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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.
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Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 12/11/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Christmas is around the corner. That's why you're here. You want an update on Christmas.
Speaker 2:Fourteen days television. Two weeks from today. Presents under the Christmas tree.
Speaker 1:Holiday. Underthechristmastree..com
Speaker 2:under the Christmas tree. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Also, SpaceX IPO under the Christmas tree, 1,500,000,000,000 for the big man, for Elon Musk.
Speaker 2:He's, he's gonna raise $30,000,000,000, something like that. That's an incredibly small amount of dilution if he actually goes out at 1,500,000,000,000.0. Should be interesting. I thought he hated
Speaker 3:Just 1.5.
Speaker 2:Company.
Speaker 1:Just 1.5.
Speaker 2:Just one Just one point point five. 5,000,000,000,000. He said the biggest number because you know that there was a whole, like, leak. I think it was in Reuters, OpenAI going out at 1,000,000,000,000. You gotta go a little bit higher.
Speaker 2:What's just a little bit higher? He should've done he should've done 1.1. I'm gonna IPO 1,100,000,000,000.0. Really stick it to Sam. But Yep.
Speaker 2:He didn't. He he says he's going out at one point five.
Speaker 1:He's gotta leave some room for the for the first day pump.
Speaker 2:Yes. Right? Get it up to two. Get it up to three. Yep.
Speaker 2:But, I mean, in terms of companies that should benefit from the space economy, like, is this not the NVIDIA of space? Like, what other company is there? It's the space company. It's SpaceX. And so, 30,000,000,000 coming in.
Speaker 2:Company was doing great. Launch launch pro launch product is fantastic. The rockets go up. They come down.
Speaker 1:They're putting sonic booms over Montecito.
Speaker 2:Apparently. But I I I think the the actual launch market for anything but satellites, but for anything but data centers has just been a little small. And so, Starlink has been the big unlock, of course, for SpaceX. Massive market there, putting the screws to Verizon, AT and T, and the other telcos. The two the other telcos, of course, have been, noodling on working with a a rival, putting up smaller satellites in a sparser constellation with more bandwidth per
Speaker 1:Somebody was talking earlier that to get the same amount of compute as a one gigawatt data center, you would need 10,000 satellites.
Speaker 2:That's not that many, though. Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe. Sure. So I know. That's not that's actually not crazy.
Speaker 2:That seems like completely that that that's actually, like, extremely bullish.
Speaker 1:There is a there no. There is there is a pathway to doing it with far fewer, which would just be, like, ultra, ultra Big. Long.
Speaker 2:I don't think they wanna do big. I think the whole thing is is constellation. That that that was the that was the beauty of Starlink was that you could go up there. And because it it it gave them the ability to have all this residual capability as Gwyneth Trotwell puts it, which is like, if the CIA shows up and they wanna put a spy satellite on there or some company shows up and says like, hey. We wanna we wanna put something really serious in space.
Speaker 2:Yep. But we only need 60% of the fairing, or we only need 40% of the fairing, or we only need 80% of the fairing. It's like, okay. Great. That's that we'll fill the rest of the space with two two starlings, five starlings, 20 starlings.
Speaker 1:Well, we have the founder of k two space coming on the show Fantastic. Later. Yeah. Raised a quarter of $1,000,000,000 at a $3,000,000,000 valuation from T. Rowe Price.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Head of Sofia, Altimeter, Lightspeed, and some others. So we will talk more about that then.
Speaker 2:And we will also talk about Fall, generative media platform for developers, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. So in terms of this, the the the space, think, I mean, we keep going back and forth on this. Is it just a pump? Is it just a new narrative? Is it is it a pivot to AI?
Speaker 2:I I don't really care. I I I think, I think it it all comes down to this just idea of, like, Elon Math. You know? The Elon Math is always crazy. He's always putting up sort of wild predictions that then may or may not come true.
Speaker 2:A lot of them are way off. But at least he's telling a story that's, like, optimistic about the future, and at least like, it feels like that Trey Stevens, like, good quest thing is, like, get to Mars is good. If he misses it by five years at least he's still the fur he's the only person that cares about it, which is great. I I went through. I tried to pull the in true, like, hit piece fashion, I pulled up all the different all the different times he's, like, made a prediction and then, like, not landed it or not delivered on time, and it's crazy.
Speaker 2:The guy loves to rip predictions. He said he he was gonna put early SpaceX concept, when they started SpaceX, was to put a small greenhouse with plants on Mars as a PR demo before they would even start the company. That, of course, did not happen.
Speaker 1:Before starting the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was, like, the original thesis was, like, he he went to some Elon went to some, like, space kinda space nerd meetup. It was like, we need to put a plant, a physical plant with a webcam on it on Mars. And if we land that there and we prove that life can live on Mars, we bring life to Mars, it will inspire everyone and marshal all the resources and all the capital and all the excitement to actually go put boots on the ground, which also he predicted. He predicted humans on Mars by 2024.
Speaker 2:Of course, hasn't happened that we know of. It's possible.
Speaker 1:It's not going up there. It's true.
Speaker 2:They keep saying that the star they keep saying the star the the starships blow up, but maybe maybe one of them didn't. Maybe one of them sneaky sneaky went off and put a person on
Speaker 1:Mars. Yeah. So you don't know. The shell of the real ship.
Speaker 2:I like the inverse the inverse conspiracy theory. You know,
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, oh, yeah. We never went to Mars or we never went to the moon. No. The inverse conspiracy theory, we're going all the time secretly, but you you're not cool enough to get in on it. You don't have a ticket.
Speaker 2:Everyone else does except for you. Because I I was just on the moon yesterday, and I'm not telling you about it. First crewed Mars landing as early as 2029. Little too early to say, but that one feels aggressive. We're just four years out.
Speaker 2:You gotta put a whole crew down there. He also said tourist trips were gonna be happening around the moon by 2018. Didn't hit that. Yep. Self sustaining city on Mars of 1,000,000 people, 2,050.
Speaker 2:Feels a little early, but I
Speaker 1:don't know. Twenty fifty longer. More than
Speaker 2:A couple decades
Speaker 1:Couple decades. Out. Anything's possible.
Speaker 2:I I agree. I agree. But then, of course, there's a bunch that he succeeded in. He said that he was gonna deliver reusable orbital rockets. He did it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And what else matters? At least, you you know, you you know, he's also predicted fully reusable Starship with rapid turnaround. It's a little too soon to tell. He's behind some of the early dates, but, you know, in general, that project seems like it's real. It's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's taking a little bit time. He has he has a bunch of other funny ones. But it is interesting how the how the SpaceX narrative has shifted from, first, we're going to Mars. Then there was the whole do you remember SpaceX point to point? Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 2:So there was a pitch for a while
Speaker 1:Like a commercial. Is this like this is a replacement for an airliner. You'll just go up and then come down
Speaker 2:Exactly. Plan? Exactly. So it like New York to Tokyo in like thirty minutes
Speaker 1:that would go so hard.
Speaker 2:Insane. Right? Insane. So the idea was like, you're in
Speaker 1:Imagine being able to commute to Tokyo for some obscure job.
Speaker 2:It'd be amazing. It would actually be remarkable.
Speaker 1:And there's a whole
Speaker 2:bunch of economic research that shows that when you increase transportation, reduce transportation times, that you really do get an economic boom because people can do business in areas where they couldn't before. Even just the reducing the time from San Francisco to LA from a six hour drive to a one hour flight, all of a sudden, people can go up and do business, come back the same day. They just get there more often. Yeah. I had a hot take for a while that if I was the president, I would recommission the SR 71 Blackbird, which, of course, goes, I think, Mach three.
Speaker 2:So you can actually get from DC to London in, like, two hours because it's a supersonic And so imagine that imagine the
Speaker 1:The presidential SR seventy one would go also very hard.
Speaker 2:Remarkably hard. Right? And imagine the aura of, you know, something happens in an I I remember I I I thought of this because the the queen had just passed away very sadly. And, of course, the president was planning on visiting the queen, paying respects to all the people of Great Britain. But imagine if, you know, the news breaks, and it's like, this is important.
Speaker 2:I'll be there in two hours. And I'm there on the ground. Like, same day the news breaks. Not, oh, we gotta charter the seven forty seven and bring the whole crew and land, and I'll see you in two days, and it'll be a whole thing.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 4:It's like
Speaker 1:jumping in the car.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. Or imagine these trade deals. These trade deals. Oh, the h two hundreds are going to China or or something's happening in Taiwan.
Speaker 2:Hey, Xi Jinping?
Speaker 1:So what happened
Speaker 3:with See you.
Speaker 1:What happened with the point to point program? Has there been any
Speaker 2:Oh, well, it's all just predicated. I mean, so the space the the Starships are still blowing up, so no one wants to get on But in theory, if Starship
Speaker 1:is super reliable. They never had any comms. It was like, we're scrapping this.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:At all. Not at all. It it was just like an interesting it was interesting, like, back of the envelope, like, bull case for this for, like, the business, basically. Just saying, like, okay. Yes.
Speaker 2:Starship is going to be really good at getting to the moon, getting to Mars, getting to getting a bunch of Starlink satellites in orbit. Right? It's it's like a good it's a good business. But Elon is always the king of opening up new markets and just kind of saying, like, well, what if what if he was also replacing commercial air travel? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And people are like, wait. That's a huge, huge market if you can do that. And, of course, if you could make it more economical, who would ever pay for a ticket on a seven forty seven when you could ride a rocket and get there literally 90% faster. It's crazy the amount of time that you would save. Now you have to go from Manhattan on a boat out to a launch pad.
Speaker 2:You can't take off from JFK. Like, there's a whole bunch of wrinkles. Yeah. This and that's why this is all practically probably, like, twenty years in the future. But it was it was one of those famous examples of an Elon project where if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it eventually will happen.
Speaker 2:And that's a lot of what's happening with the with the data centers in space. We need to inference things. We need to inference things like Cognition and the team because they are the team behind the AI software engineer. Devin, your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Right now, Devon's inferenced on Earth.
Speaker 2:Who knows? Maybe in the future, it's inferenced space. I think that the space data center thing, it's people are still having the debate on, like, is it possible? It's like obviously, it's possible. The question is, is over under a gigawatt in by 2027, which is when the other big clusters come online, will it be competitive in the short term and the near term?
Speaker 2:And then on the flip side, like, if you're if you're a bear, are you saying that it's not gonna happen in twenty years? And then, I mean, the big question is, there's one there's one more Elon Gambit that he could run with. One more like, oh, you you wanted a fifth act?
Speaker 1:Just one?
Speaker 2:No. I mean, there's tons. But there's one that's really wild, which would be if he straight up said, we're building the Dyson Sphere. Like, we are going to launch Tyler's nodding. He's pumped.
Speaker 2:He's pumped. Are
Speaker 1:you Well, isn't he is he the obvious isn't he, like, the only can't only real candidate?
Speaker 2:Well, he's the only candidate for everything in space because he has the leading space company by, like it's two orders of magnitude.
Speaker 5:I I think someone at Anthropic has said that the Dyson sphere is in the in the plans of Anthropic.
Speaker 2:Of Anthropic? Were they they weren't trolling?
Speaker 5:I mean, I Okay. I don't know. I think
Speaker 2:They they they're they're gonna need to acquire a space company if they wanna do that because how do you get the isn't the Dyson sphere just a bunch of solar panels around the sun directly capturing 100% of the energy that's put off by the sun? Yeah.
Speaker 5:I don't think it has to fully, like it's not like there there can't be any light coming out. It's like strips of
Speaker 2:Oh, I I thought Kardashev one is you're capturing 100 of the energy that's hitting your planet. Kardashev two is you're capturing 100% of the energy that is given off by your star.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Actually, I
Speaker 2:So I think
Speaker 5:Maybe what I'm talking about is that's a different term.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're two different things. Maybe Dyson sphere could just be, okay, you're only capturing 50% or 10%. And then Kardashev two is you're capturing 100% of the energy coming off your sun.
Speaker 1:Tyler, the chat wants to know, did we ever find out if this kid I'm assuming they're talking about you is related to Elon?
Speaker 2:Why would he be related to Elon?
Speaker 1:He's got a lot of sons. He's got a lot
Speaker 2:of sons. Oh, Okay. Yeah. Could anyone. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Should we read through this? So Eric Berger over at Ars Technica.
Speaker 2:You should also read through the daily newsletter, tech analysis and news daily from TVPN. We're doing ad reads for our own newsletter now. We love that. Get our daily op ed, top headlines, and best posts from the timeline every I can't read the rest of this. Tyler, yougottaeveryday..com.
Speaker 2:Tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:Go subscribe. Awesome. Awesome. Eric Berger is writing a piece called After Years of Resisting at SpaceX Now Plans to Go Public. Why?
Speaker 1:And, Elon actually replied to Eric and said, as usual, Eric is accurate. So I thought it was worth reading through this. Yeah. Eric says, SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Multiple outlets have reported and ours can confirm. This represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk. Wall Street Journal and the information first reported about possible IPO last Friday, and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting a $1,500,000,000,000 target valuation. This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history occurred in 2019 when the state owned Saudi Arabian oil company began publicly trading as Aramco and raised 29,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:In terms of revenue, Aramco is a top five company in the world. Now SpaceX is poised to potentially match or exceed this value that SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is not a surprise. The It's world's dominant space company and launched space based communications and much more. For investors seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier. But why would Musk take SpaceX public now at a time when the company's revenues are surging thanks to the growth of the Starlink Internet constellation.
Speaker 1:The decision is surprising because Musk has for so long resisted going public with SpaceX. He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of test Tesla and feared that shareholder desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars. Next section is called data centers. Arce spoke with multiple people familiar with Musk and his thinking to understand why he would wanna take SpaceX public. A significant shift in recent years has been the rise of AI, which Musk has been involved in since 2015 when he cofounded OpenAI.
Speaker 1:He later had a falling out with his cofounders and started his own company, x AI, in 2023. At Tesla, he's been pushing smart driving technology forward and more recently focused on robotics. Musk sees the convergence of these technologies in the near future, which he believes will profoundly change civilization. Raising large amounts of money in the next eighteen months would allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy at SpaceX as he influences and partakes in this convergence of technology. How can SpaceX play in space?
Speaker 1:In the near term, the company plans to develop a modified version of the Starlight satellite to serve as a foundation for building data centers in space. There you go, John. Musk said as much on X in late October, spay quote, SpaceX will be doing this. But using a next generation Starlink satellite manufactured on Earth is just the beginning of this vision. The the level beyond that is constructing satellite factories on the moon and using a mass driver electromagnetic railgun to accelerate
Speaker 2:Explain to us.
Speaker 1:To accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without the need for rockets. Musk said last weekend on X, that scales to a 100 terawatts a year of AI and enables nontrivial progress towards becoming a Kardashev two civilization. Based on some projected analysis, SpaceX is expected to have in the neighborhood of 22 to 24,000,000,000 in revenue next year.
Speaker 2:65 times revenue is what you'd be paying if SpaceX goes out at 1,500,000,000,000.0. For reference, 65 for 65 x revenue for SpaceX, NVIDIA is at 24 x revenue to market cap market cap to price to sales. So, like, twice more twice as expensive as NVIDIA, but also, you know, probably, like, even even wider lead to the rest of the industry, newer industry. I don't know about the margins, but potentially higher margins. You know.
Speaker 2:And Again, earlier this time.
Speaker 1:Talking about, like, you know, space being
Speaker 2:More of the
Speaker 1:Right. Anyways, that is a lot of money. It's on par with NASA's annual budget, and SpaceX can deploy its capital far far more efficiently than the government can. Mhmm. So the company will be able to accomplish a lot.
Speaker 1:But with a large infusion of cash, SpaceX will be able to go much faster. This is the thing that I'm not certain Mhmm. On. Like is SpaceX has SpaceX been capital constrained or are they capability constrained? Like, I don't I it hasn't been clear to me.
Speaker 1:You know, clearly, there's been like infinite demand for SpaceX equity for a very long time. So much so that people are, you know, investing in triple layered SPVs just to get, you know, and and enduring massive fees just to get a taste. Yeah. But so so, yeah, the question is like how does does this massive capital infusion actually accelerate the business that much or is it just the right moment in time for a number of reasons?
Speaker 2:Well, you know that SpaceX, whenever they launch, they stream their launches. They gotta be on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multi stream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:Abhi Trepathi, a long time SpaceX employee who is now director of mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall. Yeah. That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. If you've followed Elon's tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he full he leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition.
Speaker 1:A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is so I totally get that SpaceX was never crazy, crazy capital constrained. Even though, like, building a massive rocket, that feels like
Speaker 1:Super
Speaker 2:expensive. So so expensive. But at the same time, they've just be they've just been able to raise the money, and it just hasn't been a problem. And, of course, the like, SpaceX as a business generates a lot of revenue.
Speaker 1:Like, like, some of the
Speaker 2:some of the some of the contracts with the government are in the billions. And and then Starlink is just Yeah. It's throwing off it's telecom. So it's just throwing off tons and tons of cash. I mean, it's incredibly expensive to get the constellation up there, but you do have cash flow from it.
Speaker 2:It's effectively, you know, like, I'm I've been subscribed to to Starlink for, like, a year or two. I never use it. I'm basically 100% margin for them. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I use it just as like a a backup in case the Internet goes down, I have
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. And you just look at you look at the growth opportunity in in effectively telecom. You have T Yes. Mobile's a $217,000,000,000 business Yes.
Speaker 1:That is threatened by Starlink. Yep. AT and T is a $172,000,000,000 business. Yeah. And Verizon is a $170,000,000,000 business.
Speaker 2:But I think the reason you need 30,000,000,000 like, sort of paradoxically or or or counterintuitively might not be to build more rockets. It might be to actually just buy the GPUs. Because, like, in in theory, if you're putting a GPU in space, like like Elon SpaceX doesn't make those GPUs. They don't just pull them out of thin air. They gotta buy them from somewhere.
Speaker 2:And if they're buying them from NVIDIA, those are expensive, and you gotta buy a lot of them. And for to make a dent in like, let's assume all the physics works. Let's assume that the launch costs are cheap. All the math works out. Well, if you're putting a gigawatt of compute in space, you probably have like a billion dollars of hard cost just on the chips or something like that.
Speaker 2:I don't know the exact number. You could imagine that that you raised 30,000,000,000, the business is humming, but you still have to outlay a ton just for the GPUs. And so, yeah, you do have a you do have a new a new consumption for cash. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi asset investing that's trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Did you want to Do
Speaker 1:you think that XAI gets rolled into SpaceX or Tesla?
Speaker 2:That's the hard part. I thought it was I thought it was going to be Tesla for sure because, you know, Tesla has the lineage. They they they have their own chip. They have they have massive data centers to train AI models for full self driving. It felt like such a logical place for x AI to land.
Speaker 2:But now maybe it lands at at SpaceX. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If if if SpaceX becomes the data centers and space company Yeah. And they're effectively, like, reselling
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, mean, I I I don't it feels like there's some sort of arcane truth about consolidation where it might be less of a headache than people think to have different entities. Like, if you think about I mean, certainly, like like, Stargate is a separate entity from
Speaker 1:I'm not even thinking about it as a headache. It's just more so, like, x AI needs to get quite a lot more traction, I think, in enterprise and consumer.
Speaker 6:Somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Effectively, somewhere needs to become, like, the dominant Mhmm. A dominant lab in at least one domain. Otherwise, I think it will just make sense to roll into one of these other
Speaker 2:Yeah. Platforms. Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders Fund's investment in SpaceX because it might be one of the greatest it might be it might become the the greatest venture capital investment of all time. It certainly feels like it's in the running. This is from Nico Wittenborn.
Speaker 2:Says Founders Fund investing 20,000,000 out of a 20 out of a $220,000,000 fund too, which also invested in Palantir and Spotify early is just nasty. And Dan Primax's flashback to chatting with Founders Fund, Luke Nosek, when he led the first investment in SpaceX from an old PE Week wire newsletter in 2008. I can't believe PE Week is I I read that newsletter back not in 2008, but, like, back then. Wow. PrimaX has been in the game for a long time.
Speaker 2:So it says, I spent some time on the phone earlier this week with Luke of the Founders Fund.
Speaker 4:They had had the the. Yeah. They dropped it. And then there's also
Speaker 2:an apostrophe here, which I think has been lost at some point. I don't know. To discuss his firm's $20,000,000 investment in private space launch services provider SpaceX. The company is run by Elon Musk who cofounded PayPal along the Founders Fund partners. A few questions and answers.
Speaker 2:Dan, Founders Fund usually invest no more than a few million dollars in a company. Why invest 20,000,000 when your fund is only 220,000,000? Luke, we obviously have internal caps that we follow. What we do is look at how much a company needs and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook because that's how much it needed at the time.
Speaker 2:A lot of firms were offering more. Dan says most of the companies you back have some sort of Internet angle, which makes sense given your PayPal background. But what do you know about rocket science? Oh, there's no Internet angle at SpaceX, predict? No.
Speaker 2:No one predicted the the Internet angle, but it is remarkable that a bunch of Internet guys fund a rocket company, and then it just becomes an Internet company. And it's an ISP, and now it's a data center company, and everything collapses down to the Internet. And it's it's the Joe Esenthal take. AI will get every resource that it needs. Like like, the Internet needs Internet is the business model for everything.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter if you invest in a space company. Eventually, you're gonna be an Internet business. And so Luke answering about the rocket science question. He says, the most important aspect to us is the team. Remember, the PayPal founders didn't have banking experience, Dan.
Speaker 2:Elon has put over a $100,000,000 of his own money into this company. That is crazy that they'd already burned a 100 mil and then Founders Fund comes in with 20. And develop both the Kestrel and Merlin engines, which are the first new rocket engines developed in The US in a very long time. When we did due diligence, we wanted to speak with other investors of successful new rockets, but they were all dead. I love that.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah. We just so we so we have to we we're gonna be the first here. Dan, your announcement of the funding just came days after SpaceX had yet another launch failure. Any worries, Dan? Any worries, Luke?
Speaker 2:Says Dan. Luke says, no. There are obviously gonna be some technical kinks like an exploding rocket, But they get amplified because rocket science is more binary than would be a technical kink with a website. Either the rocket gets into orbit or it doesn't. The team has some very smart people.
Speaker 2:And they'll
Speaker 1:make Anybody anybody that that ships just regular old SaaS should have a huge amount of sympathy for anyone in hard tech because launching any type of app and not having a single bug
Speaker 2:Insane.
Speaker 1:Even a single, like, critical bug is tough. At least, like, at least, you know, early, early days. And and, of course, critical bug in aerospace is quite explosive. Well, let's So move I did want to pull up. Just the estimates, FF is estimated to own 10.4%.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So we can just keep it at 10. That means that this initial it's not and again, they've they've invested in multiple rounds since then. Historically, like, the greatest venture investment ever Mhmm. In my view is Masa's 20,000,000 investment in Alibaba
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Turned it into 70,000,000,000 Yeah. At the time of the IPO. Hard to I I wonder if we can figure out how much
Speaker 2:FFO is about 10% of SpaceX.
Speaker 1:It But I don't know how many how many they've put in yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To maintain that stake, they put in
Speaker 1:So again, it's still like gonna be a 150 ish billion dollar position. Yeah. Just the carry check alone will be nasty as Nico said. Delaysal. What?
Speaker 2:You hit the gong for the old f f crew, my former boss?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's hit the gong. John's former boss. My
Speaker 2:former boss.
Speaker 1:How does he do it? How does he do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about ProFound, and there's big news today from ProFound, the company that helps brands show up more often and more accurately in in AI platforms like ChatGPT. They've just announced their new workflows product, which lets marketers automate jobs like research, reporting, and content generation to drive even greater discoverability wherever people are searching. You can check out Workflows and marketing that runs itself. Was texting dot was
Speaker 1:texting the CEO of ProFound, James, last night. And he was giving me an update on the business. And he shared just like a clearly, like copy and pasted it, like the new customers that they had signed. I don't think we can share all of them yet. But it it basically looked like every company Yeah.
Speaker 1:In every company. Every big company looked like they had them. They have they already are working with MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, DocuSign, Ramp, Zapier, Eight Sleep, US Bank, Figma, Seekie, LG. So many of these different different, you know, companies are choosing ProFound, and we feel lucky to be partnered with them. Be partnered Here's with a good post from just another pod guy.
Speaker 1:Okay. We could sprinkle this in before we move on to Oracle. Just thought this was an interesting point of view. Elon is not really a person. He is the human embodiment of network effects.
Speaker 1:When you've been operating at that level and breadth that he has been, you aren't really dealing with an individual. You're dealing with a deep bench of talent and capital with a comms guy who is addicted to Twitter and Ted. The same warnings about underestimating Trump the person versus Trump's cabinet apply to Musk but a 100 x and with far less rationality injected and with a much higher caliber of people. Does he overpromise, overhype, overhyperbolize? Of course.
Speaker 1:But I would guess the median IQ and depth of expertise of the bench around Musk is higher than that of any nation state. Yeah. I thought this was obvious to most people.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. It's just it's just crazy how, like, yes, the yeah. Yeah. You just have to accept the overpromising, the overhyping and stuff, but recognize that it's like no one else is trying, really. There's very, very few people Oh,
Speaker 1:they're trying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But in terms of, like, the real the real people making a run at a lot of these crazy ideas, like, they're just it's it's incredibly thin. It's incredibly thin. There aren't there aren't that many people. There are a lot of people that, yeah, just just just don't take it seriously.
Speaker 2:But anyway, let's move over to one of Elon Musk's best friends, I believe.
Speaker 1:They're boys. They're boys. Elon can count on Larry for a billion or two Yeah. Over text.
Speaker 2:So Larry Ellison is addressing he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. So Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarters fell slightly short of analysts' expectations while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits. Before we continue this article, let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:So I mean, is all part
Speaker 3:of
Speaker 2:this. Think I think investors didn't realize that like when you do the one of these crazy AI deals, you have to go build the data center, and then you have to wait, then you have to get get power, and you have to buy the chips, and chips have to ship.
Speaker 1:Turn it
Speaker 2:rack the chips, then you gotta turn it on. Then you gotta test it. And then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell them. All well, enterprise AI adoption might be stashing. We'll see.
Speaker 2:There was some crazy data out of RAM today. R. Carazian, The Economist over there
Speaker 1:At least some businesses might be saying, we've got enough AI. We like it, but we have enough.
Speaker 2:Apparently, 55% of businesses are just, like, good without paying for AI. I mean, the paying thing is
Speaker 1:At least directly.
Speaker 2:At least directly. The paying thing here is So basically
Speaker 1:lot And and just the example is, like, a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud. Yes. But they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies But that leverage cloud to deliver their
Speaker 2:it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going. This is from Ara Carazian over at Ramp. He says, Ramp AI's Ramp's AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45% of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors by the model. OpenAI went down negative 1%, Anthropic up 0.8%, and Google went up 0.7%. And so you can see that this chart in 2025 OpenAI had a big, big jump.
Speaker 2:And then and then just it's been flat for the last for the last couple months, a little bit down. Anthropics been on a much smoother it seems like they didn't exist in 2023, basically, or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then 2024, you see some slight growth here. And then 2025, a much smoother, like, okay, uptick growing more, growing more, growing more, kind of all keeps up with this, you know, they've been 10 x ing every year, like like a like an Instagram hustle account. But but OpenAI had a massive had a massive spike at the start of 2025 and then has been a little bit flatter.
Speaker 2:But it is interesting. I I wonder how much you read into this. So Ara Ara has a has a take here we should go through. Before we do, let me tell you about fin dot a I. The number one AI agent for customer service automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel.
Speaker 2:So he says, adoption is flat. Is the bubble popping? And he says, I'm not calling it yet. The slowdown comes at the end of a rapid run up in adoption rates in 2025, which coincided with a significant step change in the capabilities of these models. Now the effect of the latest advancements has faded.
Speaker 2:If we want to see another run up in adoption, we would have to see at least one or two step changes, technological gains. The models get even better, spurring faster adoption or implementation gains. Early adopters figure out the best use cases for AI, and the rest of the market follows driving incremental adoption. Both are likely, the latter even more so as adoption actually rose in several industries with relatively low adoption rates like retail construction and manufacturing. Is Google is Google's AI good now?
Speaker 2:He says it's still underrated. Adoption of Google's Gemini rose point 7%, its second highest monthly increase on record. And then he says, what's going on with OpenAI? He says he cautions an overreaction to the latest results, which show OpenAI adoption dropping while Anthropic and Google adding new users and what that means for OpenAI's business. I've learned a lot covering how companies buy and use AI.
Speaker 2:Mainly, this market changes rapidly, the typical rise and fall time lines of companies does not apply here. OpenAI enjoyed rapid adoption of growth in 2025, in many ways emerging as default spend category for businesses. It's not unreasonable to think that rate would normalize as competitors find their fit in the market. Also, there's
Speaker 1:just Yeah. A of Overall overall, the interesting thing is every like, it it seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model is just getting smarter is not gonna, by default, make adoption, like, accelerate massively again. Need to become more useful. They need to be able to, you know, to our cash has talked about this. Like, they need to be able to learn on learn on the job, basically, in the way that Yeah.
Speaker 1:That a human does. And I think I think even till we have that, there's some thing you know, the forward deployed engineer movement of, like, having people out embedded in companies, like, trying to unlock the potential of the models, that's great. But I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. More useful. I don't know. Yeah. It's it's tough.
Speaker 2:I mean, I look at those when I look at the number, like the headline number, it's 45 have adopted, have paid for AI chat apps, basically. You know, he's tracking OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and x AI on there, a few others. And you flip that around and you're like, 45% of businesses don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all or are they just good with free? Because if you if you told me like 55% of companies are in sort of, like, a private equity scarcity wartime mode where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door, even a $20 subscription is something that will be scrutinized because, you know what, like, the sun, the this we've been running this business for a generation.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is a is precious. Yeah. And so we're not just gonna go sign up for whatever. No.
Speaker 2:You don't just spend, spend, spend. You need to really understand if this is valuable. And you know what? If if the particular business we have, we have a specific POS system, we have you know, we don't have that many unstructured questions. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, realistically, it's like we're not doing a lot of random email, lot of random research for our business. It's more like, you know, customer comes in, take their order, put it in the POS system
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Charge them, go do the thing, which AI is probably not, you know Yeah. Replacing. So, it's interesting. But it is one of the one of the cool factors about this rCarazian report is that it comes from ramp customers who I don't think of as I of them as a little bit more forward thinking than the general population. Like, if I were to say that there's bias in the dataset, I would say it's biased towards, like, being open to
Speaker 1:AI. For sure. For sure. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:If if I wonder if a company like Amex would look at their data of, like, AI adoption just for cohorts that signed up for Amex over a decade ago Yeah. You would expect it to be lower.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or even or even putting Amex aside, like a like a community bank. Like, because if I go to my local laundromat and I ask, like, what corporate card do you use? They're probably like, we don't do corporate cards here at all. In fact, we have a relationship with the local bank down the street, and they put up the mortgage for the building, and we write checks or we do So
Speaker 1:they're even using a debit card.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Or or they if they do have a credit card, it's probably from the local bank branch. It's not like they haven't built, like, their whole system. So, yeah, it's fascinating to read into.
Speaker 2:I do think there is something to be said to I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. Like it's not accelerating. And it is real that there is it's just getting harder and harder to justify, okay, it's a no brainer to bring it in. It's a no brainer to pay for it. Part of that's the competitive dynamic of, you know, 50% of the value from AI you just
Speaker 1:get in are Google search. You getting out of out of some of these if if you're a business that's not doing cogen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, And somebody says, hey, for $20 a month or a $100 a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level in math, but extremely low agency. You have to like tap you have to tap the person on the shoulder. I like the laundromat. The laundromat's like, actually, I don't need somebody who's PhD level in math.
Speaker 1:Sir, sir, this is a laundromat.
Speaker 2:We've been we've been running this laundromat mat in this family for forty five years. And I've never run into an IMO gold metal level problem ever in the past.
Speaker 1:I bet there are. I I bet there actually are. I bet I bet I bet Yeah.
Speaker 4:I bet
Speaker 1:abstraction on top of that. I bet if Mark Chen wanted to create a laundromat.
Speaker 2:Laundry. Allocation of laundry.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You need efficiently I mean, if if you have a big load
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:Of laundry.
Speaker 2:Yes. How do you split it across? Distribute it between Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:But but yeah. So so you have like troubleshooting. You have a a robot on your computer that is incredibly incredibly smart incredibly low agency. Yeah. It can't learn on the job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have to like tap it on the shoulder and say, hey, do this. Yeah. Okay. Now do that.
Speaker 1:Now do this. Do that. Yeah. And it's like, well, a lot of these businesses don't have again these these problems that need that level of intelligence. And They need people that are that are even have some level of agency Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not even maxed out on intelligence but can just kind of like chug away and learn on the job and get better.
Speaker 2:Or they need SaaS products that have AI functionality built in. Right? Yeah. And so to to them, it's just, oh, yeah. My my POS system just flagged a couple more fraudulent orders and took care of that or, like, ramp.
Speaker 2:You know? It's like, my receipts get classified better, but I'm not, like, a direct user of AI. Maybe they need to be on numeral numeral.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Disney is investing $1,000,000,000 in OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Before that. Before that. I I do think it's notable. So Oracle's remaining performance obligations, which we know refers to contracted revenue not yet recognized Yeah. Is $523,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Currently, their stock is trading at 500 worthy worthy of a Gong hit, sure. But currently, So the stock is trading at only $568,000,000,000. And so I just I just look at this as like Oracle continues immediately when they announced this backlog. They got a bunch of credit. It was almost immediately.
Speaker 1:And it has basically just been downhill ever since as the market has basically said, we're giving you less and less and less and less credit here Mhmm. And to the point where in many ways they're getting like negative negative credit for the partnership.
Speaker 2:That was the Financial Times take. The the deal is worth negative 70,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there, I think that the way that they frame that title was not entirely Edgy. Is definitely edgy.
Speaker 2:It's a blog. It's Alphaville. They're having fun. But
Speaker 1:And then I so I have I have more have one more post here that's relevant. So says, Cap says, I got a feel like that at some point Oracle Larry was misled. Was it OpenAI showing him something in the lab? Was it Jensen lying about token prices? Or was it a partnership that was supposed to happen that didn't?
Speaker 1:It's always been clear to me that this was a race to the bottom. Why would you want to take these economics that someone as sophisticated as Microsoft was happy to pass off? Remember? Mhmm. I've said this a bunch on the show.
Speaker 1:Satya has more information. He he owns OpenAI's IP. Mhmm. Right? He's been serving OpenAI models.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. He's been, you know, running an AI. You know, it's one of the most scaled platforms. Right? He has more information than anyone in the room.
Speaker 1:Momentarily, he looked he didn't look at when Oracle announced his backlog and the stock jumped
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:However many hundreds of billions. Everyone was kinda like, wait. Is this did Satya miss this? And I think the market is maybe realizing some of his wisdom. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Suspended cap says, Jensen's whole thing is that the rack cost $4,000,000 and you make $20,000,000 you net. Dollars 16,000,000, no one can, no one can make you $6,000,000 Got it. But a lot of assumptions baked into that. Someone has to pay you $16,000,000 for however many trillions of tokens you can spit off. If a token is a commodity and can someone can serve it at 50% lower than now, it's net plus 6,000,000 on the 4,000,000 of cost.
Speaker 1:What if the dollars paid for the infra results in massive losses for whoever is purchasing them? Is the assumption that the capital will just keep funding it? Maybe they will. Actually think they will, but I'm just confused at what Oracle thought they saw here. So
Speaker 2:Well, story is not over. Let's move on to Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, Belkam first principles on object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. So Joanna Stern has a little bit of a screenshot take joking around about Disney, which is investing 1,000,000,000 in OpenAI and is going to license their characters for use in Sora. She says, look at this hype.
Speaker 2:Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my bubble's complete? I think that's from some Disney song. I actually don't know, but I just the cadences. Do you you have any idea what what's Santa
Speaker 5:Claus is Coming to Town?
Speaker 2:No. Definitely not Santa Claus is Coming to Town. That's not a Disney property. Is it?
Speaker 5:Oh, I oh, yeah. Look at But the tune you were singing sounded like that.
Speaker 2:This is just being a bad singing, I suppose. Okay. Let let let's see if Grock can I'm a messenger. Let's see. Okay.
Speaker 2:Anyway, there is news
Speaker 1:Oh, is this Frozen maybe?
Speaker 2:Look at this end. Isn't it neat? Okay. Accompanying I don't know. Someone will have to tell us.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so Disney is making a $1,000,000,000 investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties to generate short user prompted social videos.
Speaker 1:Henry says it's from The Little Mermaid.
Speaker 2:The Little Mermaid. What is the original line from The Little Mermaid? Look at this. Okay. Anyway, Disney's three year licensing deal will let users generate videos using Sora, OpenAI's short form AI video platform of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar characters.
Speaker 2:A curation a curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney plus Woah. That's the bombshell there. I didn't realize that. Because when I think about, like, going to Sora, it's very fun to make a mashup video of Mickey Mouse fighting Iron Man or something like that. And that's something that doesn't make sense to underwrite within Disney.
Speaker 2:They're not going to spend the time. The CGI is too expensive. It's just not going to happen. But for a kid who loves you know, a Pixar character that wants to see, you know, Wall E join the Avengers and go fight Thanos, like, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who enjoys Disney's IP, and yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create that. Makes a ton of sense that they would allow this to happen in Sora, in sort of a a way where the economic value is accounted for appropriately.
Speaker 1:You can Is this see kind of deal slop?
Speaker 2:But I just the idea that this is going Disney plus is crazy. That's the crazy thing. Yeah. Because, I mean, we covered this when we were talking about Sora generally, just this idea that is it a creation tool or is it a consumption tool? And we were saying, I think, pretty quickly that this doesn't feel like an app that we're gonna hang out in.
Speaker 2:Everyone in the studio was having a lot of fun. We checked their we checked their screen times a few days later. No one was scrolling Sora or more meta vibes for that.
Speaker 1:But we continue to see outputs from Sora going Totally. Pretty viral on other platforms.
Speaker 2:Totally. Within our own, like, group chats. Like, the what's been the most impactful, Sora video that you've probably seen in the last couple weeks? Like, me making a Sora video of myself promoting John Fio's energy drink company in a suit, and I just sent it to him directly in a group chat. And it didn't it didn't exist, and it wasn't funny in any in any broader context.
Speaker 2:Now the weird thing is is that is there real demand for Sora level quality content in the Disney plus app? Like, I've when when I open the Disney plus app, I feel like it's a place that it has extremely high polish. And I feel like a
Speaker 1:safe place. What what to me what's exciting about this
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is personalized entertainment, and which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this. If Tyler figured it out with Henry's help, the the line earlier was, look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection's complete from The Little Mermaid
Speaker 2:The Little Mermaid.
Speaker 1:Part of your world. But if somebody loves The Little Mermaid and then you can prompt a really high fidelity personalized video Mhmm. For like your kid saying like, it's time to do the dishes and singing a little song. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 1:That is that's the kind of kind of moment that I imagine Disney would be excited about. Yeah. Of course, this will be immediately abused in Of course. A thousand Yeah. Millions of different ways.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure they'll put a lot of guardrails in. One thing that's notable Yeah. This went out this morning. Mhmm. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding it to stop the infringement. So yeah, basically, the article says, as Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the mouse house is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale, using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement. Quote, Google's infringing Disney's copyright on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop GenAI models and services and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney's copyrights.
Speaker 1:So the letter continued, Google operates as a virtual vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on massive scale. In compounding Google's blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI services are branded with Google's Gemini logo, false falsely implying that Google's exploitation of Disney's IP is authorized and endorsed by Disney. So the question so Disney's not just allowing OpenAI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested. And so the immediate question is, will Disney do any of these licensing IP licensing with other platforms? It doesn't this kind of lot maybe
Speaker 2:It feels like we're in the press release economy all over again. Yeah. I I don't know. It does feel like Disney's sort of like picking a winner here in AI video. And they're saying, like, we like OpenAI and we don't like Google, which is sort of a sort of a bold a bold move.
Speaker 2:You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I I I'm I'm fascinated by this.
Speaker 1:Then again, Thrive Capital bet Yeah. Bet the fund
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In some ways on OpenAI. Mhmm. Who's co owner of Thrive? Bob Iger.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Okay. Remember he bought that he was a part of a small cohort that bought a few points of Thrive? Get
Speaker 2:out the red string. It's all connected. Of course.
Speaker 1:Get out the board. Get out the board.
Speaker 2:Structure. So Disney's putting a $1,000,000,000 investment in, but they're also getting warrants to buy more stock in OpenAI at its current $500,000,000,000 valuation. So there's a little bit of opportunity in the future if the valuation goes up that they'll get a good deal there. I I really can't get over this Disney plus news. I I I really oh, okay.
Speaker 2:It say it does say a curated selection. So I I think that I would be very upset about the idea that I would open if I
Speaker 1:It's random selection of You whatever know where I'm going with
Speaker 2:this. Like like, I I think Wall E is a is a film that is, like, I think it's art. I think it's art.
Speaker 1:And I think You it's okay just watch.
Speaker 2:For my children to watch Wall E.
Speaker 1:You study Wallet.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. But I do. I
Speaker 1:do You took notes.
Speaker 2:I do think that that a lot of the Pixar films and a lot of the Disney films, they have an opinion, they have craft, they have they have something that elevates the human experience. The human like, it is not purely brain rot. It's not slop. And and if if you were in a funnel where you watch something that's that's a great, interesting film with an opinion, with something to say, And then it's like, do you wanna continue watching? Five, four, three, two, one.
Speaker 2:And then it's just blasting you with the craziest Sora mashups possible. Like, you're gonna make a lot of parents very upset. So this better be in another tab. But I do I do like that they said it's it's curated because as long as there's, like, some sort of human in the loop to, like, say, like, hey. That's they clearly jailbroke on that one because you know people are gonna get crazy with this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Some people do it neat.
Speaker 1:Every Disney carry character doing the little yachty walkout, you know?
Speaker 2:Okay. That's actually okay for the kids. I I I fully support that. Coffin is a banger and I'm good with that. But no, mean, YouTube Kids famously went through a really, really dark period with Spider Man and Elsa mashups and that were very suggestive and bizarre.
Speaker 2:And and and there's been it's been a game of whack a mole for a long time. And I think people don't expect when they open up Disney plus they don't expect it to be a a game of whack a mole. They expect it to be curated, and so Disney really needs to needs to continue instill this idea that they are that they are curating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Disney has sent cease and desist letters Mhmm. To Meta, Character, AI Mhmm. As well as against Midjourney Mhmm. And some other companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder, have they ever sent a cease and desist to To who? OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know. But they should have because early as soon as ChatGPT launched, I was having it create stories of, you know, Spider Man. I I I was particularly a fan of the the deliberately IP infringing. So I'd be like, write a bedtime story for my son where, you know, Spider Man teams up with Superman, which of course cannot happen because those are rival intellectual rival pieces of intellectual property, some owned by Warner Brothers, some owned by Disney. And so you cannot ever have those cross into the same multiverse.
Speaker 1:According to Yes. Google Gemini, which Disney has now sent this Yes. Cease and desist to, Disney has never taken any type of legal action Mhmm. Against OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So Well, they're picked they picked their they they picked they picked a side.
Speaker 2:Well, fortunately, we have someone who can add a lot more context here. We have Dylan Byers from Puck News joining us in person in just a few minutes whenever he's ready. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, our sponsor, Google's most intelligent model yet, State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up this clip. Bob Iger and Sam, we're on CNBC this morning. We can pull it up.
Speaker 2:This is twelve minute video. Can we play some of this and see if there are key moments there? And then we will bring in Dylan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the current deal is a three year license with exclusivity for the first year. So, again, it's very possible that a year from today, Google ends up with the same ability Sure. To leverage Yeah. Disney IP.
Speaker 1:Disney will set and evolve the guardrails for how its 200 characters characters will be used. I One
Speaker 2:year exclusivity doesn't seem like that like that big of a deal to me. Because v o three and Nano Banana are barely rolled out into YouTube. Like, you can put them in shorts, but it's kind of a creative tool. Like, YouTube does not seem like we got to win the AI vertical video game this year. This feels more detrimental to Facebook and Meta than than OpenAI honest or or than than than YouTube, honestly.
Speaker 2:Anyway, should we let's table this video. We can come back to the clips. I'm sure it will be clipped more more in in more Yeah. Precise detail. Instead, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM.
Speaker 2:Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And let's bring in Dylan Byers from Puck News. Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to come down to the UltraDome. Good to see you in person. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Welcome. Please have a seat.
Speaker 1:Thank And
Speaker 2:if you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself. However you describe yourself these days, whatever's whatever's quickest.
Speaker 3:I'm a senior correspondent for Puck Okay. Where I cover the media industry
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Media business, media gossip.
Speaker 2:How is covering the media different than covering the oil and gas industry or tech or anything else?
Speaker 3:More navel gazing, more incest incestral.
Speaker 2:Because you're in the media, you can are you are you doing the navel gazing or are you reporting on navel gazing?
Speaker 3:I I I navel gaze at the navel gazers.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's sort of an of navel gazing. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Very incestral. Incestral.
Speaker 2:What's has Navalgazing been the top story over the last couple weeks or is it more Oh, yeah. Deal making?
Speaker 3:You're it would it's well, here's what's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's amazing that at a time when like Paramount and Netflix are going to war for Warner Brothers Discovery
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The media industry is obsessed with like Ryan Lizzen, Olivia Nuzzi
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That's a big one.
Speaker 3:Barry Weiss CBS.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Industry is funny because you it has a way of the the the smallest, most inconsequential gossip has a way of consuming the industry at large.
Speaker 2:That doesn't feel like what the last couple months have been, though.
Speaker 1:Like like, the Olivia Newsie, the the
Speaker 2:Lizzo thing, like, that feels like much bigger than some small story. Is
Speaker 3:it really it used to be big.
Speaker 1:So part part of it part of why media loves covering media is media likes to cover things that get a lot of attention. And media businesses, in their very nature, their job is to get attention So everyone knows. To monetize it.
Speaker 3:I think that's part of it. I just think we're obsessed we're obsessed with ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would But an example I would give, very often I'll find like a a fashion brand that that is like a household name Mhmm. Will have like $5,000,000 of revenue. Right? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's because it's because they're just like Yeah. People like fashion Yep. It gets shared a ton Yep. And so I I think it's a very
Speaker 2:Same thing with individual influencers. Like, they might be recognized on the street. If you put them in a headline, it's going to get clicks versus if I was like, I have a I have a report here on a oil and gas company that's doing 50,000,000 a year, you'd be like, no one's gonna click on that. No one knows what that company is.
Speaker 3:People need stories. People need like purse you need personalities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:My you know. The media lends itself to that. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can do that at the executive level Paramount, Netflix, WBD deal.
Speaker 3:You can do it down at on the newsroom floor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think people need personalities to make these stories
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Human. Also, there's just you know, there's only so much intrigue in numbers.
Speaker 2:Do you feel like the Paramount, Netflix, Warner Brothers story has been particularly personal? Have you been focused
Speaker 3:on is the most personal at that level, at a major m and a level, even more so than when Bob Iger and Brian Roberts went to war for Fox Mhmm. Which was personal too, and had a lot of subplots there, especially on the Murdoch side. Mhmm. Of course, this is personal. This is you've you've got in David Ellison Yeah.
Speaker 3:A guy who is basically staking a lot of personal money, a lot of his dad's money Mhmm. Trying to get this asset, and then being doing all the right things, sending all the right signals to David Zaslav Having all the right dinners, going to all the right fights, and then being sort of spurned at the last minute Mhmm. For someone else. And that negotiation and the Trump element and the relationships between Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav and then David Ellison and Larry Ellison and David Zaslav, it's like it's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:So do you think I mean, there is a world where should be purely economic. Right? Because it's the
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it will be.
Speaker 2:It will be.
Speaker 3:It will in the end.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The funny part is, like, the the personal element is there, but at the end of the day, whoever spends the most money is gonna get the asset.
Speaker 2:But if you're more personal, you might be able to marshal more capital, you might know more people, you might be more more people might be willing to rally behind you, and we're kinda seeing that with Ellison pulling in folks all over the board because, you know, he's has personal relationships with them. Is that roughly right?
Speaker 3:That's rough that's roughly right. Yeah. Think that I think what you have my my partner, Bill Cohen, put it really elegantly. You've basically got a company with a $400,000,000,000 valuation going to war with a a man with $400,000,000,000
Speaker 6:valuation. And Larry Ellison
Speaker 3:and and his son. Yeah. And, yeah, marshalling the capital for it, you know, with Gulf sovereign wealth funds Yeah. And Jared Kushner and all that is is interesting. And at a certain point, Netflix is going to re reach a threshold for what it can compete with.
Speaker 3:I mean, another point Bill made is at a certain point, if Paramount were just willing to come in and offer, like, $34.35 dollars a share for this thing, I think it would be game over.
Speaker 2:Netflix can't do it.
Speaker 3:But the person I mean, the personal element is just interesting because you've got Trump who wants to be involved in this deal somehow. You've got David who really doesn't like the idea David Zaslow who really doesn't like the idea of selling to David Ellison. But fundamentally, what you're doing is just a very extended negotiation that's gonna play into Mhmm. Why does well into 2026.
Speaker 1:Why does he wanna get involved with with with David?
Speaker 3:I don't think this is how how Zaslav wanted to go out. Right? Like, I I think I'm not saying, you know, all when David Zaslav got WarnerMedia Mhmm. He did this whole song and dance coming to Hollywood and saying, you know, I'm a film guy, I'm gonna save the film industry. I don't think anyone thought he was in it for the long haul.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I think everyone knew this was sort of like a a flip. But he liked playing the Hollywood kingpin, and I don't think he wanted to go out because David Ellison came to the table and forced him to go to market. Mhmm. And I also don't think that, you know, I think David Ellison and his team and Jerry Cardinale at Redbird, I think they came in and said, you know, somewhere around that sort of $23.50, $24 a share mark.
Speaker 3:And I think he took offense to that Mhmm. Because the number he wanted and the number he thought he could get was higher to 30. And David, look, I I have spent a lot of my time at Puck writing about all of the various misguided exploits of David Zaslav at the top of Warner Brothers Discovery. But at the end of the day, like, one thing he knows how to do very well is work a deal. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The entire time that David Ellison was coming was at the table saying, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll spend more, he was talking to Ted Sarandos at Netflix. And basically, by by virtue of playing those two off against each other, he's probably gonna end up driving this the the the deal up to a price that is actually higher than $30.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So kudos to him.
Speaker 2:Do you think he's talking to anyone else? There's been a lot of skepticism about there ever having been a second bidder. People were saying, oh, the whole net the idea that Netflix would even bill bid, that's a fake stalking
Speaker 3:I remember I remember in September Yeah. When Paramount first started this whole process, someone came to me and said, this isn't over. Netflix is at the table. Everyone thought that was bullshit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3:Greg Peters went out at a Bloomberg event here in Hollywood and said, we don't do, you know, historically, we don't do M and A deals like this. We're not interested in M and A. And everyone thought, okay, well, that's it. Yeah. Netflix has been at the table the entire time.
Speaker 3:And in fact, if you talk to the guys at Paramount, what they'll tell you is, like, they feel like Zaslav was playing rope a dope with them. He's basically saying, yeah, come to the table, we're good. Everything you're offering is better than Netflix. Then finally, the eleventh hour is saying Where was Netflix?
Speaker 1:To bid and bid
Speaker 3:and bid and bid and bid. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're
Speaker 3:not done. We're not done. That's the that's the sort of funny thing. The the way when when Ted Sarandos and and Greg Peters go out there and talk about this, they're talking about it like it's over. It's not over.
Speaker 3:No. We're we're I I I you could have me on you could have me back on in six months. I think we're still talking about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 2:Do you think that the the actual Netflix contract, the deal, the breakup fees, the announcement, the pageantry around, like, we have a deal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. Make it inevitable.
Speaker 2:Is that a tactic?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 2:Okay. To drive a higher price from to to let Paramount know, to let Ellison know, hey, they your best and final, like, now is the time to go rally
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was up? What was up? Go around
Speaker 2:the world. Yeah. Get fire up the How
Speaker 1:do you make how do you make an another offer and then say, I just wanna be clear this is not my best and final?
Speaker 2:Oh, that was a funny line.
Speaker 1:Like, I've never I've never in a negotiate like, never in a negotiation had somebody make a a a new hire offer. Yeah. And then also say like, typically, you'd be like, yeah
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's not a lot of like, just shows that Yeah. Like, what is the incentive to take the offer at all?
Speaker 2:Buy your house for a million dollars, but I could go higher.
Speaker 3:I could go higher. And by the way, another partner of mine, Matt Bellini, he's reported Paramount will go higher.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:They will. Like, the Ellisons will go higher. And and part of the thing, and this gets back to the personal element, which is what's so fascinating to me. David Ellison came to the Paramount deal, the first deal, with a strategy to basically wrap up as much of Hollywood as he could, scale it up, and then try to go to war with Netflix and YouTube and the guys up in Silicon Valley. The entire thesis of his battle strategy rests on him being able to acquire more than just Paramount.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:If at
Speaker 3:the end of the day, Netflix gets Warner Brothers Discovery and he's sitting there with Paramount, he's not he's not he's not in the game.
Speaker 1:Well, So so I was thinking, so he he acquired the rights to UFC. Yes. They're killing the pay per view model, which is interesting. The pay per view model was being killed by illegal streaming, which was like the bane of Dana White's existence. He basically, to my knowledge, was always angry about it.
Speaker 1:It was kind of the nature of the Internet. It's just like if you're streaming something, it'll show up in other place in other parts of the Internet and there's not much you can do. So Paramount, you know, basically going down, throwing down and saying, like, we're gonna own the UFC, which is there's lot of people that will just subscribe because there's one ish major UFC event every month and it'll it's a much better deal than than just going and buying each individual pay per view for $80 a pop or whatever. But that subscription offering becomes much more compelling if if you're bundling in all this other IP. Totally.
Speaker 1:My question is like, you're definitely gonna get the the UFC fan base, but how big is that fan base? Certainly, it's a popular sport in America. But how do you, like, build enough value around this to really have a competitive offering?
Speaker 3:I think what's interesting about the UFC deal what the the UFC deal was a signal to the the broader market, which is so much again, having it can be depressing to cover the media industry because a lot of the times, it's going through periods of contraction or decline. Or you look at since we're talking about sports rights, you look at someone like ESPN, right, who's being forced to make all of these very calculated decisions about, you know, should we pay x amount for Major League Baseball when you're competing, still competing for the NFL with like Amazon Yep. And
Speaker 1:Well, are the the last remaining content monopolies. Right? So in news, you don't really have a monopoly on anything. Might News is a commodity. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You might break the story, but everybody else will have the facts
Speaker 3:Sports rights are the one Sports rights
Speaker 1:are the one leagues. Yes. So so the UF CD
Speaker 2:property. Like like like
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:The rights
Speaker 1:to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Warner Brothers.
Speaker 1:But but still that is highly competitive with somebody else online saying, I'm gonna make an AI cartoon.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:People aren't creating homegrown sports content. They're creating commentary and reaction content, but you still need to pay to see it live.
Speaker 3:At the end of the day, there's only one network you can watch Sunday Night Football on, and it's NBC. And that matters in a way that when news break, when a bomb goes off or a coup happens Intrimal.
Speaker 1:There are
Speaker 3:a lot of different ways to go. But what was interesting about the UFC deal is at the at this period of sort of contraction negotiation among legacy media players, David Ellison was coming in almost like a sovereign himself and saying, I'm willing I'm here. Mhmm. I'm willing to make bold bets, and I'm willing to even overpay, or what others would consider overpay, in order to go after these assets. It also helps that he's younger.
Speaker 3:He's thinking on a longer time horizon. Like, he's actually someone who's thinking, how do I build up not just a media empire? He thinks about it as a media and tech empire. How do I build that up over the course of decades? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So he's making these really long term bets. And again, part of that, it was never ever just about Paramount. I remember sitting in the polo lounge with somebody before the Paramount deal even closed, and they're like, he's going after WBD next. Like, this is always this is a this is a scale play. And so that just brings me back to like, you can't you can't execute the plan if you're just sitting with Paramount.
Speaker 3:And so if you're Zaslav, and the guy's like, well, yeah, our best and final offer is whatever starts with a two. He's like, the fuck it does. You
Speaker 1:need me more than I need you.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:Very clearly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that I mean, I count myself as oddly like a media I'm I'm just getting up to speed on a lot of these media stories and this one's been fascinating. But just digging into David Ellison's history, I mean, starting Skydance in 2004, he really has been in Hollywood as at least, like, you know, given it his all for twenty years.
Speaker 2:He starred in Flyboys, the movie that he shot. Like, it's like, he clearly wants it. It's
Speaker 1:He's about that life.
Speaker 2:Not it's not a it's hard to call him a tourist.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 3:if you've seen Flyboys. It wasn't great.
Speaker 2:No. But but to show up and and not, like there are lots of, like I mean, you could easily levy the, like, tourist label at, like, Elon Musk buying Twitter. Right? What does he know about social networking? He's been a he's been a PayPal guy, then he's been a space guy, then he's been a car guy.
Speaker 2:Now he's a social media guy. What does he know about the news? And it's like, that kinda was true. Like, did just show up and was all of a sudden, like, I use Twitter a lot, so I'm buying it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Power. This is they this is a twenty year journey. Right?
Speaker 3:David Ellison fancies himself a true film buff. Sure. Hollywood guy.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Grew Grew up watching movies, going to movies. His association with Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible to him is a massive badge of honor. Because he feels like he's really been supporting the industry. Yeah. And part of the argument you're going to see, or we're already seeing it, that that he and his team will make against Netflix, is that Netflix is paying lip service to, like, the theatrical window.
Speaker 3:They're not a they're not a business that's built on putting movies in theaters. True. And he's like, we actually will. We we are committed to Hollywood in the traditional sense.
Speaker 2:We're so committed that we'll we'll put Tom Cruise yelling at you about TV settings in front of you.
Speaker 1:Have seen this?
Speaker 3:That's right. No, I haven't.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Yeah. Tom Cruise, like, there's a lot of TVs that come with, like, specific refresh rates technology, like high refresh rate, not 24 frames. It'll do, like, 80 48. It's like smooth motion.
Speaker 2:And he hates it because it's, like, not as the filmmaker intended.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so he'll do, like, pre roll ads for that. Clearly, like a yeah. Truly, like, loves the theater still.
Speaker 3:We are going to we are all going in in this process Yeah. Because one thing that gets lost, know, the creative community in Hollywood gets really upset about the Netflix of it all. Sure.
Speaker 1:Because they
Speaker 3:don't like seem to like Netflix.
Speaker 2:Yep. Netflix from a tech perspective, not a political perspective. They see them as politically aligned with Netflix generally.
Speaker 3:But more politically aligned with Netflix Yes. In fact. But in terms of their nostalgia for what this industry is about Yes. We're gonna see a lot of nostalgia over the course of this deal negotiation and there's gonna be a lot of hemming and hawing among the Hollywood creative community about what's happening. And all I all I would say is whether Paramount or Netflix get WBD, like, the train has left the station.
Speaker 3:Like, the industry has changed. Yes. And even Ted's whole thing about, you know, we're committed to the theatrical window, like, bullshit. Like, I guess movies will be in theaters for, like, ten minutes before they're on Netflix.
Speaker 1:What do you think that do you think that Holly, you know, Hollywood in in the actual traditional sense, like the local community, we're recording this live from Hollywood. Yeah. It seems like the industry is the culture of the industry is like dominated by nostalgia. That's like the Totally. That's the feeling that I have.
Speaker 1:The interesting thing about tech is that tech has a nostalgic element to it, tech culture, but it's like videos of us going to the moon. And we're like, well, we gotta do that again. Whereas Hollywood seemingly is just wants the whole production pipeline and process to go back the way that it was. And I guess, how how are how are people processing like having a even smaller kind of potential buyer pool out of all of this?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, is the way you're making me think of I think earlier when we were talking about media, were talking about other industries like oil and gas
Speaker 2:my example.
Speaker 3:The difference is is that creatives are a real pain in the ass to deal with from the perspective of the front office. Sure. You build your business around them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But they have feelings about how things should be that I think people probably in the oil and gas industry or the trucking industry don't. Yeah. So there are a lot of, like, Tom Cruise's and Martin Scorsese's Mhmm. Who have feelings about how how this industry should work and what you need to preserve in order to preserve the integrity of it. What happens when new leaders take over is they have to do a song and dance where they pay a lot of lip service to this.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And so you see Ted Sarandos coming in and talking about how great it is to acquire the studio that made Casablanca.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The future of the film I fucking love Casablanca. I've seen it a 100 times. The future of this business does not rest on, like, future generations going back and watching Humphrey Bogart. That is not where the future is going. You see, similarly, when David Ellison took over Paramount, there's all this lip service paid to, like, Walter Cronkite
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And the
Speaker 3:integrity of CBS News. With all due respect to David, I don't think he gives a shit about Walter Cronkite. Like But you have to do that song and dance in order to sort of finesse the transition of the creative community. And in truth, I think what's more interesting is I think whether you're talking about a David Ellison or a Ted Sarandos, they're actually thinking about the future. They're thinking about how to go to the moon again.
Speaker 3:They're thinking about you guys were just talking about Disney's deal with I
Speaker 2:wanna talk to you about that, too.
Speaker 3:When when right after he he dropped his peons to Walter Cronkite at this Paramount event just down the street a few months ago, David Ellison talked about how we were just a matter of years away from his kids being able to talk to the characters on Paw Patrol, and have those characters talk back to them. Soar the the Disney sort of deal is like an early step towards that future.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They know that's where we're going.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is not my kids watching Bluey over and over and over again. It is them talking to Bluey and telling Bluey what to do. Mhmm. They're thinking about it, but the the dissonance between what they have to sort of say to placate the Marty Scorsese's and where they're actually thinking about putting the money is is notable.
Speaker 1:I feel like it's notable that I mean, there's so we talk to founders at least once a week that are building like video models and and products that could eventually be used by entertainment or are being used by entertainment. And I get as an outsider to entertainment, I get excited because I'm like, if if budgets for films hold flat and the tools that these entrepreneurs are building get better and better, you'll eventually be able to say, you know, a movie that would have cost a $100,000,000 could now be four different movies that cost $25,000,000, and you you're using AI to reduce the cost and using it for scenes that that are just, like, you know, historically expensive to actually shoot and do. And so I see an opportunity for this, like, Cambrian like, even if budgets just hold flat, a Cambrian explosion of more creativity, more people having, the opportunity to create films and television shows and things like that. But it feels like there's like zero excitement here about that. And maybe it's and maybe it's because it's in pockets because
Speaker 2:Well, it's it's entirely outside of the Hollywood system. Like Mhmm. The iPhone really did democratize filmmaking, but like the end result of that was like Mr. Beast
Speaker 1:on YouTube. But I'm just saying Not even I'm just saying it's still I'm saying I'm saying even though the technology is not being created here, it still could be a catalyst for the industry. I think it's a competitor in the industry. But but I don't know. It is it is, and and it's an and it's and it's a tool.
Speaker 3:It's a tool. I mean, it it's a tool. And as with the iPhone, the question is who who gets who has the who has the access to the tool and and who gets to harness the tool and then do something great with it? Yeah. The iPhone sort of democratized your ability to create content, and you can argue that the vast majority of what's out there is slop and is not nearly as good as what Hollywood can create.
Speaker 3:But then again, you just have to look at where where people are spending their time. People are spending more time with user generated content. People are spending more time on YouTube than they are on any other streaming platform.
Speaker 2:Be able to talk to Humphrey Bogart.
Speaker 1:You can talk to Humphrey Bogart.
Speaker 2:That's what
Speaker 3:I'm Put
Speaker 2:me in Citizen Kane.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can put him on the plane.
Speaker 1:Wiley Wiley Coyote. I'm on the plane. Wiley Coyote teaches algebra.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'll happen, for sure.
Speaker 3:I get I the the the problem with nostalgia and with trying to preserve the order as it is is that the tools are there. They're going to be harnessed. Mhmm. They are more democratized than they have been in the past. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And at a certain point, the eyeballs are gonna go where they're gonna go, and you can't force it. Yeah. And there's this weird sort of like Amish, like, let's just like preserve this moment in time that Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. So so so is if we if we hopped in a car and drove over to Burbank and snuck into Disney Yeah. Do you think Bob Iger has like a total revolt on his hands today? Because I feel like Disney is one of the truly creative places. They hire tons of those artists that have opinions.
Speaker 2:They're talent driven. And yet they just put out an announcement. Yeah. We're gonna do AI content. It feels like a very it feels like a divisive issue if I was, you know
Speaker 3:I'm sure I'm sure it is for some people. Increasingly find that the stakes are are so high and and the the change is so fast that the need to meet it is existential. Mhmm. And I think leaders like Eiger increasingly care less about Mhmm. That blowback.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm so fun. I've a long time, like twenty years ago, I was an intern at the New Yorker, and I remember when
Speaker 4:they opened up, you could they did at
Speaker 3:the back page where people could submit Yeah. Captions for the New Yorker cartoons. Yeah. And the cartoonists hated it, because they felt like that was their the integrity of their work should not be opened up to the public. And in fact, that became like one of the greatest sources of engagement Totally.
Speaker 3:With The New Yorker was was through that. I think people recognize that the being able to say, I want Darth Vader on a beach Yeah. Or I want, you know, Captain Underpants doing x y z, like, that is going to happen. Yep. You can already sort of do it.
Speaker 3:And the question for Disney is, are we going to have a piece of that revenue? Mhmm. Are we gonna make money off of it? And in fact, if we know that that's where the puck is going, and at a certain point you will be able to talk to your favorite animated characters. How can we if if we engage with that, then maybe we can start driving.
Speaker 3:Maybe that helps keep engagement. Maybe that helps drive people to theme parks. There's a whole another piece of it I was talking about with my colleague, Julie Alexander, just earlier today, but there's a there's a whole another element here too with YouTube where, you know, YouTube is or or sorry, Google is starting to generate Disney characters
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Disney doesn't want that happening.
Speaker 1:They launched a cease and desist last night. There's Yeah. They're they're they're taking legal action against basically seemingly every scaled player except OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Who
Speaker 1:they OpenAI deals are one year exclusive. Yeah. And so I think that opens up, I'm assuming Disney's using these lawsuits and and the cease and desist to start a negotiation of of what of what this will look like once everybody gets access to it. Yeah. But it's it's notable that I think this is even today, just seeing the timeline, I think this is underrated as a deal for OpenAI to be able to drive just at a time when it feels like their their product is being
Speaker 2:I completely disagree, but continue.
Speaker 1:At least at least somewhat threatened by by Gemini. Sure. If you're if you're if you're an American household
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and you're like a Disney family, what what family of apps are you gonna be paying money to? Right? If one of them creates these magical experiences for your kids and the other, you know, is completely blocked from generating any IP around that. Because like when kid I don't I don't know. My my kids are young.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But if you're a 10 year old and you realize that like you can like, my son, I generate like pick I take pictures of us and I turn us into dinosaurs Yep. And I have used ChatGPT to do that a lot Yep. It's stuck in his head. He'll be like, let's make some din like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's make dinosaur pictures.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like a fun
Speaker 1:new And so, kids realize that any Disney content that they can watch can immediately be like brought into their life Yeah. That's gonna
Speaker 2:be Or it becomes to you and says, hey, let's let's turn ourselves into the Avengers. And you're like, well, there's only one app that allows me to do that, then boom, you're in you're back in Sora as opposed
Speaker 1:And you're gonna pay for it because
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:I think parents will pay almost any price to bring joy Yeah. To their children.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I I mean, I agree with that. I just think it's it's gonna be a slow take off of that type of content because
Speaker 1:But I don't think I don't think the whole thing like Studio Ghibli, was that a slow take off?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It was it was it was a huge it was a huge meme moment where everyone had to have one. Everyone needed to see what they looked like in the Studio Ghibli mode. And then the usage like dropped off and then started climbing at like 1%, you know. And and it is climbing and it is gonna grow and it it will be
Speaker 1:you now have 200 different characters, the most valuable IP in
Speaker 2:the it's bad. It's definitely like an improvement to that product and it will make Sora a better app and it will
Speaker 1:be But it's it's it's I'm assuming I didn't see specifically, but I'm assuming yeah. It's ChatTVD and Sora. It's gonna be TakeAmy.
Speaker 2:To bring it yeah. Yeah. But to bring it back to the the the Ellison, like the Paramount WBD, like if you put them together, you get something like 15% of all watch hours in America controlled by that company. If you would take Netflix and and WBD, you put them together, you get 14%. You saw that quote.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, Sora, I think, is gonna be at, like, less than 1% for, like, years. And then it will eventually be 5%, and then 10%. But it just next year is not gonna be, like, the year that 10% of watch hours were AI generated video. Like, it's just not there yet.
Speaker 3:I think I I commend Iger on at least trying to trying trying to adapt in his company for this future.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because that is where it's going.
Speaker 2:Mean Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's very hard to reject the thesis even with the available technology, feels like very beta, very one point o
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:That that's not where this is headed. If you've got one is sitting on a better IP portfolio than Disney, particularly when you're talking about kids, obviously.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:And then there's no easier way to do this than with animation. Yeah. So why not go there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just think so so I looked it up. Yeah. Disney Plus has just under 60,000,000 total paid subscribers in The US and Canada. Mhmm. I think a lot of those subscribers are are subscribing for content for their children.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 3:Don't underestimate how many people without kids go to Disneyland.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1:There's big it's a big number. I'm I'm just saying, like, that cohort, OpenAI has, like, what? A third of that in paying subs Mhmm. Globally? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And so I just think this is I I do think this is a at least for the next twelve months, I think this is gonna be a this is Chatty Bitty doesn't have a lot of moats. Right? Like the the product is better than other comparable products. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this is a new moat where if you're those 60,000,000 people that are paying for Disney Plus
Speaker 2:Like you're an old fan.
Speaker 1:And you're you're a super fan and
Speaker 3:you're going to parks.
Speaker 2:Gonna do it for you.
Speaker 1:How many people visit
Speaker 3:Yeah. Here's an anecdotal thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, please.
Speaker 3:Most to the best of my knowledge, the one the one way I've been able to make my son cool in his second grade class is by getting him on Sora, like, introduce letting him play around with Sora earlier than his friends. Cool. Didn't do that with Minecraft. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, but like, did that with Sora.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I have all those friends coming up to me and being like, what is Sora? Tell us about Sora. Can we use Sora? Sure. I'm sure the other parents hate me.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a wild thing
Speaker 3:to do. But you do see is purely anecdotal. Yeah. You see that level, like, oh my God, can we create some can we just say something
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And create it? Yeah. And you think about how sticky Disney has been. Right? Like, I I don't know a single parent in my kid's class who doesn't have a Disney plus Yeah.
Speaker 3:Subscription. Yeah. You are just you are you are if you if that if you can do that on Sora and you can't do it on its competitors
Speaker 2:That's what
Speaker 1:I'm saying.
Speaker 3:That's really 100 A potentially really valuable.
Speaker 1:In 2023, the last reporting period for the parks that I can find Mhmm. A 140,000,000 people globally paid to go to a Disney park and experience
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:The Disney
Speaker 2:I'm sold extremely bullish for OpenAI, extremely bullish for LGBT.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:I yeah. You you win me over on this. I just
Speaker 2:think I I I still don't think I still don't think a significant percentage of content consumed by Americans next year will be fully AI generated. I think that's where we're see a slow saying. Slicing up. But, yes.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:great deal. Saying hats off if you see motion.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. So if if you get a 100 a 140,000,000 people visit Disney parks this year, I bet you they will have things in the park which is like recreate this moment.
Speaker 2:This This is very good.
Speaker 1:Like, very good. It is very
Speaker 3:I I just think
Speaker 1:what the timeline this morning that was interesting, everybody looks at the headline number $1,000,000,000 Yep. And they're like, this is a round this barely this is like slapping duct tape on a boat that's leaking water. Right? It doesn't feel like that big of a number because it's not in the context of OpenAI, but the the competitive No. Edge that gives them over the next twelve months is massive.
Speaker 2:This is fantastic. This is a great conversation.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:It's such
Speaker 3:an honor to finally be in the dome. I'm so glad you're amazing. This I'm sure
Speaker 1:with the way the WVD deal evolves,
Speaker 3:you'll be a regular guest. I'm I'm just at the streets so anytime.
Speaker 2:For having me. This is great. Thanks so much for coming.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Man. We have our next guest, Fiji Simo.
Speaker 1:Hit the gong for us. It would be our honor.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't know if I've earned this.
Speaker 2:What's a big number? You gotta give us a number. How many years you've been writing? Fourteen. Fourteen years overnight success.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Great success. Linear. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline work. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from road map to release.
Speaker 2:Let me also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Our next guest is Vigi Simo from OpenAI. She is the CEO of applications. We are very honored to be joined by What's going on?
Speaker 2:To the show. How are you doing? Great to have you on the show.
Speaker 7:Great to be here. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of, a little bit of backstory on just what was the conversation like, to recruit you, to have you join OpenAI? It's a big move. It it rocked the timeline. And I'd love to know what was the pitch?
Speaker 2:What was the opportunity? How did you wind up at OpenAI?
Speaker 7:Well, I had the extreme privilege of being on the board of OpenAI for many months, like, I think about a year before Sam approached me. And and therefore, we were already working really closely together.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And then at some point, he told me, hey. It looks like, you know, there's a lot to do and it looks like you have ideas on how to do it. So he's at in terms that we could make this happen. And I had, you know, a a big job running Instacart at the time, so it took some time to transition. But I was incredibly inspired by the mission of OpenAI already, and it felt like a no brainer.
Speaker 2:And can you take us through the the GPT 5.2 announcement? I I mean, one of the first documents that I think everyone knows you for in the OpenAI context, in the in the context of your new role, is the the different areas where you see GPT five and and OpenAI having impact, ChatGPT having impact in folks' life. Can you explain to me how you think those different sections are going? What excites you about the news today? And kind of contextualize, how do you think about the map of what ChatGPut is an application is touching?
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's a big question. So
Speaker 2:Sorry. We can break it down one at a time.
Speaker 7:No. I've I've got it. You know, when I when I look at the opportunity ahead of us, I think AI is the greatest source of empowerment for people. And I want Shared GPT to be the personal super assistance that allows you to advance every part of your life. So the manifesto that you are referring to, to me was like putting on papers this notion that if you look at how the world works right now, wealthy people have a lot of support staff.
Speaker 7:They have a travel agent. They have a personal shopper. They have a financial adviser. Imagine if we could give that team of support to everyone on earth. And fundamentally, that's what I want to build.
Speaker 7:And I think with CharGPT, we have the opportunity to graduate from what is still fundamentally a chatbot that you ask questions to, to a personal super assistance that gets everything done in your life. When you put that in the context of the announcement today, we're super excited to have launched 5.2. It's the leading model on on
Speaker 8:kind of
Speaker 7:I I was really hoping for that. It's a leading model in terms of everyday professional work. It it it's a big step change in intelligence. You see that on the benchmarks, obviously, but that gives me a lot of hope that we can be closer to achieving a lot of leaps on on these use cases. So for example, if you take something like travel, you have to, like, you know, be good at long horizon task.
Speaker 7:You have to understand the goal of the users very well. And so with GPT 5.2 and, like, the new capabilities, we're getting one step closer to making all of that possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I feel like some people have a little bit of benchmark fatigue. They they you know, everyone has their own prompts, and they feel like stuff's getting better, but it's hard to like like, everyone wants the original chat GPT moment again. So what have you done in for me lately syndrome? But I'm interested putting all of that aside, I wanna know how are you measuring success internally around the launch of a new model?
Speaker 2:Like, what does the what does the the the rigor around developing KPIs? Obviously, the company is in the interest of driving subscriptions and revenue, but there must be interim steps and AB tests. I mean, this is your lineage. This is what this is what makes you who you are. How do you think about assessing the impact of new models when they go out aside like like, downstream of the benchmarks in the actual application?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So that's like my entire job is turning to the breakthroughs into products that people use. And so, for example, on 5.2, we just talked about the consumer side. I can go back to that. But on enterprise, for example, it's really important to us.
Speaker 7:We serve a million businesses across the world. What we look at is like, can companies start to do things that they weren't able to do before? We just released earlier this week an AI report for enterprise. And it said that 75% of people were saying, of workers were saying that with AI, they can accomplish tasks that they couldn't do before. And then we see that even on the coding start.
Speaker 7:On coding, if you look, coding messages from non engineers has grown 36%. And so I look at all of these things as like, these are also like, the research team gives me this like magical superpowers. My job is to put the superpowers in the hands of people and and at at home and at work. And the thing we measure is can they do more? And are they actually, like, understanding the use case and doing more?
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And there's a lot, you know, there is a big narrative around, like, is AI adoption really happening? Is it going fast enough? But what I am seeing is that there is a lot of pent up demand as long as you cross those capabilities. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 7:All companies that I meet with tell me that if there was a way to generate spreadsheets much like, faster with AI, generate slides much faster with AI, they would use it for a lot more knowledge work because, you know, all all knowledge workers generate spreadsheets and slides. With 5.2, like, that's a big step up in the ability to do that. Like, I can tell you with 5.1, I was trying to do
Speaker 1:it and the spreadsheet was kind
Speaker 7:of janky. Things were, like, not not really in the right place. With five two, it's like great formatting. It totally understand what's, like, you know, the numbers are about. It structures them the best way.
Speaker 7:And these are the things that, like, help unlock completely new use cases and to ultimately growth for the customers that we work with.
Speaker 2:Do you do you feel like there's a there's some sort of fundamental cultural difference between, you know, your previous roles where there hasn't been so much of this divide between the consumer side of the business and the enterprise side of the business on day one. I feel like ChatGPT is unique in that it's used by kids and college students and adults, and people use it just they bring it to work with them alongside, and then enterprises and the government's using it. Whereas for something like a social media application, it didn't really have that same, oh, we need the we we need this product to work for us in an enterprise context necessarily. How how has that how has that shift been designing an application that can be used? It's sort of the same underlying model, but it's used in such different ways.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a great question, and that's that's the thing that we spend a lot of time working on. The the thing that's really interesting is that part of the reason why we're winning in enterprise is because we're winning in consumer. When you talk to CEOs, they tell you, well, if my workers are already completely familiar with the technology because they use it for their personal use, that's much easier to deploy as an enterprise and have that be adopted. So that familiarity is actually really helping us.
Speaker 7:And so the thing we're trying to do is really keep that familiarity, but upsells tools that are really specific to enterprise. So I'll give you an example. Connectors is a is a great example. We do have connectors on the consumer side. You can connect your Chargebee to your Gmail and and things like that.
Speaker 7:But on the enterprise side, it's even more critical. You have to be connected to, like, stacks to, like, all of your enterprise knowledge. And so these are cases where we push harder on the enterprise side to make sure that companies are doing what they need to unlock the value.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd love to hear your take or you how you how you're thinking about the partnership with Disney. Jordi and I were just going back and forth on it. Landed in an excited place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My
Speaker 2:Seems like a fantastic partnership.
Speaker 1:I that I think that in general, looking at the timeline this morning, obviously, everybody's gonna form an opinion on partnership immediately even before they kind of understand the facts. But as I looked at it, I think it maybe was getting less hype than maybe it deserves because it's only a $1,000,000,000 investment. It's relatively small in the context of It's
Speaker 2:an investment in France.
Speaker 1:But if you look at the example I gave last there's like a 140,000,000 people have paid to visit a Disney park in the last year. I would imagine that all like, I can imagine a world where over the next year, every person that's visiting a Disney park is like, hey, I can kind of like personalize this experience and like take and basically create this entirely new kind of like entertainment layer to that.
Speaker 2:So I need the relationship with OpenAI
Speaker 1:in one way or another. Yeah. And I'm gonna pay for the product. Right. So it feels extremely significant in a way that maybe people aren't fully appreciating.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're very very excited about it. If you think about like Sora and ImageGen, this is all about unleashing creativity. I think we're all born creators.
Speaker 7:And like, if you give people the tools to create easily and to go fast from imagination to a creation, we can see, you know, the golden age of creativity. But for that, like, you know, we need people to have inspiration to have like, you know, like IP to play with. And Disney has by far the best IP, by far the best inspiration. And so partnering with them to bring these experiences to life is such a privilege, and we're really excited about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How our audience I was thinking about this last night. Our audience is probably, on average, spent way more money on ads than actually seen ads because many folks in the audience have spent money on digital ad platforms, run ad businesses. How do you think about positioning the ads product or whatever happens to the other side the market, like the brands that want to be successful in the future of commerce. Do you have any do you have any idea of of the the the shape that it will take?
Speaker 2:Because, you know, we were just doing a a Black Friday stream and and just one founder after another singing the praises of the Meta ecosystem, even the AppLovin ecosystem. The ability to go and put money in a magical box and get customers is remarkable. Have you thought more about what you wanna offer ultimately to brands and companies that will be ultimately be partnering with OpenAI?
Speaker 7:So not much to announce today on ads. But what I can tell you is two things. One, like, if we at some point we we decide to go towards ads, we're gonna do it in a way that is extremely respectful of the very special relationships that people have with Charge GPT. Like, the thing to understand is people trust that Charge GPT has their back and gives them the best answer for their needs. Nothing we do can like jeopardize that.
Speaker 7:And so, you know, when I talk to brands and they're like, hey, how can we get more distribution? How can we, you know, influence the results of the LLM? So reality is have the best products. Like, you know, we we wanna build an LLM that is not impacted by, you know, paying companies that is not impacted by, you know, people giving the system and purely recommends the brands that are gonna be best for you. Now around that around that model response, you can imagine that there are things that we could do to get to to give brands vision, But we really wanna keep the model response pure because the trust that people have in that is critical.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there is there a good, like I don't know. Like, how how do you actually set up the company for that? You need, like, an editorial, like, firewall so that one team is just not even affected. They don't even, like, you know, hang out at the happy hours together and say, hey.
Speaker 2:You know, can can you go do this this quarter because we have a big partner? Like, have you thought about what what what it culturally takes to get there?
Speaker 7:Well, the first very good news at OpenAI is that the culture is already so focused on protecting the user, protecting the purity of LLM responses. It's so ingrained that I think anyone who would, you know, shout like, hey, can you help me change things at a at a holiday party would be all again rejected. So I think that's that's already, you know, good. We've built the right antibodies day one. The other thing is I think we're not just gonna rely on culture.
Speaker 7:We're also gonna rely on technical capabilities that have firewalls between these different things so that people can really trust that the model is not influenced by anything other than having their back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about these like, setting up the actual applications team for success? Are you I I I've been struck by the fact that the narrative has shifted in some ways from, you know, the best model wins every time the best model, the best model, the best model, the best benchmarks, like, just win and, you know, and then everyone will just switch around. It feels like we're almost leaving that era where, you know, the the technical insiders, they do care about the benchmarks. They do care about the capabilities. But a lot of consumers just care about the user experience, the design, the the the the like, the almost the qualitative aspects.
Speaker 2:How have you thought about developing delightful user experience? Is that a new muscle for the organization? Do you feel like OpenAI is set up to deliver this delightful experience that can reduce churn and and keep people coming back? How how do you think about that?
Speaker 7:Well, first off, I would say, you know, this is a company that despite not starting as a product company has built the fastest growing consumer and enterprise business industry, a product with 800,000,000 people. So while I think I can, you know, build an organization that does that even better, I really want to celebrate what they've done before me. And I think you're absolutely right. I think the magic is at the intersection of research and employment. So the thing I obsess about is how can we be tied at the hip with a product research team to understand what are the new capabilities that can unlock these new magical products.
Speaker 7:And you kind of see that like, sort of which we're just talking about it a minute ago. It's a good example where the capability was there. And like, that's what unlocks everything. But then the product thinking came in of like, you know, putting characters and yourself inside the video. And so it's really a mix of like capabilities, but also a lot of delightful product thinking and really understanding what people want that unlocks these magical experiences.
Speaker 7:We were even talking at the beginning about kind of all of the use cases, right? Like me, like, you know, just giving people more intelligence in the chat bot, like that's gonna cap out at some point, what I need to do is help them realize they can use strategy for health and like help them, you know, make that easier, help them cleanse up trouble, helps them shop. Like all of these things are gonna be based on incredible models, but also great products that makes this understandable. Because right now, you're still kind of having to stumble upon the value. And like, when people realize they can use strategy for health, they're like, my god, this is like unbelievable.
Speaker 7:But they kind of had to stumble upon it. And that means I haven't done my job fully until everyone knows how to use the value.
Speaker 1:You guys are Sam was talking earlier this week with some folks about the push into enterprise. How are you thinking about enterprise, not on the API side, but just on the core subscription size and around pricing? Historically, as a $200 a month plan subscriber for ChatGPT, I had hit some points where I'd be frustrated because I could sense the model being, lazy. And I'm like, I'm giving you as much money as you've you've I'm I'm on the highest plan. Can I be on a plan that's just not never gets lazy?
Speaker 2:Is the two this is the rumored $2,000 a month plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I've been clamoring I for I just like, can you make would it make sense to ever do an all you can eat
Speaker 2:Consumption. All you can eat Or or consumption based.
Speaker 1:Consumption on on on the non API side. Sure. Just because, know, you I think
Speaker 2:Consumer consumption based is is wild. No one wants to do that, but I don't know. It's a bold bold statement. I I'd be interested to hear what you think.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, we've launched credit based pricing on the enterprise side so that in addition to your subscription, you
Speaker 1:can buy extra credit to get more. I think that's a
Speaker 7:model that could possibly work on the consumer side. So, you know, we we are open to exploring anything. We have it, like, now for codex. Yeah. And so, you know, that's something that we could totally explore, but I think it goes back to a lot of the very, I would say, like sophisticated people really understand, like the concept of buying more intelligence.
Speaker 7:Regular people just want like more outcomes. So I think the more we make that transition from a chatbot to like, you give us your list of tasks and we do your tasks, the more we're gonna be able to make people realize the value and then, you know, the pricing will follow.
Speaker 2:Your your original manifesto, you outlined knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, support. That that sort of covers everything. Is there a seventh capability that you're excited about? You mentioned spreadsheets. Maybe that's the seventh one right after time and creative expression.
Speaker 1:Put it at the top.
Speaker 2:That should be at the top. Economic freedom, spreadsheets. But is there is there a seventh category or or a nascent just even in your own personal use, a new capability that you feel like, okay. You know, maybe this year has been the year of agents. We've gotten coding agents.
Speaker 2:We've gotten deep research a year or two ago. You know, is there some new capability that you've seen glimmers of, okay. I think we're actually solving this piece, or I think it might be good enough to use in this scenario?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, we touched on a bunch, but what I would say is, like, for me, the next step is unlocking connection to the ecosystem. So, like, ChatGPT is software and insular. Yeah. And we launched, you know, that day we launched on our platform.
Speaker 7:But I think, like, we were talking about house. Like, house would be so much more powerful if you could connect Chargebee to your house record and all of your kind of bio wearables. Yeah. We were talking about like travel. It's so much more powerful if ChargeGPT can connect with, you know, a lot of like travel companies.
Speaker 7:And so figuring out how it can not just do things in this like, you know, text format, but really connecting and doing things in the real world. That's the thing that I think the models are ready for, but we're still catching up on the product side to make that possible. And then lots is really, like, you know, much more sophisticated use cases.
Speaker 2:There's a ton of questions in the chat about the about the Code Red we have to ask. How is it going? Has it been an intense period for culturally? It feels like there's been, you know, a lot of ups and downs in any start up's history. I imagine that it's been exciting and and and thrilling to to reengage, but how has it been in internally so far?
Speaker 7:Well, for context, you know, Code Reds are not uncommon. Like, we declare code reds as a way to really marshal a lot of resources towards a priority. It's a way to signal what's at the top of the list and what can be deprioritized and really focus. And I think during this time, focus is critical. And in terms of how it's going, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of it, but I'm pretty proud of what we're releasing today and, like, you know, like, leading leading the way in terms of, you know, best model for everyday professional work that has been a goal of ours for a long time.
Speaker 7:It's been in the works for a long time. It didn't start with the Code Red, but we're really excited to be able to release that today. And on top of that, it's our ten year anniversary today. So
Speaker 1:it's Wait. Today?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No way. I feel
Speaker 7:I'll do it today. Get
Speaker 2:a trading card up ASAP. Team, what are we doing? Ten year anniversary of OpenAir. That's incredible.
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. That's amazing. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:How, startups historically have, been able to innovate because they tolerate some some amount of failure. And I think if you look at the hyperscalers too, they're willing to like launch products that that just don't work. Right? If you look at the history of Google, they're they take moonshots. They make bets.
Speaker 1:Not everything works. Some do. And it's and it's an effective way to, you know, continue to innovate. How had I feel like when OpenAI releases a new product now, whether it's Sora or the browser or anything like that, it faces so much scrutiny from the world. Some people are excited and bullish.
Speaker 1:Other people wanna see it fail. How how are you guys kind of what's your internal framework around failure today? Because ideally, you wanna keep shipping a lot of things. And if you ship three things that don't work and one thing that does, it's like, great. You have a new a new product that you can scale.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, you know, I'm I'm no stranger to a lot of scrutineers throughout my career. I've worked at companies that that went through a lot of phases like that. And I would tell you, I think it's like it's simple and cliche, but you you kind of have to block out the noise. So so the thing that's good about OpenAI is like so North Star, it's very it's very clear.
Speaker 7:Right? It's AGI that benefits all of humanity. And we have a lot of conviction internally that we're on the right path to do that. And that does mean that, you know, some things are gonna work, some things aren't. And because the culture is routine in a research lab, is very different from other companies I've worked out, I think the fear of failure is much less because people already know in research that you explore a lot of path and like many don't work like that's the core of research.
Speaker 7:And so because that's the DNA, people don't freak out when a product doesn't work because they're like, oh, it's kind of like research. We have to test a lot of things. And some of them will hit, some of them won't. But but I think this innovative spirit has gotten us to where we're at and and really leading the market. And I think that's something that we absolutely need to preserve.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so Last question. Do you think are we still going to see age verification this year? That is that going be a 2026 launch?
Speaker 7:So age verification is starting to roll out already some countries, and we're doing a slow rollout so that we can make sure that we're very accurate in predicting the teen was an adult. And then the adult mode that's gonna be unlocked by edge verification is gonna land in q one.
Speaker 2:Got it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the amazing progress and such a
Speaker 1:great to the whole team
Speaker 2:on Congratulations on a decade. Years in the business of building AGI. We're feeling the AGI here. Have a great rest of your day, and we hope to talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Good chatting. Thanks so much. Bye bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure infrastructure all through one simple API. I love that when I do the WWE voice. Effect. For the Stripe for the Stripe portfolio company or wholly owned.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Let's take you through some news. That was a fun back to back. I enjoyed both of those folks. That was I feel like it's very funny that we were discussing all week the David Allison, Netflix, Warner Brothers.
Speaker 2:We're getting up to speed on media and what's going on there. And then boom, we get our little treat, the crossover of the decade with Disney and OpenAI. It's it's funny. You were you were clearly point you were clearly alluding to me being confused by the by the Disney OpenAI deal because I I went on my own roller coaster thinking, okay. Is this like a nothing burger?
Speaker 2:Is Is this a good thing? And now I am fully in your camp. I think it's very good. And I think that it does feel like we might go into something like the the press release economy that's going on in the prediction markets wars, where every foundation model might need to hoover up particular partnerships because I didn't even know exclusivity was on the table. Like, you know that OpenAI has a content licensing partnership with The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:And so The Wall Street Journal gets paid when they when I if I hit ChatGPT and I ask for a detail about SpaceX's latest launch, it's probably going to ask The Wall Street Journal. It's gonna ask a lot of different sources, but they pay The Wall Street Journal. Now if they do an exclusive with The Wall Street Journal, and I'm like, I can't get that in Claude. Claude just doesn't
Speaker 1:way less significant because the journal No.
Speaker 3:No. No.
Speaker 1:No. Is on the same news.
Speaker 2:No. No. To me, the journal is like Disneyland on a thousand. I would I would gladly never go to Disneyland ever again if I could just read this precious this precious paper newspaper every day. No.
Speaker 1:You're like, any Disney content ever again in your life or the journal?
Speaker 2:This is this is
Speaker 4:You're riding with the journal.
Speaker 2:Is the Disneyland of business.
Speaker 1:Of your mind. Of your mind.
Speaker 2:Disneyland of my mind. No. No. Of course of course, you are correct. There are not many Wall Street Journal fans that are anywhere near as insane as the Disney Disney files.
Speaker 2:What is Lisan Al Ghaiib here saying? Lisan says, g p t 5.2 pro, it has ridiculous pricing. Once again, $20 and $168. Tyler, do you know if if GPT 5.2 Pro is more expensive? I guess they're raising prices.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, so this is
Speaker 1:the Pro model. These are always, the very expensive ones.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think it's pretty let me actually look at the Yeah.
Speaker 1:The normal model, but I think it's pretty comparable
Speaker 2:to I guess 5.1 was once one dollar and seventy five cents and fourteen dollars, so it's a pretty significant pretty significant in increase. But I don't know. They, like, this is a new technology. We don't know where the Pareto frontier of pricing is necessarily. We don't know.
Speaker 5:Yes. So so it's slightly more expensive. Elasticity
Speaker 6:is? It's,
Speaker 5:yeah. 5.1 was a dollar 25ยข on the input. Mhmm. It's dollar 75ยข for 5.2. Okay.
Speaker 5:It's like, yeah, you know, marginally more expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, so let's see. Direct challenge to Anthropic. The knowledge cutoff is 08/31/2025. So Yuchin Jin here from Hyperbolic Labs, the cofounder and CTO, is saying that this is a freshly pretrained model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so Do you believe that? Have you have you
Speaker 2:been studying the timeline while we've been live, understanding what's going on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So some people
Speaker 5:are are saying it's new pre trained. That's the newest, like, cutoff date Yeah. Since what was
Speaker 2:it? Is there a way for them to not do a full pre trained, but they could just kinda do an update with the new Yeah.
Speaker 5:Exactly. So people are it's like, oh, it's a new cutoff. Yeah. Usually, you'd think that's a new pre trained. Yep.
Speaker 5:It's probably more like a it's like a mid train or something like this where you basically do continued pre training on
Speaker 1:on new data.
Speaker 5:So it's probably not an actual pre trained because you'd expect that to be, like, a much bigger update. Right? You'd I still have to oh, GPT six, not p 5.2.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I still I still have to I I still feel like the four o pre trained. That is like the like the the latest and greatest up until now.
Speaker 2:Running that back, I mean, that thing was expensive, but it's not expensive compared to now because they have so much more money.
Speaker 5:I don't think wait. Four o? Four o. Four o was never expensive. It was always cheaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But wasn't four o like the base pre trained for like pretty much everything today to to Yeah. To date? Yeah. And so rerunning that I mean, it was expensive at the time.
Speaker 2:Was like probably a $100,000,000. But now, a $100,000,000, like,
Speaker 5:they got That's like one AI researcher.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. So they should be ripping pre trains all the time just because just to keep the timeline in check. Keep them guessing.
Speaker 1:Anyway Got it.
Speaker 2:Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What you got here? We're eating good.
Speaker 2:Future pipelines may need to unify pre, mid, post training, injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To anyone wondering if 5.2 is new pre trained, I'm letting you connect the top the the dots between this, says Alexander Doria, and this synth slash agent pipelines aside. This is the new main catch of Deepsea 3.2. This isn't a new model card, new Elo update. It's an architectural update at mid training scale.
Speaker 2:Everything mutable, and we are everything's mutable, and we are likely to see more and more sub model speculation. Interesting. Well, we'll have to let the 5.2 news sort of simmer in the timeline. Let everyone do their own benchmarks. How'd they do on ARC AGI two?
Speaker 2:That is always an interesting one. Did they are we cooked? Did they blow us away? GPT 5.2 thinking is at 52.9%, up from 17.6%. That's a huge leap.
Speaker 1:Wait. We gotta run we gotta run our our joke benchmark.
Speaker 2:Yes. Let's run some of the TVP Pull up. Pull it up. We have
Speaker 1:a number of benchmarks around Try to make us laugh.
Speaker 2:While we're pulling
Speaker 1:those up Give us tiebacks.
Speaker 2:Tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta has AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk.
Speaker 5:Okay. So so, yes, this is my benchmark where I ask to recreate the joke about the the shrimp fried rice. Yes. So I'll I'll just go through some of these and you guys tell me how how how good they are.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:You're telling me a crab rang this bell?
Speaker 2:Crab rang bell?
Speaker 1:This is thinking this is 5.2 things. This is 5.2 things.
Speaker 5:This is the frontier
Speaker 2:This is the best of
Speaker 5:all time. AI.
Speaker 2:I I kind of like, you're telling me a crab rang this goon?
Speaker 5:That's kind of funny. Yeah. Think that's what I would have thought.
Speaker 2:But that's not
Speaker 5:You're telling me a bear built this market?
Speaker 2:Oh, because markets can be bullish or bearish?
Speaker 5:A bear built You're telling me a ham you're telling me a ham wrote this lettuce?
Speaker 2:A ham wait. Ham wrote this lettuce? Ham wrote lettuce?
Speaker 5:Wait. Wait. Wait. This is happened. You're telling me a ghost wrote this script?
Speaker 2:Ghost wrote script? Ghost written script?
Speaker 5:Ghost written.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You're telling me an owl delivered this mail?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I
Speaker 5:I think on this benchmark, there's more I
Speaker 1:could get. I mean, you could get
Speaker 5:the picture. I I think Gemini is still the frontier here.
Speaker 2:In terms of in terms of shrimp fried rice bench?
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because it
Speaker 5:There were some good ones there.
Speaker 2:But again Stonewatch. To to to understand, it it seems like Gemini understood the assignment but still ultimately leaned on Reddit data and broad Internet data and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the Internet before. Yes. But it did find the good jokes on the
Speaker 5:good ones that it gave me, I could find. That's where but but you still it it you know, it's hard to, like, search
Speaker 1:for that
Speaker 2:kind of
Speaker 5:thing because they're not just listed as, oh, these are jokes
Speaker 2:like jokes.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's hard to look for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I do wonder if this And
Speaker 5:also this thing where Gemini three was Yeah. Actually a new pre trained
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At least that
Speaker 5:people are saying. So maybe that was Alright.
Speaker 1:Let's try at least one more.
Speaker 2:Wait. I I wonder if this if this benchmark is, like, saturated in the sense that, like, every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the Internet. Are is there any new territory? Like, if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny as shrimp fried rice?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You think you could?
Speaker 5:I think so.
Speaker 2:Okay. Maybe that's a Do it. But not Yeah.
Speaker 1:A new month. Okay.
Speaker 5:When we yeah.
Speaker 2:We have time.
Speaker 4:In the New Year.
Speaker 1:Okay. I want just like adult mode adult mode and Tyler discovering a new joke are both coming in.
Speaker 2:You're telling me
Speaker 1:Stanley Stanley in the chat says, l o l why don't they swear
Speaker 2:Seems I guess it is pretentious, but I don't care.
Speaker 1:No. It's bit it's our kids are our kids are watching at home.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. Let's see. What's the next show? Swearing.
Speaker 5:You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these? You're telling me a chef boy
Speaker 2:I'm telling me
Speaker 5:eat these ravioli?
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. This is really really rough.
Speaker 5:This is wait. This one's not bad. This one Okay. What's this one?
Speaker 1:You're telling me
Speaker 4:a shepherd actually pied this?
Speaker 2:They're they're they're really food based. They kinda latch onto the food
Speaker 1:You're telling
Speaker 5:me a kidnapped this?
Speaker 2:Kidnapped. Okay. Terrible. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Alright. You just bombed, Tyler. Hopefully, point three.
Speaker 2:GT three RS bench. Let's do GT three RS bench. This is the benchmark here at TPN where we ask every Frontier model to write unique copy, marketing copy for a GT three RS from Porsche. And we have an astute eye. We watch for any tells that can tell you that this was AI written.
Speaker 2:Is it generic? Does it use contrastive parallelism? Does it use antithetical parallelism? Antithetical antithetical parallelism is, of course, when grammatically, you say, it's not this, it's that. It's not just a new AI model.
Speaker 2:It's an entirely new way of thinking. Right? That is contrastive parallelism.
Speaker 5:There's a good Wikipedia article
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:I think is is relatively new where it has a bunch of tales of AI that has, like, a bunch more stuff than what
Speaker 1:we recently Yes.
Speaker 2:And people were going back and forth with Rune over this where Rune was saying, I think you could actually build an AI detector. People were saying, well, OpenAI had one of those, and then they took it down because it wasn't working. But it's weird because I feel like, yes, AI written text should be impossible to detect. Like, we're so past the Turing test. The the models are incredible.
Speaker 2:It really is remarkable. And yet, I can totally tell what people use ChatGPT to write a blog post. It's just obvious. So, anyway, let's do GTCO suspension.
Speaker 5:There is a I I read a paper, like, a month ago, and there's this company around it,
Speaker 1:I think Pangram, but they do, like, actually pretty good
Speaker 2:Oh, they do good detection? Detection.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But do you
Speaker 5:want me to read the this is GT three RS bench.
Speaker 2:Written by either GPT two point or 5.2 or handcrafted by a marketing genius. Y'all have to tell us, Jordy. Do you think this was AI or not? Let's read it.
Speaker 1:I mean, he just said he just said it was.
Speaker 5:This isn't a car you own. No.
Speaker 1:Just immediately out of the gate. You got out
Speaker 2:of the gate with the AI slob.
Speaker 5:Not this.
Speaker 2:It's literally the first
Speaker 1:It's not a car you own. It's a car
Speaker 5:you cherish. It's a car you own so much as one you operate.
Speaker 2:Wait. Really? That's the first line?
Speaker 1:That's the first line.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. Wait. Operate. That's not even a good line. That's insane.
Speaker 1:Okay. Keep going. Keep going.
Speaker 5:The nine eleven GT three RS is a Porsche at its most uncompromising.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 5:A naturally aspirated four l flat six screaming to a 9,000 rpm race bread
Speaker 2:car before, brother? Never been in a car before?
Speaker 5:Oh, is
Speaker 2:yeah. It stands really dear. I
Speaker 5:don't race bread aerodynamics that generate real downforce
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:In a chassis engineered for lap times. Okay. Not likes. M dash not likes.
Speaker 1:Okay. What? That's not even true. Yeah. It's like the most over I mean, I shouldn't say it's overhyped, but it's like the most hyped car on the Internet.
Speaker 1:It is engineered for likes.
Speaker 2:It is?
Speaker 1:In some ways, it's it's like
Speaker 2:I think it's it's not good track times.
Speaker 1:It's a great track car, but it's
Speaker 2:It is engineered.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. No. Most people are buying it for the road for likes.
Speaker 2:We we we were talking about this with the with the G Wagon. Like, who's like, the G Wagon has a particular a particular vibe around it now, where it is sort of like an influencer mobile. I think you've made the joke that, like, it's the standard issue in LA when you become an influencer. They just someone just shows up. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, that's partly because the roads in LA are so bad. You Yes. You need something that that could off road in a pinch.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. And so but the question is like, is that is that Mercedes designing the G Wagon for influencers? Like, no. Not at all.
Speaker 2:It's like they designed it. They just stuck with it for a long time. Eventually, the influencers adopted it. You can't put that on on Mercedes. It's not their fault that all the influencers drive them.
Speaker 2:Anyway Yeah. Let's continue with GPT3R s bench. Is that is that it or is there more?
Speaker 5:No. There there's more.
Speaker 2:Okay. Keep reading the slop.
Speaker 5:Every surface has a purpose. Every input is immediate. Every drive feels like a qualifying lap. Built with WYSOC level obsession Mhmm. The three GT three r s deletes.
Speaker 5:Did I also get that wrong?
Speaker 2:No. It's okay. It's just
Speaker 1:like You're just hesitated. You're hesitated.
Speaker 2:You you you just sound like someone who doesn't talk about VISOC packages very often.
Speaker 5:VISOC. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:I guess like Vimar. Yeah. Yeah. The GT three RS deletes anything unnecessary and doubles down on feel. Lightning fast PDK shifts, surgical steering, and suspension suspension tuned straight from the Nurburgring playbook.
Speaker 1:Playbook?
Speaker 5:The the Nuremberg ring playbook. What is the Nuremberg ring playbook? It's loud, stiff, dramatic, m dash, and utterly alive. This is not a luxury purchase. It's a statement of priorities.
Speaker 2:It's a statement of priorities. I don't understand how the it's not this is that is, like, still in the soup. Like, I like, just
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:Run it run the trough.
Speaker 1:Look. It's
Speaker 5:not a new pre trained, basically.
Speaker 1:I think it That's one of
Speaker 2:the Yeah.
Speaker 1:It might be that
Speaker 2:But it
Speaker 1:it might be the OpenAI team low key hates AI generated written word Mhmm. As well, and they wanna continue to be able to identify Maybe. It
Speaker 2:Maybe. I like that. It might be
Speaker 1:they're they're Yeah. Doing a public service here.
Speaker 2:Okay. So get bezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Cha ching. ARC Prize is breaking it down.
Speaker 2:A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI o three high that scored 88 on Arc AGI one at an estimate of $4,500 per task. Whoo. Today, we verified a new g p t five two, g p t 5.2 pro x high, state of the art score of 90% at $11.64 per task. This represents a 390 x efficiency improvement in one year. This is this is this is the headline.
Speaker 2:This is the story. This is the best this is the best fact, I think, about g p t 5.2. This is massive congratulations to the OpenAI team for delivering at this level. This is remarkable. Really, really great stuff.
Speaker 2:I love it. Now, go do it for RKGI three. What have you done for me lately?
Speaker 1:We the the biggest failure this year was not getting goalposts here in the studio that we can
Speaker 2:move. Production team. We need goalposts.
Speaker 1:Can you order on Amazon We need
Speaker 2:physical goalposts that we can move around the studio every time one of these releases comes Like
Speaker 5:a full size one?
Speaker 1:No. Something No. Like an indoor one of the
Speaker 2:indoor one. Can lift up and move to a different piece of the studio, and then we'll have a sign that has whatever our next goalpost is, you know, Arc AGI v three. I want them to, you know, one shot that. And we will move the goalpost over there and then we will erect a new a new goal and we will move the goalpost over there on the release of a new model that does whatever we said was going to impress us, but now no longer is enough to impress us. Well, you know what else is impressive?
Speaker 2:This scoop from Reed Alberghotti, the tech editor at Semaphore, colleague of Ben Smith. He says, scoop, Google names a new chief to head up its $100,000,000,000 a year AI infrastructure build out, Amin Vadat, who will report to Sundar directly. This is very exciting. Imagine imagine having a $100,000,000,000 budget for CapEx. That's like Ben's dream.
Speaker 1:Four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah. Ben. Was just if you're really so Ben's Ben's a cap Ben's a CapEx guy here. Almost every time
Speaker 2:Every time we
Speaker 1:hang to me, he he wants another $30 for a new camera, this light, this It's going up next year.
Speaker 2:We got some more. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for goalposts that will probably wind up costing 30 We're
Speaker 1:we're part of the problem.
Speaker 2:We are.
Speaker 1:We are. But says incredibly smart move by Google. Amin is absolutely unique in his academic, technical, operational, and business depth. Huge deal.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you about quick.com. Out of home ad out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Angela from worktrace.ai. She's in the Restream waiting room, and now she's in the TVP in Ultradigm.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are doing, Angela? Good to meet you.
Speaker 8:Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's nice to meet you guys.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on the news. Please introduce yourself, the company. Give us the news. I have a mallet here. Getting ready to ring the gong.
Speaker 8:Yes. I'm Angela, most recently a cofounder of Virtrace AI Fantastic. Where we just came out of Stealth today, so we're excited to talk to you about it.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 8:Before this, I was doing a lot of deep learning. So, you know, it was deep learning job after deep learning job, most recently with that OpenAI Amazing. The last three years, mostly doing product management. Cool. And, yeah, when I was at OpenAI, I mean, we were also making these amazing models like they are now more and more.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. But there is still this gap, you know, that we hear about where people aren't getting their magic moments from AI Totally. Despite the models being
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super duper It's pretty funny. You said you said you were doing a lot of deep learning as a product manager. Some other product managers are doing a lot of deep research these days where they're effectively glorified deep research. You know, they just
Speaker 8:I do a lot of deep research these days. Of course. Yes. A lot of my docs are powered by deep research, I have to admit.
Speaker 2:So so, I mean, Sam Altman's been on record before talking about, how not to get steamrolled. Like, do if do not start a company that is predicated on the model staying the same capabilities. Like, if your whole pitch is I got a new LLM, and it does pretty well on Arc AGI, well, today was a bad day for you, but there are plenty of other pockets of opportunities. Obviously, OpenAI believes in you because the OpenAI Fund invested. But how did you think about creating durability or or or positioning the company in a way that was, maybe, you know, synergistic with what OpenAI is already doing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I guess one benchmark for it is that when 5.2 came out today, we were excited to try it. Yes. Exactly. It was a it's it's an exciting day for us too.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 8:But, yeah, when we thought about it I mean, for me, when I was there Mhmm. And OpenAI is so strong and making just really amazing models. But I feel like they they themselves, but they also want help from whoever to help distribute these models to the world. I mean, there's so many people that need to benefit from these. And it's very difficult to actually get these into the context of enterprises, real world use cases.
Speaker 8:It requires a lot of boots on the ground and getting deep into the use cases. Ultimately, they are punching above their weight in terms of how many people they have to get all of the amazing models they have out into the world, and that's something that we felt was super complementary to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Walk me through the product experience, how a company might actually integrate WorkTrace and start building a bespoke workflow over time? What's the actual diffusion process into an organization to start getting value?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you about what I think the status quo is, which is what I saw when I was a product manager
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Which is that a team comes in. They know that AI could be transformative for their industry, and so they wanna invest in it. However, they're keeping up keeping up with what is going on with the latest 5.2 model. What does that mean for them? They're keeping up with what's actually going on in their workforce.
Speaker 8:And so what they often do is they bring in consultants or tech services company or the OpenAI go to market team to be able to figure out what is the exact right use cases that they should apply this particular model or the model they know they're that's gonna come out in three months to these particular teams that they know need help. So that takes, like, months as far as my experience has gone. Whereas with WorkTrace, what we do is what we're able to do is, like, have a desktop app to be able to see, you know, what work is going on and then be able to flag that, hey. This is task that seemed repetitive, that you seem to be spending a lot of time on, that are breaking your flow, that five point two happens to be very, very good at today. Why don't you consider building out a workflow with five point two for this exact use case?
Speaker 8:So what that looks like then is, like, a prioritized list of use cases. Mhmm. So a road map, basically, for AI transformation for a company. And then for each of those use cases, it'll have actually the JSON or the output that you need to input into OpenAI agent builder to actually start running an agent for that workflow.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. How do you deal with the scenario where the system is observing a workflow? And in the process of that identification of a workflow, it is it becomes clear that the person should just be using SAS instead of like like, if somebody is like, oh, yeah. Every day they open a spreadsheet and they have a list of people's names and phone numbers and how recently they contacted them, like, that might just be a sales opportunity to get them on a CRM. You don't necessarily need to agentically build a new CRM, maybe.
Speaker 2:But how do you deal with those scenarios? Because there's a lot of companies where they're they're not even on the frontier of SaaS implementation.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And there's a lot of, like, kind of, like, industry wide process mining tools that look for, like, bottlenecks in your work or Yeah. Maybe where you should use those other tools. And so, you know, despite how good the models are, most of your work today probably can't be done with agents. There's a huge amount that can be, though.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And, like, that's specifically what we're
Speaker 2:looking
Speaker 8:to find. So we'll mine for the ones that can today be used for agents.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:And we're making a bet that that amount will just get larger and larger over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And do you think that you have to live on the desktop in an app? Because I imagine that if my workflow is is slow but it's taking place inside of, like, you know, the Salesforce ecosystem or something, they're not just gonna let you build something on top. Or will they like, how how does AI bump into these, like, walled gardens that are going to prop up in enterprise software where, you know, Mark Benioff was probably thinking, like, I I don't want you puppeteering my software. I wanna be the one doing that.
Speaker 8:I see. I mean, for us, I mean, to understand how work happens Yeah. It's best to be able to just see what you see when you're doing work. Yeah. Which honestly is more than your desktop.
Speaker 8:It's like, also your phone. Your phone. You it's like what like, you you in meetings and whatnot. However, you know, we find that we go a long way by seeing just what's happening on your desktop to get a sense of how your work is going. In terms of actually then doing the tasks, I mean, we still use the tools that you use.
Speaker 8:You know, we integrate them with Salesforce or any of the normal tools that you might be using because, I mean, that is just how work happens, and we we wanna we wanna meet you where your work is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think some people that are aggressively pursuing a forward deployed model are going to look at your solution and think, oh, maybe I didn't need to send my most valuable human capital out into the world. I could've just sent an app and a screen recorder. Because it because it feels like this is like a potentially more, at least for a lot of different types of work, a much more elegant solution than let's fly this person out, put them in a short term rental or hotel. Let's have them just sit in the office when you can actually just use to in order to implement AI, when you can use AI to basically watch them on
Speaker 2:screen everybody.
Speaker 1:And discover what these workflows actually look like.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean I mean, part of it is that there's not that many AI experts in the world for what we need. There's not that many FTEs that we could deploy out. So most of the companies that we're working with probably can't afford FTEs for to come over, you know, for a couple of months at a time, but also continuously as AI changes. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But also, yeah, at the same time, when we were thinking about what we were doing to help companies get up to date on AI, we were listening to their workflows. We were understanding their workflows, breaking it down, looking at variations, which just happens to be something that AI is particularly good at. So when we when we saw, like, what it took to actually find use cases and then put them in the format that agent builders needed, it just felt like that in and of itself was a great use case for AI, which is actually what made us super bullish to pursue this idea.
Speaker 2:Get us up to speed on the fundraising history. I wanna know what the latest news is.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we recently closed our seed round, which we're super duper excited about.
Speaker 1:How much? How much?
Speaker 8:9,000,000.
Speaker 1:There we go. Very, very cool. I'm I'm super excited about this. I love I love when an idea, is obvious, and you just sit here thinking, why didn't anybody do this before? And sometimes it just takes the right team to come along, and do it.
Speaker 2:And look at who's in this in this deal. It's a great line. Conviction, OpenAI. Logan Kilpatrick's in. Big fan
Speaker 3:of him.
Speaker 2:Mira Moradi. Wow. You you really
Speaker 1:Murderers row.
Speaker 2:Murderers row.
Speaker 6:And genius
Speaker 1:Genius Genius ventures. I'm a I'm an LP. So, yeah, very, very excited.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on this.
Speaker 1:Have a feeling you'll be back for the a within a quarter.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:I just got a feeling.
Speaker 8:Hoping for it too.
Speaker 2:Hoping to see
Speaker 8:you guys soon.
Speaker 2:The chat is obsessed with you. They think that you should go on Joe Rogan apparently, which I don't know why, but I I do think that would be a fun a fun thing. So good luck to you on the rest of the tour. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Merry Christmas. Cheers. Goodbye. 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.
Speaker 2:Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. I'm Your fall off needs to be studied. My fall off needed to be studied.
Speaker 2:It's very clear what happened. I flew to New York City, and I slept in a bunk bed, which was not ideal. Randomly, wound up in one hotel room, four bunk beds.
Speaker 1:We didn't book the hotel.
Speaker 2:None of them fit me.
Speaker 1:It was The hotel room was booked
Speaker 2:It was a mistake.
Speaker 1:By another mistake.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It was not Nick. Nick is fantastic hotel.
Speaker 1:What'd you get? What'd you get?
Speaker 2:I got an 87.
Speaker 1:Oh. What'd get? Give me. I got an 80. I'll give it to you.
Speaker 1:I'm back. I'm back,
Speaker 2:baby. Never challenge me in sleep. Never go snooze for snooze with me because I will outsnooze you. And next, we are joined by John from Scrub Capital. John is a practicing neurosurgeon, health system leader, multi time co founder What's happening?
Speaker 2:CMO.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. And more.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you get us up to speed on, some of the writing that you've been doing, some of the some some of your, your overall thinking on where how America is misunderstanding self driving cars, what we need to change, the actual message, the status quo, then the message that we need to get out.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. So look. Up until right around now, we've been thinking about autonomous vehicles as a tech moonshot. You know, cool tech story.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Take shots at it. Like it. Whatever side you're on. But but what I'm trying to say and and now others are joining too is this is a public health urgency now.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Because what happened is Waymo put out data at 100,000,000 miles.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:This is about a month or two ago. You can go download and analyze it yourself. They put out all the raw data. And what I found was astonishing. We're facing guys the possibility that if we play our cards right now going forward, we could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of death in The United States.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Wait. It's the leading cause? I thought it was cancer.
Speaker 6:As a leading cause.
Speaker 2:Leading cause. Yeah. No. For It's huge, though. Isn't it tens of thousands of people?
Speaker 6:Yeah. 40,000 a year. And for so many young adults, it's the number two cause of death in The United States, and it's the number one worldwide children.
Speaker 2:I mean, not not all life is precious, obviously, but it also must be a cause of death of young people because it's so random when it happens. It's not it's not something where, you know, oh, someone's lived their full life and then they passed away.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's right. It does tend to bias towards younger people, healthier time of life. It's not like it's this tends to be the sick and elderly. That's for sure.
Speaker 2:So but I'm I'm totally with you. I buy it hook, line, and sinker. I'm I'm a believer. But, also, it seems like it's going fine because, like, Google has a trillion dollars of cash flow, and they're gonna do this, and Waymo is rolling out. Like, what do we really need to change?
Speaker 2:It seems like everything's going well.
Speaker 6:Right. So look. We we have a regulatory capture problem right now, guys, and that's why was so glad to come on TVPN. You could look at coverage in the Washington Post, coverage in the Boston Globe, city councils, and other moneyed forces have politicians' ears and they're working against this. And and I think, you know, it's we gotta work to liberate this and get the message out that this is this is not a risk story.
Speaker 6:This is a safety story, you know, from my perspective now looking at this from a medical lens. I haven't even scratched the surface and I'm sure I'm gonna get all flamed on Twitter now and everything else. Plaintiff bar in a lot of places is what's opposing this as well. And I won't impute motive, but people can use their imaginations.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what's what's happening in what's happening in California that allows me to every other week, I log on. I see that Waymo's map is expanding California. It seems like it's Historically, going has been I don't know. I would I would I would imagine that, this would be a tougher environment than other states that are less population dense.
Speaker 6:And, Jordy, what's interesting about this is this doesn't respect traditional political tribes or left coast, Right coast, whatever. It actually it cuts jagged across typical tribes often. So, like, you could have far left people where they love bikes, but love that Waymo's are safer. So it's like, great. But then there's a group over there that doesn't want any vehicles.
Speaker 6:So Waymo's are a problem. Mhmm. Then you might have libertarians that say, you know, technology acceleration. Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 6:Let's go. But then, well, wait. Are the vehicles surveilling me? So Interesting. This is not traditional tribes.
Speaker 6:And I think what we're seeing now is the data is moving people further and further along in this story tribe independent. And to get to your question, Jordan, I think a lot of these companies are based or sorry. Waymo certainly is based in California, and there's a there's a West Coast, you know, heaviness to this. And to be fair, Tesla's now, you know, also demoing this in Austin right now with human drivers still.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Do you have any other reads on, how this might break from a regulation perspective? It feels like, you know, we could be coming up on a seat belts in car scenario where, you know, self driving technology is a requirement for all the OEMs, and they have to either white label it from Waymo, white label it from Tesla. It needs to be available more widely. Tesla and Waymo, I don't think that's in their business model.
Speaker 2:I don't think they necessarily want to put it in every Toyota and Honda, but they're you know, you're making a
Speaker 1:Gold's voice ghost.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're making, like, a health based case, and maybe at a certain point, there needs to be, you know, a requirement. How do you how do you think about that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. That means so right. Like airbags, we all remember or some new that that, you know, they started as kind of like a luxury thing on
Speaker 2:the high end, you
Speaker 6:know, s class Mercedes and then worked their way down. I think we're gonna progressively see this with progressively more more and more automation. Mhmm. So right now, like, the automatic braking is in there and almost everybody has that. But it's gonna start to filter down.
Speaker 6:And and, Jordan and John, I think insurance industry pressure is gonna push this too. Okay. Where eventually, when the data gets stronger and stronger and I think we're about a couple of weeks away from Google's next sorry, Waymo's next data dump because just following their usual trend, I think we're a couple of weeks away from probably 125,000,000 miles. I think that this data is gonna start to push rate differential over time and that that's gonna kinda get people moving.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny. If you were expecting a debate, you're not gonna get one because I agree with everything you're saying here. But, you did go to the New York Times to write this essay. Did you get pushback from the New York Times readership?
Speaker 2:Was there a was that a conscious choice? I I'm just trying to understand, like, who is who is the current what what is the current shape of the of the anti self driving car, constituency look like? Because I'm starting to understand the anti, you know, AI data center constituency, and I get that. Like, it's it's ugly in your backyard or if you do if your if your power rates go up, like, makes sense. There's a trade off there.
Speaker 2:But who's who's not happy? What was the reaction to the New York Times piece?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So the New York Times was interesting, and I'll tell you, there was a very famous magazine that I pitched this to and they weren't interested because they were writing their own.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And this one definitely got got a lot more traction. But so the the the team there was the the crack editors obviously. Okay. The fact checking is incredible. I mean, I knew it was good.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. But I mean, every word, every statistic checked twice, it seems. And and I think I don't know if that's just because this is a super, you know, high impact story or because it's what we do. But when I was watching, they they actually shut down the message board when it got to about 2,400 messages. They might have been tired of moderating it.
Speaker 6:And I saw, you know, really these again, these jagged splits where, I guess, it's sort of obliquely cutting across groups. And I I'm having trouble. Now I understand there's some data coming out that it actually tends to cut across tech literacy. So more so than, like, left, right, libertarian, not. It's it's how tech literate you are, and that that's gonna get progressively interesting, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think about the job displacement narrative around self driving cars? That does feel like, you know, there are people whose jobs are to drive around. Some of them will be potentially displaced. It certainly has an effect on the the taxicab market.
Speaker 2:Self driving cars in other contexts are still seems like it's pretty far away. But how how do you think about balancing the the economic effects, the employment effects with the, you know, the the health benefits effectively?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we we this is a critical question. I wanna make sure that's clear. Right? This isn't just willy nilly.
Speaker 6:Let's go put these everywhere tomorrow. Mhmm. The call is for this to be done smartly starting, like, yesterday. Right? And let's make this a national priority and the job question's critical.
Speaker 6:And I and I don't wanna ever be glib about it. I wrote a whole kind of mini thesis and there wasn't room for it in the piece and I'm certainly not labor expert. But what I think is a couple things. One, we're already facing labor shortage in a lot of markets as you know, not a surplus. And we have supply chain and value chain breaking because of this.
Speaker 6:So I think what I'm looking here is we have a chance if we do this right with upskilling and other things. And I know upskilling gets panned a lot of the time, but I think we need to be thinking about moving people from operator to manager, supervising fleets of vehicles. And we could have a a truck driver managing a fleet of 10 autonomous rigs, you know, from a command center who, by the way, now goes to sleep in his own bed rather than hers or rather than staring in a white line for eleven straight hours in a dangerous environment, I think that's a waste of human potential. Now I wanna be clear. Their jobs are super important right now.
Speaker 6:They're keeping the country alive. So nobody here that I'm saying that their job is a waste of human potential. I'm saying if we just then don't figure out what to do with their jobs because this is happening whether we like it or not.
Speaker 3:We need to think
Speaker 6:about how to use that incredible expertise
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And apply it smartly. And then, you know, I I'd like to say, in 1981 was the peak cigarette manufacturer. 650,000,000,000 cigarettes were manufactured in 1981. Now we're down to a 125,000,000,000 cigarettes a year. And we'd none of us heard about an epidemic of job displacement because of cigarettes being dropped by 85%.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So let's do this right starting today. And I don't know if you're gonna go there, but if we don't, we're gonna be importing Chinese technology. They have no less than seven companies pursuing full stack autonomous vehicles right now.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 2:I'm glad we if I can name more than seven American autonomy companies, Waymo, Tesla, Comma AI, Ghost is not doing well. There's a couple that are not doing okay anymore. But it is it is about that track.
Speaker 1:What? Casers company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Applied Intuition. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:wanted while we have you, I I wanted your quick take on peptides. We're seeing an explosion of demand. You're an investor in in a bunch of different health and medical companies. I'm curious how you've viewed this category. It's it feels tough to invest in for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1:Regulatory, a lot of these therapies are not actually proven by any type of, real studies, but I'm curious if you got a hot take for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's a
Speaker 6:hot take, but look. So first of all, disclosure, we're investors in Life Force. Certainly check out Life Force. But so, I've joked and others have that remember this old book Prozac Nation? I think the new I I want I wish I had time to write peptide nation.
Speaker 6:Like, one of us need our mail. Let's do it together. I we need to make time for that. But this is where we're going, and the data is getting stronger and stronger in pockets. As a physician, I gotta say, I'm not giving anybody medical advice right now.
Speaker 6:Talk to your own doctor. But me and Chrissy Farr, and you can Google this, we surveyed a 135 clinicians who are active in health span on what they do themselves. Not what they do for their patients, what they take themselves. And something like fifteen or twenty percent of them are on more than one injectable, including peptide, of course, TRT and other things. I I think I like a
Speaker 2:genius doctor personally.
Speaker 6:There's some
Speaker 1:I think we're gonna
Speaker 2:I I I build stress. You can't get me in the clinic if he's over 10% body fat. He's gotta be dried out. He's gotta be diced.
Speaker 1:Dried out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's gotta be a supper.
Speaker 1:He's be a mass
Speaker 2:It's gotta be stringy.
Speaker 6:Is it okay if he's cutting and bulking, or does it just when he's cutting?
Speaker 2:I typically only go in for the check-in when he's on a cut, when he's in fighting form. I'm kinda stage ready.
Speaker 6:If you wanna when you're making your appointment, you almost need to know where are they.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. Miss me when you're bulking. I wanna see you
Speaker 1:I wanna see the striation.
Speaker 2:Ready to go to the Arnold, to the Arnold I want you stage ready. I want you dry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because because bodybuilders are the epitome of health.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Ronnie's looking great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. She's ready.
Speaker 6:You are looking great.
Speaker 2:Anyway, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show this morning.
Speaker 1:We're we're with you. I think I think it's a I think it's a good reframing. There's so much
Speaker 2:I like it a lot.
Speaker 1:So much investment happening in in AI broadly, and it it is interesting that and and how much the government is doing to try to, break down walls to to support
Speaker 2:industry people. There's all this, there's all this debate about, like, will AI cure cancer? Will AI save lives? Like, is that just lip service from the big AI companies? And it's like, well, this one could literally save forty thousand lives a year.
Speaker 2:Like, that's that's good. That's more than many cancers. That's a ton. That's there's no reason why we shouldn't do that, and we should celebrate it as AI saving lives. Like, that would be great.
Speaker 6:It's more than homicide and plane crashes combined Yeah. Every And what if I could leave one thing I
Speaker 2:would say to Please.
Speaker 6:This is not something that, oh my god. Waymo started on this and Tesla started on this, you know, six months ago and it looks great. This has been fifteen years of deliberate work at Waymo. And I don't work for Waymo. I wanna be clear.
Speaker 6:I'm not invested in Waymo unless it's through a mutual funded alphabet indirectly or whatever. But
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:This this has been handled for fifteen years with the rigor of what I would say is most analogous to a medical device.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 6:Not an app, not a not like a wearable, an actually regulated medical device. So what I wanna say to people is that this is a moment now. That's ready for safe and effective acceleration.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's been so incredibly high stakes. Like, there have been multiple, I'm pretty sure multiple artificial intelligence self driving companies where they've where they've had a terrible accident, and it's basically destroyed the entire company. And so the entire industry has moved slowly, but in this case, it's good because there is human life on the line. I would call it deliberate movement, and I completely agree with you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Look, this I this do this right, and this will be remembered as one of the historic Mhmm. Top three moments of American exceptionalism. Mhmm. If we dip don't let it slip out of our hands.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Great to meet you. Have a great rest
Speaker 1:of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, buddy. Bye.
Speaker 2:Hop in hop in that way, Moe. Head over to wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, and you can get there in your self driving car. Our next guest is Aaron Cannon.
Speaker 1:That is a powerful name.
Speaker 2:That's a powerful
Speaker 1:Scrub. Yeah. Launch Scrub Capital.
Speaker 2:They saw him, and they were like,
Speaker 3:put the
Speaker 2:capital put the capital in the cannon, launch the capital cannon at Aaron Cannon. Welcome to the show. How are doing?
Speaker 9:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank look at that chart in the background. What's What's
Speaker 9:that? Guys, that's real numbers. That's actually real data.
Speaker 1:Real data. Hit it again. Hit it again a few times. There we go. We're fired up, Aaron Cannon.
Speaker 1:We're you on the show. Thank you. Would love would love an introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm Aaron. I'm the CEO and co founder of Outset. I was on your show, think it was at YC demo day six months
Speaker 1:on you. That's awesome. No wonder you're back.
Speaker 9:Thank you.
Speaker 1:No wonder you're
Speaker 9:back. Had my my yellow ramp hat on in the YC offices and I was I was sharing our series Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so break it down for people because they're gonna assume you were in the in a batch this year, but you you you went through in 2022, was it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We're we're 2023. Summer twenty three, we went through YC batch and been growing since then. I just happened to be in the office and we raised our series a at the at the YC demo day, I popped in. And So so Outset is AI moderated research.
Speaker 9:So if you've ever tried to, you know, understand your customers or something, it's it really sucks today or or in the past. And finally, it doesn't suck. I mean, basically, you know, surveys are the old school way to do it. Or you talk to users one by one and, you know, talk to maybe a dozen or so. And and now AI does it for you.
Speaker 9:So our that's what our platform does. And we we just raised our series b, announced it yesterday from Radical Ventures. There it is. And, yes. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's been great. So, here we are.
Speaker 1:Six months later. Did you ever was Paul Graham ever concerned about outset? Was he worried, you know, founders might stop talking to their customers or is he comfortable with the AI talking to the customer on their
Speaker 9:I didn't clear this with with PG personally, but
Speaker 1:Dude, you gotta clear it with you gotta clear it with PG. You gotta get his blessing. You gotta I
Speaker 9:I I did not do that, but it's it's part of the reason. We don't work as much with startups and and we work with Microsoft, Google, folks like that, Weight Watchers, and Nestle, and so so we go for the big enterprises.
Speaker 1:What do you what does Yeah. What does success look like when when you're working with these companies? What are you pushing towards? Is it a key insight that impacts a a future product decision? What does actually winning look like?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. It generally falls into two things. Either they're doing product research, where it's about a key insight that drives a product decision of what to build or even not to build. There's like a famous Airbnb.
Speaker 9:Brian Chesky told the story of like, there was like a a million dollar Research saved the millions of dollars because of like one bad design. Right? And so like, you know, it could be a massive like a single insight can be hugely differentiating for a product. And then there's marketing where you're saying, like, I'm about to, you know, release a new product to a new market. You know, you're Nestle and you're testing new concepts.
Speaker 9:You gotta get that right. Right? So that's that looks like making smarter decisions and making them really, really fast. And that's like the real thing is that now with us, you can actually gather, you know, hundreds of actual interviews, like in-depth nuance, like really hear from people and you can do that in a couple of hours. And then we synthesize all that data so you can go make a decision.
Speaker 1:Are you guys taking away jobs from researchers or are researchers just able to do far more work and get far more insight?
Speaker 9:The the the classic AI question of yeah. It's so the reality Yeah.
Speaker 1:I if you look in engineering organizations, people are like, my engineers are much more effective. I'm gonna make I'm gonna build a lot more product. I want more great engineers. In this case, I don't have a lot of insight into how research teams at some of these big companies work. But I could see them saying, hey, we historically needed to hire this outside firm to conduct this research, and we needed x number of people to kind of manage it and try to unpack what was actually happening.
Speaker 2:One of them might also have just been using web forms. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So okay. So so what we actually see on the ground is very much not the get rid of your research. It's quite the opposite. And I think the the the reason for that is there is like there isn't there isn't a ceiling of like, I don't need any more insight on a thing.
Speaker 9:Right? There's actually kind of a it's like an insatiable demand for it. The problem is the old way was not economical. So you would have, you know, your researchers, you know, they do one study every month or two and it would be, you know, like talking to to to 15 users. And now that one researcher can actually do a study every week, each time talking to 200 users.
Speaker 9:And so you basically are like making smarter decisions. And then you add the speed at which people are putting new products into the world, you actually need that insight faster. Right? And so what we see on the ground is basically a research team adopting and saying, holy crap. Like, I can actually go, like, do twice as much or go twice as fast with, you know, the same people we have on the team today.
Speaker 2:How multimodal are you today? How multimodal do you wanna be in a few years? I can imagine research is happening, you know, on video interviews, audio, text based interviews, web forms. Like, what are you doing today? And what do you wanna do?
Speaker 9:We we wanna do all the modes, all the modals. You know, so so today, we are video, audio, text, and then you you can do kind of forums, you know, think like classic survey questions.
Speaker 2:Radio buttons and Radio buttons.
Speaker 1:So do you just email or and say, may I research you? Yeah.
Speaker 9:That that's exactly it. That that's the language. May I research you? No. But but then but then we also do screen sharing.
Speaker 9:So that's actually where you're you're getting a a participant to video, audio, radio buttons, and then also share their screen while they're interacting with your prototype. So you gotta do all of that together. And then we partner with a bunch of a bunch of panels that are called to to help kind of source people. Right? So in our platform, we can actually source from, you
Speaker 2:know Okay.
Speaker 9:Millions of people.
Speaker 2:And are you building, like, the full customer experience management platform down to data collection, but then also analysis? Because it sounds like you're adding sourcing, but it's not like you're you're gonna give me a big bag of text and then I gotta go sort it out elsewhere.
Speaker 9:Yeah. The the theory's always been, like, the the if we're gonna help you scale and speed up the way you collect the data, we gotta break down for you afterwards. Right? And it's just two sides of the same coin. So since day one, we've had these two sides.
Speaker 9:Right? Our core platform AI moderated research is like collect the data, synthesize the data, tell you what matters. The thing we now are building into the future and the reason we raised a bunch of this money just six months later is we're going from think study by study, I got a question, let me go answer it, to the always on customer intelligence platform. The experience management where you know, at every touch point, you know, you get off a flight, you get a, oh, how was your flight? Or you you know, you you you get a post purchase feedback form and really every point in the journey.
Speaker 9:Right? Should actually be conversational insight, should be continuous. We should have contextual questions that actually make sense, and so pulling all that together.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Todd, sorry. Have one more. Fraud detection. Like, what does that look like? And yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, is that is that AI powered or AI enabled, or is that just, like, best practices? Like, what what is the bad like, how big of a problem is fraud in customer research?
Speaker 9:Yeah. If if you talk to anybody in the in the industry, they'll say, like, it's a big it's a problem. Yeah. Like, and and ChatGPT made it worse. Right?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So the answer though Is
Speaker 1:that what is that?
Speaker 2:Because I get paid a $100 to tell Microsoft or get a gift card to tell Microsoft how I'm using Microsoft Excel, and I'm like, well, if I just go to ChatGPT and I'm like, how am I using Excel? It'll just make something up, and then I just copy paste that in, and then I get the $100 Starbucks gift card. Is that roughly correct?
Speaker 9:Yeah. That that's that's right. Okay. But but what happens is like on surveys, it's really bad.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Because you
Speaker 9:have an open, a free text field, and you just paste it in.
Speaker 2:You just try detecting whatever.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Right. Well, like, luckily, because most of our customers are doing very, like, video based stuff, it is much more right. That that is harder to, like, you know, fake your way through. But we built our own fraud detection agent.
Speaker 9:Right? And it's like it's actually kind of fun to watch because it's basically looking at your screener answers like, oh, you said you were an expert in, you know, Python. And then, like, later in the interview, as they interviewed about, you know, what tools you're using, it's like they don't know anything about it. And then you get your as a customer, you get your reasoning so that the AI agent tells you, well, this guy does not know what he's talking about. And so it's pretty impressive.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Did we hit the dong already?
Speaker 1:Hit it again.
Speaker 2:I'll hit it again.
Speaker 6:Hit it again.
Speaker 9:We did. Yeah. Hit it
Speaker 2:one more.
Speaker 1:Hit it again. I'll be back.
Speaker 2:$30,000,000 series. I I don't know if we actually got to the number. $30,000,000 series.
Speaker 1:It'd be radical vectors. Push yourself and the team. Come back in q one. It's not all about fundraising, but No. It is a pretty good indicator of momentum.
Speaker 2:Call up Rob Taves at Radical Ventures say, give me another 30. Give me another
Speaker 1:How about 300?
Speaker 2:How about yeah. How about you put your money where your mouth is, Rob? Make a bet. Yeah. Take a bet
Speaker 9:on us. Graph.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Look at the graph. Look at the graph. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks.
Speaker 1:See you again.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. Broadcom has smashed earnings.
Speaker 2:Earnings per share of $1.95 versus $1.72 projected. Revenue of 18,000,000,000. People were projecting 18 17 and a half. Look at this AI image of a crying bear relative to AVG. Oh, hot hot hot.
Speaker 1:Bears in shambles.
Speaker 2:The civil board of private equity has done it again.
Speaker 1:Up 3%.
Speaker 2:Green line. After after market. Jack riding the green line upwards.
Speaker 1:Sorry. And
Speaker 2:that is fantastic news for the good folks over at Broadcom. Congratulations to everyone on smashing earnings, and thank you to the chat for calling it out. Our next guest is from k two space. How are you doing? Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. We are trying to pull up some audio. Do we have audio here? Can we play this? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. I'm Karan. I'm the cofounder and CEO of KT Space.
Speaker 2:And can I mean, obviously, space is in the news, but can you give us a little bit more color on how you fit into the orbital economy?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. So about three and half years ago, started this company with my brother Neil. We wanted to build really large, really high power satellites Mhmm. Which at the time was a pretty big contrarian bet against the market.
Speaker 4:Everyone was kinda going smaller with their satellites. Yeah. And so, yeah, we we kinda looked at it. We were like, hey. Like, actually, the future, if you think about it, is all about higher power higher power.
Speaker 4:Right? And we're seeing that with things that we're probably about to talk about with Yeah.
Speaker 2:The data centers and space
Speaker 4:and everything. Yeah. But, yeah, we're building the largest space platforms that have ever existed.
Speaker 2:The largest space. So Yeah. But but but but importantly, you're not building the rockets.
Speaker 4:That's right. Yeah. We're just doing the satellites. We're we're gonna be launch vehicle agnostic. Most of our first missions are gonna be on on SpaceX.
Speaker 2:On SpaceX.
Speaker 4:SpaceX rockets. But over time, we'll probably use a bunch of others as
Speaker 2:well. And when you were building the company, did you have a did you have a thesis around how the launch market would play out? Because there's I feel like maybe this came up when you were pitching VCs, but there there's probably a risk that, hey. If SpaceX becomes, like, a really powerful monopoly, they're gonna be able to squeeze you like crazy. So was your initial thinking or bet, hey.
Speaker 2:I I I love SpaceX. It's amazing. It's unlocking an incredible new capability. But I do think that, you know, Firefly will be doing some stuff. Rocket Lab might be doing stuff.
Speaker 2:Blue Origin might be doing stuff. And, eventually, the market will play out that I can actually carve out a business here one way
Speaker 3:or another.
Speaker 4:I mean, 70% of our company comes from SpaceX. My my brother is the next SpaceXer, so we're all we're all pretty big fans of SpaceX. And, you know, it it they've made such a massive difference in the market. Right? Like, when we talk about there being, like, launch abundance.
Speaker 4:Right? It's both because they made bigger and bigger launch vehicles, and they increased the frequency of those launches. Right? Like, they're they're blowing past a 150 launches this year as if it's nothing. Right?
Speaker 3:It's crazy.
Speaker 4:So so we always knew that we were gonna be big users. Yeah. Yeah. We always knew we're gonna be big users of SpaceX rockets, but I it's pretty cool to see a bunch of the other launch play players coming online. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, there's a number of new players while whether it's, like, Relativity
Speaker 2:Relativity.
Speaker 4:Whether it's Andy over at Stoke, whether it's the folks over at Firefly. I think it's it's it's a really unique opportunity we have right now where Yeah. Hopefully five to ten years from now, we have a bunch of choices.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. So so so biggest big satellites. Been in the business of making big satellites. What was the first big satellite that you thought would be valuable?
Speaker 2:Communications? Put a camera on it, spy satellites, Hubble telescope? What do you what were you originally thinking before every venture capitalist said pivot to AI?
Speaker 4:So we started with giant telescopes, which Telescopes. Bit a bit bit of a extreme departure from But but, yeah, we wanna build really large telescopes because everyone knows James James Webb. Right? Like Yeah. Awesome, highly performing telescope.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But it costs billions of dollars and took, like, twenty years to produce. Right? And that's, like, kind of the the straw by which we take data from the rest of the solar system. Right?
Speaker 4:And so we wanna build many more straws and many bigger straws. Over time, we realized, like, actually, if we go bigger well, now we can start to deploy a lot of power because we can host bigger solar rays. And if we go bigger, we can build platforms that are radiation tolerant and can handle different orbits in different parts of the solar system. But it all actually stemmed from from from giant telescopes, is the the a a little known fact actually about k two.
Speaker 2:But, I mean, the the the news today, $250,000,000, a $3,000,000,000 valuation, doesn't doesn't look like a science project type funding round. You got t row price, altimeter, light speed.
Speaker 1:T row price. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I typically isn't that wouldn't that be pretty common in a pre IPO?
Speaker 2:It's like a grow yeah. These are serious investors. So so what is the shape of the business? I imagine that, like, you actually have serious serious traction and progress actually delivering capabilities. What's the majority of the customer base product mix look like right now?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So because we went in such a different direction, we started as, like, just a tactical contrarian bet that two and a half years ago started to get a lot of commercial traction. So over the last three years, we've basically gone from 5,000,000 in TCV in '23 Mhmm. To 50,000,000 in TCV in '24 to 500,000,000 in TCV in '25. Right?
Speaker 4:And this is from a mix of large commercial and government customers. Right?
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 1:I don't know
Speaker 4:I don't know that many three and half year old companies that are, like, half 1,000,000,000 in TCV. Right?
Speaker 2:That's insane. So, yeah, what what take me inside one of those contracts. Give me an example of, like, what you're delivering.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the perfect example of power is when you think about communications. Right?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:More power equals more throughput. Sure. So if I drive up the power, right, any space based data constellation suddenly gets more and more effective. Right? And we we were just, like, driving up the power incrementally.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, the typical satellites at the same price point as as us were doing, like, one to two kilowatts of power. Our first satellite is 20 kilowatts of power. Wow. Our next satellite's gonna be a 100.
Speaker 4:100. And so we saw a really interesting use case to go after, which is just for all the players that are looking at what SpaceX has done to the comms market Yeah. And are thinking about how to reset their unit economics. We were, like, the really interesting path for them to take to be able to think about a fundamentally different cost structure just based on how much power we are deploying and at the price point.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:So commercial comms in the first place. Government is the second. We can talk a bit about that. But those are the two big areas that we've kind of focused on as we scaled up
Speaker 2:the company. Let's flip over to the the the engineering side. A 100 kilowatts, that's point one megawatts. Is that right? Like, how are you actually delivering that?
Speaker 2:Is it just big solar panels? Like, what's the secret to actually scaling up power delivery in space? Do you have batteries on board? Are there other propellants or or resources for fuel, or is it all just solar? How are you how do you actually scale up power delivery in space?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we basically have to reset the entire satellite. We had to go build giant solar arrays. We had to go build giant batteries. We had to build giant primary structures.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:These things called reaction wheels, which are these large spinning discs that help you point a satellite with large solar arrays.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:Like, 80% of the satellite, we rebuilt from scratch in this factory behind me.
Speaker 2:And and Sorry. Really quickly. Giant solar array, that could in space, that could mean anything from, like, football fields to Yeah. The size of this table. Like, just ground me in, like, order of magnitude.
Speaker 2:How big are we talking?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the first, the first satellite, that we're building that we're launching in three months is 40 meters from wingtip to wingtip.
Speaker 2:40 meters. Like, yeah, like, halfway down a football field almost, something like that. Wow.
Speaker 1:And then the Space yacht.
Speaker 2:Space yacht. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Exactly. That's good. Exactly. And then the next one will be 80. So it's gonna be two x the length, but obviously much more in terms of surface
Speaker 6:area.
Speaker 2:And does that only fit the Starship fairing? Is is that Starship requirement there, or or can you
Speaker 4:get that up? The 20 kilowatt is made for Falcon nine. Okay. It'll be it's made to stack 10 in a Falcon nine. It'll stack I mean, Starship is so massive that it'll stack stack 50 in a Starship Wow.
Speaker 4:Which is which is kinda cool. The full one. Yeah. Exactly. And then the next one will be made purely
Speaker 1:for Starlink. So on the on the commercial side, from, how how are the telecom players thinking about the threat from Starlink? Yeah. Right? These are you know, the big ones are multi $100,000,000,000 market cap companies.
Speaker 1:They have a lot of infrastructure on Earth and, you know, are our understanding, like, really feeling the pressure from Starlink. But what is their kind of mental model for Starlink as a threat? And I'm assuming they're paying you to try to catch up.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Yeah. I think Starlink came in and basically took a business that, had, you know, call it, you'd you'd you'd go, like, host, like, data at 50 to $100 per megabit per second, and Starlink came in and brought that price under 10. Right? So every single player out there had to figure out, like, how do I go deploy a lot more capacity, and how do I do it at a low cost?
Speaker 4:And deploying capacity in space is just all about how much does it cost me to deploy power. Right? If I can deploy more power and I can do so at a lower cost, suddenly I have better unit economics. So we were the we were the kind of the path to doing that, right, which was saying we're gonna go max out power. So our satellite is as powerful as the billion dollar satellites that used to exist, but it's not gonna cost a billion.
Speaker 4:It'll cost 15,000,000. You can stack 10 per Falcon nine, and that's what it takes to kind of change the game for the telco players. So a bunch of them saw that, and we're like, okay. Like, this this is actually something we can play around with and and use. And and really for us, it's just like the first customer.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, we're all about integrating, like, the hardware stack for space. We wanna max out power. Today, that's for communications. Tomorrow, that's gonna be for compute.
Speaker 4:And then who knows as we, you know, start becoming, like, a a spacefaring civilization, like, what we'll
Speaker 2:do with that power later. Dyson sphere. Dyson sphere.
Speaker 1:So so this round got done, I'm assuming, at a time when, people were mocking data centers in space. There's been a little bit of a vibe shift over the last and I'm sure all your investors have been, hitting you up since Have you thought about AI computing? Elon and Gavin You gotta see this. I think you gotta I think you gotta take another look
Speaker 2:at that. Invest like the best interview. You should you should see this.
Speaker 4:I promise this isn't a data center round. I had to tell everyone. I was like
Speaker 1:No. That's the thing. The data center would be the data center would be three on on fifteen.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it was funny. It was in November. Actually, like, you know, Delian has very strong views on this. I I was talking to him about it early November, late October when we're doing the round, and, know, they they have a strong opinion.
Speaker 4:Founders Fund is right on a lot of things, so, like, I don't always wanna I I'm not gonna say I'm gonna take the other side of a bet against them, but it's now it's, Founders Fund on one side, Elon on the other. I'm like, I'm just gonna watch and see see how this plays out. But but yeah. So I our round was primarily on, like, the the communications application. It was also on a bunch of the government constellations that we're starting to work on.
Speaker 4:There's some really interesting things we're doing that the US government is pretty excited about. Yeah. So more of what you call a conventional and, like, yeah, now we'll see what happens with the with the data set up.
Speaker 1:Price of the brick going up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:mean, it's Exactly.
Speaker 2:It it it is exciting.
Speaker 1:What a
Speaker 2:As as a CEO, like, it is somewhat your job to bring energy to what you're building and bring excitement to what you're building. And if there's an opportunity, even if it's five, ten years off, if you're going to be a beneficiary of that trend, you do sort of have a responsibility to raise your hand and say, yeah, hey, it's logical that some of the value will accrue here to me, if that's the case. 100%. But you probably also don't want to whiplash everyone and be like, actually, I've been doing this the whole time. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1:Any predictions on just how big some of these commercial satellites will get over the next decade? I saw somebody on the timeline earlier talking about how in order to recreate one gigawatt of compute capacity in orbit, you need something like 10,000 satellites. But eventually, you could just have one data center sized satellite floating out. But how do you think about size versus and and just, like, massive individual satellites versus consulate the more constellation approach?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I'm I'm in the
Speaker 4:school of thought of constellations. Right? Like, I think we're gonna build really big satellites that still exist in constellations. I think compute's gonna be distributed. Right?
Speaker 4:Compute and communications are gonna be all part of the same distributed network. Right? So so our our bigger satellite, Giga, is gonna be, like, the light of, you know, a a football field. Right?
Speaker 3:It works out.
Speaker 1:It's called Giga?
Speaker 4:It's called the Giga.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gong for Giga.
Speaker 2:Best name for a satellite I've ever heard. It's an incredible name for a satellite.
Speaker 1:We are very critical of names. Yeah. Sometimes people come on and they they name their companies things that don't or not necessarily
Speaker 2:Hubris dot AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hubris dot AI.
Speaker 2:$5,000,000,000 seed round. What's gonna happen? Who knows? Giga is a fantastic name.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Giga would be
Speaker 1:a a beautiful name for a satellite. Glad you're doing it.
Speaker 2:I'm very excited to see it
Speaker 1:in this. Anyways, very exciting. Congrats to the whole team. And, yeah, hoping hoping we can partner at some point to put a TBPN satellite up in space.
Speaker 2:We need one for sure.
Speaker 1:We definitely will need one at some point.
Speaker 2:One last question from my side. Take us through a little bit of a tour of what's behind you. Yeah. Is this the only facility? How big is this facility?
Speaker 2:What's actually happening here? Are satellites getting built out?
Speaker 4:This is a 180,000 square foot factory, right, where, basically, you'll see the start of a a manufacturing line coming down here that's going to can't really see it in the view, but the clean room's over there with the satellite actually in it that's about to launch in three months. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. You you you even have a huge signs up. It says primary structure, side sections, final integration. Wow. Physical divides.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so so, yeah, we're basically scaling up now. We're eleven months in, but a large part of this round that we're raising is to is to go scale up mass production, go from one this year to 10 next year to 30 the following year.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:And it's really all about scale at this point. Right? Like, let's get the first one to work in three months, and then let's do it many more times over the coming twenty four months.
Speaker 2:And, also, is the company's name a nod to your initials?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So here's the thing. Like, it's not people think it's about my initials, and it's like, that is the most egotistical thing in the world. I promise you that is not the case. So, you know, my brother and I started this company with starting a company with your brother is, like, the coolest thing in the world to do.
Speaker 4:We're both conjures. But it comes back to the Cardichef. Right? Like, helping humanity become a type two Cardichef civilization, k two. The whole thesis is, like, build bigger.
Speaker 4:Right? Cool. And our our logo is a big Dyson sphere. I heard you mentioned that.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it's like, our whole thesis is like, let's start laying the groundwork to helping humanity become a type two carnichept civilization. So let's call the company k two.
Speaker 1:You understand naming. I'm gonna I have to say I bullish. We, we we we had a we had a company on, called Icarus. Icarus space. We were a little bit worried about
Speaker 2:For what it's worth, insanely good team.
Speaker 3:Insanely and
Speaker 2:I really hope Maybe they'll idea,
Speaker 1:but they're playing with playing with They're
Speaker 2:playing with fire.
Speaker 4:Is playing with fire. They're a super cool team, though.
Speaker 1:Not They
Speaker 2:are they are very cool. They're they're very cool. But there's been there's been a rash of of hilarious
Speaker 1:That's playing on hard mode. Companies. That's playing on hard mode.
Speaker 2:Feel like playing on hard mode. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to meet you. And congratulations to the whole team. Nice.
Speaker 4:Nice. Nice, guys.
Speaker 2:Glad to see Appreciate it. Coffers are full. We'll see you soon. Well, that essentially Let's rip some timeline. I Let's rip some timeline.
Speaker 2:Okay. I wanna watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels. When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding.
Speaker 5:This is sick.
Speaker 2:This is sick? Is this AI or is this real? Do we know?
Speaker 5:I hope it's real.
Speaker 2:I can't tell. So
Speaker 5:This is Casey Hanmer's dream.
Speaker 2:This is Casey Hanmer's dream. I hope this is a lot of this looks pretty real. I was watching a video of somebody there there's a whole trend on TikTok of people throwing tires, the longest tire throw. So because if you throw a tire off a mountain, it will just spin all the way down to the bottom, so you can throw a tire for, like, miles and miles and miles. It's a great it's a great content genre.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For some reason, solar panels over mountains do give me a little bit of disgust, whereas I I get it. I I'm I'm less
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mountains are beautiful.
Speaker 1:Deserts. Deserts. I'm like blanketed. Like it is. That's sort of already But this looks like a like it would be a really enjoyable mountain range to just go on a nice little hike.
Speaker 1:And so I'm I'm feeling the disgust You
Speaker 2:feeling the disgust?
Speaker 1:But also impressed. Yeah. By the scale.
Speaker 2:It's just crazy that, like, there was no desert between these mountains and who they needed to get power to. You know? Like, because I don't know. There must be people, like, right there living in the foothills or something, and they need to put them in the mountains. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire. You know? That's often a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm curious around the efficiency because just given the movement of the sun, are you gonna have like, there it's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks. So wouldn't this not you would you would think that finding a area nearby that was flat would be more efficient. Yeah. But who knows?
Speaker 1:Snapchat.
Speaker 2:What's going
Speaker 1:on with Snap?
Speaker 2:Anyone from Snapchat can focus on
Speaker 1:making money. They are let's see here. Base sixteen z says Snapchat plus user growth pretty much guaranteed to reaccelerate with the new storage charges. So they're saying, you've saved 4,122 memories since 2017. You've used 16 gigabytes of your five gigabyte of free storage limit.
Speaker 1:We'll temporarily backup new memories that exceed your limit for up to twelve months. Or you can join Snapchat Plus and get your 250 gigabyte. So Mhmm. Anyways, makes sense, that Snap is, trying to make more money.
Speaker 2:That's good news. I I'm surprised that they haven't had done any sort of, big, like, AI content licensing deal. And, of course, they had a deal of Perplexity, to bring AI into the Snapchat product. But I it it is does Snapchat just not have any data that would be surfaced in an LLM? Like, Reddit seems to have done such a good job with that, but I guess people aren't really reviewing things or discussing things in in text based formats on Snapchat.
Speaker 2:It's it's all kind of just day in the life content. Anyway, what else is going on?
Speaker 1:Wrote some Yeah. Here, Jordy. You wanna go first? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Trump says, doesn't see why we can't have 20% or 25% GDP growth. Says the market should continue to go up with great results.
Speaker 2:I mean, don't see why we can't have 20% GDP growth because it's like never happened in history, maybe.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Was what was China?
Speaker 2:He is AGI pilled. That's extremely AGI pilled. That's
Speaker 5:has talked about this.
Speaker 2:Dwarkash literally has talked about this. 25% GDP growth.
Speaker 1:The first AGI pill president, I suppose. Let's head over to the Apparently, China hit 19.3% in 1970. Okay. Yeah. That is that
Speaker 2:the great thing forward or
Speaker 1:something? More recently more recently, 14% in 02/2007. So I think Trump's looking at the Greatly
Speaker 2:Forward was nineteen sixty ish. Tyler, what do you got?
Speaker 5:Okay. So you guys gave me a month to to write new jokes,
Speaker 1:but I I already wrote some.
Speaker 2:Oh, you got one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 5:What's So these were I did use LM to help.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 5:But these are not never before seen.
Speaker 2:Never before seen. By the trainings Get them in the next free trailers.
Speaker 1:Did you search them in in Google to make sure that Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 5:Okay. I looked them up. These aren't these are brand gonna verify.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And I don't want you to get exposed. Okay. Which one? Ready? Okay.
Speaker 5:You're telling me Jerry rigged this car? Oh. Is that Jerry rigged?
Speaker 2:Jerry rigged car.
Speaker 1:Jerry rigged.
Speaker 2:That's pretty good.
Speaker 1:I can't.
Speaker 2:That's that but that's sort of, like, the point.
Speaker 5:But it's not a guy
Speaker 6:named Jerry.
Speaker 2:Telling me
Speaker 5:my friend Jerry rigged this car. No.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they it's it's it's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Pretty good. Pretty good.
Speaker 5:Okay. Second one. You're telling me a brain washed this colt?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's really good. Oh, yes. That is novel. There we go. That is a great one.
Speaker 2:You're telling me a brain washed this cult? You need to tweet that right now because that's a 100 k likes right there. 10 k likes. That's very good.
Speaker 1:Okay. I got I got I got two more. You're telling
Speaker 5:me a star crossed these lovers?
Speaker 2:That's sort of literal. That's sort of like what it is. That's sort of what it is. Yes.
Speaker 5:Okay. You're telling me a tongue tied this boy?
Speaker 2:That was you gotta post all four of those and see and and I would predict that that the brainwashed cult does number one, does numbers. The tongue tied boy also does decent numbers, and the other two flop.
Speaker 5:Okay. I'll I'll tweet them now, and then we'll see tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a great that's a great test.
Speaker 1:But Well done. Well done. We gave you
Speaker 2:a month. Cult is that is novel. That is novel. And that that's not coming from from any of the LLM. Oh, the shrimp fried rice bench is really, really good.
Speaker 2:Let's go over to Rune. He says everyone will go public soon because they finally feel the heat of a well of well capitalized competition, the wrath of Nyan. There was no reason to seek enormous amounts of capital until recently. We will see natural interest rates north of 3% in the end of secular stagnation. Everyone's going public.
Speaker 2:Oh, in other news, Eleven Labs partnering with Meta to power expressive scalable audio across Instagram, Verizon, and more, bringing natural and diverse audio to billions of users. Also, you got the founder of Eleven Labs on the cover of Forbes. Look at
Speaker 1:that smile. Look at that smile.
Speaker 2:Gigachad filter engaged. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Not beating the Gigachad filter allegations.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. No. He he I mean, Forbes headshot photographers, it's a great, great product. This is this is something that's very special.
Speaker 2:So congratulations to Mouti over at eleven Labs
Speaker 1:And the whole team.
Speaker 2:Making the cover of Forbes. That's a huge moment, for for him and the whole team.
Speaker 1:Speaking of AI.
Speaker 2:Presidential AI challenge?
Speaker 1:First lady, Melania Trump, is introducing the presidential AI challenge. Artificial intelligence is America's next competitive edge, driving advancements in your career, supporting your family, and strengthening your community. Sure, no one will Mhmm. Disagree with any of that. This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators to shape America's future.
Speaker 1:Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future, be part of the presidential AI challenge today. What is the presidential AI challenge?
Speaker 2:It's a good question.
Speaker 1:The presidential AI challenge will foster interest and expertise in AI in America's use. Early training in the responsible use of AI tools will demystify this technology and prepare
Speaker 2:America I think this might be the challenge. I think the challenge might be To figure out what
Speaker 1:it the presidential AI challenge. It's like a it's a riddle. This is a riddle. I think it's
Speaker 2:a think it's it's some it's some sort of like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery. That's the whole goal, to to test the American people. Can they understand what it is?
Speaker 1:Okay. They might never I I think I figured it out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school. Yep. And there's challenge projects that groups of students will be able to participate in as well as awards and prizes.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, solid gold solid gold trophies.
Speaker 2:Massive trophies. Yeah. Statues.
Speaker 1:I wanna see I wanna see the comically large checkbook come out to, you know, for the winners. Yeah. Maybe grants to schools.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe the exact projects haven't been, like, you know, released.
Speaker 1:There actually is a cash prize. Sick. $10,000 per
Speaker 2:team Peyton Melania coin or Trump coin or US dollar?
Speaker 1:I think the
Speaker 5:Or gold.
Speaker 1:Or gold.
Speaker 5:I think that's
Speaker 2:It's not Trump coin. Get it right. It's Trump meme. It's the best. Okay.
Speaker 1:Here's some win cloud credits. That's so insane.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's actually amazing. I love that.
Speaker 1:A presidential award certificate, so boom certificate. You're getting cloud credits. You're getting 10,000 for your school, homeschool or community group. And you're getting $10,000 per team in the middle school category and the high school category and the educator category. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, who Tyler, you guess there's no college tier.
Speaker 2:Too old.
Speaker 1:You say you have to go back to school and participate and win.
Speaker 2:Get a fake ID that says you're thirteenth.
Speaker 1:Just to go back and dominate the presidential AI challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's exciting. Good luck to everyone.
Speaker 1:Is the presidential fitness challenge back? I don't know. Did that get a It
Speaker 2:has to be back.
Speaker 1:Did that
Speaker 2:get They're putting gyms in airports. Of course, of course, you're gonna have to run a mile if you're an American kid.
Speaker 1:According
Speaker 2:The first wait, wait. I didn't see this. The first child was born in a huebo?
Speaker 1:Yeah. According to Avital. Crazy. Says Lisan al Gayib.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is you are truly the the puppeteer of the silicon intelligence if you are born in a Waymo. You merely adopted the Waymo. I was born in it.
Speaker 1:That is truly the most twenty twenty five story.
Speaker 2:You merely adopted artificial intelligence. I was I was born in a way boring being born in a I mean, being born in a taxi cab is, a classic thing that's, like, that's, like, been, you know, described for years. But Sucker and Jetty is coming on the show on Friday. He says I I guess that's tomorrow. He says on h two hundreds, the pro selling to China theory relies on it being good for US interest to keep China on The US technology tree and forestalling Huawei.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, this ignores the singular flavor of US biz relationship with China since PNTR. In every case that U. S. Companies came became intertwined with China, they became less favorable to U. S.
Speaker 2:Interests and more malleable tools of The U. S. Of Chinese state. And so he is he's bearish on the H-two 100 plan. But we will dig into it all with him tomorrow.
Speaker 2:In other news, Kayser Yunis, the CEO of Applied Intelligence, is on the timeline. He's joined X. He says after sixteen years and ten months sitting on a fantastic handle, he says I'm finally writing my first X. Also, will start writing more regularly. This my first post is ironically on why I'm posting.
Speaker 2:And so he shares a link to a blog post and Ryan Peterson says welcome brother. But also writing a long form blog post is not being on X, LOL, which is very funny.
Speaker 1:On the blog post, says after many years of railing against going on x, I'm finally pulling the band aid and getting on the platform.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Historically, if you've watched my talks, you've heard me say that one of the keys to applied success is focus. Mhmm. And I'm often demonized. I've I've often demonized social media specifically x as wasteful and distracting. It encourages superficiality, showmanship, the wrong values of a real substance.
Speaker 1:Quote, well, well, well, how the turntables. Some of that is still true. But as a company has grown, the balance has changed. The value of having a microphone now outweighs the downsides. So I'm going to try this.
Speaker 1:So Okay. Well, to is posting. Let's hit the Gong.
Speaker 2:Let's hit the Gong for him and then we gotta do the Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Before Salesforce, I wanna say congratulations to Shergil Oz Ozaire. Mhmm. He is the founder of General Agents. He launched his product on April 2 and was acquired by What? By Jeff Bezos' company.
Speaker 1:Very, very exciting. Congrats to the general agents team.
Speaker 2:Give me the Benioff numbers.
Speaker 1:Benioff numbers. He making on AI? According to Tane, Salesforce says their agent force ARR is now 540,000,000. 4.3 x year over year.
Speaker 2:Million dollars. Congratulations to Mark Benioff.
Speaker 1:This is why he might be re renaming the company Agent Force. We will see. We will see. And closing it out.
Speaker 2:One more?
Speaker 1:Jason says the original Omega Speedmaster two nine one five one is one of the best looking watches of all time and this is a particularly good looking example from 1958. Hairspring knows how to shoot a watch is stunning. Stunning. Stunning silhouette. Well, thank you
Speaker 2:for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM sharp. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 1:Please do.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day, and Merry Christmas. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.