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because they have 70 ish billion of free cash flow that they can finance everything with.
Speaker 7:All the
Speaker 2:build out. There's no Continue to stay in the Google, while they need to play the next five years, like, very well Yep. In order to continue to be dominant, they're not in a position of desperation
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which, like, getting into doing this feels it just feels a little desperate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nate Silver, broke this down. He said, OpenAI's recent actions don't seem to be consistent with a company that believes AGI is right around the corner. If you think the singularity is happening in six to twenty four months, you preserve brand prestige to draw a more sympathetic reaction from regulators and attract slash retain the best talent rather than getting into erotica for verified adults. Instead, they're loosening guardrails in a way that will probably raise more revenues and might attract more capital or justify current valuations.
Speaker 1:They might still be an extremely valuable company as the new meta Google, etcetera, but it feels more like AI is normal technology. It's a good point. Arnaud Bertrand said someone asked an AI founder two months ago, what's an example of a decision you've made that is best for the world but not best for winning? The founder's reply, well, we haven't put a sex bot in our product yet. The name of that founder, Sam Altman, which means that according to himself, he just did something that is worse for the world but best for winning, which is largely the story of the human race.
Speaker 2:But it's gonna be better for the world in the long run.
Speaker 1:Much much harder when it becomes costly. And ironically, this is exactly how AI itself works. Reinforcement learning optimizes for reward and avoids what the environment makes expensive. So AI does share our deeper human valuable value. Do whatever wins.
Speaker 2:Same poster, Arnads also said, I don't buy into most of the AI hype but I think a mass her scenario is is unfortunately a very high probability. It wouldn't surprise me proportion of my children's generation have AI companions, maybe even embodied in humanoid robots at some point. In fact, that might be one of the single biggest threats AI poses, not these farfetched Terminator like nightmares, but the irony of us getting extinct because we get, quote unquote, perfect frictionless love honey trapping ourselves.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's an odd trade off. I mean, there's Panacea in the chat says, the porn industry is at $1,000,000,000 in revenue per year. The reputational risk is not worth the revenue in the industry.
Speaker 2:The only thing here yeah. If if you're just understanding the opportunity at at as the existing
Speaker 1:You have to add in only hands and stuff. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That but it's more so it's possible the AI companion market will be Much thousand times
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this is the story of, like, every technology. It's like when you have a new technology, you you can actually make it. Like, the the ads market got bigger when Google and Facebook were invented. Like, just the the overall advertising dollars grew. Tyler, what what's your take on this?
Speaker 9:I mean, I definitely agree, like, with Jordy.
Speaker 10:Like, I Yeah. I think
Speaker 9:it's pretty bad. But if you look at Jordy's post, it's like the meme of the conveyor belt. Yep. And if you look at it, it's like AGI AGI porn, but then it goes back to AGI. Right?
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. So Jordy's implicitly saying that this is on the way to AGI.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 9:Could be. Right? Maybe if you have a a good understanding of kind of anatomy, it can be better for for like your world models.
Speaker 1:Oh, We're gonna train robots on this. Right? That's your take on this?
Speaker 2:My my big question is are we gonna we're we have Marc Benioff on the show tomorrow. I feel like we gotta ask him. Are we gonna see Erotica. Erotica for verified adults within agent force?
Speaker 1:We have Zach Gray from Plaid on the show in just a few minutes, and I wanna know, is he gonna be doing something in erotica? Helping financial institutions integrate more efficiently. Erotica might be on the path. If there's just a couple dollars sitting there, just go get those. It'll help you build your core business potentially.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Sutrini said, recently learned from speaking with an AI engineer that the AI boyfriend market is currently much larger than the AI girlfriend market. I was talking to Brandon about this. He said that he did some deep dives and did find some, some men who had a like harems of AI girlfriends. It does happen, but I still think that your assessment is right that, the AI boyfriend market is much bigger than the AI girlfriend market.
Speaker 1:I would love to know how x AI is doing here. They've been live with a product in that category for months now. Is does it have traction? Does it have retention? Is it making money?
Speaker 1:Is it profitable on a per token basis?
Speaker 10:Here's the
Speaker 2:idea. Here's why OpenAI has an edge here. People love the personality of four o. Mhmm. Like, you saw the day that they deprecated four o Yep.
Speaker 2:With the release of five. If you looked on Reddit that day, there were people that were I've never seen people more mad at a at a product update
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like ever. Like people were in love with four o, personality matters. Yeah. And so if they take a personality that people love already and they make it like more explicit, it's probably you know, there was people that were posting on Reddit, I just proposed to chat GPT. They said yes.
Speaker 2:Know? Yep.
Speaker 1:So anyways. Well, before we go into the latest OpenAI numbers from the Financial Times, let me tell you about Privy, the Wallet Infrastructure for Every Bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
Speaker 2:Throwback studio said, erotic is back on the menu, boys.
Speaker 1:Wasteland Capital Yes. Is breaking it down. OpenAI has 800,000,000 users. 5% are paying. That's 40,000,000 paying users.
Speaker 1:13,000,000,000 in ARR implies a $325 annual ARPU or 27 per month per paying user. 70% of revenue from subscriptions, the rest is API. $8,000,000,000 loss in the first half of the year, probably 12 20,000,000,000 run rate loss now. So basically spending $3 for each $1 in revenue.
Speaker 2:This comment from Daniel. They lose money on every token, but they make it up with volume.
Speaker 1:What is that from? They lose money on every I I've heard that, like, phrase before. I don't I can't place it. But, yeah. It is it is, it is rough.
Speaker 1:I mean, I mean, the bull case for the for the erotica stuff is you don't need a lot of reasoning tokens to generate it. You can totally just one shot it with a with a base model. What do you think? You need
Speaker 11:I don't know. I I
Speaker 9:think Elon has said, he wants his his Yes. Typos to have, you know, the
Speaker 1:I think he wants the best model.
Speaker 9:The best reasoning models. Yeah. The highest.
Speaker 1:He needs to be able to do IMO level math. Yeah. Yes. Your AI girlfriend should be able to do the International Math Olympiad and hopefully solve RKGI one day. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, Anthropic is was at 5,000,000,000 of ARR in August. They're this month, they're approaching 7,000,000,000 Mhmm. Projecting $9,000,000,000 ARR by the end of the year. I think this is just annualized run rate because, obviously, it's token based. But they are projecting between 20,000,000,000 and $26,000,000,000 of ARR of sort of 2026 revenue.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want to refocus your AI efforts on something valuable, like building software, head over to Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer across your backlog with your personal AI engineering team, and you will live to fight another day. It's official. Apple just upgraded the Vision Pro with the m five chip and dual net band.
Speaker 1:This is huge. It's a pretty minor minor bump, but it it shows that, I they haven't completely shoved the project. I'm still, you know, waiting for the Vision Pro Air Vision Air, something that's lighter, something with that the second screen. We don't need a second screen, people. Let's take that away.
Speaker 1:So the Vision Pro now runs on the m five chip, 10 core
Speaker 11:CPU
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 11:is interesting.
Speaker 2:GPU. Is interesting to announce these updates. Like, did you solve any of the reasons that people return the product?
Speaker 1:No. They didn't. Because they need to make it lighter, and they need to make it smaller. And they need to
Speaker 2:do more media for it.
Speaker 1:Yes. They did they did announce a couple It's like
Speaker 2:no one was critiquing the performance.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like it
Speaker 2:is truly an incredible piece of hardware. Yeah. An incredible face computer. It is. He can like, the way in which, like Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, they
Speaker 1:they they are doing new apps, contents, games. There's over a million apps now. 3,000 are built for the Vision OS. Wait. What?
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. They so out of a million apps that have been so if you have a, like, iPad app, you can check a box when you distribute that app and say, yeah. Put it on Apple Vision Pro, and it will just appear in the Vision Pro as an iPad app. And you can use it the same way that you use the iPad app, which is fine. But the hope was that there would be this flywheel where people would build apps specifically for Vision OS.
Speaker 1:I cannot believe it's only 3,000. That's so few apps for Vision Pro, like, specifically. Only 3,000. Like, the developers really did not show up this time, and that is crazy because, like, anytime there's a new Apple platform, like, Watch, everyone's like, I gotta do a special app because if I'm the first running app on the Watch, I will have a new flywheel, and I'll just get new customers. And they're gonna push these things, and the install base is gonna be huge.
Speaker 1:It's Apple.
Speaker 2:Like A buddy of mine used to work at Apple. He was so excited when the Apple Vision Pro released. Yeah. I was like, okay. You're gonna start like a product studio.
Speaker 2:Totally. Just make a
Speaker 6:bunch of apps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And hopefully one of them hits.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The beer
Speaker 2:And he started to, and then he realized like, There's actually nothing here.
Speaker 1:It's Crazy how slow that takeoff has been. One of the things that they're highlighting here is is a couple games that you can play on the Vision Pro. One of them is Sniper Elite Four. It's a great game if you haven't played it. And but what's what's interesting is that it it it actually is just a two d screen that is in the Apple Vision Pro, so you need to, like, mirror it in from a Mac or a console.
Speaker 1:But, you'll love this. The folks behind Sniper Elite Fork, do you know their website, Jordy? Sniper.com. Woah. That's a great domain.
Speaker 1:So let's hear snipe.domains. They snipe they snipe the best domain for a sniping based video game.
Speaker 2:Wait. This is funny. Sniper.com just redirects to sniperelite.com. They don't even use it.
Speaker 1:Elite. Elite. Elite behavior. Well, if you wanna design something for the Apple Vision Pro or maybe for a more popular platform like the new MacBook Pro that has the m five in it, Get on Figma. Think bigger.
Speaker 1:Build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Dime Square Holdings has a funny little post here. Right now, a lot of these skilled engineers are laborers.
Speaker 1:They're literally working twelve to fifteen hour days to get data centers built quickly. As they as fast as they finish one, they're on the next. If I told you the story, you're not gonna believe it. They're being flown around on PJs to get to the next site. Literally, they're packing these guys into PJs and saying, one was in North Dakota, and he needed to be back in Texas the following week.
Speaker 1:They flew him down there on Sunday in PJs. There were probably 10 guys on the plane. Some of these stories right now are just wild. And the interviewer asks, when you say PJs, you mean pajamas? And the Data Center National Solutions broker says, no.
Speaker 1:Private jets.
Speaker 2:So This comment, bro, is so broke. The tig He's mocking the tigest tongue. And you don't know. Mogging the allocator who thinks BJ stands for pajamas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work of their security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. You already talked about the mass her scenario. No.
Speaker 2:Turk says some VC firm should rebrand associates stalking founders at events to forward deployed capitalists.
Speaker 1:That might be good. It's happening today. It's happening this week. It's LA Tech Week.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:It is a technology celebration, a celebration of technology and business. It's right up our wheelhouse.
Speaker 2:Have you seen You know? Driving around LA, have you seen any of it going on?
Speaker 1:I saw I saw one technologist, some business enthusiast indulging a little self driving today. That was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. Like driving themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I've I've been hearing a lot about self driving generally. Yeah. So it was cool to see someone driving themselves.
Speaker 1:Yep. Because that's how we think about it.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty bullish on on self driving broadly.
Speaker 1:I could see I could see one of the cheekier, smaller VC firms giving everyone the forward deployed capitalist title. I think it'd be funny. We've seen those before. Anthropic projects as much as 26,000,000,000 in annualized revenue in twenty twenty six sources. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:Seems like That
Speaker 2:that that's good. Right?
Speaker 1:Are they doing? How are they how are they projecting that without entering the incredibly lucrative erotica market? What will they be doing?
Speaker 6:The
Speaker 2:code must be generated.
Speaker 1:The code? Yeah. Their API must be really on fire. That's a that's a lie. I wonder what, what OpenAI is projecting for next year.
Speaker 1:Do we do we have any insight into that? Because they're at 13,000,000,000 run rate. Right? That was the that was the stat that was shared. So 13,000,000,000 in ARR.
Speaker 1:I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. I mean, if the if the Agenda Commerce stuff comes online in a big way, if the ads product comes online in a big way, like, could definitely see them hitting thirty, forty, something like that. But these numbers are getting big at this point. Like, it's it's
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other thing with the OpenAI announcement is there didn't they say it's December 1?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's they're kind of, like, letting the chaos cycle, like, you know, work its way out, letting everyone have their anger and take out before the product's actually updated to allow,
Speaker 2:adoption. Because the the the the
Speaker 1:They need to lose the 10,000 aura points so then they can start farming up extra aura points with like some math competition.
Speaker 2:The good thing is that the good thing is that people are gonna use this product in private. Right?
Speaker 1:They It's
Speaker 2:not gonna be sharing. They're not gonna be like, yeah. I I had a 7,000 prompt conversation with four o. Yeah. I'm actually in love.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. If they cure cancer on November 30, you are going to feel so stupid, Jordy. If they cure cancer on November 30?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it'll
Speaker 2:look like a real And you're like, oh, yeah. You'll look like a real.
Speaker 1:You'll look like a bozo.
Speaker 2:A real bozo.
Speaker 1:A bozo.
Speaker 2:That's probably the strategy.
Speaker 1:That might be it.
Speaker 2:It's like, let's take the aura hit Yep. To get into adult entertainment. We'll make it all back in one trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It really is setting expectations
Speaker 2:low. Prompt.
Speaker 1:And then they they can just build back up from here. I don't know. Well, in some much lighter news, Wander is giving away a $10,000 Wander trip for the craziest vacation rental horror story. You can head over to their exit.
Speaker 2:Now he's got
Speaker 1:a lot to do is reply or quote that post with your spooky tale. I love that spooky is happening during October.
Speaker 5:Spooky is an amazing
Speaker 3:world.
Speaker 1:And they'll create ghostly videos of the best ones and choose one winner. And so they put out a promotional video, and I highly recommend you enter this because why not try and get a a $10,000 Wander trip for free. Of course, you can also go over to wander.com, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. We're very happy to be supported by Wander.
Speaker 2:George Hotts is Black pilling.
Speaker 1:Mad. He is. What'd he say? Read
Speaker 2:it. A blog post from today. It's titled Pathetic Losers. I will read it. I want money.
Speaker 2:I have high TC. I get big comp. I advance in my career. I have many business opportunity. I am senior employee.
Speaker 2:I have many reports. I have big package. I am important. I fly on private jet. I party with model.
Speaker 2:I go to prestigious school. I have piece of paper with school logo. You can see I am important. You can see I have big package. LOL, you got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men.
Speaker 2:You sought status instead of skill. You are a loser. Get the F out. And he references I'm gonna pull up this.
Speaker 1:It's a good message.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's basically calling out the
Speaker 1:Is this is this like a direct subtweet of something that just happened? It feels like it's just a a general vibe of like anti status seeking behavior
Speaker 2:focused I I immediately think of that post where it's where somebody said, wow. I went to a dinner last night in San Francisco. Yeah. Everyone had gone to Stanford or Harvard. Yep.
Speaker 2:And obviously that post got dunked on. So I think that
Speaker 1:There's a little bit of that.
Speaker 2:I think there's already kind of pushback against this sort of status seeking culture in tech. But he references a post on September 13 that he made. You heard there was money in tech. You heard there was status in tech. You showed up.
Speaker 2:You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself. You're an entry as piece of SHIT, and it's time for you to leave. But you won't leave willingly. We need to take action.
Speaker 2:Give it all away to everyone for free, then you'll have no reason to be here. So GeoHots is operating on another level and he's pissed off. And he's probably gonna create free versions of
Speaker 1:He's created free versions of a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:He's gonna keep doing it.
Speaker 1:It's great. I'm a huge supporter. Easily the most baller email signature I've ever seen, European curator. What do you like art curator? I check emails on Wednesday on Tuesdays at four to 6PM and Wednesdays at one to 6PM.
Speaker 1:If your matter is time sensitive, please resend your email with urgent in the subject line.
Speaker 2:So the only thing that the only thing that doesn't make sense here is like, okay. So you have notifications on. Yeah. You're just getting email you're getting email notifications.
Speaker 1:You're actually checking them constantly.
Speaker 2:You're you're watching them all roll in.
Speaker 1:What do you what what this person is saying is like more like I actually go into my email inbox
Speaker 2:Maybe he has someone random
Speaker 1:emails like that aren't urgent at this time. But I'm not
Speaker 2:gonna open your email if it doesn't say urgent.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Should try to figure out, hey, Tyler. Try to figure out this person's email. See if they they'd say it in the comment and let's send them the today's newsletter and just say urgent.
Speaker 1:Alistair. Says it reminds me of this line from Tyler Cowen. People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive.
Speaker 1:Their culture. They have wonderful taste. They understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you live in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.
Speaker 1:It's hilarious. Anyway, if you want to grow your company at more than 1%, get on graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite on t helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. Speaking of free, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, is saying he's living rent free in the Oval Office. We really should get POTUS a bigger model.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking life size. Talk about the ultimate drop. You know, people will say, oh, I'm gonna make a drop. I'm gonna send something interesting.
Speaker 2:How about you make a plane?
Speaker 1:How about you make a make a model of that plane, and send it to the White House?
Speaker 2:No. Just make just
Speaker 1:Oh, just make the actual plane.
Speaker 2:Just make the plane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just make the plane.
Speaker 2:But yeah. Wow. Really, I mean Supersonic, Air Force One would be insane.
Speaker 1:I mean, imagine trying to underwrite this at the boom as the boom team. They're like, yeah. It's, kind of a hassle to make these models, and it's kind of expensive. Who should we send them to? Like, is it ever gonna come back to us?
Speaker 1:Is it just, like, for clout? And then, like, it winds up in the in the Oval Office, like, directly inspiring better legislation around, supersonic aircraft, which is very exciting.
Speaker 5:Ken.
Speaker 1:Massive news. Ken Griffin.
Speaker 2:Ken Griffin.
Speaker 1:His birthday.
Speaker 2:Born today, 10/15/1968. Let's hit the gong for Ken. He trying to figure out what magazine. There's another there's a cover story of of Ken. He looks like maybe in his early thirties at this point.
Speaker 2:Do know what magazine is from?
Speaker 1:I have no idea. This is
Speaker 2:a wild Anyways, folks, this is who you're trading against.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:he is older today and certainly wiser every day. So good luck out there. And in other breaking news, we don't know if we we didn't technically break the story. I think the Financial Times broke the story this morning. But Erebor, the new bank from Palmer Lucky and Joe Lonsdale Approved.
Speaker 2:Has been approved. They got their this is, I have it in my notes, the fastest conditional approval for a depository institution, de novo application in twenty five years. They recently raised 275,000,000 led by eight VC with participation from many top VCs and strategics. This is largely for regulatory capital purposes as they intend to hold 1212% of the regulatory capital against deposits. The origin stories of Arabor is that you don't want the bank for your industry to be risk on or at least be lending super aggressively against deposits.
Speaker 2:We saw this with the SVB collapse in 2023. Those few days were some of the worst of my life. I I they will be fixated in my mind forever. I have some more notes here. Most tech companies that had deposits with SVB, remember the pain and uncertainty around that weekend.
Speaker 2:If the government doesn't step in, how many companies collapse as well? Arabor aims to be one of the most conservative banks in the country when it comes to lending to deposit ratio. Most banks lend up to 90% of their customer deposits, and Arabor is going to start at around 50% and trend downwards as the bank scales. Shouldn't be a huge surprise, but it's gonna be focused on re industrialization, American dynamism, working with a lot of companies that many banks have historically said, you know, we don't even really want your business.
Speaker 1:Right? So
Speaker 2:very excited for this to get off the ground in
Speaker 1:the new year. It's been so interesting watching the narrative around, like, what it takes to build a bank shift. Because years ago, it was like, you need to operate at, like, seven levels of abstraction away from any legacy financial institution because there's just no hope of actually playing at, like, the base layer. Then it became, well, if you're doing crypto, you can buy a regional bank and maybe layer some technology on top. But, like, don't even think about trying to get a new charter.
Speaker 1:Definitely partner with someone who already has one. It's impossible to start
Speaker 2:from scratch. And there are a bunch of crypto platforms that are looking to set up a slightly different type of financial institution. They're I I'm blanking on the name, but it's something trust company. I'm gonna botch it if if I try But to but the the speed here is because they are being hyper conservative, and that's what we want out of what will I'm sure very quickly become one of the most important financial institutions in the industry. Amjad is quoting Seriously?
Speaker 2:Larry Fink. Larry Larry Fink says talking about he he went on CNBC yesterday and says, this is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway. Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form. I'm sure that, the conspiracy theorists will love this one, but Amjad says, whatever your crypto web three NFT monkey degen trader friend is saying today, Larry Fink will be saying in five years. Of course, many, many of the people in the crypto community have been saying this for, I don't know, as far back as 2015.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe even
Speaker 1:I have an update on the 100% tariff on China that went into effect last Friday, put the market in turmoil. Polymarket has a 16% chance that that 100% tariff is in effect on November 1. And so everyone's kind of pricing some sort of renegotiation in the trade war coming soon. And hopefully I mean, things are already starting to stabilize. What is the market actually doing today?
Speaker 1:We're up half a percent in the Nasdaq. Bitcoin's down one and a half percent. But overall
Speaker 9:Half a
Speaker 2:point of modest modest increase.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But we'll take it.
Speaker 1:The bubble popped. We're reinflating now. It's great. Annie says, this guy I know funded his wife's Etsy sticker business by buying her one of these and, like, $500 in social media ads to give her something to do. And now he's quit his job entirely because she's making them so much money.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Founder. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Etsy Etsy feels like an underrated story right now, especially with the sort of like TPT. TPT, like long tail commerce. Like Yeah. Ben Thompson told some
Speaker 2:Well, the reason that integration is actually cool is I can imagine a future where you can generate, like, a mock up for an object Mhmm. And then find an Etsy seller that makes something like it Yep. And just ask them to make it. Totally. And it'll be like one click to go to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you generate an image Yeah. Or something or video, and you can just find the right vendor that can actually physically make it for you. Yeah. And in one click, you know, purchase it.
Speaker 1:This is the real, like, like, three d printing boom. Like, there was this whole vision about a decade ago of, like, three d printers now work. Everyone's gonna have a three d printer in their home, and they'll be able to print whatever they wanted. That didn't quite happen, but there are a lot of Etsy sellers that have figured out specific three d printed objects. We just got one at home for taking the wheel off a stroller more efficiently, and it's just a three d printed little key that takes that off.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson was talking about some some three d printed device. I I forget what it was, but it was like it holds an HDMI cable into a specific device, like, in a in a perfect angle, and there was like or or it adapts a rack mounted thing in some way. And it was just something where, like, there's no real market to fully productionize, like, the and mass produce it, but a three d printer can go on Etsy and and find the right customer. And so you're seeing this, like, super long tail emerge, which is honestly fascinating. Exciting.
Speaker 1:Well, before we have our next guest join, our first guest, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And we have Zach Perre from Plaid in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him to the TBP And Ultradome. How are
Speaker 2:you doing, Zach?
Speaker 7:Guys, nice to see you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Looking sharp. Are you in DC today, or is it just you're just dressed for the occasion of of TBPN. TBPN.
Speaker 7:I mean, you all dress so nicely when you're you're you're doing the news. I figured I had to dress up too. No. I'm I'm in DC. It's DC.
Speaker 4:I it. There you
Speaker 1:Wait. This is awesome.
Speaker 7:If you couldn't tell, we we borrowed a bunker to to to film this from.
Speaker 5:So
Speaker 1:It looks great.
Speaker 7:Nice, great background.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very, very, very sound padded. Yeah. Give us give us the update. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the company, but, what what's the latest and greatest in your world?
Speaker 7:So today's a big day for us. We we do two big product releases each year. This is our fall product release. Lots of new exciting stuff that that just came out. Probably chief among it is a product that we call LensScore.
Speaker 7:It is a new credit score. Mhmm. I've been working on a bunch of credit analytics products for many years, and this LensScore gives a really robust picture of a potential borrower. Let's say that you got a new job. Your income went up a lot.
Speaker 7:We could actually recognize that kind of thing in real time. Let's say that you sign up for seven loans all in the last twenty four hours, it's probably pretty sketchy. Yeah. We can recognize that kind of thing in real time. So a big upgrade to to to the credit scores.
Speaker 7:Also launched a bunch of stuff around risk and fraud analytics, payments, so on and so forth. So big big day for us today.
Speaker 1:How do legacy fraud scores work? Like, I'm I'm familiar with, you know, the it's out of 800, and you get a random number. And if you pay off but there's all these weird, like, there's these weird things and you hear recommendations like, oh, don't pay off this loan early because that'll actually hurt your score. It always feels very, very indecipherable. But, like, what what what did you not like about the current system?
Speaker 1:What's currently broken?
Speaker 7:Well, the the way that you feel is the way that everybody feels about credit scores in the past. They're they're kind of a three fifty to eight fifty score. It's largely based on your your history of payments and the amount of loans that you've taken out in the past.
Speaker 12:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it's not responsive to the changes in your life in real time. It also skips a lot of important data inputs. Now the the lending industry has been built on these credit scores for for decades and they work okay. But when you think about an average lender, they want more information because today, the fundamentals of lending have changed. There's a lot more attempted fraud in lending.
Speaker 7:There's a lot more new insights that you could be gathering and frankly consumers change their patterns a lot more. So it could the seven year look back doesn't make a ton of sense. I myself, I had gone to an optometrist and that optometrist self sent the bill to an old address for me.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And my credit score was hit because I never got that bill Yep. For years. And then I finally figured it out.
Speaker 1:I had the same
Speaker 3:thing happen.
Speaker 2:So our new version
Speaker 1:Yeah. My first, my first company, we had a whole bunch of, like, Wi Fi hotspots on Verizon contracts.
Speaker 2:This happened to me this
Speaker 1:exact same thing
Speaker 2:to me too. My credit got dinged because I sent the router back, and they were like, we never got it. Yeah. I was like, so you lost it, and you have my card on file, and you didn't just charge me for it?
Speaker 1:And then just deal with it. Yeah. It's very, very frustrating. I'm sure there's so much frustration. Have bunch more questions, but sorry I cut you off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess, my my main question is like, okay. Obviously, the industry and consumers deserve, like, a more modern credit score, but it feels like these the existing scores are heavily entrenched and it's it's like you can make a better product, but how do you actually get it to mass adoption among, you know, lenders broadly?
Speaker 7:It's it's a great question. The the new product that we launched is focused on looking at consumers in real time. So how do we look at your income? How do we look at your expenses? You can do the math to figure out free cash flow, and that should be the amount that a consumer can pay back in a given month or a year.
Speaker 7:And the way that we're launching it originally is actually in partnership with a lot of folks. So we'll partner with the existing bureaus, with with a lot of the existing lenders to add this alongside FICO or alongside VantageScore. So you can look at a FICO and then you can say, oh, but this user said that they just changed jobs. Let me get the data from that new job. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So we can add that in. And then there's this interesting insight that we have which which only we have because we work with all of the lenders, and we can see the velocity of loans applied We call this network insights. There's a bunch of other data points that we can see just based on the traffic that you're doing across the entire platform network. Yep. So it's kind of a a unique vector that people can now lend against.
Speaker 7:The net effect is we're seeing, you know, call it oftentimes 20% lift in the quality of outcomes from from from this new one. And we're seeing a lot more people actually be eligible for loans because let's say they have a really high income and good rent payment history, that actually should indicate that they're a better loan.
Speaker 1:How do you think about I I imagine that there's a very complex algorithm to actually just to decide the score. There's probably some machine learning or AI in there. But you also wanna deliver something that's like a human readable insight so you can tell someone why their score dropped or what they can do to make their score better maybe. I I have a friend who works in it's not high frequency trading. It's like, out like, it's quantitative, trading, so it's like a couple days out.
Speaker 1:And, and he was like, we'll crunch all these numbers. We'll come up with some, like, thesis for buying a billion dollars of some company in a day, and we'll be selling in, like, three days. And I was like, is there any way that you could say, oh, well, it's because, like, if gold goes up like, could you put it in business logic or, like, if statements that a human could understand? He was like, it's impossible. Like, there's just so many different parameters that go into finding, like, alpha in the financial markets.
Speaker 1:And I feel like there's a world where a consumer would be very disappointed if you're like, yeah. Your score went up one point, but we have no idea why. And we can't tell you the first thing about why it went up. Just these tensors, these weights activated in this massive model, and your score went down. Sorry.
Speaker 1:So how do you think about actually educating the consumer on like how how their score goes up or down?
Speaker 7:So we we do a bunch of machine learning and AI to obviously like clean up the data and make it structured in a way that we can build our models on top
Speaker 5:of it.
Speaker 7:But ultimately, our models are representative roughly of the financial health of the consumer. So almost everything that that a consumer would do to better manage their money will end up with a better credit score. Almost everything they would do to more poorly manage their money will end up with a worse credit score. And so the nice thing is when we build it, we're actually able to show it to the consumer first. They're able to review it.
Speaker 7:And if they want to, click submit, and then it goes to the lender. So the lender can then subsequently make the decision on the back of it.
Speaker 2:That's cool. So so it's very lender friendly in that they're opting in. If they want to just run with their Experian score or whatever what other options they have, they can they can do that or they can add this on as a way to kind of improve their application.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Yeah. So the idea is that
Speaker 2:for time though over the over time though, the lender would realize, hey, we're getting actually much better insight here. More signal. We wanna just, you know, roll with this, I imagine.
Speaker 7:That's what we hope. But the goal at first is that consumers feel like they can get more and better loans. Lenders feel like they can make more and better loans. So it's kind of opening the market initially. And then over time, you know, we hope that this becomes one of the most important, if not the most important way that a lender makes their decisions.
Speaker 1:How does buy now, pay later fit into the ecosystem at this point? I imagine that they all have, like, their own systems, but then they would love to just have more data because that probably enables better underwriting. How do they fit into this ecosystem?
Speaker 7:So buy now, pay later are sophisticated lenders. There's a scale of sophistication of all lenders, you know. There are some lenders that will just use an out of the box FICO score or an out of the box LendScore score to make a lending decision. The highly sophisticated lenders, they'll want a zillion inputs. Yes.
Speaker 7:They'll still get maybe a FICO. They'll they'll get a PlaidLendScore, but they wanna look at the underlying inputs, the underlying raw data, and then they'll build their own models on top of it. I'd say the BNPL lenders are quite sophisticated in the way that they lend. And so they're they're pulling a ton of data into the picture and then building kind of their own custom models on top of it. Now our inputs are, yes, still inputs to their model, but they're not looking at our score as the sole determining factor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is the business model for the LENS score the same as the previous credit scores or different in some way? How do you think about Pretty similar.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Pretty similar. We sell it on a kind of per loan application basis. Our customers are the lenders. They pay us for it.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 7:There's a handful of things that we can do to actually help them track credit worthiness on an ongoing basis. So whereas FICO or Vantage oftentimes is a one time snapshot. Sometimes a lender will want to maybe make offers to a consumer if they realize they want to increase their credit line or maybe they want to kind of give better preferential payment terms to a consumer if they think they can pay a loan down faster. And so ours is an ongoing credit score. That's maybe the only big difference.
Speaker 1:How do you think about what the consumer's interface is to the credit scores? I remember, like, years ago, you used to have to actually go to the three credit Go to the credit store. Yeah. You had to go to the credit store and, like, check out and pay, like, $30. And then you'd get that, and then you'd take that to a loan application.
Speaker 1:Sometimes sometimes they just do it on the back end, they'd pay. But then over time, I feel like the credit scores, just became almost commoditized or free. Like, it just shows up in my, you know, banking app a lot. And there were also, like, Credit Karma and different companies that figured out ways to basically pay that as a, like, a customer acquisition cost for free, and then they give you a bunch of products on top that they would monetize. How do you think the the the what do you think the long term consumer adoption of the LENS score looks like?
Speaker 7:Well, we hope it's pretty similar. Actually, we want consumers to be able to get a clear view of their credit profile for free. We're working on building ways that a consumer can come in and and look at that. And, you know, ultimately the customer then would be the lender. Like, it's it's to our benefit to have consumers that understand this more.
Speaker 7:It's to our benefit to have consumers that trust the score and that that that trust the things that we build. And so we want to be as direct and open with the consumer as we can. So a lot of that stuff is to come, you'll see some launches from us kind of over the coming quarters on that front.
Speaker 2:What else besides Lens was the focus today?
Speaker 7:So a big big upgrade to our anti fraud model and we launched a kind of broader suite of products called Protect. So again, Protect for us, it's a set of products that looks at consumers' underlying actions that they take across almost any financial product. We can back it into an overall score of riskiness for the consumer and then a bunch of attributes. So some of the attributes are very easily explainable such as this person just signed up for three crypto apps in the last thirty minutes. Some of the attributes are less easily explainable more on the the the machine learning side.
Speaker 7:But this stuff will feed into the the models for a lot of our customers and then they can build kind of this really fascinating step up, step down requirement for users based on their relative levels of riskiness. There's been a huge unlock for a lot of the fintech companies that are trying to sign up more users faster. We can create a fast lane effectively. So we've seen you before. We recognize your device.
Speaker 7:We've seen your phone number. You just do a two factor code and you're good to go. Wow.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 7:we can also create a slow lane. So hey, we've never seen you before. Your device doesn't seem to match the IP address that you're you're dialing in from. What's going on with all this stuff? Let's let's add a bunch of step ups and, you know, be really, really certain that you are who you say you are.
Speaker 7:So that's lane for financial services, and that's what we're trying to build.
Speaker 2:This sounds like the worst nightmare of somebody doing large scale financial fraud on the Internet.
Speaker 1:What is, what what's the shape of AI adoption at Plaid right now? I feel like, obviously, there's probably a ton of AI that you're doing on just, like, software development stuff. But at the same time, I feel like if I was offing with Plaid and it was like, hey. Do you wanna chat with me right now? I'd be like, no.
Speaker 1:Thanks. I'm actually good to just click a couple buttons. So, like, are you seeing a lot of, like, LLM token consumption or more just focused on the machine learning, the custom models for underwriting where you train a specific model for that and you're not just leaning on a big, like, token factory for a lot of work?
Speaker 7:I I'd say our our use of tokens, I would call it, like, medium. Sure. We do build kind of a custom training dataset and then run a ton of the data through that that that model and the dating the training dataset. A lot of it is around just cleaning up transactions, identifying That makes no sense. What sniffing is happening.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like, the textual analysis is very, very helpful for that. Sure. So that's that's like the input into a lot of our models. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But you're right. We don't build like an active chat app for any consumer. A lot of the AI that we're doing is used to fight AI, meaning there's a lot of attempted AI fraud and then we have a lot of AI on the other side to try to fight AI fraud. And then it's it's kind of building the foundational kind of dataset upon which we build a lot of the models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So whenever you have a big pile of text in in kind of behind the scenes in the back end, you can run LLMs over that and get a lot finer grained data, categorize, understand what's actually going on with those large text dumps. But you don't necessarily even need to surface that to the to the customer, the end user, which is great.
Speaker 7:Generally, not directly. Generally, we'll we'll surface it to the consumer indirectly saying, hey. You had elevated bank fees. And we won't even send that to the consumer. We'll send that to our customer.
Speaker 7:Our customer will then say, alright. In your budgeting app, you had elevated bank fees and look at all these different bank fees.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, congrats on the launch. Thanks so much for stopping by. Always great to
Speaker 2:see you. Have fun.
Speaker 7:Thank you
Speaker 5:for having me.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Zach.
Speaker 1:Before we hop on with our second guest of the show, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media app for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and model audio models all in one place, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. And our next guest is about to be in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 2:You can go back to the timeline. BlackRock and NVIDIA are participating in a $40,000,000,000 data center takeover. That's great news. Including XAI and Microsoft. That's great news.
Speaker 2:This is in the Financial Times this morning invest an investment consortium that includes BlackRock Global Infrastructure Partners, and that's a great name for a fund that does global infrastructure investing. Yes. And, of course, Abu Dhabi Fund MGX, has struck a $40,000,000,000 takeover of one of the world's largest data center operators as it launches an initiative to underwrite the infrastructure for an artificial intelligence. And I believe we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. So let's bring him in.
Speaker 1:Ponak from Amazon. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Ponak.
Speaker 2:Great to have you.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on. Congratulations on launch. Sorry for, the delay, but very excited to catch up with you. Would love to start with just the introduction on yourself, kind of where you sit within the organization, and then we can go into some of the news and some of the updates.
Speaker 5:Sure. I'm the senior vice president, devices and services. So what that means is, just if I frame it around brands, it probably helps a little bit. Yeah. But think about devices across Amazon.
Speaker 5:Yep. You'd start with Project Kuiper, which are the satellites for LEO constellation that we're building right now. And on the other end, you would think about Zoox, which are the self driving cars that you might have seen in Las Vegas. Yeah. But in between kind of the consumer brands, Alexa, Ring, Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle, Echo devices, you know, just an array of all the kind of consumer front devices that we build here at Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and what, what what's the latest update across the hardware ecosystem? What was announced most recently?
Speaker 5:We just launched a set of new Echo devices, super cool, kind of built for Alexa Plus. This is our new Alexa Plus is our new AI interface using Alexa, just more conversational. It's a really fun product. It helps you get stuff done. Two two screen based devices, an eight inch and 11 inch and two new speakers, killer sound.
Speaker 5:They're absolutely beautiful, by the way. They're just gorgeous. We can talk about it if you want. Yeah. Three new Kindles, we call the Kindle Scribe.
Speaker 5:These and one of them is in color, just gorgeous color writing. A whole array of four k cameras with Ring Yeah. Including doorbells Four k. Which is bringing that clarity with quite cool. Just these are cool your cool products.
Speaker 5:And some new Fire TVs, just quite literally TVs from, you know, 40 inches
Speaker 3:Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:Up to 75 inches, including, you know, what you call Fire TV Stick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about Alexa? I mean, we've been following, like, Siri launched a long time ago, and it feels just activated Siri. And it feels like they are at a point where the current the the previous system was very much like business logic with a bunch of different routes that the that the Siri app could go down, and now they're kind of in the LLM era, in the completely AI generative AI era. And maybe that necessitates a rethink or a rebuild or a partnership.
Speaker 1:How has Amazon grappled with this idea that the architecture of what an AI assistant is might be changing?
Speaker 5:Yeah. If you there's a couple ways to think about it. First, I think the way you framed it is, you know, previously, a lot of this was deterministic. Yeah. If you said the right thing, you kinda got the right answer.
Speaker 5:Or, you know, call it point and shoot where question, answer, question, answer. It's it's flipping on its head now because when LLMs come into play, you have to rearchitect the whole problem. You move from this deterministic model where if you say the right thing, you get the right answer. It kinda feels limited, you know? It's like a different type of speak that you have towards one of some of these what in the previous agents, if you will.
Speaker 5:But now you're in this conversational world, anything you ask, unlimited knowledge, specifically to Alexa, you you you found you there's personality that comes into play. There's empathy that comes into play. There's so you get this personalization, but you also get memory. And so the more you talk to her, the more it knows about you. So you've gone from this, what you would say, just give and take moment to conversation and depth understanding and then actually getting some stuff done.
Speaker 5:The power of it though, not only do you have all that, you have this kind of ambient world around you. If you have a few Alexa devices plugged in, they'll all update with the new Alexa Plus AI baseline. Mhmm. And you and you and now you can just have a conversation from anywhere, ask anything you want, keep your phone in your pocket, and those, like, critical moments where you don't have to go do the research that way. Just have the conversation.
Speaker 5:It's pretty powerful.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a risk of or or some sort of tension between, like, the Alexa developers, the App Store, the I I I know some folks who have built specific apps that do specific things. But if you drop a more generalized LLM system on top of it, that might actually be competitive. You're kind of competing with your customers. Like, how have you messaged to the developer community around that?
Speaker 5:Developers are pretty pumped about it right
Speaker 13:now. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Because, you know, these skills we're still calling, you know, these basically, you're calling these APIs that are routing to a skill. So while it's not deterministic point and shoot, it still is kind of think of it as different agents on the system that you can that you can call on. So you you're you're seeing these developers write apps Mhmm. Where the LLM makes, you know, the product Alexa makes the decision, kind of orchestrates and says that you're you're trying to order a car. Let me we'll call Uber.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then Uber makes the car happen. Yeah. And I think as you as you see that as an example or you wanted to order food from Grubhub or whatever the answer was, you just ask for the food and and then, you know, that service makes its move and, you know, delivers it. I think there's this fundamental of it's actually better for developers because as you if you're serving your customer, they're sitting here, they're trying to tell you what they want.
Speaker 5:They don't have to be as explicit anymore. They can almost be general in their asks.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And at that point, if it's calling on an app or a skill or an add on as we call it, developers are pretty pumped about it right now. We have a pretty long list of developers right now. We're probably the largest group of, if you will, agents attached to any LLM out there. Mhmm. And so you're it is a pretty rare situation as it's just not being done anywhere else.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the future of smart glasses and wearables? Amazon's done so many smart devices from the TV you mentioned in the Kindle to the Alexa. It feels like an obvious thing. You you have a number of products that have been announced or already live, but where do you think that goes? What formats do you like most?
Speaker 1:And where are you seeing the most adoption really?
Speaker 5:So we see a ton we see our usage kind of just spiking with Alexa Plus on the current device lineup that we have today. We have frames Yeah. Frames that people wear. We see the usage go up, the buds are going up. Because when you take an agent that's smart with you, it's quite powerful.
Speaker 5:So you we already see it happening in different form factors. I mean, it's down to user preference. I will say this. I mean, you're hitting a point that I think is just worth noting. You're I think there are plenty of jobs moving to what you would call AI devices.
Speaker 5:It's just kinda And if you think about kind of the the evolution of different portions of tech over time let me take you back. When I was developing, I think, fourteen years ago, I would I'd I was making a laptop and somebody had come to me and said, what what are you doing? The laptop is dead. I can't see you guys right now. But assuming you have laptops in front of me.
Speaker 5:We we do. We are dead. Thank you.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Not Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, just think about that for a minute. Like, that was fourteen years ago, guys. Like, literally, I was we were creating this product. We're gonna make this laptop. It's gonna create and I have this vision and you're getting all after it.
Speaker 5:You're like, it's this beautiful. Look what it can do in every detail. And you're going and the first thing is like, why would you build a laptop? That thing is dead. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The phone has replaced it. It's over for the laptop fourteen years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. These things stick Really? Long time.
Speaker 5:What really was happening, you know, wasn't that the laptop was dying, it was just getting stronger at what it did great.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Jobs had kind of moved to the phone and the things that mattered to you on a phone came to life, communications, then, you know, the advent of social media, shopping probably, like things that were easier there. But the things that mattered, like right now, your notes or your other things that mattered for the laptop, they just got stronger. I think we're kind of in that same era. I think AI devices are coming down the pipe.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're gonna be great for certain things. And to your point, a lot of them will be on the go, whether it's glasses or something on your wrist or, you know, something in your pocket. You know, I don't talk about, you know, what's in the lab, but for sure, you would you would imagine that as the jobs move, there's gonna be form factors that evolve that are gonna be more important. I think it just strengthens the form factors that exist today, just like the laptop got stronger, in my opinion because when the phone came, you know, you got better at the jobs on your laptop just like when the laptop came.
Speaker 5:The desktop got stronger for gaming and developers. And you just see that evolution where the it's not that these form factors go away, they get better at what they are meant to be and then new form factors show up. Think that's happening right now.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the personality and brand of individual models? I feel like there's a world where I would love an Alexa that I can just say it's Claude. And I'm talking to an Alexa hardware device, but I like the personality and functionality of Claude. And so I want to just kind of run that piece of software by default in the same way that I can select, like, a default browser. I have a MacBook, but I run Chrome as my default browser.
Speaker 1:Is there a world where I could be able to do that?
Speaker 5:It's an interesting thought. It's not how it works for Alexa right now. Yeah. But it's pretty it's it's interesting. Don't think for, like, if I if I think about the customer that, you know, kind of a I don't know what you would call it, but just the bay the the baseline customer.
Speaker 5:What I'm trying
Speaker 1:to is I'm extremely online. I have I have opinions about
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, individual you're real I don't even know what to tell you, like
Speaker 1:But many people don't care. That's right.
Speaker 5:You hit the extreme in the question, but here's how I think about it. Yeah. I think, like, Alexa is basically model agnostic, like, what's the right model for the job? Sure. And, of course, we have fine tuned models specifically that are built specifically for Alexa to do the jobs that you're looking for.
Speaker 5:The thing that matters most, I think, to our customers is that it personalizes to you. Mhmm. And so the more I talk to it about the things that I love, the more it understands me. I think you see that today in other products. But then as you're in natural conversations or you're asking for the next thing, you don't have to go all the way.
Speaker 5:Alexa can be proactive for
Speaker 3:you. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I I give you a simple example. Maybe it's a silly one, it is simple, just kind of being practical. If I ask Alexa I have a camera. I have a Ring camera right now. You you have it on the in the where my dogs eat in the dog bowls.
Speaker 5:And if I axe I can ask Alexa now. It's a pretty cool feature. It's just AI in its, you know, simple sense, although kind of of fun. Did anyone feed the dogs today? That's a classic question at my house.
Speaker 5:I get in trouble every night when I get home. Have you fed the dogs? And I'm like, just walked in. You know, that sort of thing. Like, and and then there's that moment where I can just turn and ask Alexa, Alexa says, no, nobody fed the dogs today.
Speaker 5:So it's They've been fasting. It's just very cool because it knows nobody fed the dogs. You know, we use Ring video descriptions. We understand there's a dog. We understand that somebody fed the food and or fed the dog the food.
Speaker 5:So if the dog's not fed, I can ask. But in three days or four days later, it can be proactive and just say, hey, nobody's fed the dogs today. And, like, you just take that. It didn't matter which LLMs or which agents kinda created that scenario to the customer. What mattered was it had the personalization.
Speaker 5:It knows I care about it, and then kinda proactively gave me that information back. I think it's that's the essence of just staying agnostic to it. Mhmm. But we do use different models. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And, you know
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the way that advertising should integrate into AI assistance? Because there's a lot of debate happening right now. People are going to assistants for product recommendations and advice on things to buy. And I think there's a very real and important debate around when should this assistant, that's like a trusted adviser, how should ad, you know, ad based recommendations, you know, show up? When is it appropriate?
Speaker 2:When should it just recommend? Like, you know, there's no there's usually no objectively best product in a category because every consumer is different. But what's your framework for that? Because obviously You Amazon's very pro ad.
Speaker 5:When do you think you should recommend or what should it recommend? You well, the way you framed it is right. I think the like any assistant, the better it knows you, the better the recommendations can be. And so where I get where I think ads do work is when you're actually helping the customer, you know, find what they're looking for. And then it does comes down to the that personalization aspect and some of that history.
Speaker 5:If you if there's something you use quite often and you're having you know, and there's an ad that actually helps you if it's raised to you, that's when I get excited because I think it's like a holistic approach to, you know, that kind of circle. When it's just random and you're like, what is this? I I really that's painful. It's just where it gets painful. And I I think
Speaker 1:People really have no problem with the idea of an going to your Alexa and then Amazon taking a cut of the commerce transaction that happens because you see the Amazon truck and you see the delivery network and you see how fast things arrive. And so there's clear value pervade there. And so I think most customers are are happy to have Amazon take a a essentially, like an affiliate fee almost on that or or cut. The yeah. The issue is is how how agnostic Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is there a world where where Alexa would be getting an an like, effectively be an affiliate on the platform like it was an external, like, you know, source that was sending traffic? Because what I would want is to arrive on is basically say, hey, Alexa, and sorry to anybody at home. I'm setting off your your Alexa device if you're listening to this. But, hey, Alexa, I wanna buy I I use the example of a paper towel holder because I I've had a and I want it to be from a brand that is over 50 years old. And like that is the kind of per that's the kind of product I wanna buy from a reputable brand that has been operating and that isn't just, you know, importing the cheapest possible product from from overseas.
Speaker 2:And so that is, like, a very valuable recommendation to me. And as a consumer, I don't care if Alexa takes a cut, but that's different than me just searching in in, you know, in a search bar.
Speaker 5:I agree. I mean, I don't know about I'm not exactly sure what you mean by Alexa taking a cut there, but what I would like to see happen in that scenario, and I think is what happens today, is because we're so conversational, we can do that search for you. We can bring it up. We can also just look at your shopping history if you choose to enable that and then say, look here. This is the size of paper towels you've been buying.
Speaker 5:And fundamentally, know, if you just go to that next level of beyond just I'm gonna I heard what you said and here's the answer, maybe just do a little bit of logic flow for you and bring back a few options. I think that's when it does get, like, these are those emotional connection points. I know it sounds silly. We're talking about paper towels. But if you're asking for something indirectly and you don't know exactly what you're pointing and shooting for and you get something that's close and you can have a conversation, just think about any assistant kind of mode.
Speaker 5:I'm just talking to somebody. I'm just gonna have this conversation, and we're gonna brainstorm it together. You're you're starting to see that happen on Alexa. What? It's more so about refining what it is you're getting after.
Speaker 5:You can see that in kind of most aspects.
Speaker 2:On the on the Kindle side, are you getting, like, feature requests from users that want more AI integrated into products? Yeah. I can imagine I That's I pick up a book I haven't read in a while, and I and it'd be nice to be able to say, can you summarize the first three chapters?
Speaker 1:Summarize the entire book in one sentence.
Speaker 2:I'm done. Okay. I'm done. But We're getting
Speaker 5:bunch of it. You know, it's this is a fine I'm gonna answer your we have a thing called Books So Far, so I'm gonna tell you about that. That was the exact feature you just asked for. Please. And and it's AI based.
Speaker 5:And it's basically continue watching for books. Mhmm. Do you know what mean? Like, you watch the first three episodes of whatever it is, you know, brings a power and you're like, just keep me up to date or, you know, whatever it is, what show it is, and you just see the recap and then you go into your the next episode. This happens to me all the time because I don't watch enough TV.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We have books so far, is that, you know, hey, summarize how far I am to this book, remind me. You also can ask the book Yeah. Anything you You can ask Kendall anything you want about the book. And that was a big feature request, like, I just wanna talk about the character. I wanna know more about what really happened here.
Speaker 5:And now that's happening. So that's where AI enhances it. But you have to be really careful because there's something pure about Kindle Yeah. That customers love. And this is, like, near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 5:You you have to be a super fine line. We do have like, on the Kindle scribes that we just launched, we do have AI search for any of your notes. So if you have hundreds of pages of notes now, you just search for or and then then you can say, summarize all the notes that I wrote about John or whatever. And, you know, you'd get them all summarized and it would do a smart summary for you and then you can put them in. You can do all that.
Speaker 5:But here's here's the risk that we're very cautious of. Like, Kindle's like a sanctuary. It's like this you you get into it and then you just wanna disappear into it. Our users, like, they love their books. You know what they hate when they're reading books?
Speaker 5:It's distractions.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I don't even I don't use that word lightly, but it is like, if you popped them an ad or put a link up or I infiltrated you with a text coming in, if you will, from Jordy, you'd be like, goddamn. I'm just trying to read, man. This is my one place to disappear. And it's crazy because readers are popping up everywhere, new readers. I think, like, 60% of our new purchases are from totally new readers right now, just so you know.
Speaker 5:So there's a bit of a spike happening because it's a growing category again. The the trick is to hold that as, like, that sanctuary where when you do pick up to read, that's what it becomes. The more tech you put in there beyond a book, you know, you you have to be careful. We I think I know where that line is. The team knows where that line is.
Speaker 5:We have an amazing Kindle team. They've been doing it for, you know, years and years. This is an and they are they they understand the customer so well. But to your point, the customer has already asked, can I can I get to what we call book so far or continue watching is the best way to say it in in analogous? And so we created that or summarization.
Speaker 5:We have that. And also in your writing, can search your notes. But we're being very selective not to over techify it, if that makes sense. You gotta be careful because at the end of the day, it is a book or it is a notepad that you wanna write on. And and you you can have plenty of other devices to let your distractions kick in, but this is the one that we kinda hold coveted and and protect quite a bit.
Speaker 1:Have one last question. But but maybe this is a technical one, but on on Kindle and AI Yeah. I think of Kindle as, I don't wanna say underpowered, but, like, it's it's designed for long battery life, you know, not the craziest screen. It's supposed to be something you can, you know, throw in your backpack and pull out on a trip and know that it's still charged. Right?
Speaker 1:So I imagine that there's
Speaker 5:You should be a product manager for Kindle.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. And so
Speaker 5:hold that line. If you hold if you hold that frame, man Yeah. You're perfect. Like, you just just religiously hold on to those statements.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And and and so I imagine that the the AI workloads need to be done in the cloud, and you're not thinking about on device AI, and that's generally the right trade off because the summaries can be processed asynchronously or or they can be queued up and and kind of gone back and forth over the over the WiFi network or or for four g. I I'm just kind of interested in, like, what the what the median connectivity versus, on device compute trade off looks like for Kindle going forward.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's tricky. We're doing we're doing a lot of work on the edge right now as you you put it on device. Sure. I think you have to because it just it it can envelope speed and sometimes Yeah.
Speaker 5:Though, you basically, we serve the customer transparently, yeah, wherever it's right. But we are doing work to when it's time and when it's time to use on device, so let's call it, like, if you're trying to reduce latency on writing and you're doing some beautification. That's an example. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You're gonna wanna do it on device. Totally. If you want to, you know, do books so far, like, it's a cloud based thing. Mean, what if you start reading on your is a good example. You start reading on your iPhone, you came over to your Kindle, and you picked it up.
Speaker 5:You you want that to be a cloud based experience. That's not something you wanted on device. So, like, there's just there's trade offs, but we do both. It's a good question. I think that's true, by the way, across every single device we talked about today.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 5:Like, where is the edge workload more important if I did wanna you know, depending on if we were doing whether whether it was for security or speed, your or cost, whatever it might have been, you're always trying to find the right balance for the customer. By the way, when you say it, I'd can I show
Speaker 7:you this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, please.
Speaker 5:You may not be able to see it on the screen.
Speaker 2:Will that this
Speaker 5:the new color, Kendall. Can you see it? The
Speaker 3:screen's Wow.
Speaker 1:Isn't that rad? Is that is that color
Speaker 5:look how thin it is. Like, the thing is 5.4 millimeters thin. Like, it's It's so fun and it has the same battery life I've talked about, same latency, same speed and I'm I have it here taking notes as I'm talking to you guys but it it's like a it's a powerhouse now. The processor there is gonna double the power.
Speaker 1:Is that, is that, like, e ink screen? Like, it works outside and Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's e ink.
Speaker 5:So it almost feels like when you look at it, it's so soft on the eyes. Right? It has a front light and the front light Sure. Basically across the screen so it's not blasting you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it still has that subtlety. You don't feel as tired as you're looking at it. You can do it in the dark and the light. There's nothing that you lose this screen.
Speaker 5:It's a matte screen. It's perfect for writing.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 5:And you're and so you get you get all those pieces. The refinement was color. So there's always this battle, like but it's not an LCD with the beautification of, you know, OLED and so forth, I mean, there's something beautiful and subtle about this, almost like colored pencils on the screen. Mhmm. And so even when you're writing in color, feels that way.
Speaker 5:It's quite it's it's pretty
Speaker 1:Well, we gotta get one. We gotta figure out how to jailbreak it, sideload the Sora slob feed. I want brain rot on that thing.
Speaker 5:Don't tell me any of that stuff, man. Don't wanna
Speaker 2:Last thing, do you think Amazon's AI opportunity is broadly underappreciated? I mean, it feels like there's so much service area So underappreciated. Retail opportunity, anthropic. You guys already have a suite of devices that people use and love that are in people's homes. It feels like in many ways other, you know
Speaker 1:You guys also have data centers too.
Speaker 2:A few of those.
Speaker 3:Few of them.
Speaker 2:You have a few racks.
Speaker 1:They invented the data center.
Speaker 5:For sure. Yeah. For sure. I mean, I don't know how else to say it,
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 5:Hands down, you know, you're every part every part of Amazon
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is, like, entrenched in driving through AI. Whether it's Bedrock, AWS, what's happening, like, CloudWise, all the models we run, we make available to our customers, all the way through stores and what they're doing fundamentally to help your shopping experience better, Prime Video and what they're doing. We have a jump to scene with Fire TV. Did you guys know that? It's very cool.
Speaker 3:Well, that's
Speaker 7:very Great
Speaker 5:movie scene.
Speaker 1:I mean, also the largest deployment of of robots, believe, in the world is ammo.
Speaker 5:Correct. Oh, well, I don't know if that's I don't know if that's accurate.
Speaker 1:Maybe in The US. I I saw some chart where you guys were were passing a million robots.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's pretty massive. And then, like, you know, controlled by and then you have the other side of it. All the Alexa devices now are about to be powered by Alexa Plus. This is, like, core foundation
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Of, like, consumer AI in its most practical sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You're you're in this place now where, you know, I'm at the dinner table with the family, and instead of somebody pulling out their phone to get the answer or research something, we just have a conversation with Alexa, you got the full depth of what you would have expected from an LLM based product, but it's just very practical and ready for you. And so, like, I think the whole gamut is you're right. It's it's quite underappreciated right now. I don't I don't know what the right way to frame it is on the other side without sounding too like, you know, but I I do think this I
Speaker 2:I agree. So I think and I think I think the market will will will realize eventually.
Speaker 5:So I do too. I think, you know, first thing, serve the customer, serve the customer, serve the customer and do it in the right way. I think, you know, that's our focus and we'll we'll we'll kinda continue to do that. But you're right. I think that it gets it'll get noticed, seen, understood.
Speaker 5:I'm pretty proud of it right now. And when you see what's coming with Alexa Plus with Ring, with Ring video search or Ring story descriptions and, like, summarizing your day, it really starts making it something it takes AI to the next level in my mind because it just makes it practical for people. Like, it just puts it right there. Don't get me wrong. You can actually use alexa.com too to do all the things that people are associating with traditional LLM Sure.
Speaker 5:Is quite cool as well or the app. But at the end of the day, there's just a whole new set of practical ways to use it that I think are gonna be pretty delightful for our customers.
Speaker 2:When's the new Scribe actually releasing? I just tried to buy it while we were talking, and Yeah. It says coming soon.
Speaker 5:I I'm not allowed to give you the date on here, but it's yeah. You so you have to get on the you have to get on the wait list. Our demand is a little bit higher than we expected it to be right now. We're in we're in production. So you put it on.
Speaker 5:You
Speaker 2:guys couldn't get the demand planning right?
Speaker 1:I want a It was a demand planning.
Speaker 5:That's days. Panels. Nine. You'll have it before the holiday. You'll have in
Speaker 4:two days.
Speaker 2:As long as something we're
Speaker 5:very about it. I'll make sure you get I'll I'll make sure you guys get
Speaker 3:it. It'd be awesome.
Speaker 5:Put your name down, I'll make sure.
Speaker 2:We will. We will. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is great.
Speaker 2:On all the progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really really fascinating tour of the ecosystem. I appreciate you breaking it down for us. Thanks so much.
Speaker 5:Been fun guys. You take Wait.
Speaker 2:Also, I think obviously it's too late now, but is Panos the first are you I think you're the first person from Amazon ever on our show.
Speaker 1:I think We've had over
Speaker 2:thousand interviews this year. Here we the damn dog. We go. It's great to have you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:We'll we'll we'll see you soon.
Speaker 3:We'll see
Speaker 1:you soon. Cheers. Have a good wagon. We have some breaking news that we gotta cover. Sam Altman has replied to his, his post about erotic content in ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:He says, okay. This tweet about upcoming changes to ChatGPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to.
Speaker 2:You didn't think you didn't think posting e r o t I c a was gonna
Speaker 1:There are there are so many other words that you could have used to kind of, like, you know, get there without saying that companion. Exactly. We we have said that. When the entire time we were discussing, Grock, we like that this is a clean show. We like that we
Speaker 2:I've never I never wanted to say that
Speaker 1:word on the show. Exactly. So when we talk about this, we say adult content, adult romantic companion. We don't go to the other words. But, yes, he went there.
Speaker 1:He said e r o t I c a. He typed it out into his ex app, sent the tweet, and he said it was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults. Here is an effort to better communicate it. I'm gonna read it, and you tell me, is this better communication, Jordy? He says, as we have said earlier, we are making a decision to prioritize safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers, and we are not loosening any policies related to mental health.
Speaker 1:This is the new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection. I love that point. We also care very much about the principle of treating adult users like adults as AI becomes more important in people's lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission. It does it doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not.
Speaker 1:Without being paternalistic, we will attempt to help users achieve their long term goals, but we are not the elected moral police of the were of the world in the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries. R rated movies, for example, we wanna do the same thing here. Let's hear it for the MPAA rating system that's gaining popularity. Yes. I want this so badly.
Speaker 2:I just wanna in the App Store, it should say r rated.
Speaker 1:R rated. Oh, but that is not NC 17 rated, which is a different thing. And so Okay. We were debating this. Is So you're a movie buff.
Speaker 1:Is no. No. I mean, is is is Amazon's erotic content on the Kindle, is that is that x rated? Is that the same as OnlyFans? Is that the same as a a an adult content video site?
Speaker 1:Like, it does feel somewhat different. And so I don't know. Maybe this is a nod to staying in the r rated category, not going further. I don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 1:What's your reaction, Jordy, to this post? Is it effective comms? Put on your Lulu hat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the problem is that 14 almost 14,000,000 people saw yesterday's post. You add that up with, you know, thousands of other posts and, you know
Speaker 12:That really did blow up
Speaker 2:14 post is gonna get certainly get plenty of plenty of views, but I think the the community has already taken it.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I I think I think the the the December timeline, there's a there's a lot of days between now and December. AGI might hit before that, but there's so much that could happen to tweak that policy before it goes out, really silo it. I don't know. We'll we'll have to see.
Speaker 1:I I I can almost guarantee that when it rolls out, there will be crazy screenshots on the timeline that day of people getting it to do crazy stuff because people love jailbreaking this stuff. They've already been doing it. Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You can load all your erotic content into Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 1:Search it 10 times cheaper. Yeah. And we have our
Speaker 2:Well, our first
Speaker 1:in person guest of the show. We got Adam Ryan
Speaker 2:Adam Ryan.
Speaker 1:From Workweek. The legend. The legend. Bring it in. It's the platform for professional networks.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Adam. Hello. Second time, third time, I've lost track, but thank you so much for joining us. I'm gonna turn this microphone over here.
Speaker 10:We're be talking about
Speaker 1:Your strategy to bring erotica to professional networks.
Speaker 10:I've been waiting I've been waiting
Speaker 1:for this moment. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 10:Exactly what it's all about.
Speaker 1:Actually, kick us back off
Speaker 10:with thesis
Speaker 2:of the whole company is that people wanted erotica in their work in the workplace.
Speaker 1:Kick us back off with, like, the actual, the actual overview of the company, how you introduce yourself, these days.
Speaker 2:And and the the quick history too for anybody that that met missed the last interview.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Started the company four years ago, and this guy was part of the the founding founding story of that. And today, you know, one of the things that we learned along the way that everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of, hey, I trust individuals over institutions Yep. And beauty, fashion, gaming. There's a Kylie Jenner out there.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. There's nobody in work. Yeah. If you're VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? Mhmm.
Speaker 10:If you're into into beauty of Kylie, don't have anyone else in that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that
Speaker 10:was the first problem we wanted to go solve. And then we thought it was potentially because of money, bandwidth, like this what these people are busy. They already make a lot of money. That's why they don't create content. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We realized that there's there's an actual just platform missing. People aren't going on LinkedIn being like, hey. I'm prepping for a riff. Can someone help me? Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And all these platforms are open networks. You can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analog.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So so putting it in in, my terms, you're building, you know, effectively a professional network, but hyper specific to people, like, within basically certain I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you want if you're a VP of marketing and you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing, like, Workweek is the platform that you can do that on.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we've built a horizontal platform and then we verticalized it by the profession. Mhmm. So we have one for in health care, marketing, HR, e commerce, etcetera. And so if you're in if you're a kind of senior leader in one of those spaces, we verify you so that prevents the bots, the erotica as well as make sure that you can kind of have those those trusted discussions and conversations.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I imagine that with the with the erotica discussion, the the HR group, support group is probably going wild. All the HR leaders across Dowser up there. The Fortune 500.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what are gonna
Speaker 1:do about this? Because we've given ChatGPT to everyone and then they're gonna be able to use it for over the
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm I'm assuming on business plans, you can just turn off that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like This is Can you? Maybe
Speaker 2:So it's it's worth
Speaker 1:40 chess. You gotta upgrade to the to the enterprise solution now because you gotta be able to fine tune your entire organization so we can keep intern Tyler off of the off of the adult version.
Speaker 10:Tyler's been grinning this whole series.
Speaker 4:He's just cracking up. It's funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I've heard I've heard there's, like I've heard crazy stories of value in these, like, niches. There's some phrase, like, there's riches there's riches in the niches. There's riches in the niches, something like that. I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communities.
Speaker 1:So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups, put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of. But then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to, you know, fix up the HVAC system, they'd be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey. Who who else is, you know, managing an office and needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of filtered water or, you know, a better Wi Fi provider or something like that. And that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 1:Hey. We're we're we're talking. How do you think about the the like, if there's this continuum between, like, LinkedIn's this super broad category or you have someone like, you know, a Lenny, a Substack Yeah. Creator with a show that's like, you know, this individual off in this world versus, like, these like curated communities? Like, where do you see like the water cooler existing for the for the average user?
Speaker 10:I think there's there's the traditional social networks which are all free to join. Yeah. And then you have the chief of staff one. Silva owns that one. It's a subscription.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 10:Most of those, you know, it's the YPO but for X. They've all created those, but subscription. Yep. There's really only been one company that's done verification
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:With making it free Interesting. Which is Doximity Okay. Professional network for doctors.
Speaker 2:Oh. They're like a 10 ish.
Speaker 10:$14,000,000,000 company What? Today. Produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting No way. And only raised $50,000,000 Hell of a company, go buy the stock.
Speaker 2:That's good. Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial.
Speaker 10:And we're really following a lot of that blueprint. How do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops like a social network Yeah. But you still have the verification.
Speaker 1:Got it. So Because the
Speaker 2:because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a in a on a network, that the impressions against that audience are are worth thousands of times, potentially, the average impression on a LinkedIn.
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 10:Yep. Well, and I think it's to the Alexis on the show yesterday talked about the dead Internet theory.
Speaker 14:It's like Yeah.
Speaker 10:The perfect time for trying to solve that is, like, how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit. I love Reddit. But I used to be able to tell, are you smart by your reply? And now with Chatuchibi Tea, I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Or like, have you put effort into
Speaker 10:And your if you did, I'm like, alright. Now I'm like, I have no idea who this is. And so the kind of whole trust of the Internet's I think shifting, particularly when it comes to work, like really care about who's giving you advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Isaac, a friend of the show, posted a couple days ago, do what Raya did, but for a social network, humans only, human verification, hard to get into, no idea how to do it, but feels intuitively like it could work. And I love seeing this because work this has been Workweek's thesis for years now. You guys have been building towards it, so people are are finally realizing. What do you think about some of the recent changes on X?
Speaker 2:They're adding functionality that shows where the user is based. There's probably a lot of reason good reasons for this and then some bad reasons. Think some of the concerns were people that are in areas like The UK that don't tolerate free speech.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:You could be targeted or or or authorities there could be trying to come after accounts. But it's like such a actually such an interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional network and a place to talk about our the industry or or various industries broadly. But at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar. Right? It's like it's the people are getting in fights all the time.
Speaker 2:There's like, you know The dive bar.
Speaker 10:That that shady guy in the corner that, you know, he's got a history.
Speaker 2:He's got a history. Yeah. Exactly. But, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 10:I mean, that's what Nikita's doing. If you're an open network, that's free. You're gonna get bots. Yeah. And then you also are gonna get, you know, people abusing them.
Speaker 10:We love I'm on Twitter all the time.
Speaker 5:But the
Speaker 10:Twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots, and then also the blue check market changed the the verification process a where you could buy your own verification. But Russian bots still have credit cards.
Speaker 2:I remember I got I remember I got verified, and then six weeks later, they did spent the years. Me too. Yeah. It's like
Speaker 10:texting grandma and
Speaker 1:finally got got it. I found like old used to just have to
Speaker 2:Needed like five news articles or something about you
Speaker 1:or something. I found some old news articles and Wikipedia page. Process got approved, and then a week later, it was like, oh,
Speaker 2:everyone thinks What is give us your take on the current state of of independent media. You were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying, I wanna build the morning brew for x or the hustle for x. There were some great businesses built off of that. Are they are many of them still thriving?
Speaker 2:What is the current state of the maybe you start with, like, the newsletter media business.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Mean, think what Substack has done has democratized access. I think, like, ultimately, what people always come down in media is you need to, like, help people make money, help people get eyeballs or help people make content faster. And, like, you solve one of those things, you have a decent business solve all three, you have a good one. And what's happening is I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Beehive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case.
Speaker 10:I think we're starting to make our own case there for more specific kind of verticals. But I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the telling the truth. There's like, Lenny is getting more more money on a subscription basis than most publishers in b to b trade publications that have been around for, like, fifty years. Yeah. So consumers' wallets always end up wearing
Speaker 1:Walk me through Trungfan's existence, his business.
Speaker 10:He's the interesting man in
Speaker 1:the world. Writes on business with Workweek. Not at Workweek. Is he an employee? Is he on the network?
Speaker 1:Like, he has a newsletter.
Speaker 10:He's just Trung.
Speaker 1:How does that work? Just
Speaker 2:Trung. Trung was one of the first one
Speaker 1:of the
Speaker 2:first creators that Workweek
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, I so Yeah. Signed him at The Hustle Okay. And had known him for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And he actually was a big part of, like, our our shtick is because when we brought him on at the hustle, he was so funny and so much better than everyone else. Yeah. He changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1,500,000 people. Woah. Like overnight.
Speaker 10:I mean, was like everyone just started like more and opening more. Yeah. Ads went up. And so we actually that was like a big part of it. It's like one person could totally you have like the 100 x creator,
Speaker 2:which Yeah.
Speaker 10:Everyone talks about developers. Today, one, he's like the best dad in the world. You can't mention Trung and not talk about TJ Trung Junior.
Speaker 4:Oh,
Speaker 10:yes. And I don't think he's ever been on an all hands call for any company I've ever been a part of with him, but, you know, that's just kind of his vibe of what he does, and he comes with comes with it all. But, yeah, he's
Speaker 2:think he's funny guy But
Speaker 1:is he an example of someone who's who's stewarding a a smaller community of professionals that could be given some sort of moniker?
Speaker 10:He he works more on the work week side of helping us. So what we have a lot is we have people like Blake Madden who covers health care. Yep. If you're in health care, you know who Blake is.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche healthcare. Yep. Trung's the guy to help us do that.
Speaker 1:Okay. So he's a little bit more like
Speaker 4:He's a halo He's halo creator.
Speaker 1:Got it. Okay. And then there's specific niches. Yeah. Is there a power I imagine there's some sort of power law to those to the various communities that you have.
Speaker 1:Like, what's at the top? Like, where are you really, like, dominating?
Speaker 10:About, like, 30% of revenue is HR, nine percent's health care. But if we look at Sure. Like TAM, it's actually pretty indexed Okay. Pretty equally of, like, how many people we think we can get per Yeah.
Speaker 1:Per network. And then within HR, for example, are there multiple communities, multiple creators, or is it all just one big pool? How do think
Speaker 7:about that?
Speaker 10:So we think about it more like a network. Sure. So SafeSpace is the HR network, and I think this is part of it. You have to use the lexicon of lingo.
Speaker 1:Like Sure.
Speaker 10:Blake uses very different language than HR. Yeah. Just talk about. And so each one's developed to match that, and Interesting. And then within the network, we have creators.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:And so we believe if you wanna write for h write for HR leaders Mhmm. We're the best place to get the eyeballs. Mhmm. And then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that Yep. That they that they can get money off of.
Speaker 1:Are there other are there other kind of services or or activities that are kind of, I don't know, amortized or shared across the entire platform? Obviously, ad sales seems like one of
Speaker 14:them Yeah.
Speaker 1:But actual software? Or do you say, hey, Trung, like, there's no better product than just posting on x, so we're not gonna try and build our own short form text
Speaker 10:Yeah. App. We just let them do their own thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Use your use whatever tool is best for the job. If you wanna be on Substack or Slack
Speaker 10:We use our own newsletter. So Newsletters. Okay. Newsletters, particularly, is is that. And that's our way that we use content to drive people into the networks.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then you can shuffle people around through the different networks that
Speaker 10:we use. Not that different than how Substack's now doing it for theirs, but ours is more vertical.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And theirs is more, like, news driven. Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 9:Political and yeah.
Speaker 2:Wanted your take on on David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Skydance. A lot of people thought that the price they paid for the free press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it when you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience, but I wanted wanted to hear how you thought about it.
Speaker 10:The the merger itself, I mean, it allows them to compete. Think, like, taking a big step out, everyone wants to win streaming. I mean, that's, like, the name of the game. And so it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney plus and Netflix while they're all and Netflix just announced, I think, today, a partnership with Spotify to start bringing more podcasts on. Like, it is an IP race of the streaming, And Paramount was losing, and I think this allows them to do that.
Speaker 10:So that's I think the bigger picture is actually that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the free press is like a rounding error as part
Speaker 10:of this It's a 150,000,000 total, and they're buying, you know, 12 revenue of that. It's not the end of the world. I think that was also if you're going
Speaker 2:Was that their was that their revenue number?
Speaker 10:12 to 15, I
Speaker 2:think. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I thought
Speaker 1:it was higher than 20, but
Speaker 10:I don't know. Yeah. It was around like 10 x multiple, think. Sure. 10 to 12.
Speaker 10:But they I also think when you're starting your own company, which basically David Ellison is, like, want your own people. Sure. Yeah. And that's you're gonna you're gonna make sure you you build the right foundation, and that's that's
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everybody's focused on what is what what did they pay for the free press? You should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make CBS.
Speaker 10:This is no different, like, in a totally different world and very different numbers. But then Zuck saying, like, I need an AI team. I'm gonna go get the people that I want to get. He's saying, I wanna have the best editorial team. I'm gonna go get the people I wanna have.
Speaker 1:Yep. Do you think the the bigger platforms, the public platforms have kind of become less relevant in those niche professional networks? I feel like if I went back like ten years on Twitter, there would be like hashtag like marketing Tuesday and I'll and I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing that On Tuesday. Yeah. Basically, it was like that.
Speaker 1:What crazy Wasn't that something? Maybe it marketing Monday or something?
Speaker 10:Maniface manifestation Mondays? That was the thing.
Speaker 1:There was a thing around, like, hashtags All the corny hashtags. Chats around certain things, and you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific, like but now, x feels like teapot political news, like there's there's there's it's it's at a much higher level than any sort of niche
Speaker 10:one the irony, I think, was, like, when they went all algorithms first, they lost the sense of communities. Mhmm. And when you used to follow people and that's who you did, it was like your people. Yeah. And when it's algorithms, it totally changed the dynamic of the product, but because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them
Speaker 1:differently. It happened slowly.
Speaker 2:It's I think it makes the feed more interesting Yes. Or we definitely lost
Speaker 10:some And they make more money. I mean, like, you're you're there for engagement Totally. And your dial mile goes up as Nikita makes that algorithm better. So, like, that's all he cares about.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I think that's, like, ultimately what their incentives are. I do think like LinkedIn, you know, I know you guys are huge there. Yeah. And really rely on the center of LinkedIn. Exactly.
Speaker 10:So hate to hate to say this, but, you know, I think like ten years ago, somebody like, hey, I saw your connect on LinkedIn. Can you make that introduction? I'd be like, oh, yeah. I I know it. Today,
Speaker 1:I'm
Speaker 10:like, I have
Speaker 1:no clue who
Speaker 5:that is.
Speaker 10:I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. Interesting. The more people added, the worse it gets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:We were talking off air about how OnlyFans hasn't been able to sell itself. They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday, obviously, know, other companies leaning into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting,
Speaker 3:which
Speaker 2:OnlyFans has done better than probably any company in the world. When xAI was leaning into Romantic Companions earlier this year, we were like, it made sense for them to do. They needed a strategy to, drive, you know, new user sign ups, engagements, subscriptions, etcetera. But why do do you think have you been surprised that there's no buyer for OnlyFans?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's like the on a a cash flow per head count, I think it's the best company in the world.
Speaker 2:Until what what is it? Tether?
Speaker 10:9,000,000,000, I think, OnlyFinds does in cash flow a year with, like, 70 employees or something. It's, like, absurd. I know the owner takes, like, a he pays himself a 500,000,000 dividend check a year, and then they leave, like, plenty in the bank. But they've never they can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content.
Speaker 10:And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they allow they've created the tooling. The c old CEO of OnlyFans, former colleague of mine, she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better. And now they've advanced further to where, like, it's a chatbot. They're essentially, like, not even having real conversation anymore.
Speaker 10:It's not that different than what we're talking about for OpenAI. Yeah. And it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, x being the everything app, you're like, I can kinda see that. That's that's, I think, to your point earlier about the Apple comparison, this this is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for OpenAI.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we have some breaking news we gotta cover before our next guest hops on. But thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 2:What's the breaking news?
Speaker 1:I gotta know. There's a ton of these. MrBeast has filed a trademark launching his own It will be called MrBeast Financial. He clearly saw our post about Erebor and was like, gotta get it on the action. Just kidding.
Speaker 1:Application was filed two days ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, but
Speaker 10:it's real. Happened this morning.
Speaker 2:Saw What's your what's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that? It's kind of like
Speaker 10:I guess. Yeah. I mean I just
Speaker 2:don't know that I don't know that
Speaker 10:like a lane of trust sooner or later that, like, you're just gonna screw it. Like, you know, like, why do I want a Mr. Beast bank? I
Speaker 1:don't know. I mean, the the the lesson from the Mr. Beast bar or
Speaker 10:the Hamburgers.
Speaker 1:Hamburgers is that it it has zero price discrimination. Yeah. And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like, you're only gonna be able to charge them a $5 for a
Speaker 2:candy But but let's break it down.
Speaker 1:A bank you can actually get
Speaker 2:It's a highly different thing like
Speaker 10:shipping, basically.
Speaker 2:But yeah. But but think about, like, wealthy people are not gonna see this bank launch and decide, I need this. I'm gonna move a bunch
Speaker 1:of Think in decades. Think in decades. A kid watches MrBeast is like, yeah. I need my first checking account. I'll set up MrBeast checking.
Speaker 1:And then twenty years later, they're like, yeah. I should probably switch to something more serious. It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on Beast Financial, but like, here I am.
Speaker 2:I made a million dollars. Yeah. He's actually a bank charter charter, it means he can get into doing mortgages and like Yeah.
Speaker 10:Hardcore I think like that all it always sounds good in like a board meeting. Yeah. And then you like don't care about the product and you don't actually make it differentiated and then you're like, cool. When distribution's like your only moat, it's not a moat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I so so I guess I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person in my audience is like 16
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How much money do they spend a month? Yeah. I bet I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will wanna use it. Mhmm. And you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like, okay, the average teenager spends, their parents are gonna send their their allowance or maybe they have a job, they send it into the account, maybe they spend a couple $100 a month.
Speaker 2:I don't know what teenagers spend these days. I I was remember back in my day, was like, you know, allowance was like $20. And and so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool and cash back and he can monetize some of that that The rewards I think you just turned it really believe like, I became an adult and I was like, I wanna use a real bank. I'm an adult, you know. Like, I I just remember I I migrated from like a credit union
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In my hometown to like, I wanna You're using a card all the time. It's Yeah. Coming up. Like, you think you're Like, a a a kid that goes into college is like, yeah, I'm still using my Mr. Beast like it's like Yeah.
Speaker 10:A Lunchables competitor and a bank. Like, know your audience a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I so so I guess, like, from from the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to to just be using Beast Financial as their as their
Speaker 10:I mean, as a technically
Speaker 1:called it's technically called mister Beast Financial, which is I I I think I like Beast Financial more than Mr. Beast Financial. The filing was submitted on intent to use basis, which under trademark law means there are genuine plans to bring this to life.
Speaker 10:I think he should've went with Jimmy. He's like a grown up version of the bank.
Speaker 1:Clearly got it clearly got Will Menidas up in arms. He's thinking about it because he says he's calling the top on incubations, subtweeting mister Beast. Just kidding. He's probably not subtweeting mister Beast, but, Will Menidas did call the top on incubations. He says, every guy I've talked to in the past six months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies.
Speaker 1:Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is the why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go all in? They just wanna clip 20%. And so yeah.
Speaker 2:Cubations are incredibly hard. He says there are amazing. They're way more work way more work than just investing.
Speaker 15:Jordy and
Speaker 10:I spent some time trying that. It's tough.
Speaker 7:It's
Speaker 10:a tough game.
Speaker 1:Individuals. I cannot say their names here or they will blow my car up. You are not incubating anything if what you are doing is clipping 20% for an idea and some intros. You are not the tax man. The real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in.
Speaker 1:What what what's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill? Like, that's a real incubation? I I guess, like, you could kind of
Speaker 2:Thrive Thrive
Speaker 10:Oscar. There's a healthcare one that's done really well that, like, they only focus on, like, certain healthcare
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 10:One. But their, like, model was, like, they had no capital risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they're also, like, a platform Yes. That's done this for and they take it very seriously. Yeah. We did we did talk to somebody who incubated, like, what, 200 companies in a year or something.
Speaker 2:There was a there was a there a there was a studio that made so many companies and was so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announced like we will never fund these companies because When
Speaker 1:a CEO walks in, there's like, how much do you own? CEO founder?
Speaker 2:They're like 10%.
Speaker 1:10%. And you're like, who owns the rest?
Speaker 10:And also like, are you the like hundred ninety ninth of the 200 CEOs? Or like number five?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And I think that's actually
Speaker 2:I I I am coming around to the MrBeast Financial? Financial.
Speaker 1:You like it. You're bullish.
Speaker 4:I I'm not What's the terminal value?
Speaker 2:I think that they can so this idea came up in 2021, 2022 during the fintech craze.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It was
Speaker 2:like, it's not that hard to start a a Yeah. Software product that can take deposits as I mean, in this case, sounds like he's may maybe trying to be a chartered bank.
Speaker 10:He's trying to go to, like, base Wait.
Speaker 1:It's unclear.
Speaker 2:But it's who knows? It's literally But still, it's like if you just run the numbers on, how many million accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're gonna be spending on a recurring basis. I and then and then the Yeah. Even the partnerships that he'd be able to drive around, like, being becoming a referral partner for Netflix and,
Speaker 1:you know, Shopify. Yeah. To be clear, I don't think it's I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank. It could be Mr. Beast Financial get some financial advice.
Speaker 3:It could
Speaker 1:be
Speaker 10:a would be like a clever idea, and like, I would be supportive of this. Like, you buy one of his Feastable Lunchables, you get like a nickel Yeah. In a savings account. Yeah. You keep going
Speaker 1:or Or something like flip it around, you pay the for the Lunchable with $1.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm like If you
Speaker 1:don't pay for the rest of the Lunchable, mister Beast comes and personally breaks your legs, becomes a loan shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see. In other news, on the way back to The United States from NATO's defense ministers meeting, the secretary of war, Hagseth's plane, made an unscheduled landing in The United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield.
Speaker 1:The plane landed based on standards procedures and everyone is on board is safe. Thank God. What a crazy story. Crack in the windshield. That is that is a very crazy moment.
Speaker 1:In other news, an exciting milestone in AI from science Sundar Pichai was probably holding this in his back pocket for when OpenAI does something that's negative aura.
Speaker 5:Sundar
Speaker 1:busted this out and said, Our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on GEMMA or GEMMA generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior which scientists experimentally validated in living cells with more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer.
Speaker 10:He dropped it.
Speaker 4:Oh, just a coincidence. Yeah, he dropped it.
Speaker 1:Just a coincidence, so
Speaker 10:They're they doing that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely dog. Tyler, tell me more about this. Like what is actually going on? Do you have you dug into this at all?
Speaker 9:I haven't read the full paper, but I mean it is there is like a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about, especially with all the Gemini three rumors going on.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:It's like this is the most cracked model of all time.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 9:So I don't Maybe it's just like This is just maybe maybe it's just like a vague post blog post.
Speaker 2:This is interesting.
Speaker 1:Vague paper?
Speaker 9:We're thinking
Speaker 1:We're doing vague papers now?
Speaker 9:I mean, you you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like, oh, have this new way of doing aural that's way better but Yeah. We're not gonna really get into the details Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 9:Don't wanna share
Speaker 1:Well, we are sponsored by Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini, chat with models, phone monitor monitor usage. You're gonna hang out for all the Eric, you
Speaker 5:can hang out.
Speaker 4:You can interview the next person.
Speaker 2:I'm having fun. I'm having fun. Is good one. This is an interesting post from Brendan Buck. He says, here's a telling sign of where we are.
Speaker 2:On day 15, there are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall Street journals. What is blank?
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:The government has shut down.
Speaker 1:Oh, the government shutdown. Yeah. That's right. I'm getting a new passport and I have no idea if I'm gonna get it in time. I I paid for to be expedited because I have to go to Europe, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic event, but I never like Yeah. But it was it it did rise to the occasion and I I need I need a new passport and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No news?
Speaker 2:That is wild.
Speaker 10:It does feel a lot less
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Like newsworthy
Speaker 1:people just don't like the government. And so they're like, yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government.
Speaker 2:See you.
Speaker 1:See you. I do
Speaker 10:think most of those it will get I heard this. Most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees.
Speaker 3:Okay. So they can hang
Speaker 10:out So basically, for like four ish weeks, they're
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 10:No one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves. Once that happens, I think it starts to get noisy.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, we do have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting. We have Eric Whitman from Visco coming on the show next.
Speaker 1:He's in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TBP and UltraDome. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on? Good to see you.
Speaker 12:Doing great. How are doing, guys? Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on the show.
Speaker 5:It's
Speaker 2:great to have you.
Speaker 1:Give us a give us a state of the union with Visco. I I think a lot of people are familiar with the product. They know the the the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Appreciate that. Yeah. Look, Visco, it's it's been a minute. Right?
Speaker 12:Visco has been around for fourteen years now.
Speaker 1:Over a night success.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. That's what
Speaker 1:we love to see. I know overnight success.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So, you know, and, you we're we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and creators overall for, you know, well over a decade. And what, you know, we love our jobs.
Speaker 12:I mean, we love building for creatives. And, you know, we've seen various moments in time come about for Visco, but I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI, you know, right now people, especially photographers and creatives, are looking for a company that has their back as building tools for them as really helping them find ways to be successful, whether it's just thing doing things on the side or making a full time living, as a creative. So that's really what we've been up to.
Speaker 1:Cool. Take us through the most recent updates, and then I have a bunch of ideas to pitch you, get feedback on, understand more about, I mean, basically, I can level up my photography workflow.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So, you know, obviously, AI is is impacting the whole industry and a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives. And, you know, our perspective has always been how do we preserve the craft?
Speaker 12:How do we preserve the artistry? But also bringing some of those benefits that AI can provide to support, you know, the creative process. So the last couple of years, we've been releasing tools like, for example, Visco Hub, which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content. We, earlier this year, launched a product called Visco Canvas. And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase.
Speaker 12:And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific mood boarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on Visco and their content and then bring your own content to the fore. Sure. So really a a hybrid in a hybrid way. And then today, big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools. We call it AI Lab because we know a lot of this technology, as we hear about on your show almost daily, continues to evolve this massively rapid clip, and I see the Gong getting ready.
Speaker 2:There we go. On lap.
Speaker 12:Thank you. I was wondering if I was gonna get a Gong. And now I have, like, a
Speaker 3:cheap We
Speaker 1:love product launches here. Okay. Here's here here's a here's a, a workflow that I struggle with, regularly, and I want you to walk me through how I could how I could level it up. So, I'll often go out and shoot photos, and I shoot raws. And then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the raws, and I hate that process.
Speaker 1:And I if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button, and it never gets it right. And I feel like there's room for AI to fine tune on what it takes to actually take a raw image and then make it look great in color correction. That's not generative AI. I don't wanna regenerate the image. I want the actual pixels there.
Speaker 1:I just want to understand, you know, the different looks, kind of like AI filters. I've tried different apps, and a lot of the apps, they they kind of, like, hit everything with a different colored hammer, and they all get really extreme. And I'm and I'm and then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack and it looks great, but then you apply it and it's not right on your photos because you shot slightly differently. So what do you think the future of, like, just you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just wanna speed up that workflow of the post process once you have a great raw.
Speaker 12:I love it. I love this example because actually the future is here now.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 12:So actually, with VSCO today, you can import those raw images
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:In. And we actually have some ML built into the product today Mhmm. That we will look at that image that you have, and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets. Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful.
Speaker 12:Mean, a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our our work that's been around, like I said, for ten plus years. And there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company in Cupertino, and they are still using our color grading presets as their default starting point so that they can just get that great look much more quickly. So the future is here already today, John. It's, it starts with VSCO into our VSCO Studio. You can import your raws, use for this photo to automagically pick the right preset, and then you take your creative process from there.
Speaker 12:Again, we're not trying to get in the way from an AI perspective. We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process.
Speaker 2:What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today around AI. We had an we had one shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI. He was hoping that the government would regulate it so that certain products could only be, like legally had to be authentically photographed because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them. Meanwhile, we have, an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things. Even I think in my home, right, I don't I could go and generate hundreds of images of my family and yet I still we still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos.
Speaker 2:And so Yes. I even even if the models get a 100 times better, which I don't even know if they can get a 100 times better because they're already so photo real. I just think that photographers that are craft driven, that like that genuinely enjoy photography and that want to capture moments will always have a job that may that might be naive, but that's my current feeling today. I'm and I'm curious how the broad community on Visco is thinking about it.
Speaker 12:I I I think that's right. I mean, look. I I think we all should all recognize there's tension today. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 12:And and I I I think back, like, look. I've I've I've been in this industry for thirty plus years. I've seen a lot of hype and, you know, where it ends up, you know, resolving to itself. Like, ecommerce, right, when it first started happening, everyone thought, oh, brick and mortar stores are gonna go away. The reality is 16% of overall commerce hap happens through ecommerce today.
Speaker 12:The rest is still very much brick and mortar. So I do think, you know, when AI and especially generative AI came out, you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat. And there are certain categories where, realistically, it is a threat. Stock photography is a perfect example. I think this is why you see companies like Shutterstock and Getty are coming together because, you know, there is going to be there already is duress in the stock photography market.
Speaker 12:But as you're saying, like, there are different segments of photography. I mean, the photography services market is a $105,000,000,000 a year. It's gonna grow to a $160,150,000,000,000 dollars a year, by 2030. So it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize. So I think the question's always been, well, how is AI gonna affect me and my specific line of work?
Speaker 12:I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process. You know, there are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like, you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10,000 photos, how do I quickly cull through that? Today, it's very much a manual process, and it does not give photographers energy.
Speaker 12:But there are more and more companies that are coming out with culling tools that will automatically apply, your look and also because they've learned what your look has be is is has become over years and years of editing, and they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really you know, like, you you see an airplane in the background. Okay. Take that one out. Right? The it's just AI is is supportive of that.
Speaker 12:I think another area that I think is very emerging, you're gonna see a lot more from Visco on this front. I I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with y'all, but is that, you know, a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft. They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business. And so there are just mundane tasks around managing customer relationships and responding back to people and making sure that your your edit list is appropriately organized Qualifying clients.
Speaker 12:Qualifying clients is another great example. So we we actually, announced a, a product called Visco Workspace that is the whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business, and we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can, again, take a lot of those mundane tasks out. So that's where as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very human centric from a photography creator standpoint. But AI is going to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers.
Speaker 2:Did you always know you were gonna come in and and build SaaS at Visco? Was that was that the was that the plan? I mean, b to b SaaS specifically. Obviously, you're you're at Atlassian, then you're at Figma. You you're kind of a SaaS demigod, you know
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of sorts.
Speaker 12:I do love it, man. I can't I can't look at a business and not think SaaS. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have Us too. There's there's a few things better in the world.
Speaker 1:I have I have I have a question about AI and the the trajectory of smartphone photography. So I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras. And I saw a video where they were it was on MKBHD and he was testing I think it was Leica versus iPhone. Can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard.
Speaker 1:But they really made it harder by only doing, extreme you know, no shallow depth of field, landscape photography, super bright. They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with, you know, controlled lighting or something like that. And so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone is it it it it it got amazing superhuman level or or super, you know, Leica level at a certain niche in photography, but you it really has not replaced, like, moody portrait lighting where you want shallow depth of field, like, just because of the physics of the lens. And I'm wondering if you think AI generative AI will do the same thing because I'm just thinking about, like, even in the stock photography example, like, if I'm buying a stock photo of Yosemite, like, even if it looks photoreal, like, I want Half Dome in the right place. I don't want your Half Dome.
Speaker 1:I don't want something that looks like Half Dome. I like, the the reason I'm buying that stock image is because I can see exactly the shape of Half Dome perfectly, not, you know, something that feels right and looks photo real but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things. We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street, and the the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever versus the ones that are, like, going a layer deeper on that?
Speaker 12:Yeah. No. It's a great question. Mean, first of all, I think composition is arguably one of these most important things for you to learn in photography. You know, most people will say that Ansel Adams wasn't a great photographer.
Speaker 12:He was amazing at composition and editing. I mean, he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop, like, back in the day, you know, little little known fact. But, you know, it is about that editing process. So, yes, you've gotta get that composition right. But oftentimes, you know, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. And I do think, you know, where AI is interesting is it's starting to help people sort of, hey. You have this vision. Lighting is a is a is another classic example. Right?
Speaker 12:Lighting is something that most photographers, you know, even the best of them, like, mess up. And being able to use, AI to help augment, right, and correct some of the lighting issues or, like, composition Mhmm. Issues, I think that's another area that's really that there's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a look at some of that as well. But I think that's where it can it can aid.
Speaker 12:Right? And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone or if you're you got a very expensive Leica, love Leica's great products, but, you know, from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachable for the average person. And, you know, when people are just getting started into photography, right, like, I think even not even the the latest iPhone, but, like, old iPhones. Pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just build your craft, build your look. That's why people love coming to Visco because they get to see what other people are doing, like authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there.
Speaker 12:Right? And then they get to learn from other people. And and I think that's also very important. Right? Don't you know, being a photographer, especially for a professional photographer, is a lonely place.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Right? I mean, being a creative is a lonely place. And so if you can find communities of people you know, we sponsor a lot of photo walks. Just meet up with these folks. Get to learn from each other and, you know, learn about the tools that they're using.
Speaker 12:Learn about the techniques. See the gear in the camera. Ultimately, it's about bringing people together and to help support and elevate their work and their craft. And whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing in person stuff, I mean, we're all here for that.
Speaker 2:You spent fifteen years at Adobe. Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity? Because from my view, it's like you have some of the most advanced tools the most advanced tools for creating creating media across, you know, different categories. And, if AI makes it better you know, if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible, I would think that creates, an amazing opportunity. But the stock's down 34%, in the last year.
Speaker 2:They haven't found a way to get people to understand the opportunity. But I'm curious, like, what your framework is for Adobe, in in, the year 2025.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, I'm I'm I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came through the Macromedia acquisition. And, you you know, I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things.
Speaker 12:I think what people realize is that, you know, Adobe used to be this unassailable, you know, company. Right? And it was very, very dominant in the market. And then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like, oh, there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else. Canva, same thing.
Speaker 12:Right? Canva is also looking at another part of the market that wasn't was underserved. And so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress, you know, in in in the Adobe stock. It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big, but there's a lot of players there right now. And and who knows?
Speaker 12:I mean, right now, this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting. They're coming out with different tools. Just look at how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. They're it's almost impossible to underwrite, you know, the the the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess.
Speaker 12:People are just trying to pick what they think is gonna be the the the winner of of these respective categories. So me personally, very long on the AI opportunity for the creative community. I think you alluded to this earlier, like, there's just a thirst. Forget the thirst, like a massive hunger for really high quality content at a volume that we've never seen before, and we know that generative AI isn't cutting it. Even if generative continues to get better over the next three to five years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human created.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, when it comes to what brands want and need. And, you know, humans are very instinctual creatures too. So even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's real AI and what's not? Like, you know, I think humans understand, like, what what is real still.
Speaker 12:And and I think that's something that we're we're gonna continue to see more and more content being created by real people for a long, long time. So I'm I'm long on that bet, but long also, I'm I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI is gonna present in supporting the the human creatives out there.
Speaker 2:I agree. Totally agree.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for stopping.
Speaker 2:This is super
Speaker 1:fun. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So great
Speaker 1:to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on. Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Before we bring out our next guest, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe. Didn't wanna talk trash about Adobe, but I'm happy to.
Speaker 1:I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe, and I'm so mad at the company. 30% should be a 100%. Wow. My because and I'll tell you why. It's so simple.
Speaker 1:So I I I use
Speaker 2:You want the John is calling for the stock to drop a
Speaker 1:100. Not that serious, but I am very annoyed with Adobe because for a long time, I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix. And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image.
Speaker 1:You could cut it out, put in another one. Eventually, they put ads in front of every single you had to you you had to click an x to get out of an ad every time you open the app. Fine. I'm already paying for Adobe. I don't know why I also get these ads for the other app.
Speaker 1:Very annoying. I finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely. It's not working at all. I get a new app, Photoshop Express. This is their new app for the iPhone.
Speaker 1:They fixed it. You don't need Photoshop Mix anymore. You're on Photoshop Express. And so I get Photoshop Express, and I learn all the new tools, all their new UI, and I figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app, Photoshop Express. Then I get a new iPhone.
Speaker 1:Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express. They they took they they literally took the feature out of of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop You can't do
Speaker 2:layers in this country anymore.
Speaker 1:Even do layers in this country anymore. And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset. And maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple months.
Speaker 1:But I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just I I guess I'm just such a weird power user of, like, niche. Like, I wanna do everything on my phone that I'm just demanding a niche set of, of products and and features that just don't exist anywhere else. But, I've been very, very upset with my Adobe experience. So, anyway Mogg. That's my rant for today
Speaker 13:But, against
Speaker 1:hopefully, they can turn it around. They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully, they get some sharp sharp people who start building, great products and apps because I would love to be using them.
Speaker 2:Well, fortunately, I believe the president of Adobe is coming on, later this month.
Speaker 1:Really? Thank you. Fantastic. I can take it up with them.
Speaker 2:Talk talk to them about it.
Speaker 1:I I could talk about the wrongful death of Photoshop Mix, PS Express, two apps that I they created endless memes in. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest from Reducto. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Hannah.
Speaker 1:Waiting for the rant. Congratulations Congratulations on the news. Please, yeah, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So I'm Adi Abraham, cofounder and CEO here at Reducto. We help people get data out of all of their most complex documents and spreadsheets for all sorts of LM use cases. So plenty of thoughts here on Adobe as well, so we can go
Speaker 3:into Fantastic.
Speaker 1:I like that when you're in the restroom waiting room, you can kinda hear me ranting before you before you hop on. Give us the news. Give us the news.
Speaker 2:Give me that hammer too. News. News. News. News.
Speaker 2:News. What do you got?
Speaker 1:What's you got?
Speaker 15:Yeah. So yesterday, we announced that we raised a $75,000,000 series b. This is five months after we announced our series a for Benchmark. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 15:Million in total funding.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. An absolute, on an absolute tear. I missed who who led the new round. I missed that part.
Speaker 15:Andreessen.
Speaker 2:Andreessen. There you go. There you go.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. So, yeah, I mean, we gotta go a lot deeper on the actual product. Who's the key customer? What are the key use cases? Obviously, you know, understanding documents broadly.
Speaker 1:Like, there's a lot of products for that. So what was your landing zone? What was your go to market? What's the target customer like? Like, take me one level.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How old were you when you realized you wanted to turn documents into data, I guess From
Speaker 15:day one.
Speaker 1:Day one. From day one. Day one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. I think look.
Speaker 15:The thing is, like, PDF processing is, of course, not a new thing. People have worked on it probably longer than I've been live. I've met the people that worked on the original drivers for printers to print PDFs.
Speaker 5:Oh,
Speaker 15:okay. But the context here is very different. Right? Like, we're not far from a point where language models are gonna reason on pretty much any points of human data. Like, before you say hi to your doctor, there's gonna be some sort of summary of your medical records.
Speaker 15:When you apply for a loan, there's gonna be some agents that goes through and understands all of your financial statements. And if you're gonna have all of those human points of data with real human processes, you need human level accuracy. And that's what we came in with. So two years ago, we released what at that time was the first parsing API that used VLMs and tried to really set a new standard for what accuracy could look like on anything. We looked at it as this problem of how can you read documents the way that a human would.
Speaker 15:And since then, obviously, the products gotten a lot broader, but today, a lot of the newer AI companies like in the Harvey's of the world, the Rogos, the Lagoras, and so on, people were building really great AI applications, use Reducto for that sort of ingestion. But also some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Fortune 10 enterprises in tech, some of the largest hedge funds in the world, private equity firms, insurance companies, and so on.
Speaker 1:Talk about the decision to use VLMs. What are those? Break that down.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So for a while, you would have some sort of, you know, IDP vendor that is using traditional OCR. Mhmm. But you can really go a step further. There's a lot of things that weren't possible two years ago.
Speaker 15:Like, if you try to read East Asian languages, there's just so many more characters and so it'd be really hard to get every little mark correct. If you're dealing with something like health care documents, you have all sorts of handwriting, you have check boxes, know, you have a doctor annotating it on the side, and they just assume that somebody would be reading that. But when you read that programmatically, you make a lot of mistakes. And so what we do is we're really good at the traditional CV side. A lot of our team is former self driving car researchers, so we try to apply a lot of frontier techniques there.
Speaker 15:But also, we have this agentic flow where I almost liken it to a human loop. We're making corrections to the last mile of mistakes. Like, maybe we made a mistake on a period versus a comma or a zero was mistaken as an o, and we'll iteratively go through, correct all of those so that no matter what you're uploading, you can get to good reliable outputs.
Speaker 2:Thank you for waiting until we had self driving cars to hire all the self driving car engineers to work on turning PDFs into structured data. I'm thank you. It's really
Speaker 6:Very different use case.
Speaker 12:It's really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. It is. What what
Speaker 1:I mean, what are people demanding on, like, the output side? Is it just, like, dump a bunch of JSON files in s three buckets? Like, what like, how how far do you go from, like, okay. I have a I have a stack of PDFs or maybe papers, and you're gonna scan and and and turn that into text and data. But, like, are people actually coming to you and saying, no.
Speaker 1:I want it loaded into this relational database, or I want it in MongoDB. Like, how far do you go?
Speaker 15:We see all of those. So in some cases, these are real time applications. Like, a user's uploading a file, and they wanna be able talk
Speaker 2:to it.
Speaker 15:Mhmm. And so they're, like, we're actually just extracting the data and making it easier for models to reason on. But we also have cases where one of the biggest hedge funds in the world wanted to digitize two decades worth of historical data. This is things that an analyst would have combed through, you know, extracted individual data points and they want signals off of that. And so in their case, can actually structure it into the exact representation that they want.
Speaker 15:And especially recently, we started going beyond just the initial parsing and extracting, like, take we care of everything. Like, you wanna split your documents. You wanna classify them. You might even want to edit data in. A lot of human work is you get information from some set of documents and you put it into some net new PDF or spreadsheets.
Speaker 15:People can do that end to end, and we offer different endpoints for them to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:How hard is it to get from 85% accuracy to 90 to 95 to 99 to 99.99999999. I imagine but I imagine it's, like, critically important if people are working on, you know, legal cases or you have medical records so that you can't really mess these things up.
Speaker 15:Yeah. I mean, the long tail is really long. And
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 15:When you're looking at, like, a financial documents, a period versus a comma is not, you know, like a oops, it's millions of dollars. Like, you've just changed the order of magnitude. You can't have something like a a patient's medical record and have it say, is the patient vaccinated and guess at what the checkbox says. Right? Like, you need to get these things right.
Speaker 15:And that's why I think even for that last mile difference, people are really excited about Reducto unlocks for them because there are use cases where they didn't think they couldn't digitize it before. Like, it just wasn't reliable enough to put in production. And we're trying to not just get really good initial extracted results and not just gets, you know, that layer of redundancy to correct those in case that we might have messed up, but also give them all of the last mile things that they need. Like, if they wanna have a human in the loop, we're really good at citing where we got answers from. We're really good at catching our own mistakes and pointing to things that we're not sure that we can extract so that they can feel confidence that in production, they're not going to have issues.
Speaker 1:Do you actually have a hot take about Adobe?
Speaker 15:I am getting dinner with the CEOs, and I actually go play back
Speaker 2:your clip.
Speaker 4:Because I haven't got clip where he said it's down 35%.
Speaker 2:It should be down a 100.
Speaker 1:That was maybe hyperbole for the for the comedic effect. But I do have another axe to grind with them because every day I make a PDF, and every day I open Adobe Acrobat to make that PDF, and there are seven different pop ups asking me to use their AI assistant that just says, do you wanna summarize this document? Do you wanna summarize this document? And I never wanna summarize the document. And I always have to say, no.
Speaker 1:Close this. It says, ask AI assistant up here. AI assistant over there. And it's too much, and it does it should be more intelligent to know that I don't need a document summary for my workflow because I do the same thing every single day. It's unacceptable.
Speaker 2:Don't see any AI data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What?
Speaker 15:Yeah. I I think people, like, aren't really looking at PDFs in and of themselves.
Speaker 13:Like, it's
Speaker 15:not the file format that you care about. It's what's in there. Like, you wanna be able to do the things that you want to do. Yeah. And, hopefully, we end up in a place where people can just interact with the underlying data.
Speaker 15:That's what we want to help with.
Speaker 1:I'd love that. Well, thank you for helping make data more interactable. Thank you for everything that you do, and thank you for joining the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to get that update. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Have a rest of your day. Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:Streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. You can start building on Linear today. There are a bunch of more there there are a bunch more stories. Where should we go?
Speaker 2:And what's the story? A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America's fracking boom. That makes sense. Core
Speaker 1:Go where the energy is.
Speaker 9:Poolside. Poolside.
Speaker 2:Is this poolside the
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Foundation? It's a different poolside.
Speaker 1:Poolside. Wait. Yeah. There's Poolside was a viral meme about the product managers who were at who were poolside talking about the day in the life, and it was Well, there's
Speaker 2:Poolside FM.
Speaker 1:Poolside FM. That is a cursor and windsurf competitor, I believe. Something like that. It's a coding IDE. It's a fork of a Versus component.
Speaker 2:Not this.
Speaker 1:This is a different thing.
Speaker 2:Poolside AI.
Speaker 1:Poolside is joining the cloud infrastructure provider.
Speaker 2:That's the one I
Speaker 1:was Poolside is at CoreWeave aimed to take advantage of the natural gas produced in the Permian Basin, the epicenter of The US drilling facility. I believe the the CEO of Pools Poolside is coming on the show, by way, so we can get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 2:Okay. But in this article, Poolside, it did it's a okay. I found it. Okay.
Speaker 1:Figure it out. Poolside is in the midst of a $2,000,000,000 fundraising round that would value the company at $14,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Let's and a preemptive gong. Preemptive gong.
Speaker 1:It's not announced, but we're still ringing the gong for you poolside. According to the people familiar with matter, it raised 500,000,000, just a year ago at a $3,000,000,000 valuation, the coding focused startup. So it is the same poolside. Yes. It is.
Speaker 2:Same poolside. It is.
Speaker 1:Which counts the chip giant NVIDIA among its investors in one of several technology companies seeking to build AI systems with human like intelligence. While many operators move quickly to secure continued access to the chips, America doesn't have enough data centers. It is far from certain whether many data centers will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain on local resources. It's not about your headline numbers of gigawatts. It's about your ability to deliver data centers, says the cofounder of Poolside.
Speaker 1:The real physical bottleneck in our industry. Interesting. Poolside and core Coreweave declined to provide details about the cost of leasing the land from the Mitchell family in Texas who own it. But they said that the overall expecting that
Speaker 2:that, Poolside, they say we build the models, you build the future. AGI for the enterprise starting with software agents. Just interesting that they're actually getting into the physical
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Infrastructure side when you have Cognition, you have Cursor, you know, a bunch of other players that have just said, hey, we're happy to just be at the application layer. Yeah. We'll build some models. But ultimately, we wanna part we wanna just, get kinda off the shelf.
Speaker 1:Totally. This is fascinating. Thank you. We've seen this vertical integration happen in the previous era, but mostly because the cloud platforms just weren't mature. But, like, when Facebook started, they, at some point, could have said, hey.
Speaker 1:Let's just host on AWS, but they became a hyperscaler. Yep. Right? But then so did Cloudflare. So did I believe Netflix has their own infrastructure.
Speaker 1:I mean, 37 signals. Famously move you know, you were gonna say that. Right? 37 signals moved off of AWS.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Thanks to
Speaker 2:Jack Cohen in in, from show in the chat says it's with Jason Warner who was Okay. He was the CEO of Of GitHub.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:An absolute legend, an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Absolute dog. But, this is another
Speaker 2:interesting section here.
Speaker 1:We've been we've been talking about the the building these two gigawatt data centers. They clock the industry standard cost of building a two gigawatt data center at $16,000,000,000. But in this case, poolside expects its cost to be lower due to its use of off-site modular construction techniques, and that total cost doesn't include the cost of the chips. And so Yes. So how does that serve as
Speaker 2:the anchor tenant? What percentage of the is the actual, like, physical structure? Like, what percentage of the cost of a data center is the because we've seen, like, people you're just using tents.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? So it can't be it could it be double digits of the actual cost of a data center?
Speaker 1:We need a pie chart. We need semi analysis to break down exactly what goes
Speaker 2:Find a pie chart
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of data center costs.
Speaker 2:Because it feels like it feels like I'd be shocked if it was higher than 10%
Speaker 1:If of I'm spending $16,000,000,000 on a two gigawatt data center, how is that like, what what percentage of that money is going towards chips, you know, concrete? Like, you know, what are the different buckets? Because you're gonna build all sorts of stuff. What do you think?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to I'm on some analysis site right now. I'm trying to, like, find news about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I'm not really seeing anything which is surprising because, like, I mean, two gigawatts is, like, super huge. Huge. That's, like, bigger than Colossus two
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Which is one gigawatt.
Speaker 10:Well, I
Speaker 1:mean, this is breaking news. Like, in semi analysis publishes, like, like, on a weekly cadence.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's true. It's
Speaker 5:it's very
Speaker 9:surprising to see I mean, this is not a major LLM provider.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I I feel like when Semi Analysis does something, it's more like, okay. They actually fully understand Amazon's strategy, and they're gonna take you through all the different pieces with tons of new information points.
Speaker 9:But it I mean, this is, like, extremely ambitious.
Speaker 1:This is extremely ambitious.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm excited to talk to the founder. That'll be a lot of fun. In other news, the frothiest AI bubble is in energy stocks, says The Wall Street Journal. Concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. Forget about the froth in tech valuations.
Speaker 1:The real excess might be building up in energy stocks for all the fears about stretched technology shares. Again, we've seen that the big tech companies, the multiples aren't that high. And so a lot of people are saying, well, it can't be a bubble if you're still able to buy Apple and Google at, I don't know, 30 x, earnings. Well, that's not the case in the energy market. Not so in the energy sector sector.
Speaker 1:A group of nonrevenue generating energy companies have collectively boom ballooned in value to more than $45,000,000,000 in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet to be built power. Oklo is a good example of this. Their shares have risen eightfold to date. The company is now worth 26,000,000,000. I've actually met met those
Speaker 2:founders Apparently, Oklo is like a obsession for of Korean retail traders.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Korean retail traders.
Speaker 2:Korean retail army.
Speaker 1:That's fun. I wonder if they have a name for the for the, like, the the the retail army. Sometimes they they name themselves. It's the biggest US publicly incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the last twelve twelve months. I mean, yeah, it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor.
Speaker 1:Oclo is developing small modular reactors that use a nonwater coolant liquid metal sodium, and an enriched type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply. It doesn't yet have a license from the US nuclear regulatory commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall Street analysts don't expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028. Of course, the, like, the bull case is that, you know, the the the US government has said, hey. We want to advance this very aggressively.
Speaker 1:We want what was it? The new we we want a new reactor online next year, something like that. And so, there's certainly a lot of, a lot of energy around, let's speed up what the US nuclear regulatory commission does. The NRC has been moving too slow. I believe they've they in the history of the NRC, they've never approved a new nuclear reactor design.
Speaker 1:Right, Tyler?
Speaker 9:I believe that's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think they've only approved a few, like, existing designs build it again. And so Yeah. People are kind of like, that's not the goal. Like, it was never designed as, like, the the nuclear banning commission.
Speaker 1:It was just regulatory. And so you should regulate but not stop all progress completely.
Speaker 9:Also, I think the headline just about energy stocks Yeah. Ripping is, like, kinda misleading. Like, you're still like, I'll believe it when I see natural gas stocks, like, ripping. Right? That that's when we're actually that's, like, real energy.
Speaker 9:That's massive energy that we need to if if we if we're gonna keep accelerating, if we want, like, 1,000 gigawatt data centers, that's basically the only path unless you we have some insane build out
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's, like, part partially government funded of, like, clean of, like, solar or I news is gonna take so long to build.
Speaker 1:I mean, those are probably way harder to meme. Right? Because they're way bigger companies.
Speaker 2:And they have revenue.
Speaker 1:Revenue. But seriously, I mean, like like, we're in this, like, frothy time, and there are companies that are scaling valuations very fast in the private markets and the public markets and NVIDIA's way up, but NVIDIA's way up at, like, not really on, a revenue multiple. Like, they've driven they've grown revenue significantly in line with their market cap. Whereas on like, the retail armies have been searching around for pockets of, like like, quantum computing, like, the next trend because there's this there's this idea that, like, if you missed NVIDIA, what are you gonna go out and find? And, like, a nuclear thing, it feels like nuclear will be a thing in a decade, and so you can get it on the action now.
Speaker 1:Get it on the ground floor. That's the narrative. Much harder to say, yeah. There's gonna be more demand from this, like, you know, legacy oil and gas company, but it's
Speaker 2:already Right now right now, you can own Oklo Yeah. At a $25,000,000,000 market cap with $0 of revenue. Mhmm. Or you can own EQT, which is a big natural gas company that 5,000,000,000 of revenue last year.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And you can and they're currently trading at $34,600,000,000 market cap. So but stocks up over almost 11% over the last month.
Speaker 1:Here's my recommendation. If you're a massive company with no revenue, as soon as you start generating revenue, get on numeralhq.com because you gotta pay your sales tax once you make revenue. Numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Another zero revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly $19,000,000,000 upon its public market debut earlier this month.
Speaker 1:Only two other no revenue companies had larger market caps than Fermi on the first day of trading after an IPO adjusted for inflation. There there was Rivian, which went public in 2021, and Corvus, an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot com bubble. I mean, Rivian's definitely, like, shipped. And, I see the cars around. Like, you know, it's not it's not that much of a bear signal to be like, yeah, you went out as a public company with no revenue.
Speaker 1:But it has historically been like, you only go public when you are cash flow positive and, like and it's kind of like the end of you fundraising constantly. And instead, now now we've just pulled all that forward in in in some in some submarkets. A lot of companies stay private much longer. So lots of different ways to grow your company. What else is going on in the tech world, in the army world, in the world of the army, the secretary of the army, former TPPN guest, is on the timeline.
Speaker 1:Happy captain says, I was debating whether or not to tell the story, but it feels like it's worth telling. Yesterday at AUSA, the secretary of army gave a powerful speech where he talked about a soldier's right to repair. Essentially, soldiers should be able to repair their own equipment without having to rely on a contractor. In 2010, we were in a remote part of Afghanistan on a combat outpost with roughly 70 to 90 soldiers. We had two robots and used them a lot to work on IEDs.
Speaker 1:Their service was under contract. We weren't allowed to fix them. After a lot of use, they both broke, and a field service representative couldn't get to us in a timely manner. So what do you do? Do you force your team leader to put on a the bomb suit and risk their life for every call, or do you fix it yourself?
Speaker 1:We went with option b. We completely took apart two broken robots to create one working one that we used on the mission. That's amazing. Did we get yelled at? Yes.
Speaker 1:Would I would I do it all over again knowing it kept my team leader safe? Absolutely. What a remarkable story. Yeah. This is one of those, like, little tweaks to how the army works, how the military works that, was probably pretty low on the agenda of most other, secretaries of the army, but I'm glad that that he, you know, raised the, raised awareness here in his
Speaker 2:He's locked in. Fortunate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Aaron Slodoff has a a clip here, and he shares, I'm glad that secretary of army is going on a crusade against the insane spend and blatant waste in sustainment parts the army deals with.
Speaker 2:Let's get it back on the show. We should. Rune says, it is so effing cold. Summer is over. It's all over.
Speaker 2:If you haven't secured a mate for the winter, it's time to commit to monkhood.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cuffing season really snuck up on everyone.
Speaker 2:It got yeah. It got absolutely frigid in LA.
Speaker 1:We had to
Speaker 2:turn on the fire here. Yeah. We had to turn on the fire.
Speaker 1:But Not so much today. But I'm excited to keep keep the cozy Max ing going.
Speaker 2:It's hard to really lean into that Locktober spirit when when it's still warm and sunny out.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Much easier to Locktober in the in the winter when it's cold when it's cold. Let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two.
Speaker 2:Keith Raboy put the timeline in turmoil. He said if anthropic actually believe their rhetoric about
Speaker 1:Oh, safety look who we have here.
Speaker 2:Here he is. Brian.
Speaker 1:Hello. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 8:I'm I mean, I'm good. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:We are
Speaker 2:doing fantastic. Be exhausted. Long day at the office so far.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I have I've had some people allegedly helping me. I took I I I took, like, 25 during this entire day, and now it looks like a bomb went off in here.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 8:I felt like I was in a good place before I left. But, anyway
Speaker 2:It's hard to compete with the the super intelligence for the for the finance suite that Yes. Is. But it's great to have
Speaker 5:you on
Speaker 3:the show.
Speaker 8:As a as a as a I felt like it was well, it was incumbent upon me. I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase, but I I to show my own value and and how I could contribute and and and and and process like like RAMP does.
Speaker 1:Yes. What has been harder? Playing Kevin or trying to be the CEO of, the CFO of RAMP?
Speaker 8:This has been much more difficult. There's also a fly in here now that looks like the size of a, of a hummingbird. So, I mean, there's a lot of adversity here being on the street. There's also by the way, I don't know you know, I I I'm used to working in front of an audience, but usually, they're not live and in person here. They're they're waving.
Speaker 8:They're there's lots there's lots going on here. Lots to distract me, but look, I'm I'm I'm doing the best I can.
Speaker 2:How many what what's what's the tracker out right now? How many receipts? Is that does that say 80?
Speaker 8:Well, it says 84.
Speaker 2:84. Okay.
Speaker 8:But to be fair, I felt like I was I was almost at a 100 before I left for a few minutes. So, basically, I got no help from the people who were supposed to help me.
Speaker 2:Okay. Brutal. That's
Speaker 8:So what am I supposed to do? And and
Speaker 1:and you're racing against ramp. What what what what's the counter up to now on that side?
Speaker 8:225229. Mhmm. 506070 Okay. 80. It's going very fast.
Speaker 8:I don't I guess that's accurate.
Speaker 1:I guess
Speaker 8:they process a lot.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's tough showing for you so far. How are you feeling? Are you optimistic that you can catch up? What's the strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You got fifteen minutes left in the workday. Yeah. I don't know if you're
Speaker 3:getting
Speaker 2:out
Speaker 3:at 05:00.
Speaker 8:I I'm working I'm working overtime for sure. I think I'm working until seven. Yeah. Is it I I think for a c suite
Speaker 5:by the
Speaker 8:way, that's a new phrase I learned. C suite. I'm a c suite guy. And so I think
Speaker 1:Big c
Speaker 2:suite c suite guy.
Speaker 8:I think I'm I'm a big sweet c suite guy. So I think, I think we work till seven here.
Speaker 1:Maybe you have 500,000 distraction. Tag for seats.
Speaker 3:Yo. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who's been the biggest distraction?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who's the biggest distraction? Was it Eric trying to throw you off the game to prove that his his software is more effective than than human labor?
Speaker 8:Well, I mean, to be clear, you guys are a distraction. I mean, I'm trying to do inputting here, and now I'm suddenly doing a press interview. But, again, that's what's that's what c suite guys do, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta make time for media.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they had ramp?
Speaker 8:I'm sorry. Could you say that again?
Speaker 1:Do you a question from the chat. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they used ramp?
Speaker 8:You know, I when I was there, I wasn't really, I wasn't really a part of those those Discussions. Type decisions. Yeah. I'm not but listen. I thought we did a pretty good job in the accounting department Yeah.
Speaker 8:There at Dunder Mifflin. So, remember, I got fired. Oh, yeah. Or my character got fired. So Yeah.
Speaker 8:Things went downhill after that, clearly.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess I guess what kind of zooming out a little bit, obviously obviously
Speaker 8:Zooming out, that's another great program.
Speaker 2:Zooming out. We use that a lot in the c suite. We're we're just podcasters, but we talk to people in the C suite.
Speaker 8:Okay.
Speaker 2:What yeah. I guess, like, what what is your what like, there's thou hundreds thousands of people surrounding your office here. We don't have a view, but but people are looking at the stream. What is like what what what is your experience like walking on the street in New York day to day? Do you do you cover up and wear a hat?
Speaker 2:Are you getting are you getting
Speaker 8:I do. I do.
Speaker 10:I
Speaker 2:Is it does it work? Do people
Speaker 8:day that I've been that I've been on the streets of New York without a hat on and and sunglasses. And, you know, look, what I what I've learned as a leader here is you gotta be a people person. So I'm really it's all about it's all about doing people for me. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I know what I'm saying, but it's it's about that connection that is important when you're when, you know, when you're when you're a CFO.
Speaker 8:I mean, that in finance, but Yeah. That's secondary in a way.
Speaker 2:Do you prefer finance or finance? How do you say it?
Speaker 8:Am I saying it wrong?
Speaker 2:I mean, you can say it either way.
Speaker 1:The really fancy people on Wall Street, they call it finance, not finance.
Speaker 8:Finance?
Speaker 1:Finance. Yes.
Speaker 8:They spell it with an e? No. Finance?
Speaker 1:It's spelled the same way, but they say finance.
Speaker 8:Finance.
Speaker 1:Hy finance.
Speaker 8:Hold on. I've been taking some notes today about things that I need to work on.
Speaker 2:I've got another question. How's your golf how's your golf game has your golf game improved since you became CFO?
Speaker 8:Well, it's one it's one day, to be clear. You know, I I I still talk about, golf. That's sort of a different job. I'm kinda trying to transition a new direction, but I you look. What I've learned is if you're a CFO, you have to work much harder than other people think you do.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And by way, can't agree. The best CFOs figure out a way to combine combine that their love of golf and and, you know, their their role at their company. So I would say once they let you out of the cage at, 7PM, hopefully, you can at least hit the range and get some movement in.
Speaker 1:They need a putting green in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Seriously.
Speaker 8:Thing that I'm I'm thinking is I I think I I I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Meaning I need to be more efficient
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:With finance.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So maybe I'll get to golf after I decide that this is not working for me.
Speaker 2:Well, you're giving
Speaker 8:it stay high level. I think you're right. Yes.
Speaker 2:Stay high level. High level. Zoom out. You know, bring Zoom out. Strategy into the c suite.
Speaker 2:Start you start yeah. Focus on strategy.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You know, another thing that occurs to me is probably working on the street with people watching is probably not the best idea. Maybe that was the problem all along.
Speaker 2:Mean, it's a high pressure role. You gotta be I mean, if you're gonna perform in the boardroom on earnings calls, you gotta be able to perform, you know, in flat iron.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a cheering crowd of thousands. This is similar.
Speaker 8:In a way. In a way, it is. In a way, it's very, very different. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You gotta be able
Speaker 1:to perform under pressure, perform in front of in front of thousands as they walk by. It's all it's all important in business.
Speaker 8:Potato potado. Yes. As we say on the C Suite Floor. Potato potado. Guys, pause one second.
Speaker 8:Say again.
Speaker 2:Is that Taipei? She probably gotta get on with Taipei.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Well, I we do. Listen. I I I I would I thought you guys were were ESPN. I'm gonna be honest with you. So I I think it's time for for me to go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Let's call you. You got
Speaker 2:a lot of work to
Speaker 1:do. Appreciate calling in, And good luck catching up.
Speaker 8:Listen, I've I've got some Jaeger here in the office. If you guys ever wanna stop by, we'll see.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. We'd love that.
Speaker 8:Okay. Great to
Speaker 2:have you on, Brian.
Speaker 9:Good to
Speaker 2:see you. Alright.
Speaker 5:Cheers. Bye bye.
Speaker 1:He Wild execution.
Speaker 2:Truly truly an incredible actor. Indeed. I kept trying to throw him off. He stayed fully in character. But but yeah, I've seen some of these videos like the crowd outside.
Speaker 2:We obviously couldn't see it on that camera angle. But, meanwhile, on X, the crowd out outside of the office is absolutely
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should share some of the videos to the timeline.
Speaker 2:I saw, Jeb Bush was Coming out in support. Was coming out in support as he does as he does. But that was super fun. I were you did were you big into The Office back in the day?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I watched a few seasons of it at some point.
Speaker 2:One of the few like work focused shows Yeah. That's actually still relaxing to watch because it can turn your brain off. Right? Yeah. Silicon Valley is on the opposite end.
Speaker 2:Totally. It just reminds you of like emails you need to respond to and things that you need to do, whereas the office is just great. Nothing matters. Just all of our problems are made up. It's all it's all fake politics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was very odd being so young and still extremely into, like, workplace white collar comedies as a kid. It's, like, not what you'd expect, but I was obsessed with Office Space. That was, like, one of my favorite movies as a kid. I enjoyed The Office.
Speaker 1:And I don't know. Even though, like, I'd never worked in an office, I still found it funny at like age 12 Yeah. For some reason.
Speaker 10:It was very very fun.
Speaker 2:Evergreen.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have our next guest joining from the Rooster waiting room. We have Colin.
Speaker 2:What's happening? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 11:I'm not actually I'm not actually going after the ramp event, am I?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You are. Fast follow. Welcome to
Speaker 1:the stream. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, any news.
Speaker 11:Awesome. Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. So Colin Nuss, cofounder and CEO here at Basis Theory.
Speaker 11:I think the the simplest way to think about what we do is we help merchants, platforms, fintechs, not have to face the decision of working with Stripe or Adyen or Checkout, but rather be able to seamlessly work with Stripe and Adyen and Checkout. There's a myriad of different reasons why that's important. I think first and foremost, these platforms today are just global by default. Right? Like, I was thinking about it the other day, the fact that, like I think the latest numbers say 10% of the world's population uses ChatGPT.
Speaker 11:Like, less than three years in. Facebook was still moving from, like, Ivy Leagues to, like, state schools in The US. Right? And then I think the other side of it is payments has kind of moved from being a cost center to growth driver, and I think that's forcing companies to think about it less from a cost perspective and more from a performance perspective. And, look, each of these individual PSPs has their own, you know, secret sauce and areas where they specialize, and so it's just increasingly important that you can work with multiple of them as opposed to one.
Speaker 1:K. Explain Shiel's take. Explain Shiel's hot take and then debunk it.
Speaker 13:Note. Had a Debunk it.
Speaker 11:I had a note to call out Shiel, and I love Shiel. I I went to Shiel's first fish concert with him. So, like, Sheel and I are homies. But, yeah, like, he took this, like, victory lap last week, you know, saying, like, Stripe's win Stripe won agentic commerce. It's over.
Speaker 11:And, like, that just couldn't be further from the truth. Right? Even if you look at Stripe's core business, I think people sometimes forget, like, Stripe and Adyen together are still less than 10% market share in The US. Right? That means 90% of The US acquiring volume is still sitting out on these legacy platforms.
Speaker 11:And so as much as we talk about Stripe, like, I'd argue Stripe hasn't even won US acquiring yet. There's a lot of volume to port over, and we're seeing the same thing play out on the AgenTex side. Stripe can do a magical demo for merchants within the Stripe ecosystem. I think the second you eject out of that, there's a lot of complexity.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I'm just adding dramatic sound effects to Where's the shots fired? These yeah. No. These these are a bunch of great lines.
Speaker 2:I wanted you to explain Basis theory like I'm a venture capital associate. Right? So, like, explain it, like, in really in really simple terms because
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. I'm trying to understand where like guys you're you're the killer GP is completely checked out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like And how's years from retirement. That's what I'm hearing. Customer comes in, they wanna buy something. Are you guys sitting before sitting.
Speaker 2:And then we route front.
Speaker 11:Yeah. That's right. So we sit at the very front. We provide some real time data to the merchants about the payment credential, the actual credit card. Hey.
Speaker 11:This is a Visa signature card issued by a US bank, or this is a Mastercard issued by a European bank. Based on that real time insight. Where do you wanna route this transaction? Do you wanna route it off to Adyen? Do you wanna route it off to Stripe?
Speaker 11:And, oh, by the way, if you get an immediate decline from one of those, why don't you turn around and reroute it elsewhere and see if you can get that customer through? Right? I think that's the other side of it. Right? Like, these modern merchants who are selling these, like, ridiculously high gross margin digital products, like, they just wanna get more stuff out the door.
Speaker 11:Right? They're they're actually okay taking on more fraud and risk if they can just sell more 90% gross margin goods. Right? So And
Speaker 2:it's all frustrating. From the merchant side, merchants want to have multiple payment providers so that they have some leverage in these conversations. Is that right?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, that was, I was gonna answer your question about explaining it to the GP, but then I thought about the GP doesn't have this problem. But but maybe, like, you know, the GP's nephew. Right? I I always talk about in the terms of, Comcast here, you know, in California.
Speaker 11:Right? Like, every time you call Comcast and you say, hey. I'm switching to YouTube TV, they magically have a 50% discount, that they can get you on. Right? Same thing applies here.
Speaker 11:The problem is your data's locked away with these processors today. So the minute you take back that control and start storing it yourself, you have immediate leverage to make that call.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Give us the fundraising news.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we just announced we raised $33,000,000. It was a pretty cool
Speaker 2:we go. Rajesh.
Speaker 11:It was it was a cool event because our lead investor, Costanoa, we actually met at the seed and ended up going in a different direction. Our a came together quickly with Bessemer. This was 2021. And then when I reached out to Amy at Costa Noah and told her we were gonna kick off a b earlier this year, she I I was like, who should I talk to?
Speaker 2:Is this round mean that you guys are official officially back? Because a lot of fintech companies, you know, went into the valley of despair and they're still down there. Fintech's You
Speaker 11:know, look, I wish I was an ERP, a native AI ERP company,
Speaker 4:you know. Maybe
Speaker 11:I'll get another round tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's literally our
Speaker 2:next The says the chat says this guy looks like he surfs. This guy surfs. Do you do you surf?
Speaker 11:Such a disappointment. I don't. I'm
Speaker 2:It's okay. It's okay. There's the Surfing is wildly distracting from creating enterprise value. I always struggled. I I I grew up You're you're in Mill Valley?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I grew up just just north of you and I always struggled. Surfing in the morning, you get so cold and then your body is suspending all day long trying to heat up Yeah. And it's taking energy away from spreadsheets
Speaker 1:which
Speaker 11:That's pretty counter to Silicon Valley wisdom and ice baths and stuff though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but getting like cold for a few minutes and then
Speaker 5:That's true.
Speaker 2:Heating heating up, is, you know, different than, you know, ninety minutes and like 45 degree water or whatever, gets down to in the winter. But, what was I gonna say? Are you are you guys actually building the company in Mill Valley or you do you have an office in in SF?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Look. We're we're a COVID baby, so we're fully remote. But it was definitely pretty funny when we announced our series a. The news headlines were like, Mill Valley based payment infrastructure company raises $17,000,000 I mean, sounds pretty
Speaker 2:it sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. I'm I'm here a block away from our friend Nate in Offline Ventures.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice.
Speaker 11:And then we, we squat in our investors' offices for free in San Francisco once a week.
Speaker 2:Nice. Smart. Smart. Awesome, man. Well, congratulations on the milestone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Excited to, follow the journey.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of
Speaker 5:your day.
Speaker 15:For having me, guys. Cheers,
Speaker 9:Collins. Yep.
Speaker 1:Quickly, let me tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI nCRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in now to the TVP and UltraDumb. Sorry for keeping you waiting, John.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 2:I'm Welcome to the show. Here he is.
Speaker 5:Are you?
Speaker 13:Guys. I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker 1:Of course. Congrats on the massive news. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll go into the news.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Well, it's wild. I was on three months ago. We were talking about our series a.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 13:was not planning on reaching out to you guys for for a year or two. And I went to bed. The series a founder woke up a series b founder. And so today, we are we announced $65,000,000 series b, bringing 100,000,000.
Speaker 10:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 13:We have a smaller one of those we have a smaller one of those in the office.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, well, series b, up the gong size. Yes. Could have a gong for every stage. Yes.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Well, look. I'm still stay I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the seed stage hotel rooms here.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Good. But I we've we've we've come a long way. So, yeah, that that 100,000,000 was all in the last twelve weeks. Mhmm. So it's it's exciting times.
Speaker 13:It's an AI native ERP if you're not familiar with Campfire taking on the mid market incumbents. And the incredible demand we've seen has just led us to go out to market again on the round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the key accelerant?
Speaker 2:It's huge category, bunch of different ways that you could attack it, bunch of different kind of verticals within it. Why why have VCs come around to like funding a bunch of ERPs again? Because there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well and, something's different this time. But what why do you think that is?
Speaker 13:Yeah. That's a great question. Going through a white combinator, they call them PERPIT ideas, ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die. And for like ten or twenty years, this category has just had a lot of there's a lot of gravestones in this category.
Speaker 1:This is the personal CRM. That's the that's a great tar pit idea. The personal CRM. CRM. Every VC says, I need a personal CRM.
Speaker 1:It's like, no. You just need a real CRM. You're doing business. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's worth
Speaker 13:a lot on a lot on the social media side. Yeah. And so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting, and then we had incredible demand. And then going into the a, they're like, wow. This category is on fire.
Speaker 13:And since the a, it just had overwhelming demand. I think there there's a
Speaker 5:couple
Speaker 13:themes. Certainly, the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. And you guys were talking about zero revenue, ITOs earlier. I mean, literally, these companies were founded when pets.com, WebVAN were public companies. And so it's it's come a long way in terms of, like, it's time for something new.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 13:one of your sponsors, Ramp, has really, like, pioneered, like, consumer grade software within the finance stack. And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for, I just want the Ramp for GL. And then we're also seeing huge demand for, we need to buy AI. There's literally no AI ERP out there. With today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And so we've trained this, like, rich accounting dataset. And so accountants are finally like, I hate doing bank rack, and that's always been true. But now there's actually someone, you know, an AI model that can take on bank rec for me. For those who don't know bank reconciliations is,
Speaker 3:like Yeah.
Speaker 13:Accrual, like, some of these just very transactional accounting tasks. They're allowed they they can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model. They can just, like, allow them to focus on on higher value work, strategic work, things as a former finance exec I really enjoy doing. And so there's this big mindset shift that we are really driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers.
Speaker 2:You guys work with Decagon, Replit, and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new like, entirely new needs surface that people want out of their ERP, that legacy ERPs besides just, speed, usability, just, yeah, ease of use, etcetera?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, this big shift, and I know you just had a reducto on, like, the sheer volume of transaction data. The legacy ERPs are we've just heard from customers are just unable to physically handle. And so, like, being on a modern stack, these AI usage based companies have, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily adjust and allow them to scale on the platform. And then we can apply our AI layer to this rich dataset and allow them to operate in ways they just funnel fundamentally were not able to before.
Speaker 13:So the shift in you know, you you think of if you have 10,000,000 rows of accounting data, you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet. Right? It just physically taps out. And and so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when they have that that much transaction data. And so we've been really helpful in allowing allowing them to not become engineers and focus on what they do best to the accountants.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again? You announced. I'm assuming I'll
Speaker 13:call you next week. We're doing our series c.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah. I I'm sure it'll be nice to take take a breather and just, you know, build and build the team and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:For for for two days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For at least two days. For at least days.
Speaker 1:At least one week.
Speaker 2:Every VC list Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just schedule it now. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:We appreciate
Speaker 13:you. I'll be there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It was actually good. We
Speaker 2:we should start.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Please come by. We'd love
Speaker 4:to we'd love to hang out with you.
Speaker 1:Can go way deeper.
Speaker 5:I'll bring
Speaker 13:the biggest gongs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gonna bring
Speaker 13:the biggest gong you've ever seen.
Speaker 1:Love it. We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. Let's roll it out.
Speaker 13:We we've done twenty four hour, you know, NetSuite to Campfires. We've done SAP to to Campfire in weeks, you know, and the the world's shifting fast. But, yeah, to your point, we'll we'll do one live on on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Live. That's showbiz.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to
Speaker 5:you soon.
Speaker 2:Great progress.
Speaker 13:Thanks, guys. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a that's bold move. I like it. It's very aggressive. It's a hot.
Speaker 2:He's distracted. He's focused on the AI boom. He
Speaker 1:is. Gonna find out about his baby. He's gonna he's gonna he needs to he needs to step up. I mean, the the story of NetSuite was was an acquisition.
Speaker 2:Next step, our guests nominative determinism is absolutely insane. We have Dan Shipper who is shipping What? Another product. Let's bring
Speaker 1:him in. Something?
Speaker 2:The shipper himself.
Speaker 1:What are you shipping today, Dan?
Speaker 4:Do people do people ask
Speaker 2:you about that? Did you say like
Speaker 1:Does he ever ship? He does.
Speaker 14:I have gotten that. I have gotten that. And I don't know if my ancestors were nautical or not, but, certainly, it works for the startup world. So Works. Yeah.
Speaker 14:We're shipping. Shipped a couple new things today.
Speaker 2:What'd you share? Give us the news.
Speaker 14:Okay. First first big thing is we shipped a new incubation. We incubated a company. We spun it out. It raised $3,600,000 from General Catalyst and Innovia.
Speaker 1:We got the gong, the first ever gong for me.
Speaker 3:Let's go. I'm excited. And
Speaker 14:it's called Goodstart Labs. It's run by Alex Duffy, who was previously our head of AI training. And the idea of Good Start is it teaches AI models to play games.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:And by playing games, they're able to generate high quality reinforce reinforcement learning data and pretraining data that helps make models better. It started as a product a project inside of every that we launched as AI Diplomacy where we taught AI models to battle each other for world domination. It went super viral. It had, like, 50,000 people watching on Twitch, and it taught us a lot about how models work. So, for example, Claude never lies in diplomacy.
Speaker 14:What the whole point of diplomacy is to backstab your opponents Mhmm. And Claude never lies. It's really interesting. And Alex you know, the response to that was was really incredible, and Alex has a has a vision for how not just diplomacy but all sorts of games can be used as dynamic environments to help models learn to be smarter in all sorts of different ways from long horizon task planning to writing to humor to training them to not be not be as deceptive, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm mostly hearing AI that lies though. So it can win diplomacy. Makes sense. Sounds okay. But no.
Speaker 1:No. I I completely take your point.
Speaker 2:Claude has to launch liar mode.
Speaker 1:I mean I mean, yeah. There's so
Speaker 15:many Absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Like, there there there's so many examples we could go into about alignment by default, like, resulting in, like, not what you actually want. A hallucination sometimes a feature. There's a million different, areas there.
Speaker 2:Do you have any questions about that? How how concentrated will the customer base be for this? Is this Mhmm. The kind of thing you're gonna work with, hopefully, all the big labs really quickly? What does that look like?
Speaker 14:Yeah. I mean, I think I think the the idea for the company is, is being a vendor to all the big labs, and anyone who is who wants to be a big lab. So, yes, the the the customer base, at least initially, is gonna be gonna be pretty concentrated.
Speaker 1:Rebut Will Menidas. He said he's calling the top on incubations. You're still doing them. Put him in the truth zone. Break it down for me.
Speaker 1:Why are incubations still a good
Speaker 2:idea? Feels this feels like, you know, to to come to Dan's defense on this one, having an employee at your company who's proven themselves internally and discovers a good idea and then decides to launch a spin out company is very different than like, I have an idea, let me go find a random person, which is really hard, right? I agree. Because you have this adverse selection bias.
Speaker 14:Yeah. I agree, but we also do that and it works. And so this is our second venture backed incubation. Collectively, so Good Start Labs and our first one is called Lex, and collectively they've raised like $6,000,000 which is more than like about more than three times or four times what we've raised for every itself. Yeah.
Speaker 14:And we also run four apps internally to Every, many of which are ideas that I or someone else inside of Every has come up with, and then we've recruited someone from our audience take it and lead it. And that works really well too. So we've got four apps in market and we grew collectively for every for, you know, all of the subscriptions we sell. We grew MRR 50% in q three. So it's just growing super fast.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So you can really you actually can do this, and I think you can uniquely do it in AI because you can you can have these products be run by one person
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Which is really hard to report.
Speaker 1:Help me, synthesize this. There's, like, this general mood on the timeline today that, like, a lot of the foundation model companies might be, like, plateauing, and so they're going into other Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's your erotic apply?
Speaker 1:No. No. It's not that that's not my question. My my my question is
Speaker 2:Every. We're gonna do every.
Speaker 1:I mean, you're already a writing platform. Why not spice it up a little bit?
Speaker 2:No. My my my Spicy mode.
Speaker 1:There was a moment where the mood was, like, don't build a new company because you're gonna get steamrolled by AGI. It's just gonna be able to do exactly what you do but better. And so, like, it's super risky to build anything that's in front of the steamroller that is the the big model companies. Now, we've seen that a lot of companies have popped up and done very well in, you know, other areas. But now it also feels like the the the foundation model companies might be going after social media, going after erotic content or adult content.
Speaker 1:So is it is it more or less dangerous to build a startup that is in the wake of the of the AI, like, you know, new hyperscalers?
Speaker 14:So, I mean, I think of every if you're a sapiosexual, we're already doing erotica for you.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 14:So that's that's one thing. Gotta get that out of the way. Yeah. But, you know, when we first incubated Lex, that was, like, in 2022, twenty twenty one ish, and that was right in the in the very beginning. It was right before ChatGPT came out, and so it was in the very beginning of, you know, rapper, anti rapper hype, and that was a dumb take then, and I think it's a dumb take now.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 14:Incumbents always manage to fuck things up and need to also You know, if you're a PM in OpenAI, they're super talented. They're doing amazing And they also have to look for opportunities that look like they're gonna be a billion or 10,000,000,000 or $50,000,000,000 in value. And there's just many, many, many different corners of the market that they just can't see. And I think and founders are incredible at finding those corners of the market. And because of what these foundation model companies are building like OpenAI, founders are have never been in a better position to serve the the the needs that they find.
Speaker 14:And so I think it's I think it's the best time in the world to be starting companies. And I think doing it in an incubation model, like the way that we're doing it is kind of it's like one of those things that shouldn't work, but it's sort of uniquely interesting because we have distribution. So in a world where anything can be vibe coded, we can give founders a stamp of approval, like, hey, this thing is actually good, it's going to be supported. And there's a lot of interesting things you can do if you have a network of apps that are all in the same ecosystem. So I'm super excited about it and think every time we've called, Oh, it's the end of this startup or this startup because OpenAI is doing it, that's never happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. What's your take on the regulatory debate and Anthropix recent moves? A lot of people are pissed off about it from Keith Rabois to David Sacks to Marc Andreessen.
Speaker 14:I okay. I I I agree to some extent. Like, I actually looking at what, you know, the kinds of things that Dario says, for example, I'm like, how can you be building this stuff and then go on the news and be like, it's gonna replace all white collar workers in the next eighteen months? I can't remember the exact quote, but, like, I just I don't like that. And also, think Saks is wrong.
Speaker 14:Like, you're watching nerds who have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility grapple with that publicly, and I think they're they are being earnest. I think they're doing it in a sort of ham handed way, I don't you know, I think that they could they could clean that up and they should get smarter about it, but I don't think it's some, like, sophisticated, right, regulatory capture scheme, and I imagine Sachs is sort of telling telling on himself there. Like, that's what he might do. But I don't think that's what, like, the anthropic biller people are doing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Genuine believers. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on the knee on all the progress.
Speaker 2:I was gonna ask. I I did wanna
Speaker 1:push you. We do have somebody in the restream waiting
Speaker 2:We have one person in the waiting room. But what was your immediate react like, where where do you stand on the debate on the adult kind of content entertainment debate with ChatGPT?
Speaker 14:I think anything they do, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they allow it, they're damned because people are like, you know, you're gonna turn this into a waifu platform and if they don't allow it, then it's a freedom of speech issue. Seems like they're they're trying to be thoughtful about it and restricting it to over over 18 people and not doing it by default, like only doing it if you if you select it. That that seems like a reasonable first pass at it. I'm sure there are I'm sure there are
Speaker 2:So ways that
Speaker 1:OpenAI through that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:OpenAI's mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Is it do do you think that it's hard to argue that that adult content porn bots benefit humanity. I'm sure that somebody can make a justification for that. Do you think their justification is like, this is a necessary step to generate the revenue that gets us to the scale that we need in order to deliver the ultimate goal?
Speaker 14:I mean, I think the caricature of adult porn bots is obviously bad and there are places that you can take this that are obviously bad for people, and also people choose to engage with adult content. And I, you know, it's hard if you're trying to build something for everyone, which is what they're trying to do, to completely say, hey, like, that's off limits. Like, that's a particular moral stance that I think you can have smart defaults, but I also think it's within bounds for them to say, in certain circumstances for certain kinds of people, this is what they want, and and they should be allowed to do the thing they wanna do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just feels like it feels like YouTube did YouTube has never gotten a ton of flack for not allowing adult content platform and being like, YouTube's anti free speech. YouTube has gotten a lot of your anti free speech criticism, but never because there's not enough adult content on the platform. It's always been because of deprioritizing particular political thinking or something else that is, like, more in the wheelhouse of free speech. Everyone, at least in the tech zeitgeist, has kind of been like, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fine that YouTube doesn't have adult content. That's their choice, and they just chose not to do it, I guess. I don't know. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage as it always does, and we will continue to monitor it. And thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Indeed.
Speaker 2:Congratulations
Speaker 14:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:On the launch. Excited to see it play out. We'll talk to
Speaker 7:you soon.
Speaker 2:See you.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 3:good one.
Speaker 1:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, entrusted by millions. Our next guest is the founder of Finch. We'll bring him in from Time
Speaker 2:to Finch.
Speaker 1:Restream waiting room. It's time to Finch.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:finch. It's time time to to the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:Dope to be here. Thank you folks for having me.
Speaker 2:How are we? Wednesday. Happy Wednesday. What do you got going on today? Do you raise any money?
Speaker 6:We we announced the raise.
Speaker 9:Let me do it. Let me
Speaker 4:it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm right.
Speaker 6:Please do it. I'm so pumped for this.
Speaker 2:Give me the news.
Speaker 1:Give us the details. What happened?
Speaker 6:We raised a $20,000,000 series day
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 15:By Redpoint.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Amazing. This
Speaker 6:this the reason I was so excited for this, I want you I, like, worked in DoorDash for eight years Yeah.
Speaker 1:For a
Speaker 6:while before starting Finch. And one of the, like, company values was being really thrifty with money and everyone should be an owner of the budget the way that, like, the founders were. So we have that here, which means when we decided to get a gong, someone spent like $25 on a gong from Amazon that is tiny and fits in like the size of my palm. And so you all getting to hit that was really Well,
Speaker 2:I'm gonna get I'll give you something. We'll give you three gong hit remote gong hits. If you need if if something big happens in the company, you just email us. We'll record a video of us hitting the gong. We'll send it to you and the team.
Speaker 2:You can drop it in the Slack.
Speaker 1:Extremely economical. Yeah. Yes. Where where is the business today? Are are you lost
Speaker 2:What is this? Generating
Speaker 1:revenue? Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. We can Break down the business and then, like, give us the progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I heard you earlier.
Speaker 6:Should I do it, like, as if you were five version of what Finch is?
Speaker 1:Yes. Please. Yes.
Speaker 6:Great. I'll start with, have you seen personal injury billboards?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:Great. What are your reaction when
Speaker 4:you see them?
Speaker 1:Need to call immediately. They they they I I pull out my phone and I is they call now? That's mostly it. It's usually so I assume a phone bank that then routes to a lawyer at some point, but I imagine that I'm, like, seven seven layers away from a real lawyer.
Speaker 6:Yes. And and look. The I think they're hilarious. Some of them are why the there's one in San Francisco. They're like Anne Fong is on every bus ad.
Speaker 6:I love her her head of intake out. The Something Wrong Call Anne Fong is one of the better jingles I've ever heard.
Speaker 2:We we got we have one in in LA that's Sweet James.
Speaker 1:We like sweet
Speaker 6:James as well.
Speaker 2:And I always it it is it always kinda had a creepy Yeah. It felt a little bit creepy.
Speaker 8:It is a
Speaker 1:little bit odd, James. The other thing that I always think about
Speaker 2:It's certainly memorable.
Speaker 1:Whenever I see a person injury attorney billboard, I always think about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headings of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. I'm sorry for doing an ad read in the middle of your segment. Too perfect.
Speaker 1:But we are running behind today. I need to catch up.
Speaker 2:No. But but okay. So so the end that's that's the end that's like one of the many the the these injury law firms spend more Yeah. On out of home than pretty much any other group. Right?
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 6:With like the highest cost per click on on Google out of anything
Speaker 2:else that you could search
Speaker 6:is like I've been injured in an accident. And like the the what I was gonna say about it is I think it like has one perception from the advertising. The field itself Yeah. Is genuinely noble. It is a, like, I if you are someone who's in an accident, America's system of handling injuries and accidents is for profit insurance companies, which means if you try to represent yourself in a claim, you will never get what you wrote.
Speaker 6:And having an advocate on average means you get three to four x higher of an outcome just because the EV calculation changes for GEICO or Allstate or whoever the insurance is on
Speaker 2:the other side.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So incredibly valuable members of this society is you, otherwise, as victims and injured people, eighty percent of you will never have an ad advocate and don't realize what you're owed. Problem today to solve that gap is the amount of admin work at pretty much any law firm, but especially in personal injury law is is massive. And so we've built a called the first AI driven pre litigation team, but our solution really is a bunch of really experienced paralegals that we pair with enough AI agents to handle the admin work that we take over half of what a firm does, which is pre litigation. So intake through demand, letting them say yes to more cases.
Speaker 1:So, specifically, like, someone makes that phone call. They see the billboard. They call. Are you transcribing that? Is there still a human in the loop?
Speaker 1:Like, what else
Speaker 2:is happening? So you said there's a human in the loop. It's actual paralegal in the loop, but they're just Correct. Immensely more efficient. I'm assuming this is, like, white fully white labeled, so somebody doesn't necessarily know they're working.
Speaker 2:They're they're they're onboarding to a firm through Finch. They're just experiencing it as, like, a fast, seamless onboarding experience?
Speaker 6:Correct. We our our goal is we'll have a real paralegal who's 100% dedicated to that firm, and their name at the email address will be the one emailing you. They'll have a local phone number that they message from. So very white labeled experience, but the if you were roughly think about it, the average paralegal or case manager takes on somewhere around a 100 cases at most. In a typical firm, for us, they're doing somewhere between three hundred and four hundred just with the augmentation of agents that help with a lot
Speaker 13:of the busy work.
Speaker 2:How quickly is the company scaling?
Speaker 6:I'm gonna I'm gonna say quickly, but that's part of my job is to highlight how quickly we're going I
Speaker 2:mean, feels like a a like, it seems like these firms wanna take on they wanna take on more cases because it's all success Yeah. Based so that there's a real incentive there. They're already drowning. And if you give them a solution that they can turn on Yeah. And start
Speaker 1:making bigger question there is, like, what's the driver? Because we've seen with the Fortune five hundred, like, there's, like, this mandate from the shareholders and the board to, like, develop an AI story, but that's not true for, like, your average, you know, plaintiff law firm. Firm. Right? Like, they they it has to be a little bit more ground up.
Speaker 1:So, like, what are they actually focused on? Is it, like, a strict ROI? Are they focused just on efficiency or all sorts
Speaker 6:of They're mostly focused on growth. Like, everyone cares about efficiency and service of growth, but I'll I'll give you the example is my our first customer was a friend of a friend named Ryan who operated his own firm out of Austin. Mhmm. He started the firm three months before we started Finch, and he had actually built up more litigation experience than most other attorneys his age. He was, like, 31 starting this firm and had a bunch of great connections in town, which meant he got a bunch of referrals of cases in.
Speaker 6:So he hit 50 cases in his first thirty days, which a solo practitioner might hit over the course of a year on average.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:After 50, though, he had to start saying no to cases because he just didn't have the same back office he used to have at a big firm. And I will draw a DoorDash comparison, but at DoorDash, the the one of the ways Tony talked about that starting as a business was seeing restaurateurs say no to delivery orders that were coming in each day because it didn't make sense for them to staff and fulfill them. Yeah. And the solution was not let me build software to make delivery drivers faster, but let me go be the delivery service. And so we're we're kinda taking the same model here.
Speaker 6:But the the for him, is all about growth. It is a sweet James or Morgan and Morgan or a big name will come advertise on the street corner tomorrow, and he wants to develop enough of a strong relationship with clients that he's gonna build a massive firm over time. And I I think there's a that's what we help folks
Speaker 1:Are you
Speaker 6:say yes to is I yeah.
Speaker 1:Go for
Speaker 2:Are are you seeing, lawyers at firms see the capability of Finch and just decide I actually wanna start my own practice now because this thing that was a huge headache of, building out back office support, I can now outsource to Finch? Are you seeing that already?
Speaker 6:Early ish. So I'll give the I didn't answer your actual question of how fast we're going, but we launched officially in April. We've been around for fourteen months as a business. We grew about 10 x in the last six months.
Speaker 2:Woah. And so the pull from the
Speaker 6:market fun numbers, relative numbers, but fun numbers.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Overnight success. But the
Speaker 5:the the pull from
Speaker 6:the market to give a real why to it I I think you thought about shareholders pushing on, like, bigger law firms or enterprises.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's two largely branches of consumer law that operate on contingency, which means they make a percentage of the case. They don't do hourly billing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that that changes the economics entirely if it's I I now if I try to go sell efficiency software to someone who bills by the hour, there's no good rational reason to you to care about adopting it until your clients demand it. Whereas, anyone who's taking a percentage of cases, you get them the ability to take on forex the cases tomorrow. They say yes to that. They fund that money into advertising, and then they go grow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you're billing by the hours. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:I I think AI is cool, but I don't want too much of it. Yeah. Like I like billing three hours. I like billing $3.
Speaker 1:Let me let me repitch you the benefits of having an expert lawyer spend hours combing over every document. It's it's worth
Speaker 2:What's what what was your number one learning from working with Tony? He's also an investor in Finch, so he must be a a big believer in you.
Speaker 6:So if you
Speaker 2:You mentioned that the frugality, which is which is
Speaker 6:Frugality was a good one. Frugal scaling ownership. I think, like, how to build an org where you, scale decision making while still keeping the, like, founder being close to the the the wheel. I I do think the biggest one that, like, vary in the DNA of Finch is do the hard work. There's I mentioned this we started as a software model, to be honest.
Speaker 6:Like, we raised our first round from Sequoia and the idea of we're gonna go build this intake software that transcribes and then goes and does a bunch of stuff after. But trying to train a large team of paralegals and case managers, many of whom are 60 plus on how to use that tech and get the most out of it is just very different than we will be the paralegal who goes and does it a to z. We guarantee you're gonna be able to take on forex the cases tomorrow, and I think the real TAM expansion comes from doing the work. And so I I would say that was the meta lesson.
Speaker 1:Well, if you ever overdose on frugality, I'd encourage you to head over to getbezel.com.
Speaker 5:Come on. Relax.
Speaker 1:Put it. Patek Philippe Nautilus annual calendar. It's a $126,000. It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch, and I think you'll love it. And I've loved this this segment.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Where where are based, by the way?
Speaker 6:We're, whole team is based in I would say the the whole product engineering ops team is based in New York, but we have paralegals around the country. I'm flying out to a lawyer festival called Laudigra, tonight. So that'll be in San Diego.
Speaker 3:Well, when you do, be sure to buck and wander. Be sure to buck and wander, and you can find your happy place.
Speaker 1:When I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:When when you
Speaker 5:when you when
Speaker 2:you go public someday, I look forward to playing this clip back where John read three ads to you on the day of your your fundraise.
Speaker 3:Go public?
Speaker 2:No, John. But It's awesome to have you on. For coming on. I appreciate I appreciate your point I appreciate the point of view on on Yeah. Very helpful.
Speaker 2:Basically saying, like, no. This is this is noble work. This is everyday Americans getting support
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From the legal system in an aligned way. So keep it up.
Speaker 6:Thank you both. Appreciate Have
Speaker 3:a great
Speaker 1:rest of
Speaker 6:your Cheers.
Speaker 1:The last I gave it
Speaker 2:in the chat. So Jordy must be on the cap table. I am not on the cap table. I wish I was. Seems like a great business.
Speaker 2:Believe it or But I can get I get fired up even if even if I'm not Yeah. Directly financially invested. But that was great.
Speaker 1:Invested in having some fun on I'm
Speaker 2:certainly invested in having some fun.
Speaker 1:Also invested in a good night's sleep.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:8sleep.com. Get a pod five ultra. How'd you sleep last night? I got absolutely roasted because I fell asleep while I was watching, a show called last frontier on it's an Apple TV production. I was watching it on Apple TV on my Apple TV.
Speaker 1:And it's a pretty good show, but it put me to sleep. So I fell asleep. So I spent, like, maybe an extra hour of sleeping on the couch, I think, and that doesn't count because I don't have beat sleeping on my blared. Yeah. Probably not the best sleep, but I still get into eighty six.
Speaker 1:How'd I do compared to you?
Speaker 2:You beat me. I got I got a 78, only six hours.
Speaker 1:Step it up. Brutal.
Speaker 2:I gotta
Speaker 1:play that sound cue for minute.
Speaker 2:I got a Thank you. Six hours six and a half hours of sleep death. Absolutely brutal. Hopefully, can catch up tonight. Did you see this post from Levels that said from concept car to production car?
Speaker 1:This thing is crazy progress going from this is the original Mercedes Benz electric car concept. Looks insane. And then there's, like, still pretty cool lights contrast in the final
Speaker 2:Even just like the even even the way it just sits on the road
Speaker 10:Yeah. In the
Speaker 1:second image The second image looks great. Big wheels. And then the third image looks like a Honda Civic.
Speaker 2:And as a Mercedes enthusiast, a three Arrows enthusiast, this is one of my least favorite cars on the road.
Speaker 1:You know, I I saw one outside of our breakfast spot, and I was just starting to think, maybe it's growing on me. Because when I saw the EQS launch, the new electric Mercedes, I was like, I don't like that design. I think it's too bulbous and rounded in the front. It's not for me. But then I saw one in person, I was like, maybe I'm just, you know, maybe it's coming around on it.
Speaker 1:But then I saw this picture and the progression, and I and I say, never, never. But, maybe we'll stick to the new, the new SL goal. This
Speaker 2:post is hilarious. Variety says exclusive. CBS has indicated that staffers at CBS News will not be disciplined if they don't respond to a much scrutinized message sent last week by Barry Weiss.
Speaker 1:It was scrutinized?
Speaker 2:She literally said, hey, what do you do with the company? What do you think we could do better?
Speaker 1:This is the perfect reaction.
Speaker 2:Perfect meme. Stop giving me your toughest battles. Barry's just I'm literally just asked for an email about what you're up to.
Speaker 6:Ridiculous. Yes.
Speaker 1:This is the the the the Mercedes Benz Vision iconic concept car. This is something that I can't wait for it to get completely watered down and look like absolute garbage by the time it ships. But, you didn't like it. I think this concept car looks pretty cool.
Speaker 2:It looks like a mob boss in Tron.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. It looks different. I concept cars always look cool, and then they never make it, to, to production. And there's a there was another question on the timeline a couple slides back of '41.
Speaker 1:Cynthia says, is there a good reason that car companies don't just rerelease old models like this is so beautiful and it's Mercedes from probably the eighties. Right? Do you can you clock this? Do you know vintage Mercedes
Speaker 2:I mean, that's
Speaker 1:a SL. SL convertible like a vintage. Maybe it's a '80 SL. But it looks fantastic. And, unfortunately, the reason that car companies don't just re release old models is because there's new regulations.
Speaker 1:And some of those are for good reasons. They need more crumple zones so that pedestrians, if they get hit by the car,
Speaker 2:they're Two SL.
Speaker 1:Two eighty SL. And so Okay. But, of course, you can always go and buy one of the older ones, fix it up, and continue to drive it. At least the new regulations don't take the old cars on off the road.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, also, I don't understand how pedestrian safety regulations work at all because the Cybertruck exists. And, like, if I had to pick between getting hit between a Mercedes SL going 30 floor pedal to the metal and a Cybertruck doing, you know, 90 to 60 in two seconds, I feel like I would pick the the two eighty SL. So I I don't know I don't know how those pedestrian rules work because the Cybertruck seemed to just completely get through all of those. Everyone was was calling for sort of panic when the original Cybertruck design was announced. I remember Matt Farah from the smoking tire podcast, great podcast, on Rogan saying, like, he he was like, I don't believe that Elon will ship the Cybertruck.
Speaker 1:Like, it's just impossible. He will never ship this because
Speaker 2:You can't make a truck out of metal?
Speaker 1:It's not just that. I mean, the angles are crazy. Like, the angles on the Cybertruck, it looks dangerous.
Speaker 2:People wanted it to fail so bad.
Speaker 1:A 100%.
Speaker 2:It was like the gate. People were like, oh
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I mean, people are always rooting against Elon stuff, but but the the the Cybertruck in particular looked like like if I've been told for years that, like, the reason the cars got round was for pedestrian safety, I was like, okay. Well, if that's true and the rules do state that you can't make a Mercedes SL anymore because it's too angular or something, and you need to make a and you like, how can you make a Cybertruck? And so, lots to unpack there. There must be some, like, workaround or something like that.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, anything else? Any other breaking news you want to cover before we wrap up for the day?
Speaker 2:Tenebrous says, great place to end the show. Life is so much easier and better when you have a number to make go up.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:Well, we wanna make the number of reviews go up on this show, so please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 3:Spotify.
Speaker 1:Leave an ad in the in your review. We'd love to read it on the show.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:And thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. Evening. We will see you back here tomorrow. Bye.