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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, 09/21/2026. We are live from TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:How many days till Christmas? TBPN's road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got ninety four days until Christmas.
Speaker 2:Double digits.
Speaker 1:We're so close. Every day
Speaker 2:So close.
Speaker 1:One day closer to Christmas. So get excited, start shopping for presents, start picking out that Christmas tree. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. They got musicals.
Speaker 1:I guess they're doing musicals now, and I guess we do in AI safety now. We're...... That.
Speaker 2:Later. Doing a bit of a show today. Yeah. We got Augustus Doricko coming in with a $100,000,000... Tip of
Speaker 3:the hat
Speaker 1:for a $100,000,000...
Speaker 4:We have Vinod Khosla.
Speaker 1:Vinod Khosla's coming on, coming back.
Speaker 2:Aaron AI. Levie breaking his silence on the SaaS rebound
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:New model drops, the latest on open source and more. We have Ron from iConnections. They are putting on an incredible show in November that we're gonna be at called Tomorrow X. Excited to talk with him about that. And then we'll round it out with none other than Vin Hylak coming in with a new round of funding as well.
Speaker 1:For Raindrop. Raindrop. How was your... Drop Top. Yes.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Good name for a company. How was your weekend?
Speaker 2:It was couldn't have been better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was good. Couldn't have been We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day. Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired.
Speaker 2:Terrific.
Speaker 1:I got completely one shotted by the new AI video model. Seedance 2.5, Gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when it was called Dream Booth. This paper came out from Google. And it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo.
Speaker 1:Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today. But back then, you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them. Then you had to feed that into like a python script that was either hosted on... What what's their notebook? Their hosted iPython notebook?
Speaker 1:Google Colab. Colab. And then the Colab thing was weird because it was a luck of the draw what GPU you got. So you would like sign up and create an instance and then sometimes it would just be like, you got a ten eighty TI and you'd be like, bah. Like I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing.
Speaker 1:And then sometimes it would be like, you got an a 100 brother, like lock in. Like, it was just random provisioning. And people would be like so excited when they got one or the other. But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run. This is a crazy thing, this guy who's just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer figured out how to get Dreambooth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware.
Speaker 1:So then you could go and you could take your face, fine tune it and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever. It was all built on that open source one, not mid journey. The other image generator, a mod mustock was... Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion.
Speaker 1:It was like Stable Diffusion as the base and then this dream booth thing on top. It was super cool because if you actually went through... If you jumped through all those hoops, you basically had access to the magic avatar thing like three months before everyone else and you could like send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. And then it was just completely commodified. It became an app and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after.
Speaker 1:But the AI video has been moving a lot slower. It's very compute... It's very compute intensive, obviously, since OpenAI had to shut down Sora. And it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this.
Speaker 1:Had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did. But...
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was one point where you sent me like 10 videos back to back of me Yeah. Various AI scenes and then I was just sending you some like pretty mundane commentary back and then and then I was like, woah, okay. Yeah. On something totally different.
Speaker 2:Oh, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, oh, sorry. Need to respect your culture and actually respond.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's because like you no longer need to go get a different app or sign up for anything. Can do... I like I was just texting with Codex remotely. I had a PC that was running this and then I would just be like, I didn't even say take this video.
Speaker 1:I would just say like go find some videos and put Jordy in them. And it would just do that. And I didn't even have to like upload photos of you. I would just say like, go find some reference photography for Jordy across the Internet. And it would...
Speaker 2:And so far, it seems to have made a lot of sense not to focus on video Yep. Given that Codex and Claude can connect into all these other tools Yep. And models and Yep. Just give you what you want as a user
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Without incurring any of the cost of focusing to make great models or the actual cost of of serving them Yeah. And having to allocate, you know, GPUs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think people will be having fun. Oh, speaking of Codecs, let me tell you about Codecs. Codecs are a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, creating some of the videos I will show you shortly, automating or business workflows. Khosla helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 1:So the latest turn of AI video models, like they're really, really good. Not just for the high fidelity stuff which we'll show you some of, but even going back to like nineties VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time. Seedance 2.5, the the the big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object as opposed to just a face swap which just it it just hits way harder. You you... You'll see.
Speaker 1:And it matches all the subtle details of the footage so things integrate really nicely. Dylan Patel posted a video of him as Drake in this cheetah print video over the weekend. And I think a lot of people fell for this.
Speaker 2:It tricked everyone.
Speaker 1:I I I think it tricked a lot of people because it's super high fidelity. Let's play semi analysis latest post on x, Dylan Patel as Drake. And what's interesting about this is the video model's really good, but also this Drake video came out a day ago. And so it's not... It hasn't saturated the Internet.
Speaker 1:Like,
Speaker 2:a lot people hadn't seen it.
Speaker 1:This is the first... I I saw this video before I saw the actual Drake music video and of course the choreography is is fantastic in the underlying video and that drives the motion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe mute mute the audio.
Speaker 1:Really. Yeah. We're probably gonna get...
Speaker 2:Fun as it is.
Speaker 1:But it's so funny to see Dylan walk around. And that first shot really sells it. It really looks like him. Later on, he goes into the mirror. He walks up the stairs.
Speaker 1:This is this is what the model is really good at is even though he's very small and he's behind like the chandelier cuts in front of him, there's no aberrations. This part, his face starts to look a little not like him. There's a little bit of Drake like sort of sneaking back in on the facial structure. But overall, very very like incredible performance and it does a good job whether he's looking away from the camera, whether he's big in the frame or small in the frame and...
Speaker 2:And it... I can't stress enough how funny it is that so many people like so many people were dunking on saying
Speaker 1:They thought he Wow.
Speaker 2:This is the top. We're definitely closer to the to the top than the bottom. Never became He's the main not serious. It's like one, Dylan has never had the most like serious brand. Likes to have fun.
Speaker 2:Two, the fact it was tricking everyone shows that shows where we are.
Speaker 1:No. Seriously, this is exactly what you want from the semi analysis. You want them to
Speaker 2:analyze Hey, we just updated you on the state of video models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and the idea that the idea that the idea that Dylan... They use so much AI on anything. Yeah. Yeah. Everything.
Speaker 2:I've... I even texted Dylan recently. Was like, you should get an actual creative director. Maybe use less slop. Oh, You know?
Speaker 2:But the idea that he would just like take forty eight hours Yeah. And a $100,000 budget to go and film this.
Speaker 1:The day after Drake drops the... Yeah. It was crazy. But if he did, like he is like obviously he's in like an an analysis business, but he's also an entertainer. He also has to fill the top of funnel, newsletter subscribers.
Speaker 1:Like he has to be front and center. And so it's actually not that crazy. Like even if he did this by himself, I would just be like, respect. Like that that's a fun project. But of course, he's using AI.
Speaker 1:He's using CDN 2.5. Higgs field wrapped CDN 2.5 in in a model that sort of harnessed that sort of makes this a little bit easier. You can use that via the API. It's also available on fall and there's a couple other ways to interface with it. But it's interesting because it's it's highly compute intensive.
Speaker 1:China's obviously way behind on compute. So what's going on with the strategy? But before we get to that, it's really fun. So we got to play some of the more videos that we made. So I had Codex finding famous or funny videos to use as base clips.
Speaker 1:I would just say I I started with the rap videos. Did a couple of those. I think there's one maybe in the time
Speaker 2:Noah in play. The x chat says no headphones, obviously fake.
Speaker 1:Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You gotta have the you gotta have the headphones to make it believable, Dylan Patel. But yeah, let's see if we can play the the video. Is it... Did did that one make it into the production chat? The...
Speaker 1:Yeah. This one. Because I saw this originally with Elon Musk and Sam Altman rapping and I think we
Speaker 2:might mute it just because of swearing.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting here is that it does a pretty good job of getting us. But there's moments when I sort of blend into to Elon Musk which is funny because it's not like it's originally an Elon video but clearly the underlying video that was driving the AI model was the Elon and Sam version. And then our heights kind of changed. Like, I look a little bit more like Elon there. It's very silly.
Speaker 1:But but but very very funny. Gonna fool a lot of people. But also then I was able to just say like, okay, go make a bunch of tech videos. Like just find iconic videos from tech and it did it and it found like Sweet Baby Ray's. I didn't tell it to go get that video but it just did it which was very cool.
Speaker 1:Some of them came out really well. Some of them didn't do too well. The one that I liked, I think the most...
Speaker 2:And it's a funny dynamic that we noticed where when you're looking at an AI video of yourself Yeah. Thinking, that doesn't look like me. And then when other people look... Watch it, they're like, wow, that looks exactly like Jordy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So let's watch Jordy introduce the MacBook Air as Steve Jobs. I don't think... Actually Apple kind of bans everything.
Speaker 1:So we'll see we'll see if this one gets flagged. But we might be we might be cooked on this on this particular one. But let's I said video is solved.
Speaker 2:Roll the dice.
Speaker 1:The post. Yeah. Let's roll the dice on this one. Video is solved. Jordy Hayes introducing the MacBook Air.
Speaker 1:It's already got 350 likes on axe. Let's play it. Boom. So it didn't change the voice. So you still hear Steve Jobs' voice, which is also funny about the Dylan Patel thing because it's Drake's voice.
Speaker 1:So it's like what did they think happened? He's like lip syncing to it or something. That didn't make any sense. But what's really cool about this is that it changes Geordie, the small Geordie and the big Geordie. It it changes both of them in the same frame.
Speaker 1:And then even there, you only see a little bit of Steve Jobs mouth and he was able to change that to Jordi so it can represent what's going on outside of the frame. And historically, that's been very difficult for AI models. They want the face in the center of the frame. They want to be able to crop it and think reasonably reasonably about it, but it did a good job there. Jordi as Jensen taking the GPUs out Added
Speaker 2:some mass for this one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very funny when you when when when you use a different person with a different stature, different musculature, like they... It just comes across differently. But very funny clip, iconic when Jensen announced. Was this the h 100 announcement?
Speaker 1:The a one hundred announcement? Was pretty early but this is still such a funny gag that Jensen actually did this. I love it. He's really grunting. I mean, that's a heavy rack.
Speaker 1:We got here. It's the world's largest graphics card. Such a funny fit that he just did this in the kitchen. It's so good. Something I gotta show you.
Speaker 1:I got something I gotta show you. Jensen's such a such a master performer. We saw that on stage at at Salesforce, Agent Force last last week. The last one that I did... And before we pull up the Jordy of Steve Ballmer, which is particularly hilarious, let me tell you about console.com.
Speaker 1:Console built AI agents that only make 70 of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. This one, I I specifically told it, like, keep the sweaty the sweaty shirt and so I think it did more of a face replacement. So the face was sort of jumping around but still very funny.
Speaker 3:The key
Speaker 5:to dot net, the key to industry transformation, the key to success is developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
Speaker 1:It really got like the level of sweat on your face pretty cracked, but the face is jumping around. Not not quite not quite dialed. I think you'll have to perform that one IRL. And I should
Speaker 6:I should
Speaker 2:run that build at some point.
Speaker 1:You should. You should bulk to get to get to that level for sure. For sure. So, yeah. I mean, downstream of this, obviously, there's going to be the the...
Speaker 1:It's over for traditional filmmakers, blah blah blah. Then, obviously, a whole bunch of blended work that uses the right tool for the job. Some productions will use this where it helps in urgent scenarios. I think some of the stuff is already actually being used in Hollywood, specifically for reshoots. About ten years ago, Henry Cavill was in was was in Superman and he left Superman.
Speaker 1:They wrapped production. He went to film Mission Impossible. In Mission Impossible, he has a mustache. So, he grew out a real mustache, was filming Mission Impossible and they were like, we didn't get the shot for Superman. You gotta come back and film another scene as Superman.
Speaker 1:And he was like, I can't shave my mustache. And they were like, okay. We'll fix it in post. And in the newsletter, there's a photo here that we can pull up of how it came away because they had to remove and reconstruct his lip and his mouth using twenty seventeen technology and it was not good. It was very very rough.
Speaker 1:Probably very tedious, very expensive.
Speaker 2:Isn't a mustache like the easiest thing to to apply?
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Like fake? Like you should have just shaved it and then put on a fake mustache?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think Mission Impossible, they want the real thing. So yeah. The the the superman on the right is Henry Cavill with a mustache that has been removed in post and it was, yeah, widely widely critiqued by the VFX community. So you can imagine for stuff like that, this...
Speaker 1:These tools will creep in very quickly. For most things, it's gonna be, okay, well, if you needed someone to drive the video, why don't you just have the actor do that? Maybe for stunts and stuff, you'd do it. But for most performances, I think you'll still be doing it. The old way, at least for the time being.
Speaker 2:About some of the other more action oriented?
Speaker 1:Yes. So this was a fun one. I had to go and pull Johnny Knoxville and Steve O clips throughout the throughout their filmmaking and TV.
Speaker 2:Generational run.
Speaker 1:Their yeah. Their entire run. Make about 20 of them and then put it together into a trailer that we can watch now. And I really enjoyed this. We got to do that in the office.
Speaker 1:I think Tyler was thinking about getting that. This one this one didn't seem that bad to me, but Nick said this was terrifying, getting in a cactus. I don't know. I've never really been poked by a cactus. The hands on the bikes.
Speaker 1:I don't know how the guy on the left wins. Of course, a lot of Steve O in that one. A lot of Steve O here too. But I think these work so well because a lot of the underlying footage looks like AI. It like this.
Speaker 2:The prompts.
Speaker 1:Looks like an AI prompt. Like like drive a jet ski in a
Speaker 2:pool Out
Speaker 1:the pool. In a luxury house, you know. This looks
Speaker 2:This like is real though. This is real. We actually shot this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is real. No. The only thing that's different about this is the suits. We replaced the characters.
Speaker 1:But the underlying footage is all real from Johnny Knoxville and crew. The This fire hose one, that looks fun. Just kidding. Who's dying laughing?
Speaker 2:The old alligator in the house?
Speaker 1:Like the the old alligator in the house trick. I think they chilled that guy down, so he was real slow. And then the the bull run slammed. I didn't know Rams were so aggressive. The Ram just slammed that guy.
Speaker 2:It's in the name, John.
Speaker 1:I know, but I think of them... This looks like an AI prompt too. Boxing match on stilts, but replacing the suits. The gag chair that falls apart, that's classic.
Speaker 2:All time.
Speaker 1:All time classic. Then I come up and... Hey. Don't don't don't steal that. The old the old air horn while you're golfing.
Speaker 1:Classic. No. This is a good one. Going through the window. Souped.
Speaker 1:Just asking someone, hey. Can you go grab the six bowls of soup on a tray and bring it in? Okay. That's just pure Johnny Knoxville. So, yeah, sometimes you get, like, a blended half the main character, half who you tried to replace.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's pretty good. There's a little bit of there's a little bit of us in there. But but very fun to be able to just just do this in via text. Like you don't even... I mean, I'm I'm technically interacting with an API, but I didn't write a line of code.
Speaker 2:All on your phones?
Speaker 1:Yeah. All on my phone. So very very fun. I think these things will sort of burn through pretty quickly like everyone will be like, oh, yeah, like that like that's the capability. Everyone did their version of the meme and then and it becomes more of a tool, melts into the background.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You you already saw us with all the Young Lean music videos.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's kind of made the
Speaker 6:same thing and now...
Speaker 1:Yeah. And now it's like played out. Yeah. But a very impressive demo.
Speaker 2:Zip of the hat?
Speaker 1:Tip of hat to Young Lean. But a very impressive demo because it's able to replace multiple people and and do it very consistently even through like some really aggressive motion. So I thought that was pretty cool. So the the the whole pipeline here was I was running codecs on my PC, interacting with that from my phone, the ChatGPT app. And then I had codecs go and generate reference images with just ChatGPT images because it's pretty good at that.
Speaker 1:And then use those to swap through Seedance, which was which was actually rendered via Higgs Field. Higgs Field, amazing in terms of just delivering the assets, like, as an API. Extremely confusing as a product because they basically have two ways to give them money. You can you can load up API credits and then you can like buy a plan. And so at one point, I ran out of API credits and it was like time to upgrade to the plan.
Speaker 1:And I was like, okay. Cool. I'm having a good time. I'll do more of this. Click the button.
Speaker 1:I'm like, okay. Yeah. You loaded up a couple $100 in here with like the ultimate plan or whatever. And then it's like, those credits are not available in the API. And I was like, great.
Speaker 1:Thanks. And then and then it was like, Time to add some credits to your plan. I was like, okay. This is what I need to do. I add credits to the plan.
Speaker 1:It's like, those credits are on your plan. Those aren't API credits. Those are plan credits. And so I have like so much random money stuck in various pieces of...
Speaker 2:Been a massive complaint. The the Hagfield has faced a bunch of I think various allegations over the last year. I'm just like...
Speaker 1:I mean, the website looks like a gambling company. It'll be like countdown ten minutes to claim 75% discount on your next credit. It's like, it's totally optimized for like brain rot as you go through the flow being like, oh, buy... You gotta buy... Yeah.
Speaker 2:I had seen stuff of like, you can't, you know, not not being able to actually cancel your plan. So now that you have a plan that you can't use for anything It's over for it's over for me. It's over
Speaker 1:for me.
Speaker 2:You're a customer for life. But the products... Great entertainment.
Speaker 1:Great entertainment. And I do think, yeah. I I I think I might try fall again as as more of like a cleaner API that's a little more intelligible. But but yeah. I I think once you set up the bindings and get them all dialed in in Kotax...
Speaker 2:Says, looking mighty sus and mysterious today, chaps. Well... Well, this is the era that we're in. This is the era that we're in. You gotta take a...
Speaker 2:Safety era.
Speaker 1:Gotta take a hat hat seriously.
Speaker 2:The safety
Speaker 1:era. Anyway... John,
Speaker 2:once a week John's John's like, I think I think fedoras are gonna come back. I think fedoras are gonna come... There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the hat.
Speaker 1:I do think the hat would work if it's styled properly. Think it goes better with a suit. Think I it goes better with some sunglasses and a...
Speaker 2:Says, my safety.
Speaker 1:My safety. No. I mean, like, obviously the fedora is is often often maligned as as not particularly stylish, not particularly modern. But if you go back to old state James Bond, there was a way to make us... To make a fedora look very stylish.
Speaker 1:Now we are wearing relatively cheap fedoras. I think you drop a couple thousand dollars on a Bottega Roman weave fedora. It's a different conversation.
Speaker 2:Different story.
Speaker 1:Different story. No. I I I think it can be done. I think it can be done properly, but it requires discerning eyes and taste. Taste is the new mode in AI.
Speaker 1:The fedora will be a piece of that story. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So my questions my questions my questions about Seedance two point five. I was like, how is China winning?
Speaker 1:How is China winning in this like they have one fifth to compute, one... No rules. Is it that simple? And then also, why aren't they open sourcing it? They love open sourcing everything.
Speaker 1:They're like, we love open sourcing except when we're on the frontier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good.
Speaker 1:And there's a weird dynamic there. So first off, did some digging, got some answers. Let's dig into it. At a high level, intellectual property rules are somewhat flexible over there. That's true.
Speaker 1:But the models are insanely compute intensive. Like it is even if you're like I don't care about Hollywood IP come sue me in China. Good luck. You're still like there's still a finite amount of compute and so why aren't you on the RSI trajectory? Why aren't you working on coding models?
Speaker 1:Like, why don't you just take that compute and put it on the next GLM run or the next Kimmy run. Right? Well, there are reasons for that. First is that ByteDance has a more natural flywheel here than the leaders in America. So Anthropic and OpenAI do not have good surfaces to deliver video, AI or not video.
Speaker 1:Like OpenAI tried with Sora, got a decent amount of people to use but it's but it was not the obvious flywheel that ByteDance has. And so over in China ByteDance is a big company leading and they have TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, ads, e commerce, recommendation systems, tons of immediate benefits to the core business without needing to pull together a new demand surface for video. This sort of exists in America with Meta and GoogleYouTube. Right? But AI slop is deeply unpopular in America.
Speaker 1:Although debate whether or not this is this is sloppier than some of the videos we showed you. But both companies, DeepMind and and MSL, they are on the RSI trajectory. They're focusing on agentic workflows, personal agents, knowledge retrieval, coding, recursive self improvement, AGI. They are, it feels like they are more AGI pill than ByteDance which is like, look, we got a good thing going with Duyen and TikTok. We got a lot of video space.
Speaker 1:Let's dominate there because we have an because we have an opportunity. And and also like the a... The AI... The IP infringement thing is not actually dead to rights. They haven't necessarily been caught in any major way.
Speaker 1:It's just that the... When the model comes out, people are like, Tom Cruise. And it's like, perfectly Tom Cruise. And so it's like, what's going on here? So some of that could be the the outputs and the harness that actually like reviews outputs.
Speaker 1:Like, because there is an argument on fair use for training to include everything, when you think about TikTok. So people go to TikTok and they upload clips from movies. Some of those are fair use. Some of those are transformational. Like, you can actually make a vibe real from from Top Gun that is transformational and passes the fair use test, which is that it's not a replacement.
Speaker 1:So you're not like, why would I watch Top Gun when I could watch thirty seconds of Top Gun edited like a crazy hyper lapse edit? So it's competitive in that way. It is transformative and it provides some commentary layer on top. So that is actually okay. You can use clips from movies if you're commenting on the lighting and you're trying to explain the lighting.
Speaker 1:All that means is that some of that data goes on to TikTok and lives there forever and Hollywood can't say anything about that. Same thing with YouTube. Same thing with Instagram. There are plenty of film criticism channels that post barely long clips for movies completely acceptably and they don't even need to share revenue because it is transformational. It is open.
Speaker 1:It is fair use. And so so they have the they have Hollywood IP in the training data. They can train on it. Now there's a question about what the output should be. You still own your likeness and so even if you can perfectly recreate something, you might still get sued.
Speaker 1:Google has a... We we tested this out. Google has a has a music generation service. And if you go and say like I want a Madonna song, clearly YouTube has all the Madonna songs in the catalog. They can train on them.
Speaker 1:But it will say I can't exactly make a Madonna song. I can make a pop song that's generic. Here you go. And that doesn't pull enough for Madonna to get sued, at least in theory. We'll see how it plays out.
Speaker 1:And so, and then also like a lot of people just upload full movies to TikTok and stuff and they'll just be like, I uploaded all of Lord of the Rings. And even though that probably gets taken down, it goes through by Dance servers, might get saved somewhere, might get like soft deleted, like it like it doesn't exist on... You can't watch it on TikTok but it still exists on the server. So so they have a lot of data to train all this. But they're not open sourcing.
Speaker 1:They're not doing open weights. They're certainly not open sourcing the the training dataset. And it's a little bit of a narrative violation from the default Chinese AI strategy. There are a few reasons for this. First, no one wants to open source when they're in the lead.
Speaker 1:We've just seen this time and time again. And second, with coding models, open weights are a play to build a Chinese tech stack. And so you open source the coding model, build the developer ecosystem and then maybe that helps Huawei stay competitive. Maybe that, you know, reduces the amount of dominance of the American technology stack. And so there's there's a little bit of like public incentive to build up the indigenous supply chain that comes from that, less so in video where they are vertically integrated and have everything down to the distribution surface.
Speaker 1:So in general, if you are a challenger that needs an ecosystem, you want to open up. We saw this with the early meta stuff. And and then if you're an incumbent and you have distribution, you want to close down. So there's some interesting knockout effects mainly around a speculative future value of video models and training humanoid robots. Like China also seems to be doing really well in humanoids.
Speaker 1:If AI video becomes really important in sim to real translation and training these AI training humanoid robots with simulated video, then this could be like part of the bigger picture. But I think that's farther out. I think for the next month, we're just gonna be talking about memes and funny videos. Anyway. That's right.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.
Speaker 2:Just do it. Do it. Meta on a tear. Meta's up 27% this month according to Sheil. Monat, almost entirely thanks to Muse.
Speaker 2:This makes sense, right?
Speaker 1:Isn't that almost entirely
Speaker 2:thanks to Muse?
Speaker 1:I mean, there's some analysis...
Speaker 2:Basically, when you have a company that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on something without much to show for it and then you have something to show for it Yeah. Then the market's going react positively. Yeah. They're gonna... They're saying...
Speaker 2:So you're saying there's a fighting chance here.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And the feedback on the product is incredible. There's a lot of investors who have tried it and they're like, hey, this is a good product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And... And and and interestingly, like, they are in the lead in a subcategory where they have never been the lead before. Like Google had Nano Banana which like there was a moment where it was like, Nano Banana is the best. Obviously, Anthropic had best coding models for a while.
Speaker 1:Like like crowns have changed, but Met has never really held the best model in knowledge retrieval or when they did vibes. That was not the best version of that. But this is, at this moment in time, the version of of of what they have. And it's building off of a model that's not on the frontier, but able to deliver an experience that puts them in first place for the subcategory, which
Speaker 2:And is exciting. And can immediately be incredibly integrated across everything else that they do. Exactly. Shopping, messaging, all these different things. Yep.
Speaker 2:Shopify and Muse announced a partnership this morning
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:Counter positioning a little bit against Amazon. Ban Hammer. Amazon came down with the Ban Hammer. BUCO Capital says Amazon cuts off Muse while I am bullish Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here.
Speaker 2:Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new muse personal AI agent from shopping on amazon.com on behalf of customers after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e commerce site from the experience. The problem Amazon says is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses and it appears to capture and store customer credentials which the company says create privacy and security risk. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the pop up continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use to which our customers have agreed.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond Because...
Speaker 2:Walmart was always...
Speaker 1:Inventory overlap is is is higher than I think most people think.
Speaker 2:So I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps. Yeah. Specifically ChatGPT. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not the lead, you know, when when you're not the leader in the space, you're more willing to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Experiment...
Speaker 1:Up rolling their own. I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's two dog named AI agents that do the shopping. And then and then most recently...
Speaker 2:Tyler's been dailying Rufus, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just for everything.
Speaker 2:For everything.
Speaker 1:Just... Yeah. Just psychology.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Psychology. Getting close to solving another millennium.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Rufus underrated. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I know Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT instead of letting ChatGPT, like, check out. This is the whole Eric Seed for agent to commerce is a is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value. But I I don't know it's whole plan play out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saw saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that that are using Muse and excited about it say, why is why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so shortsighted. And then I actually saw two, in two instances they deleted because of course they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect. You can't serve ads to muse agents or instinct or chat or any of these other things.
Speaker 2:And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both Anthropic and OpenAI Oh,
Speaker 1:just
Speaker 2:the random. Last 12 Yeah. Wow. So they've done 76,000,000,000 in the last twelve months through q two of twenty twenty six. So obviously they're going to protect Obviously they're going to protect this.
Speaker 2:I think consumers would love to be able to check out with with other services. Yeah. It it is pretty gnarly to navigate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Amazon.com as amazing as the services overall.
Speaker 1:Describing experience is
Speaker 2:gnarly. No. It's it's...
Speaker 1:Just being a UX researcher at Amazon, they're calling it gnarly.
Speaker 2:It is fairly gnarly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And but but you can see that that there's and again, Peter Yeah. Who who effectively is the founder of Muse because he obviously
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Muse is based entirely on Open Claw. Open Claw and they built an amazing sort of effectively almost like
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think instinct too is is is has some Open Claw lineage. Is that correct? Yeah. Peter
Speaker 2:says the beauty of running a claw yourself, they cannot block you.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're gonna block me. When say claw, open 10,000 Amazon windows on my desktop. Open up 5,000 chrome tabs of of Amazon. So the souffinator... You can get banned even if you're running it locally.
Speaker 1:This has happened to me like this is this is not a full solution, but he is he is right that there will be more sovereignty and the users might win. Like, that's what we were talking to John Quinn about was that Amazon versus Perplexity Computer, the ruling was that Amazon can't block it if it's not... If it's running on the person's computer because it's like Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. I told the agent to open the Chrome tab but it's my Chrome tab on my computer. And so you shouldn't be able to block that because it's not a third party company. It's not it's not corporate warfare. You're coming to me, the consumer.
Speaker 1:The customer's always right.
Speaker 2:I can I can see that being the ultimate outcome? Yeah. I do think that's a bit... I mean, you basically... I I think Amazon's ad business, at least at least their search ad business, is something that eventually you might need to underwrite like cable television, where it's like
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You're basically saying that there's a terminal value here. People aren't gonna use their assistance
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To shop. Mhmm. That does... But some amount of people are just gonna keep going to amazon.com. Right now, it is...
Speaker 2:Amazon has made it quite easy to buy things on amazon.com. It's not like it's that much easier with an assistant, something I found is it's it's actually really nice having a single interface for all the things that you do. Right. So I like going to one place.
Speaker 1:Agent, push the order burrito button. That's really
Speaker 2:the future word. The souffinator has had some of the best commentary on this which actually dates back to he says, the knife fight already took place. It ended a year ago when I wrote the first entry in my agent to Commerce is a Mirage series. Amazon began blocking agents last July. It's currently suing Perplexity over autonomous shopping with Comet.
Speaker 2:Amazon won't capitulate. It doesn't have to. Alexa for shopping.
Speaker 4:Rufus generated 12,000,000,000
Speaker 2:in incremental revenue.
Speaker 1:Every time I hear Rufus or Sparky.
Speaker 2:Walmart's Sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company. AgenTek commerce is already a reality but it takes place on-site, not through independent agents. Chat GPT launched ads in February 2026 and shortly thereafter shuttered instant checkout. The affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Chat GPT has already demonstrated that.
Speaker 1:Yep. Advertising is the dominant business model. Yeah. It'll be interesting. I mean, when the open class stuff came out, was like, it feels like Napster.
Speaker 1:It feels like the Napster moment. Like, yeah, you can go check out on e commerce website but like nobody wants you to do that that way. And like you're gonna have to write some API binding and then like scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out because they're constantly gonna be fighting you. And you are sort of like playing this like game of cat and mouse, which you can play. And for certain for certain e commerce sites, they're gonna be very open to that.
Speaker 1:Other ones are gonna be a huge hassle to deal with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the question is can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with instinct. Instinct coming in. They did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites.
Speaker 2:You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? Yeah. So even though they're not paying for the product and they're incurring a lot of costs Yeah.
Speaker 2:Product's free to them, they're still mad that that they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit Sure. Not in their...
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. I wonder if we'll live in a world where, you know how Chatty Pizzy has like those recommended agentic actions? If like one of those could be like sponsored? Like, hey, like, want me to go shopping for you right now?
Speaker 1:Like...
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. No. And that's important because because companies will happily pay for incremental demand. Yeah. But the issue with with with agents is if you're saying go to Amazon and buy this thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The user already wanted to go to Amazon. Totally. It's not...
Speaker 1:But if I'm if I'm I'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers, I might choose to send you a notification when you open up ChatGPT that says like, hey, wanna go surfing? Wanna take it to the next level? Isn't that what happened?
Speaker 2:Basically.
Speaker 1:You got one one recommendation.
Speaker 2:Strategy pt recommends
Speaker 1:What what was it?
Speaker 2:Various agentic workflows for me.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I sent it earlier. And...
Speaker 1:One of them was?
Speaker 2:They recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's great. It's like... I
Speaker 2:know exactly what I need to do.
Speaker 1:Like, this isn't actually
Speaker 2:Raj Veer Okay. Called out something interesting
Speaker 1:What did say?
Speaker 2:Which is that threads started free falling in the charts right as Muse started growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Today on on Instagram, there there's a there's a hero story that's a full bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it. And yeah, they're probably saying like, let's let's funnel it over to Muse.
Speaker 1:And it makes sense. The the monetization on Muse, would expect to be way higher than threads. Threads, you get some display ads, it's text. It's never... That surface has never monetized as well as Instagram.
Speaker 1:So the best case was like you get something half as valuable as Instagram, a quarter, tenth as valuable. Yeah. Whereas music is like a new surface area where there's a whole bunch of different monetization opportunities and they already have the whole small business community. So I I I think it makes a ton of sense to to funnel the the the attention over there. Let me tell you about MongoDB.
Speaker 1:What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Now, going over to the the less the less good news in the agentic future that we're all living in. It feels like hallucinations are coming back. There was a moment where it was like if you hit GPT six pro with a query on some history or you basically want a Wikipedia page that's generated or a history report, pull some data, you could rely on it that it was not totally making things up, directionally correct, bunch of really high quality links, pretty valuable.
Speaker 1:And so hallucinations this year have kinda gone away. You still get slop if you're doing something on the on the frontier like trying to design some system in code or using blender or even AI video. You'll see little things here and there. But for knowledge retrieval, the the hallucination problem kind of went away. But it's coming back in full force.
Speaker 1:David here said instinct made up his middle name and he can't board his flight because he tried to use his agent to book a flight and it just made up David Bomb Chang Choi which I guess is not his middle name. And I've had that before where...
Speaker 2:I find it a little hard. Well, one we know we know why hallucinations would be happening, which is like if you're serving a product for free at scale, you have to figure out a way to do it really cheaply. And so they're they're certainly using older models and trying... And and again trying to find...
Speaker 1:How's someone figured out the model? Was it? Kimi. I think it's Kimi running OpenClaw. Right?
Speaker 1:But it's hosted in the cloud and so you get an OpenClaw instance cloud hosted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That said, I've been in situations where my name was misspelled on like flight details and this is pretty easy to to resolve. So hopefully...
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. You think it's not that big of a deal because like you can just get on
Speaker 2:the flight... Here's my ID. I made a mistake. Totally.... Fix it and I'll give you new boarding pass.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They might kick you out of security line. So if you're running really late, as I like to do, you might you might you might struggle to get on the plane, you might miss your flight, but that's okay. You gotta miss a couple.
Speaker 2:This was interesting from former Meta employee Nikita Beer. It says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto negotiating for stuff on Facebook Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots, low balling sellers will eventually kill the product.
Speaker 2:But this was escalated to Zach by the Muse team and he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little.
Speaker 1:Wait. Why will that kill the product?
Speaker 2:I mean, think about the experience of you tell your bot like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items. Go anytime one of them appears auto negotiate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with the negotiation?
Speaker 6:You can do outbound too.
Speaker 1:You can go outbound. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yes. Message everyone on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Yes. I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know. I got one pair of keys and I saw your post... You liked a post from the Dodge Hellcat community.
Speaker 1:Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll I'll need cash.
Speaker 2:Don't ask questions.
Speaker 1:Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Got Augustus Doricko back in the Ultra Dome, back in the waiting room. He's coming in hot off of the series b. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Gentlemen, I'm blessed. It's a pleasure to
Speaker 2:be chatting again. Congratulations. Dude, you align all this news? Yeah. Was that strategic?
Speaker 2:Was this like a...
Speaker 1:You're like, I need to pump the series b so I'll get engaged to get an extra press cycle going?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. They were close together,
Speaker 2:I guess. That was coincidence.
Speaker 1:They were both embargoed. Same weekend maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's what you were.
Speaker 1:Obviously. Congratulations. We're very happy for you on on on the engagement. But also the series b. How are things going?
Speaker 1:What's new in your world? How much rain are you making these days?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, first of all, the the 100,000,000 that we raised, I'm super grateful to have done that with with great partners.
Speaker 1:Hey. Goodness. Keep... We need... We're gonna need
Speaker 2:a bigger gong the next We are. We've been with... I feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date. Day one. And, yeah.
Speaker 2:Time to upgrade for us.
Speaker 4:No. You were there you were there early. I, I was wondering whether a $100,000,000 bag was big enough for the Seizagun. But...
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 4:The the reality is it's it's it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending.
Speaker 1:Wait. What are they spending?
Speaker 4:They understand... Say again?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what what are they spending? Order of magnitude?
Speaker 4:So so so they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource. We talk about critical minerals. We talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agricultural and food. And if we don't produce more, and cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, the the bodies of water across The United States are going to be, impaired to the point of mass evacuation.
Speaker 4:So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health, of the country and then also for our allies overseas that need more water, like Jordan in The Middle East, like Morocco, and so on.
Speaker 1:Did you get saved by data center backlash? Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data center started sucking all the air out of the discourse.
Speaker 4:Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our reservoirs.
Speaker 1:How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert. Talk to data center people. They'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We use water, but we recycle it. At the same time, you know, water usage, it... It's low, but everyone's saying we're gonna build a thousand times more data centers. So at a certain point, it might be significant.
Speaker 1:What what... What's your take on it?
Speaker 4:Well, the reality is, yes. American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So so does municipal use. The showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers, but data centers do consume water.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West, do you want to give water to computer or to, your shower and your... Probably computer.
Speaker 6:Probably probably computer.
Speaker 1:Asking... All
Speaker 2:weekend generating AI videos. But...
Speaker 1:If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower. I'll walk in.
Speaker 4:But, John Jordy, you can have AI slot videos in the shower if you just make it via cloud seeding.
Speaker 1:I can have my cake and eat it too with cloud seeding. Precisely. Precisely. Is there actually any any closed... Any any near term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers, or is that, like, further out?
Speaker 4:Rainmaker already has one deal closed with Okay. Hyperscaler, and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others. Offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior, that's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide. And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. But keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk... Yeah. Talk... I...
Speaker 2:Talk more about that as... Personally, as a skier, I'm I'm, I'm quite fascinated. But but, like, what what are what are those deployments gonna look like? Like, are you... Is that basically you have a a team that's set up at an individual mountain and then you're basically...
Speaker 2:I mean, the... These are, businesses that have basically dealt with making artificial snow for such a long period of time. I'm sure they took, like, very naturally to the concept. But what are these deployments gonna actually look like?
Speaker 4:So they haven't taken supernaturally to it initially because cloud seeding and weather modification has mostly been full of Fugazi and snake oil for the last hundred years. Right? There, are many, many people in the last couple decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time. If you can't do that, then, why would somebody bother paying you? It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska and Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water that they've taken an interest, and we wouldn't be able to do that if not for our efforts to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world.
Speaker 4:The weather is something that's historically underinvested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks. We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions and then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers.
Speaker 1:Are you gonna stay with drone delivery for the foreseeable future or is there a howitzer in the pipeline? Because I I I've seen though some ski resorts actually have howitzer cannons that will just launch conventional munitions to cause avalanches to clear avalanches for safety. But they already have some of the equipment, and I imagine with the right round, you fire the right chemical and disperse it at the right... It doesn't seem that crazy to me. It might be cheaper, but I'm sure you've looked at it.
Speaker 1:What's the decision tree for you?
Speaker 3:At the
Speaker 4:end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants. Right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you? If it's a rocket or a howitzer or me skydiving and halo jumping through a cloud with with silver iodide in my hands.
Speaker 4:Like, whichever way is best works. We're taking a really big and deliberate bet on autonomy. Drones, they... The ones that Raymakers built are unparalleled in their capability to fly in these severe atmospheric conditions much more wide a flight envelope than most manned aircraft. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost effective observations, and and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers. So we're gonna keep using, our drones and make them increasingly autonomous. Although, we'll probably do some research with plans in the not too distant future.
Speaker 2:How does El Nino affect your sales cycle? Like...
Speaker 1:Is that gonna put you out of business? It's gonna be rough couple of months?
Speaker 2:But I just but I just imagine there there's some players that are like, I think we're gonna be good this year. Yeah. Let's check back.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's kind of a cyclical business. Right?
Speaker 2:Shift your focus to other parts of The US.
Speaker 4:It's it's a... You know, I think Time Morris commented recently that building rainmaker is like playing Diablo on insanity mode for startups. Sure. Not only is it a seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter, but also it is annually cyclical because of El Nino, El Nino, La Nina. Some regions are gonna get a lot more natural snow
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:But, other regions will get a lot less, and Rainmaker will be working harder there. That said, even in the regions around this, Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies that are getting more snow, they're so critically depleted that they need excess snow melt relative to the baseline year in order to refill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, etcetera. So we're geographically hedged in order to accommodate this, not just within The United States, but across the world. That is going to scale up the extent to which, you know, we're we're hedged across multiple different climates simultaneously.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What does the team look like? Where are you... Are are you... Have you expanded beyond the Gundo?
Speaker 1:I know you have, like, four deployed operating bases, but what's the footprint of the company right now?
Speaker 4:Well, you asked first what does the team look like. I first would say drippy.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh, look at that.
Speaker 4:A series a series of Hermes ties that
Speaker 2:we've designed to be with.
Speaker 1:I love it. This is
Speaker 4:a nice collection of different ties that have clouds on them.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Are you are you donning ties more or less often than you were last year when I saw you on local TV every week?
Speaker 6:More. More. More often.
Speaker 4:And, you know, the the Gunda thing, it's great. I love it. I am a Gunda supremacist. Absolutely. And we couldn't have built Rainmaker if not for that.
Speaker 4:But we wanna serve water for everybody. Sure. We wanna serve water to the federal government, to nations around the world. And in order to do so, we need to collaborate with the best national labs and universities across the country. Being the mulleted guy in Yeezy is not necessarily the outfit and persona that you wanna don when you're talking about those research scopes of work.
Speaker 4:So I'm wearing a lot more Hermes. I am wearing a little bit less Yeezy, and that'll probably persist for a while.
Speaker 6:Last
Speaker 2:question last question for me. As as some of these open problems, Millennium Prize problems have been solved, a lot of people outside of San Francisco are like, cool. The the nerd solved another math problem. Like, you know, they don't... They're not like as as captivated by it.
Speaker 2:But something that I've been thinking about is like for for every one of those sort of high profile open problems, there's tons of businesses that have access to the same models or models with close to the same capabilities that are just applying them to their industries. And I feel like for you and and and your category, it just feels like having intelligence on demand that you can apply to these problems that like hasn't had 10,000 PhDs working on it. You talked about how, you know, hedge funds have paid a lot of attention to the weather weather because of commodities trading. But are you feeling like an acceleration in in in your team's abilities because of new models or are you not feeling it yet?
Speaker 4:To give credit where credit is due, the nerds in San Francisco have done a spectacular thing. And... A tip
Speaker 1:of the fedora, perhaps.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Tip of the old fedora. Worth worth taking a point too. Right? Like, Richard Feynman was a spectacular scientist. Oppenheimer, spectacular scientist.
Speaker 4:We can do great in frontier science without, being total nerds. Just a reminder to the San Franciscan audience listening. But, again, you can, you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at Rainmaker because of the models available. Astra has been a spectacular lever for Rainmaker, and we're gonna continue using it. And and then also, like, developing better and better models with the, informed participation of the LLMs, critiquing the output.
Speaker 4:Like, that is something that is actually genuinely accretive to our understanding of the atmosphere, and and it's gonna become all the more so in time.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the engagement and safe trips. Yeah. Massive travels. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great progress, dude. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have Vinod Khosla coming in the TBPN UltraDome in just a minute.
Speaker 1:First, I wanted to... We're going to talk to him about personal agents and I wanted to share this hot take from Alex Kerr who says, I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents optimizing entirely for the outcome and forgetting that for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of the experience. Travel is the obvious answer. People almost always never want book me a trip. They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends, and eventually book.
Speaker 1:I think you can actually do all that with with agents, but he says that the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think. That's why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category. Well, Vinod Khosla has seen both, you know, develop over his career. He's the perfect person to talk to about this. And so we're very pleased to be joined by Vinod Khosla, founder What's going on?
Speaker 1:Of Ventures. Vinod, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I would love to hear about how you're thinking about this moment in personal agents. It feels like a new category, a new feature, a new product, a new winner take all potentially, how are you viewing the market? How are you investing against it?
Speaker 3:Well, it's a new category. It'll be a broad category. I do think it'll be very diverse and I don't think there will be a winner take all. Every one of the big labs or big companies, Meta included and Google included, will want to have their agents.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They will have different tradeoffs and I think we'll see a lot of diversity in requirements. Mhmm. As to Alex's comment, I think he hasn't used agents enough to understand much of that diversity that he's thinking about. Like Sure. We want to browse.
Speaker 3:The best way to browse is have the agent do the work for you and give you the options and ask you questions and be interactive with it. It's amazingly good when you can do it that way. I think some companies will optimize for it. I think the fundamental difference Mhmm. Will be, do you want to be an advertising product or be something else?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Do you want to trust Meta with your data Or you wanna... And some people will and they do today and I think Meta will be successful. I'm not trying to say they won't be. Mhmm. But there's others who will have different trade offs and I do think agents from start ups will move faster than agents from the big companies.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that makes that makes a lot of sense. There's... I wanted to ask you about the the knife fight that's unfolding between agents which are right now deeply aligned with users. Right?
Speaker 2:Even fundamentally, last year we went through the cycle of labs and different players launching new browsers
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I thought was fascinating at the time because it felt like for me, ChatGPT was a browser. Yeah. It would replace my need to go to 20 different websites to understand like a topic or or a certain Yeah. Of 20 Chrome
Speaker 1:tabs,
Speaker 2:it's already fast was a question. It's just that consumers like the ability to do a lot of things from one single interface without bump, you know, jumping around and they can ask a question about a product and then navigate to another and all these different things. But but it seems like there's this, you know, something that's been basically ongoing, this fight between new agents that wanna just do what the user what the user wants in a way that's aligned to them and these platforms like Amazon that Mhmm. That have big businesses that are under attack by these sort of new products.
Speaker 3:I think you're right on there. There's a massive difference between a company wanting its agenda. And the browser battle you referred to wasn't for the consumer. It wasn't the consumer wanted to move from Chrome to something else. It was the company saying, Google controls what gets...
Speaker 3:Happens on the Chrome browser. I don't want that, so I'll have my own browser.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:That's a very different need than what the consumer wants. Yeah. I think from the consumer's point of view, with all the assault on the consumer, the marketing assault, should say, from AI, and all the AIs ganging up on changing shades of blue, which Meta does to make you click more or other things, TikTok plays. Do you wanna be subject to the consumer or fight all the AIs with your own AI, your personal AI that does... Only has your interests at heart?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I think that's a very, very large and important category. I think I talked about this first about four years ago. The largest opportunity being protecting the consumer against all the AI assaults and getting all their work done without it being biased. Today, you can't even look at the reviews, without understanding whether it was paid for by whoever's marketing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So representing the consumer and having an AI that loyal to the consumer, not to a particular company, a particular product, a particular point of view, is going to be very very important.
Speaker 2:Dude, so so Silicon Valley has long said consumers consumers won't pay for things at scale. There's Ben
Speaker 1:talked... Want to be entertained. They don't want to be productive. Yeah. If you're building a tool that is a productivity tool, you ultimately need to sell that business as an enterprise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And yet, it feels like that is gonna be the most aligned model for agents because your agents can go fight different things, it can save you money, all these different things. It feels possible that this time could be different. I don't wanna... Maybe it's too early to say, but an agent that can get $20 a month and it saves you couple hours a month and it...
Speaker 1:That was Mark Zuckerberg's pitch. Said Muse will save you money. And we're already seeing examples of people using it to cancel subscriptions that they're not using, get refunds. And so there might be some economic calculus where it looks more like paying for TurboTax than, you know, browsing Instagram reels potentially. So how
Speaker 3:do you think about monetization? ChatGPT Yeah. With its subscription service proved that consumers will pay if there's enough value. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Massive business got built. Google always assumed consumers won't pay. Yep. And that was the conventional wisdom and chat GPT in my view destroyed that.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:For enough value, consumers will pay. Mhmm. Now saving you money is really, really valuable for most consumers, and they will pay if something does that. Knowing that it represents them, knowing every time they're about to spend some money, they can find a more efficient way to get the same thing, that's a big deal for consumers because whether you're looking in travel, whether you're looking in shopping, there's always ways to save money. Subscriptions is a great example.
Speaker 3:I have way more subscriptions than I know about. And and so representing the consumer's interest and acting on their behalf as it was an... As if it was an omnipotent personal assistant is what matters, and personal is the key. It's for them, the consumer, not for some company.
Speaker 1:How do you think about moats in this era of personal agents? There's a there's a thesis that's percolating right now that says once you install a personal agent, once you've given one personal maybe people won't trust Meta. Certain people obviously will. But the people that do and they go in that bucket and they start daily driving that particular personal agent, they give it access to their calendar, their email, their text messages, they are not going to move to another agent even if it's a little bit better. At the same time, I feel like there's a risk of if you're on instinct you can go to Muse and say, hey, just off board me from instinct and set up Muse or vice versa.
Speaker 1:And so it might be a little bit less of a hassle to off board, not quite as strong of a mode as traditional social networking. But how do you see the moats question playing out in the era of personal agents?
Speaker 3:I think off boarding will be possible, a little bit clumsy, but then if you have a good agent, tell it to do the off boarding. Yeah. And the on boarding onto the new one. Yeah. Know?
Speaker 2:And we
Speaker 1:saw that with OpenAI and Anthropic saying, hey, go dump this prompt in the other chat app to get all your memories. Come and paste it over here. And they were fighting over that because it was possible to move from one LLM to What the
Speaker 3:I would say is the complexity of tasks, especially as companies make it hard to off board, will no longer Mhmm. Be a barrier. Mhmm. You know, if I had to look at all my information on Google or Meta and figure it out, it's complex. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:If I wanna know... I don't want Google to know where I was on September 3 at 5PM, they probably know, and I can probably disable that, but it's hard. Mhmm. AI is just gonna be good at doing all these complex things, and so I think that mode disappears. So what's the mode?
Speaker 3:I believe the mode will be trust. In a company that develops trust with consumers, and that's where Meta has a huge disadvantage. So the trust will be the moat. That'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important.
Speaker 3:Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done. Excuse the language.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true. It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's like we miss it a lot, but...
Speaker 3:Basically, if you if you look at the Vagio agent Yeah. You don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck. Yeah. Most agents then just tell you they're stuck or don't even tell you that they're just stuck. The audio agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:You lose a human to complete your task. Interesting. So the idea of trust first, your your information, your most private information, of what you like, what you don't, what you buy, what your preferences are, that's trust. Mhmm. Then there's completion.
Speaker 3:If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. And for the very large companies, it's very hard to have humans in the loop. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. I think
Speaker 1:You need to scale it. I mean, it's it's it's very difficult to come over the top with, you know, a product that can service a billion users that has humans in the loop because you have to stand up. Yeah. That won't
Speaker 3:So there's an advantage to being small and agile
Speaker 1:Interesting. And and...
Speaker 3:Okay. Right? And and frankly, for people who need stuff done
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's much much better if you pay a little for the human in the loop and get things done, then... Yeah. So the other thing that really important, and you talked about the Chrome browser, not everything will be in the browser. Mhmm. The right agent won't be an app.
Speaker 3:It just... Where do most people live? They live in their email. They live in text messaging. They live in Slack.
Speaker 3:They live in other channels. Mhmm. And so agent has to operate primarily with all those channels in the app. If there's one, and there may not be one, it's just in the background. So you don't have to open the app.
Speaker 3:You just text message your agent Mhmm. Like you do with four from Voyager Mhmm. And it takes care of it. Or sometimes you just pick up the phone and do that. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And sometimes the agent just has to pick up the phone and have a conversation with the merchant.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, you know, meeting the consumer where they are Yeah. The consumer experience is really, really important. Not get stuck in redo text only. We do browser only. You have to be in our app.
Speaker 3:You... Users don't like those constraints.
Speaker 1:How do you
Speaker 3:think And I about don't wanna install one more app on my phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's reflected in the App Store. It's it's all just AI apps. How do you how do you think about the way you will interface with personal agents over the next few years. If you want to send a message to me, John, will I receive that message from you?
Speaker 1:Will I think it's coming from you or will I think it's coming from your agent? Will your agent identify itself as Vinod's agent with a different name, with a different identity, a different persona perhaps? Or will you want to tuck the AI beneath the fold of your digital life so that it's sending emails as you?
Speaker 3:So I was actually doing some ordering from Petco yesterday.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And it said some things to me and I said, just pretend to me me. And it said, I can't do that. I won't do that. Mhmm. So this goes back to trust as a key mold.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Right? So I do think for both parties, you have to be transparent. The agent is your agent, but it's not you. Mhmm. And I think that's important and that'll engender trust Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And we'll see much better...
Speaker 1:I want to stay on Petco. Dog, cat, bird. What type of animal are you most fond of?
Speaker 3:Oh, dogs for sure. I
Speaker 1:mean,
Speaker 3:I'm sorry?
Speaker 1:What kind of dogs?
Speaker 3:Oh. I'm a big fan of Newfoundlands. Have
Speaker 1:a Newfoundland. I love Newfoundland.
Speaker 3:Oh, awesome.
Speaker 1:I had two. One made it to eleven. He passed away. Rest in peace. But we have another one that's going strong.
Speaker 1:A about a 100 and So 30 pound you know, doggy.
Speaker 3:I I had I had two Newfoundlands Yeah. That died last year. Were both around two hundred pounds.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Wow. And so we now have a puppy, I was trying to get a cast done. Yeah. I could have looked at six websites for this specialty type of dog collar after My puppy had surgery last week. It could call lots of stores.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And look for do they have same day delivery, which is the key thing I was looking for. Yeah. And can it pay for me and all that stuff. One of the great things is payments is going be a real differentiator.
Speaker 3:Sure. If you can be absolutely secure and give your agent, my... Your credit card, that's a big deal. Mhmm. And there will be lots of abuses or mistakes in that domain.
Speaker 3:I feel comfortable with the Wajo agent giving it my Amex card
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Because it has certain types of protections that are going to be patented, so I won't go into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I will be absolutely sure that card won't be reused for something I didn't authorize.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You can sort of set up payment rules if it's over this threshold and that's and that's actually in code. That's not something that can hallucinate. It made a mistake and the model thought it was a $100, it was actually a $100,000.
Speaker 1:It it makes a mistake like that. So Yep. Yeah. Makes sense that we'll be in this blended regime of both, you know, deterministic software, stochastic software.
Speaker 2:Last thing for me, do you think we'll get to the point where users will want to give like something like power of attorney to their to their agents? Dan in our chat was asking about that and I've thought about this before. Just working with executive, normal executive assistants, it's always very frustrating where you get to the point where a certain service will be like, hey, they they need... They actually need you to call now. I can't sort of like take this any further.
Speaker 2:So it feels like we'll we'll get to that point eventually. All
Speaker 3:these questions come back to what's the more. Trust is the more. And will you give your power of attorney, you know, to the agent if you trust it? My bet is 95%... 5% of users will do anything.
Speaker 3:95% will not trust giving your power of attorney to your agent today. Now in four years will that have... Start to happen? I suspect 40 or 50% of people will give a power of attorney to their agent by 2030
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Because they've had enough interaction and developed enough trust. Mhmm. So trust becomes the key issue and this is why startups may have an advantage. Startups with great transparency will have an advantage over people who already have a brand of lack of trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's been your journey with Wajo and Pho? Did you invest early and then this is just the right product at the right moment? Did they pitch you on this day one? Has this been years in the making?
Speaker 1:What's been the journey?
Speaker 3:Well, we invested in it day one. In fact, we brainstormed with Shivani, who's just a great technologist and a real understanding of the human factors. Mhmm. Those were two things that are key. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So we invested and we even brainstormed the idea. So we're really happy with Vajo where she's... And and she's of course deeply technical and has this other understanding of what consumers need, and I I call it empathy for consumers is really what you need Yeah. And say, how do I best represent them? That's the right mindset.
Speaker 3:So we've been very excited about Wadjog.
Speaker 1:Do you need an access code? Is it in early access? How does how does actual onboarding work right now? Because it feels like if there's a human loop, you can't jump straight to general availability because you might get flooded. Right?
Speaker 3:You you also wanna grow slowly Yeah. Because you want lots of connectivity to lots of things and that builds over time as you get more users. Today, it is not free access. Okay. It's limited access by invite only.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And hopefully, you can give people an invite code from the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll share out some invites to anyone in By the
Speaker 3:September 30, it'll be a free release. Fantastic. By the end of the month, you'll see it pretty open to everybody.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, breaking
Speaker 2:it down and... Yeah. Great great to see you. Great
Speaker 1:update.... Tussling with all the different trade offs in the modern era. Have a great rest of your day, Vinod.
Speaker 2:We'll Thank talk you. To you Great. Cheers.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:And send my best to the puppy. I hope he heals up quickly. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's some breaking news before we bring in our next guest. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Authority, has restricted airspace up to 10,000 feet for the Tesla Roadster reveal.
Speaker 1:Remember, we have a bet going here. Elon has teased that the next Tesla Roadster, which will be announced October 2, I think, October 1, he has teased that the Tesla Roadster will leave the ground. He said it might fly. There's a SpaceX collab. There's four cold gas thrusters.
Speaker 1:We had a debate. Where did you... You had six inches? You had six inches?
Speaker 6:No. I was at nine.
Speaker 1:You were at nine and I was at six feet?
Speaker 2:I was at half a foot.
Speaker 1:Half a foot? I thought you were
Speaker 6:at eight inches.
Speaker 1:No. I thought I was at like six feet. I wanted jumping. I wanted flying. I'm going 10,000
Speaker 2:did see something. They FAA shut down the airspace around the launch site.
Speaker 1:That's this. They shut down... So the FAA has has issued a temporary flight restriction over SpaceX's MacGregor, Texas, rocket development test facility ahead of Tesla's October 1 roads to reveal. The restriction covers a 1.5 nautical mile radius around the site and extends from the ground up 10,000 feet in the air. Altitude is unusually high for MacGregor where restrictions tied to static engine fires and component testing have often topped out closer to 2,000 feet.
Speaker 1:So they're going five times higher. The larger block of airspace is feeding speculation that Tesla plans to demonstrate the long promised SpaceX package for the Roadster. Elon Musk has previously described a version of the car equipped with cold gas thrusters that could dramatically improve acceleration and potentially allow the vehicle to briefly lift off the ground. Reports earlier this year suggested Tesla was preparing a remotely operated demonstration at McGregor with the car unmanned and spectators positioned hundreds of yards away because of the expected noise, which is just a hilarious a hilarious thing. You're demoing something that if you drive it within hundreds of yards of someone's house, they will be annoyed or maybe not safe.
Speaker 1:Like, is this going to work? It's a lot of it's a lot of showmanship for what could wind up just being like a pretty fast sports car. But Tesla has not confirmed that the Roadster will actually leave the ground. So far the company has only teased the event with language like go for launch and imagery showing the car on what appears to be a launch pad, but the FAA restrictions suggest Tesla and SpaceX are preparing for something beyond an ordinary static presentation. Whether that means the Roadster will actually hover on October 1 remains unknown, but the FAA has now reserved a substantial column of Texas airspace for whatever happens.
Speaker 1:I wanted like an f 35. I wanted to do full VTOL. If I want to park, just bring me up, plop me down. I don't know. I'm excited.
Speaker 1:I think I think he's gotta deliver something. It's been nine years since he took the deposit. Are you gonna put a deposit down? I think it's... Down....
Speaker 1:$45,000 due within like ten days. And it feels like it's kind of high optionality because if it's incredible that so many people are gonna flood in after the fact, but unlike waiting nine years, you can just wait until October 1. If it's a flop, you can just get a refund. So for locking up $50,000 for ten days?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think you should do it.
Speaker 1:It's pretty tempting. It's pretty tempting. I need to really read the fine print or have AI read the fine print to understand if there's a chance I get hosed. But there's a chance that you get one of the first ones not even, oh, it pops financially and it resells. Just the fact that it could be a really special and cool car that's really fun to have.
Speaker 1:And if they bring it in with the final price of $2.50, there's a lot that they can do to impress at that price range. If it comes in at 800, they're competing with a lot
Speaker 2:of stuff. If if it's just a if it's just a sports car that looks like a Cybertruck, it'll be a huge hit.
Speaker 1:If it's $2.50. If it's 800, now you're competing with new Vollary. And new Vollary has a v 10, v eight, something like that. Like, it needs to be it needs to be Cybertruck, Cybericon, like Huracan Cybertruck, but also two fifty. Because then you're like, wow.
Speaker 1:This is this is crazy. This is competitive. And that's what Tesla has been for a long time. The Model S was was really, really performing, delivered a lot of value for a pretty decent price. Same thing with the Model Y.
Speaker 1:It's still like a value play even though it is a relatively mid market expensive car.
Speaker 2:Well, I bet you Aaron has has his preorder down from like...
Speaker 1:Find out. That's gonna be the first question. We're bringing in Aaron Levie from Box. He's the co founder, CEO. Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Did you deposit for a Roadster nine
Speaker 8:years ago?
Speaker 1:For a Roadster deposit?
Speaker 6:I I would... I I didn't do nine years ago. Was very tempted this time around though. Right? I did I did go down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 6:There's these great YouTube, you know, kind of...
Speaker 1:Speculative fiction?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sleuth folks that Okay. Did you see the thing if you
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 6:If you white out the the the video it says where we are going.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Do you see this?
Speaker 1:Is is that a reference to Back to the Future?
Speaker 6:Yes. So...
Speaker 1:So it might it might go 88 miles an hour. That would be huge.
Speaker 6:Either that or or...
Speaker 1:Or so...
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we're... But there's a whole... I went I went and watched a twenty minute video. I'm very excited.
Speaker 6:I'm glad that... Though? What's your theory?
Speaker 1:No. I don't know.
Speaker 6:The the... I mean, obviously, Elon would make a flying car. So it's I think we're all we're all waiting for that. Now, I guess the question is, like, practically, what is it... What does that do if you literally can't fly it?
Speaker 6:But but but like...
Speaker 1:Fly it if you're within 1.5 nautical miles of Starbase, Texas and the FAA clears you, I guess. But...
Speaker 2:I wonder I wonder if there's some loophole where like if you're on your own private property, can you can you get off the ground and and you could have... You know those people have have...
Speaker 1:Those VTOL things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. I was Those gonna are say
Speaker 1:the same.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, you drive onto it and then it spins your car around.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Turntables.
Speaker 2:So you could make it like, you know, if your your garage is tight and you wanna turn around, little indoor...
Speaker 6:We we may have reached the point though where Elon is building things for his personal life that exceed our normal zoning laws of of mere mortals.
Speaker 1:There's gonna be a lot of people with deposits that are like, you're telling me I need a 100 acres of private land now? I was told that this would go zero to 60 in two seconds. And the craziest thing is the original the original specs were zero to 60 in two seconds. Cars already do that. The model s plaid did that.
Speaker 1:Not not crazy. 250 k. Okay. That's like a reasonable price point for a super car these days. But 6...
Speaker 1:Over 600 miles of range, which is Mhmm. Which is actually not been done by any EV.
Speaker 6:That's hard.
Speaker 1:And in a smaller vehicle, it's not like it's gonna be huge. So Yeah. Very very uncertain how...
Speaker 6:They seem to be doing things with batteries that I never thought would be possible with batteries. Like, was always told, like, twenty years ago that, you know, we'll never get more than 30 miles in a in a car ride. So you just wake up one day and I guess it's 600.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. I mean, I guess if you launch with the cold gas thrusters, put it in neutral, coast for a 100 miles of rain.
Speaker 6:Maybe that's exactly... Yeah. They get you the first 300 miles with
Speaker 1:Yeah. 600 downhill as long as you just cruise them. Anyway, how are things going at Box? Roller coaster ride. SaaSpocalypse fully canceled.
Speaker 1:We were very happy to see that. Bunch of we we were early to cancel. We actually...
Speaker 6:You canceled it within like three hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. We were like, we're in three hours. Not happening.
Speaker 2:But we did have we did have a a newsletter that went out like Yeah. During the depths and I believe we were the first people... Asspocalypse is cancelled.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because...
Speaker 6:You know, you almost though had to... You almost couldn't cancel it too soon though because you had to have the full trough. Yeah. And you had to have like full capitulation on, okay, it turns out that there there is actually software that is powering the world and these systems of of record are incredibly robust and Yep. And actually the more agents that you have running on these systems, in fact, the more important the backbone becomes.
Speaker 6:Yep. You know, like everybody always sort of made this claim that once you have all these agents, then actually all they really need is a database underneath. But the problem is is that database has to be coordinated against possibly thousands of end users and then possibly tens of thousands of agents. And so the the access controls, the business logic, being able to actually render the the experience, the security, obviously, you know, see OpenAI Hugging Face like the... These core systems are actually gonna become more important in a world of of all of these agentic workloads.
Speaker 6:So it's good to see the market, I think, paying more attention to that reality and it's obviously, you know, driven by, I think, the continued performance of these these software products doing well in the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, even over the weekend, was generating AI videos. I was trying to get them from my PC to my phone. And at no point was I like, build a new storage system for these videos. If it could do it, I'm like, I don't want to waste a prompt.
Speaker 1:I don't want to waste a second doing that. Let's use what I already use. Let's use all the tools that are already built out that are robust and I can share links and all these things. I don't need you to one shot some some shoddy clone. It's a waste of time.
Speaker 1:It's a waste of money. It's a waste of energy. A bunch of things. But in terms of in terms of resetting the narrative with the market, the street, investors, employees, everyone, how much of it is going back to, okay, you thought this thing was existential. You thought we were going be in so much trouble.
Speaker 1:We're not. It's business as usual versus there might be still some threats, but there's more opportunity and that's actually outweighing the threats and so that's why the company is performing well in the markets over the last couple months, for example.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Very much not business as usual I think for anybody in software. Okay. So so, like like, this is... Is go time.
Speaker 6:I don't know if a single company is still being run the way that it was run maybe, you know, eighteen months ago. Mean, everybody is is, you know, running insanely fast into the future. And then I think we're we're... You know, there there still will clearly be some parts of the market that don't capture as much of the value
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:As they did previously. Mhmm. And then there are gonna be some parts of the market that capture actually a ton more value than they did previously because of what agents can do. I mean, you look at infrastructure providers as an example, like the cloud flares of the world totally on fire because agents need sandboxes, they need compute, they need network, they need gateways, like like great business. If you look at Databricks or Snowflake Yeah.
Speaker 6:Agents need to be able to triage against large sets of data that are that that that that you need to be able to pull together in one kind of common system. So doing fantastically well. For us, we have reaccelerated growth far past our internal plans because it turns out that enterprises need core systems to be able to manage their unstructured data. And agents need to be able to work with that unstructured data to make decisions or move information through a workflow, whether it's all of your contracts or your research materials or marketing assets or financial documents. And again, like, it might be easy in a personal productivity sense to be like, okay, well, I can just have that data in some cloud system or even in my local device.
Speaker 6:Now imagine an enterprise with 10,000 employees. Yeah. How do you ensure that those agents continue to go after the actual canonical records? Yeah. The actual documents that that are the real sources of truth and that are the authoritative versions of that data?
Speaker 6:That means you platforms. And we're obviously competing for how do you become the platform for all of this unstructured data. But I think there's a lot of value being created really across these ecosystems. And I would say right now, my view would be it is unequivocally been a net positive for software even with some of the spaces being under pressure simply because how much more work agents are doing on these systems and the need to be able to provide the guardrails and be able to be the traffic cop for what those agents are doing and to be able to deploy these agents natively within your own agent harness Yeah. In your own system of record.
Speaker 6:And and all of that is creating more value for these platforms.
Speaker 1:At at a system level, what is the what is the biggest like lever that you want to pull? Is it like, speed of interaction with agents? Because in the previous paradigm, search and and, you know, file retrieval, if it took a couple minutes, somebody's drinking coffee, they're checking their email. Maybe it's not as, like, crucial. But if it's like, if my agent is hanging because I'm, you know, churning through a bunch of of records or files, that could actually be more annoying, like like...
Speaker 1:Or or or is it just the volume of content because even an employee, if they're not like totally slopping it up, they're probably producing more files, more contents, more video. Everything's just multiplying. So like where have you been like, okay, this is the lever we need to really pull to make sure that agents like love the Box experience?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I mean, I think realistically all of the above. First all, there's an explosion in just content creation in general. Agents are producing content at an unbelievable rate and Yeah. You know, you...
Speaker 1:You gone through this? I wanna talk I wanna talk about that, but let let's finish what you're saying. Sure. Sorry.
Speaker 6:There's just data more than ever and and Yeah. And you're gonna need to you're gonna need to govern it. You're gonna need to store it. You need to manage it in... Just as if a person created it.
Speaker 6:And so all of that is obviously like the core backbone system. We're doing a lot of work at the second layer, which is which is... We we we effectively think about it as sort of context retrieval for your unstructured data. But obviously, if you did a regular search, you know, two or three years ago and you compared it to a search today when we actually can capture embeddings of those documents, we can our agents do re rankings, of the search results. We search in parallel so we can run multiple versions of your query at once.
Speaker 6:Your chance of finding your document not only faster but just generally more accurately is way higher today than it was a couple years ago because we not only have all these other signals, but we can parallelize the process much better. So an agent from the outside coming in and saying, hey, I'm looking for this record, you're able to now much more accurately achieve that result, which is fantastic. And then I think the thing that we're also spending a lot more time on is how do you better secure data in this world of, you know, kind of infinitely more agents than what we had, you know, three or five years ago. You know, the OpenAI Hugging Face incident was... Has many interesting ramifications to how we build agents, how we ensure the safety and alignment of them, but has very real real world implications on the security of our of our system.
Speaker 6:So while this was more of like a production system from from Hugging Face that was under threat, you can imagine the internal environment of an enterprise. If you have all of your critical contracts or financial documents in an environment that agents can eventually get their way into, enterprises are going to need to care deeply about how do you protect that information. So we're imagining and reimagining all the ways that you would protect data in a world where you had agent swarms that were being deployed against your data environment. And how do you go and defend and protect that type of risk? So, lots of...
Speaker 6:Mean, many, many layers to this problem, but really just through the lens of imagine you have a 100 times more agents than people, how would you work with, store, access, search Mhmm. And secure your data in that kind of world? That's the platform we're building.
Speaker 1:Do you think we need to move away from the word sandbox? Because I don't know if you have kids, but if you ever take in like a five year old and plop them down in a sandbox, at no point should you as a parent believe that that kid will stay in that sandbox. The sand is gonna go everywhere. The kid's gonna be on the playground two seconds later on the swing set. They're gonna be running around crazy.
Speaker 1:Sandboxes have never been secure environments. They're not jails.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think...
Speaker 1:I don't know who's... I think that terminology. It's outgating.
Speaker 6:It's running
Speaker 1:its course.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 1:it's running its course.
Speaker 2:Yes. On personal agents, how are you processing the new the new race Mhmm. To be the most helpful assistant ever. Yeah. And then specifically, I wanna understand how you think all, you know, the sort of agents versus walled gardens war is gonna evolve.
Speaker 2:Just because it seems incredibly obvious that Amazon will fight to the death to maintain their like 75,000,000,000 ad business and and the health of it. But but what's your read?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Super super fun how fast moving this space is. I want to I I want to first apologize because I I honestly did not have the imagination on the consumer front. And so so so I I was, like, I was pretty skeptical of of what the breakthrough would look like on the consumer end. And it...
Speaker 6:It's funny because it was obviously staring at us with with Open Claw. But the... But just the form factor and the packaging and getting it all kind of in the right way that both Muse and Instinct have done, and obviously there's gonna be more more more, you know, entries into this space, has just been phenomenal. And and then the capability progress on computer use and browser use is just amazing. And I do think I have a I have a list of, like like...
Speaker 6:I have a wish list of what we need architecturally as an industry. Like, you need to eventually be able to have some better password sharing dynamic. You know, if I can in one click be able to get into any of these products in a very secure way and there's a trusted handshake between the agentic system and and, you know, the tools that I'm using, we're we're gonna need that. Payments are largely solved because of obviously the work that that Stripe and others have done. So I'm...
Speaker 6:I think that's pretty seamless, but but really it's the authentication that we still need to work on as you're kind of ramping up the use of these agents. But I think it's gonna be an incredible market. I I... You know, the ability to now hand off the whole problem to an agent as opposed to just using it merely as a research assistant, I think is going to be a breakthrough for consumer use cases. I'm very excited about about what this can mean for all new business models in the economy.
Speaker 6:I think there's a... You know, the Seedrini post, you know, five months ago, four months ago or whatever had had some of the more, you know, kind of, you know, risky to to capitalism elements and and the market. But you can easily look at the exact other end, which is I might now be a consumer of five times the amount of local service providers Sure. As a result of of these types of systems. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know,
Speaker 6:like like if I if I could lower the barrier to just like, I need flowers, like, right now delivered for this thing, and and it handles the whole thing. I I would... I I mean, at least in my personal experiences, I'm gonna I'm gonna grow my usage of the local economy as a result of this. And so Yeah. Very interesting to see, you know, you might have, I think, some...
Speaker 1:And installing an even more powerful middleman.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Or layers and layers of middle man. It might be middle man all the way down. I mean There you go.
Speaker 6:I like like Yelp as an example. It's like how do you sort of triage the local economy as
Speaker 1:a Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, there's something even with even with how good the Internet has gotten in so many ways, like, there's still, like, specifically local providers where I think using flowers as an example. Like, how many... The the place that I order flowers from, it's good reminder to everyone to order order flowers for your significant...
Speaker 1:It's five months until Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day starts now. No.
Speaker 2:But it's like the service is they make amazing bouquets, but the process of actually making an order is like Oh,
Speaker 6:so painful.
Speaker 2:It's so painful.
Speaker 6:So painful.
Speaker 2:That that, yeah, just that little bit of friction. And so people say, okay, consumers don't want productivity. They don't care about productivity is what a lot of the But bears are saying right they also hate friction. So, what's to win out?
Speaker 6:I that's the thing is I'm so utilitarian and productivity pill that I share the same view of like consumers don't sort of value their time in the same way. But I think it's just then not on that dimension. It's like the pitch is not to save you time. Just to do things that you've probably like added to your remit. And and then there are lots of ways which are like...
Speaker 6:That... Like, on one hand, they're time saving, but on the other hand, they are just like literally doing more as a consumer. Like, you know, we have three kids who are always signing up for more things. There's there's more camps, there's more, you know, I don't know what what was that one for?
Speaker 1:Three kids is just very good.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. We have nine kids.
Speaker 1:We have nine kids in 2019.
Speaker 6:We might have nine kids in the future. So so, you know, you have camps and museums and and this and this thing, and you're renting that thing. And so so it's not even like you're saving time. You... Like, if you could just have an agent do a lot of these activities for stress reliever.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You're stress reliever, then you actually just do more with your kids. And Yeah. It's like, it's fantastic. We Totally.
Speaker 6:We we we went to... There's these Japanese tea gardens in in San Francisco, and I had an agent. Oh my god. What is that one?
Speaker 2:That's for Japanese tea gardens.
Speaker 1:I'm just excited. I'm sorry. That is
Speaker 6:exciting.... Castle.
Speaker 1:Bring me the castle.
Speaker 6:And we had an agent book the whole thing. And we just added that to our plate that day because it was that much easier to go and execute. So I like the idea of more of kind of consumer abundance use cases. And so I'm I'm I'm very excited by this as as just even more volume in the economy of of just buying and selling. I mean, you're you can imagine the you can imagine the thumbtack, Yelp, TaskRabbit use cases of, hey, I need help right now to to go install this thing.
Speaker 6:And it's just like you... All new all new forms of of activity happening. So so I... I'm I'm a big fan of the the personal agents. I think it's a...
Speaker 6:It's just full net growth in the consumer economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I completely agree with you. At the same time, I would assign some sort of low probability that in a few years we're having this conversation and being like, Oh, well, actually, what we saw in Q4 of twenty twenty six was prosumers, early adopters. It didn't cross the chasm. Those agent personal agent companies are basically getting ready for the enterprise and doing enterprise level OAuth.
Speaker 1:And like we've seen this... You've seen this play out before and there's a Ben Thompson take about this and whatnot. So it it... I don't think it's like a foregone conclusion that will cross the chasm but it feels like No. We're definitely the closest we've ever been.
Speaker 1:You know, six months ago, people were like using command line coding agents to like order food and And being like, this feels like we're definitely one click forward
Speaker 6:but we're in middle of With a technology like this Yeah. You you have to you you have to do a couple things. One, you have to extrapolate to to the ultimate sort of... Maybe the limit on technological progress.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:And so and so if you if you sort of somewhat just imagine that the agent literally can, you know, with a 98, kind of perfectly execute these tasks. Yeah. And everybody opens up their CLIs and their MCPs and browser uses is sort of good enough for all the long tail. Let's just assume that for one second. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Then you're not really left with the technological breakthrough that's required. The form factor itself is just a mobile app on your phone, so we don't need societal level change of behavior a la, like VR glass or something.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 6:so I think this one kind of works because it's not... If the technology works and the consumer kind of change of behavior isn't high, then it just literally just might be a new way to interact with your mobile device and the apps that you already would otherwise use. So, I agree, we'll have to see, but it's not like... This is not sort of like Oculus VR level, you know, kind of, you know,
Speaker 1:of fact I I had a friend who who sort of framed it as more of like a return. He was like he was like, yeah. I'm just I just, you know, I'm just like a business person, but I feel like a gilded age CEO. I'm like, take a memo and then dictate a letter to someone and go and do this and it and it feels like you're in like Great Gatsby or something. As opposed to it is futuristic but it's also like a return and a democratization of a certain style of working that is actually been the way it's happened throughout history many, many times as opposed
Speaker 6:Yeah. To being The point 0001% could do this in history and now everybody can.
Speaker 1:So... Now everybody can. Now everybody can. Jordy...
Speaker 2:It's not just the fedora clock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what is your what is your take on X rays? Do have a PDOM? What's what's the internal house philosophy?
Speaker 6:My PDOM my my PDOM still remains, you know, kind of very, very low. Yeah. So I'm but, you know, I think the the the progress on AI is is certainly, like, I'm, you know, I'm I'm I'm in a weird category because I have low PDOM, but I actually appreciate all of the safety work that's happening.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 6:And so it...
Speaker 1:It kinda has to happen. Yeah. A lot of it's like cybersecurity and stuff. Like, things are good to happen.
Speaker 6:And and I think that that the... Because of the amount of attention on the safety, I think that's sort of what causes me to have a low PDOM ironically. Sure. Yeah. So so I I see the events that otherwise could be quite, you know, catastrophic or or Yeah.
Speaker 6:Problematic. Yeah. But because of the attention that I think the ecosystem Yeah. Incent... It has an...
Speaker 6:A strong incentive to go and attack. Totally. That lowers my PDOM as a result.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So... A lot of the state PDOM's are conditional on doing nothing. So it's
Speaker 7:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:10% if we don't fight it back. And it's like, okay. Right. Well, well, if we fight back, what is it then? Then they'll be like, oh, was 0% then because that's Yeah.
Speaker 1:A different would say
Speaker 6:very high Pnuem if literally Yeah. If decide to... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny that so criticism of any safety rhetoric or or or talking about safety and criticism of of the Hugging Face incident. But can you imagine like alternative reality where all the researchers are like, I don't care about safety at all. I'm building this as fast as possible. Totally, totally.
Speaker 2:No. It's actually great that we have this powerful technology and the people building it...
Speaker 1:Taking it very seriously.... Cared
Speaker 2:almost as much about safety five years ago. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. Five years ago. Some of them have been on this forever. Yeah. Every Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lab is founded like
Speaker 6:I mean, I I think that's a key point. I think the one thread that we still have to figure out though is is the the language will be co opted by parties
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:That that don't have the same kind of either level of of either view or goals or incentives Yeah. On the situation. And so so the the one the one risk is is is how does it... Like, once it... Once you get that language into the rest of the world, it will be turned against you no matter what.
Speaker 6:So do you have the right sort of fortification of the industry and of progress to be able to not just basically get the whole thing halted and and shut down. Because that that that sort of, like, is a very narrow line between the right way of elevating the risk and and continue to fund all of AI, you know, safety and alignment research. And then one click above that where basically we will just vote for the data centers to never get built again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 6:navigating that is a really tricky kind of terrain. I'm not sure that I've seen a perfect sort of anybody perfectly finesse that. But Cool. But that's the that's the one kind of, you know, challenge here is do you end up in a spot where where enough people say, you're telling me it's extremely scary. You're saying that the likelihood is actually, like, high enough that I should be very worried, and I could just press a button and vote this thing to not exist.
Speaker 6:Yep. I probably am just gonna press that button because, again, so far, you know, your best the best thing you've presented to me is that is that you're going to go shopping for me on my mobile phone. So so, like, that's... Like, like, we're going to have to work on that that sort of, you know, kind of, you know, trade to to Yeah. Consumers a
Speaker 1:There's a lot of, like, odd alliances between people that just... They... I mean, they don't even use the the frontier models. They they want to go back to a world where there's no GPT three. So they're like, oh, cool.
Speaker 1:These people speak for us. And it's like, I don't know that they're actually gonna try and go that far. And so a lot of them are saying like, we're not even gonna pause training. You know? So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think see we'll see how things get papered out.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I I'm I'm still unfortunately on the more nervous camp on can we... Can any country realistically, but but can we kind of navigate through this where all parties are satisfied? I I think it's Yeah. I think it's just extremely unlikely.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I I expect this to be quite messy for for the coming years. I think it's gonna become the dominant 2028 conversation Totally. From a from a presidential election standpoint. Like, it has to be because it's gonna deal with jobs and and GDP Yep.
Speaker 6:And safety and and the next sort of major risk that that people start to think about. So... And and we as an industry, as a tech industry, I don't think we know where where we want things to land. You have this sort of roller coaster of, you know, one day everybody signs open wait... The open
Speaker 1:source thing, yeah.
Speaker 6:And then the next day everybody signs the pacing letter. Yep. And like, I think there are some people that can kind of figure out how the two letters are the same, you know, could could deliver the same outcome. But but they basically pull you in two different directions. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Totally. And and so I I think it's gonna be interesting to see how that... How how we kind of thread all of that.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a hundred and forty six days till Valentine's Day, so fire up that personal agent. This is your notice. We're only a hundred and forty six days away, so get ready. Make sure you're onboarded to some Frontier Intelligence personal agent that can make sure your Valentine's Day is fantastic in the next hundred and forty six days. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Nice to see you, Aaron. Always been too long.
Speaker 1:We'll see you soon.
Speaker 6:Alright. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ron from iConnections here. He's the co founder and CEO. Ron, how
Speaker 2:are doing?
Speaker 3:We go.
Speaker 1:Look at that. Oh, look at that.
Speaker 2:You you got some memo. Tip of the hat to you, sir. Looking fantastic.
Speaker 1:Looking fantastic. How are
Speaker 2:you doing?... Audio but you have motion.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It doesn't matter. When you got a hat like that, who needs audio? Who needs audio?
Speaker 2:How are we doing?
Speaker 1:You have... We'd love to start with background but also what's the the ribbon on the... Going black on black and there's some contrast
Speaker 2:there. I
Speaker 1:I think that might be the next iteration. I've been saying we need to There we go. Continue the progress There
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 1:Evolve the...
Speaker 2:You had this thing ready because we didn't I know we didn't give anybody warning.
Speaker 1:No, no. This was a test.
Speaker 2:We were testing all of our guests.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 2:Can you pull out the fedora
Speaker 1:And you do.
Speaker 2:At a moment's notice.
Speaker 1:Anyway, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 9:Hey, it's great to be here. And I have to give my 28 year old son credit because he got into the fedora way before we did.
Speaker 1:Wow. So
Speaker 9:he he actually had one available. He it over to me and it arrived like two minutes ago.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 9:There we go.
Speaker 1:Well, fantastic. It seems like you're you're feeling optimistic. Let's start with like some background. I'd love to let the audience know about you, your journey and and and Tomorrow X and what's happening but
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let's start with iConnections.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Let's start with iConnections.
Speaker 9:Absolutely. So iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform. And what that means is we connect the world's largest institutional investors with all the fund managers who appear on your show, private equity, venture, private credit, real estate. Everyone who lives in those more unique strategies, they come to our events and they use our software to meet the institutional investors who deploy capital into them. And over the course of a year, we'll run about 30,001 on one meetings between all of them, and they'll move about 10 to $20,000,000,000 in a given year through that whole ecosystem.
Speaker 9:It's really become a machine.
Speaker 1:And what is the what is the business model? What's the shape of the business? I know that there's events but there's there's probably other things like can you walk us through the of So the
Speaker 9:the the business is we we really combine the software. The software is the special sauce that makes this whole thing go. Sure. But because alternatives is very much a face to face business, you know you don't cut a $10,000,000 or a $100,000,000 check without meeting someone in person. So it is still very much a face to face business, and we combine our software that makes it possible for you to identify who you really wanna meet and spend time with.
Speaker 9:Sure. And then at our event series, you actually do those face to face meetings. So we... All the investors, of course, come for free. We roll out the red carpet for all of our institutional investors.
Speaker 9:Yep. We take great care of them and they never have to pay because they're the money in the room. Yep. And and the GPs are the ones who pay Sure. For that package of software plus event.
Speaker 1:That's great. Was there a chicken and an egg problem? I'm interested in like how you start the business.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's definitely a chicken and egg Right. Kind of problem. So I was lucky enough to have been at a point... When we started iConnections in 2020, we actually did it by way of a global charity event.
Speaker 9:We said Uh-huh. We first went to the institutional investors, and we said, hey, everyone's freaking out, you know. You can't do a lunch meeting, you can't have a breakfast, all the ways that people got together were not available.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:We said, we wanna do a global event to benefit food banks all over the world. Mhmm. We'll give a 100% of the money we make to the food banks, and we're gonna charge the GPs to come to this thing. Will you just agree to take meetings? They...
Speaker 9:I literally don't think one of them said no. We had about 400 institutional LPs in that event. We ran 3,000 meetings. And I'll never forget the first meeting was a fund in Hong Kong meeting the Kansas State University Endowment. And I remember thinking, there is no way these two people would have ever met if it hadn't been for the software making it possible.
Speaker 9:So COVID really created this opportunity to make it more of a tech play at the core Because like, I will say the industry doesn't generally adopt technology quickly, you know, they're they're very old school. They wanna just get in a room together. Yeah. But the tech kind of made it possible during COVID. They all had to buy into that and it worked incredibly well and then they kind of fell in love with it and it took off from there.
Speaker 1:And then I'd love your your overview, your positioning of Tomorrow X. It's it's it's sort of like my Super Bowl in the sense that the group that you bring together is incredible and particularly you just get people that are huge names in the world of private markets but are sort of under the radar among retail investors, among the broader investor community. That's what I love about it because it would be so easy to to pull other names on stage. But I think you've done a great job of like honing a really really laser focused polished product. But much of that was deliberate?
Speaker 1:How how much of it is happenstance? How do you think about positioning Tomorrow x today?
Speaker 9:So Tomorrow x is different really from what I just described. Yeah. Tomorrow x is really the brainchild of three of us. Myself, Gavin Baker and Antonio Gracias. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I had been talking with Gavin and Antonio Love them. About... They are the best. I had been talking with them about how to pull more tech CEOs into what we were doing in in the fund world. And they advised me to not do it in Miami where our flagship typically happens.
Speaker 9:They advised me to really try and do something in Austin, and then they actually came back to me a few months later and said, we've been thinking about that discussion and we would love to do an event in partnership with you. So that was kind of the beginning of Tomorrow X. But I I would say more than anyone, it's been Gavin's brainchild. Gavin Gavin is so active on X. Yeah.
Speaker 9:He loves that community, and and his concept was, why don't we try and democratize access to a world class banking conference for the fin x community? You know, when you think about it, there are so many analysts on Substack, and Reddit, and X of course, who are never gonna get invited to a Wall Street event. Know, you're not gonna see them at a Morgan Stanley conference or a Goldman conference, but they all would benefit from being in a room with the best tech CEOs in the world. Mhmm. So Tomorrow X is our attempt to really bring that world class banking experience to the masses.
Speaker 9:So if you're a retail investor, or you're an analyst that has a sub stack, and and you're really active in the space, you can now come to this event and hear Jensen Huang Yeah. Michael Dell, John Gray, David Solomon, you know, the CEOs of Databricks and Vercel. I mean, it is in... If you go to tomorrowxsummit.com and look at that speaker list.
Speaker 2:It's because some of these people are like very much moving the market. Totally. You'll have these like...
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Private place CEOs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Market's tons. Well well, that but I'm saying Investors... Even analysts that may not even use a real profile picture Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they are deeper in this stuff and have 100%. Bigger audiences than Yeah. Than many people at the bank. Yeah. Look the tree
Speaker 1:analysis. Yeah.
Speaker 2:These are important Yeah. Then the long tail as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tons of them.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. And and that was exactly Gavin's point and and why he felt... I mean, we we, you know, like normally when you do a conference, you start small. You know, you get like a ballroom in a hotel and you try and get a thousand people.
Speaker 9:We rented a stadium. So the concept the concept of Tomorrow X is like, let's really lean in to this thing and make it available to the masses. You know, it's priced super inexpensively so that it's really accessible by anyone.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And we're gonna be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're very excited.
Speaker 9:Guys, I I can't tell you. This is so exciting to have TBPN as our podcast media partner. We were like, who do we want to be the tech podcast partner? And there was really only one choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have some amazing guests lined up. I know it's gonna be an amazing event. I'm so excited for it. It's...
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just so perfectly aligned with everything that we love.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we really hope a bunch of people in our community which already are overlapping with Yeah. With Gavin's are are all there in person. We can't wait to hang out with everybody.
Speaker 1:No. It's gonna be fantastic.
Speaker 9:For sure. You guys plenty of interviews.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, son comes too because he's clearly tapped in. Yeah. He be there... We got these this morning. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He already had it. He already had it ready.
Speaker 1:He was years ahead of He the invested early. Head of
Speaker 9:the curve then. Alex Biscardi ahead of the curve.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to see you here on the show and we can't wait for the event in November.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for...
Speaker 9:Same here guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 9:you soon. Bye.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have Ben Hylak in person, the co founder of Raindrop. I'm gonna tell you about Shopify while he comes in to the TBPN UltraDome. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Go check it out. Ben, how you doing?
Speaker 8:Doing great.
Speaker 3:Welcome to
Speaker 1:the TBPN UltraDome. How you doing?
Speaker 2:John's going detective mode. You guys look great.
Speaker 8:I didn't get the memo. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's okay. You wanna wear one?
Speaker 2:I would. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy. Tyler, maybe sacrifice your...
Speaker 1:No. We we we can share...
Speaker 2:Look like you're about to release a book on Hold on. Fear and doom. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How optimistic are you? How how about the world? How are things going in your world? Are you a doomer? Are you an optimist?
Speaker 1:Are you an accelerationist? Are you cautious optimist?
Speaker 2:Getting right into... Right right with the...
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's always it's always interesting to start from like where you... Because something I've noticed is that there are no doomers at the application layer. There are no doomers in the infrastructure trade, there are no doomers are only at the model layer, and there's a good reason because that's where AGI and super intelligence
Speaker 8:I is emerging actually... I think this is maybe a hot take here. I actually think that... I... So I think part of the problem right now is that the, like, whole AI safety conversation risk, whatever, it's like five or six different things all muddled up into one.
Speaker 8:Totally. There's like... Yeah. There's like...
Speaker 1:Climate change from data centers is getting looped into Like bio weapons. Exactly. Very different things.
Speaker 8:There's like there's like the whole sycophancy thing, how it affects people's mental health. Totally. Totally. A There's bunch of different things.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 8:And I do think that for some of them, not necessarily the bioweapon thing or the data center thing, but like for a lot of... Like, a lot of the things I think about are at the application layer. They are like... That's where people meet models.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:And there there is a risk there that a, people at Frontier Labs like don't really care about or think about.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:Right? But like, you know, we work with Fortune 100 companies that like their their products are used by millions of people and then affect even more people. Right? And so... Sure.
Speaker 1:Well, start there. Reintroduce the product. Explain. I know you're here with fundraising news and product news, but give us the high level again.
Speaker 8:Raindrop is a agent reliability product. Important. So we detect issues happening in production and we prevent those issues from happening. So, the product we just announced recently, which I'm really, really excited about, is simulations. Cool.
Speaker 8:So, when people make changes to their agents, we simulate what those changes are going do in the real world and can show people things they wouldn't have even ever expected to happen. Sure. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:How reasonable is it to have a AI model that just reads every Trace. Thing, every trace. So... Is that prohibitively expensive? Is that the problem?
Speaker 8:It's getting less so. Yeah. So I think like, you know, we've we've sort of pioneered like super cheap classifiers for this thing. Jeff is another example of...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I'm just imagining like like burn a classifier onto silicon that just says, is this bad or not and have it run over... So here's You start...
Speaker 1:Now.
Speaker 8:So there's a problem.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 8:It turns out that like binary classification, is this bad or not, is really really hard.
Speaker 1:I can imagine, yeah.
Speaker 8:Take it like a step like back. It's like humanity has trying... Has been trying to define
Speaker 1:what is good and what
Speaker 8:is bad for like as long as we've existed.
Speaker 1:We're gonna need more than one simple...
Speaker 8:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So so we consider ourselves in some ways like a human alignment company. Like Sure. How do you get a company to define what is good or bad?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then how do you make that as like easy as possible? How do you... A lot of it is like, especially now that agents can do more than the people that make them have ever imagined that they can do. They're looking at Tracy, she's like, oh, shit. I didn't expect that to be asked.
Speaker 8:I didn't know it could do that. You need to be able to like surface those things and be like, hey, do you want to be able
Speaker 3:to do this? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 8:want it to be...
Speaker 1:Yeah. So creating like alignment within a company looks different. I always think about the tobacco industry because a lot of the models will reject to work on anything tobacco related. But like Altria is going to use AI somewhere.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:So they're... But they're gonna get rejected a lot. But in some ways, they're gonna wind up deploying AI one way or another. And their sense of
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Legality is going to be informed by the way they're regulated in every single market. And it might not look like the morality of the lab that trained the model, but it will fit within their business construct in weird a way. And the way we process the morality of cigarettes is through the court system.
Speaker 8:Totally. I I think there's hundreds of examples of this, thousands of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Or infinite like Probably infinite. And especially like I think the way that Frontier Labs consider alignment is like often very different. Sure. I was, like, using, I think, Claude or something recently. Was, like, trying to negotiate on some product.
Speaker 8:And, like, I wanted the the... It was, like, on Marketplace. And the guy, like, wanted to, like, hang out with me. Like, he was, like, oh, it'd be really cool if I could, like, sit down and, like, show you this thing. I was just getting, weird vibes.
Speaker 8:I was, like, I told him, Vlad, I was, like, you know, just just, like, something that kinda, like, gets by this, but, like, in a
Speaker 1:way that's not What true, about softly?
Speaker 8:And it was, like, I cannot be dishonest about this. Oh. We should not, like, set...
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 1:was, it's a Exactly. I was like, come on. Like, you know,
Speaker 3:it could be
Speaker 8:my safety at risk here. Who knows? Right? But anyway, so yeah, I I think that human alignment is a really hard problem and I think
Speaker 1:you should...
Speaker 2:So did you hang out with a guy? No.
Speaker 1:I did
Speaker 6:not. I
Speaker 3:didn't even end up.
Speaker 1:He was just like, yeah, actually, Claude booked us a four hour walk on the... It would have. Right?
Speaker 8:It would have. No. The deal wasn't worth it in the end. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think that like... I think that telling something, whether that's a human or an agent, what you want is incredibly hard. I think management is incredibly hard. It's just in general.
Speaker 8:Like, if it were really easy to express what you want and have the other person... Like, have some entity understand, like, management wouldn't... Half of management wouldn't
Speaker 2:be. Okay. So so an interesting thing for your business right now is that consumer agents are getting more and more popular. We saw we saw the, you know, the Open Claw boom and then cycle will be bigger because you don't need to go buy a Mac Mini or really set up much of anything. And you can just imagine every business on earth is going to start having...
Speaker 2:First of all, they're gonna start realizing like, wow, our phones like a We're lot getting just like more messages. And so what that's gonna create is like tons and tons of businesses that need to create like counter agents to process and negotiate with other agents which is kind of funny because I'm sure some people will be like, why do we need a data center for this? Just like why don't just work it out the old fashioned way? You know, but clearly people like having like an intermediary in a bunch of these different things. And so is your bet that like there's this massive long tail of businesses that are gonna need to have their own agents and sort of process and and basically grade them on on how they're performing and improve them?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I I think that there's gonna be more agents and... Than than there are now. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Hot day of the century. More AI in the future.
Speaker 4:Right. But another question is like, you would
Speaker 2:almost bet that a business is going to have to take some version of an agent and then fine tune it for their business Yeah. And then test it. And I feel like that is where you're gonna fit it.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Like a bit... Like somebody might buy an aide... Say, I'll take one agent and but then I also want the software to understand how it's working.
Speaker 8:Yes. I think that companies will want both, like, humans and agents that are aligned to how their company works. Like, if you take, you know... Like, pick a random Fortune 100 company, they probably have some way that they work that like works for whatever industry that they're in. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And there might even be parts of it that are like, you know, suboptimal. Yeah. Some like...
Speaker 1:I wonder if more culture stuff will bleed in. There's a there's a couple famous examples of like if you go to Nike headquarters like everyone wears Nike. Yeah. Like you don't walk... You don't go to
Speaker 7:work like I'm
Speaker 1:wearing Adidas today. Like that would be a bad look.
Speaker 7:That would be
Speaker 3:bad.
Speaker 1:And so... But if you get an off the shelf model...
Speaker 2:You wear a Nike fedora. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you get an off the shelf model, it's gonna be like, yeah, like Nike and Adidas, these are both like comparable brands. They're both like pretty good.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and you're gonna be like, this AI is not a culture fit. Yeah. I need to... And and that's like a very subtle alignment thing that actually might be real because you don't want be building a deck and it's like, oh, yeah, like, you know, maybe we should partner with Adidas because they're similar and it's like...
Speaker 8:I worked I worked at Apple for like four years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone works at Apple. Right?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and this is like a protest, not wearing out. But no.
Speaker 8:I I think that the way that AI is and agents will fit into there Yeah. Will be different than other companies. Yeah. Like, it's just like they're... It's a...
Speaker 8:The way it works is just entirely different. Right? Yeah. Like, if you've ever worked at a big company, you sort of get that. And so, I don't know.
Speaker 8:I think there's millions of examples of this. I I think that... Yeah. I think a lot of the future will be how do you sort of conform Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Simulation, where does the simulation end? Because you can create a digital twin... Right here.
Speaker 8:We're in it. But
Speaker 1:I mean I mean if you go to a company, can create a digital twin of their their AWS instance
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 1:And their Gmail and their Slack. Yep. But at a certain point, then you also need to simulate like the entire Internet because that's part of Like the how big can you go? How big are you going now? How big will you go ultimately?
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 8:really really good question. I mean, you know, I'm joking but also like, know, maybe this could be a raindrop simulation. I don't
Speaker 1:know. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I don't know. For now, where we're starting
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Is all about... It's all about replaying historical things that have happened, getting really really smart about how you choose those historical things, and then in very specific scenarios creating completely sort of like on the fly adversarial scenarios. As far as like technically, we simulate everything.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it's kind of a hybrid of trying to do... Be as smart upfront about what you need to... One way of thinking about it is if you think about like... Let's take a pass trace, like something the agent did. Every time it called a tool, it's almost like a a hole through this like veil that lets you sort of see what the world behind it looks like.
Speaker 8:Right? The agent sort of perceiving that world one sort of, like, tool call at a time. So, you can sort of start there and say, well, let's try to, like, fill in around the holes as much as possible.
Speaker 3:So, if it goes heat...
Speaker 8:You know, except here it goes, like, right next to it, it sort of has that data. Right? And then you also have to be monitoring that simulation in real time just like they do for this one. Right? To see, oh, you know, if something's slightly off.
Speaker 8:Right? So, it's like maybe it tried to get data somewhere but that data was not filled in. You can sort of detect that as a quality gap if
Speaker 1:you get really
Speaker 8:smart about how you're classifying it. Mhmm. And then fill in that data at run time. Mhmm. So, that's essentially the way to do it well.
Speaker 2:How do you think about how different cultures are set up to even build agents? Because it feels like there's... It's quite funny to me that that...
Speaker 1:I'm looking at like Amish culture.
Speaker 2:Not... I think it's very funny that think it's very funny that Apple like is just getting around to cloning chat GBT.
Speaker 1:And they have such an advantage in the personal agent thing. I know. They are the most trusted Google company. Apple privacy. They should be killing it.
Speaker 8:All of my passwords are in Google.
Speaker 1:Google people will be like, they're gonna sell your data. They wanna advertise. Apple is the one where my I family photos are in there.
Speaker 8:Oh, I know.
Speaker 1:They have very very high trust... Behind
Speaker 8:it. There's two companies...
Speaker 2:And and Meta Meta
Speaker 8:is Oh, yeah. Totally. Google and Apple.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Meta is specifically well suited for it because Zach's like, I don't care if it misspells like five out of a 100 people's names if nine, you know... Like you saw this with with one of the agents today, somebody had an issue like getting on a flight apparently because...
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's always working like a messier more algorithmic than Apple where it's like if the photo is on your phone it must sync to your iCloud like that's... There is no there is no AI lineage, no stochastic lineage in the business.
Speaker 8:I think I think it's very true. I think that that Apple is... First of would literally never count them out because I think they're ridiculously well positioned and have some amazing people there. But, yeah, like, I think that there was this, you know, there there was a way of working there which was sort of, you know, we're going to, like, you know... The reason why Apple is such, like, insanely...
Speaker 8:You know, the most insane attention to detail, etcetera, is that designers would sort of define like, this is how it should work.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Right? And then engineers are like, well, no, like, that won't work. And the designers are well, we don't care. Like, this is how it's going to work. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And, you know, you just kind of do that loop. Right? Sure. It's like RL or something. And the thing is that that does...
Speaker 8:That kind of way of working doesn't work as well
Speaker 6:for AI.
Speaker 1:AI or AI.
Speaker 8:Right? Because you you can't just say like, oh, it's like, well, you know, it should be, you know, as natural as...
Speaker 1:I mean, is entirely flipped at the Yes. At the Frontier Labs. It's like the researchers went and did something Yep. And this is what it can do. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Go market.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Like like like try to build a product. And and and... But we do also see Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. It can do math now? Yeah. Exactly. Go tell people it can
Speaker 8:do math. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And they're like, but it can't do comedy or it can't do... They're still six fingers but it's, you know, amazing at Python. And you're like, okay. That's the product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. As opposed to the opposite which is like
Speaker 8:100%.
Speaker 1:We are building this particular thing. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Very...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very exciting times. What does it take to sell to a Fortune 100 these days? Like what are you seeing in the enterprise? Our Khosla has this evolving take that there's sort of this duopoly in price competition at the frontier between Anthropic and OpenAI.
Speaker 1:He has said that there's less switching to open source and Chinese open source than he thought he would see. But there's tons of price competition on the frontier still. What are you seeing? What are what are enterprise leaders just like excited about, worried about? Anything that you can share.
Speaker 8:So, yes. Definitely way less adoption of like, I would just say like Chinese models in general, especially Fortune one hundreds. I think that there's like definitely a narrative of like a risk around it, even if it's not super well...
Speaker 1:It's more like, let's go actually, instead of token max, like efficient token spend will take us the next leg up.
Speaker 8:Cost. People do care about cost. Yep. And I think that it's like pretty reasonable when you're like even, you know, five five k, you know, ahead times like, you know, 50,000, 100,000, like whatever. It's like, it starts getting crazy.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So it does matter. I think that there's a lot of... Like, companies are definitely all building internal things right now and I think trying to grapple with like, well, like, when do we just use Cloud Code? When do we just build our own, I guess, Codex Now maybe. But like, when do we just build our own thing?
Speaker 8:I think that like, there's more of a justification for companies to build their own kind of internal ways of working than I might have expected six months ago, actually. Yeah. Which is really interesting. Like, I think even if you look at something like Muse, it's like it's like pretty much like some open claw style thing. Heavily inspired.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is their words.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone was talking about his open claw Yeah. Telling him to drink more water Yeah. The strike sessions like maybe four or five months ago.
Speaker 8:It's it's... The the barrier to entry there is like pretty low.
Speaker 1:But distribution is really important.
Speaker 8:Yes. But but if you have, you know, especially I think, again, you think about Fortune one hundred, Fortune five hundred, I think we're seeing an increasing number of just internal
Speaker 1:Oh, shit.
Speaker 8:Agents and applications that I think like two years ago might have felt a little silly. Like, it's kind of like, well, why are you actually building this yourself? I think increasingly it's like, now, you know, you have all these legacy, like, you know, internal docs and exact path a ticket should take and every company Yeah. Sort of like maps to org structure, etcetera. It like kind of makes sense increasingly, which is interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is interesting that like even if you go back to .com, like Amazon became the everything store and yet there were so many brands that didn't go all in on Amazon, maintained third party websites for decades
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Successfully Yep. And and built brands even on... Even in retail and and big box. Like, all these things, like, lived on longer and so... Yeah.
Speaker 1:When I see like a law firm saying like, okay, we're gonna build our own models. We're gonna build our own
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Harnesses. I'm like, yeah. Maybe that's not that crazy. Maybe that'll stick around.
Speaker 2:Does brand design matter more or less today than it did two years ago?
Speaker 8:Oh, it matters more. Yeah. It matters more.
Speaker 2:Does it though?
Speaker 8:I think so.
Speaker 2:Because I feel like when everyone can have like a pretty decent brand like I... You see Yeah. Some teams like looking at at instincts, right, getting to to 10,000,000,000 with the plain text website.
Speaker 1:You don't have a brand, right? Is there a brand?
Speaker 4:No, of course. Twitter brand.
Speaker 8:Right? Like like like brand is not always... It's like what you do... Understated.
Speaker 2:But but here's another here's another example. It used to be like you could get a long way as an early stage startup designing like a really simple Yes. Cool three d asset. Yes. Totally.
Speaker 2:Like that, they would just instantly be like, okay, this team, they may not have a lot of resources, but they like and now you can just be like, make me a
Speaker 1:cool three d asset. This website flips around. Control.
Speaker 8:This is why it matters more though. So, I think I've like, I've gone back and forth. I think right now my view is that, like, some ways you could think of it as like tastes being commoditized. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 8:also, the second that things are commoditized, you need to stand out. Yeah. And so, you do need someone at the, like, like that understands the zeitgeist, understands whatever the tip of like whatever it is. It's like, you know, because it is not enough to throw a nice like three d asset on your website or something. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so... But you'd still need like, for example, if a Fortune 100 company is landing on your page or, like, just anyone, you want them to understand that this is a real team of humans behind it. Mhmm. It's even like writing, like, you can imagine that, like... So I I think AI writing is still bad, But also, like, if you sent, like, AI writing to people, like, ten years ago, you know, would they think it's bad?
Speaker 8:It's not obvious to me. Versus, like, there being a lot of tells because you are getting inundated with like really low quality writing that you... The
Speaker 1:old Paul Graham post where he uses all the AI.
Speaker 8:No. Yeah. And dashes. Whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And he clearly wasn't using AI unless he was a time traveler.
Speaker 3:Which is possible.
Speaker 1:But, Like, if I asked Strategy PD to go pull some data together for me
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I'm noticing they clearly are all, but it's not this. It's that out of the model on the last run.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 1:Because people are like, it's okay. That's actually really annoying. But in general, like, I'll sit there and I probably read twenty minutes of AI text a day Yeah. Just from queries that I do throughout the day.
Speaker 8:You're like, yeah, it's off?
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I mean I'm live a lot so... Yeah. But but you're not necessarily annoyed by that. But if I tell you like, hey, I got this blog post and then you're like, this is AI, it's like disrespectful.
Speaker 8:We we we actually...
Speaker 1:But the actual quality of the writing is probably identical to what you read all day.
Speaker 8:I get what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I actually I actually do find the the responses from like simulated game called hugging world. It's at huggingworld.com.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 8:And it's pretty funny. It's funny to watch. And so, the thing is, like,
Speaker 6:I was pretty busy. I got the
Speaker 8:blog, like, 80% done, but, like, I knew that there were, like, some
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, you could read you could read it.
Speaker 8:It was good. It it... Also, I was like, someone's gonna call... Like, someone's gonna see like the the like some AI written phrase I don't wanna get called on that. Sure.
Speaker 1:You know I mean?
Speaker 8:And so I added a little like stamp like vibe written, you know,
Speaker 6:on the top.
Speaker 8:I think that was like a nice like.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Just being honest with the audience.
Speaker 8:Exactly. But it's like it's like there is good information
Speaker 1:in there. And was there pushback or no? No. That's great.
Speaker 8:Exactly. So I I think I think like there was good information. It was not I think disrespectful to someone to read. Yeah. But at the same time, it's a little bit different than if I were to write every sentence.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah.... Some sort of
Speaker 1:I have one more question. Please.
Speaker 2:Then we have one big gong here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do.
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should hit the gong first. You raised $25,000,000 CRV. 35. 35. Oh, who's counting?
Speaker 1:We get it. Woah, woah, wee, woah. Smash that gong. CRV. CRV is any shipment up to Boston.
Speaker 1:Did you go to Boston or you raised in the Valley? No. No. Okay. Cool.
Speaker 1:Rivers Ventures. The Charles. It's in Boston. We were...
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's great. Charles Rivers. Completely unrelated question, but prediction in the tech world. The new Tesla Roadster is being announced October 1 and the FAA has cleared the airspace 10,000 feet up.
Speaker 1:I saw it. So the maximum height it could go is 10,000 feet. The minimum height it could go is is zero feet. Right? What is your prediction?
Speaker 1:It has to be It's
Speaker 3:going to get off
Speaker 1:the inclusive of zero to 10,000 feet. How high do
Speaker 8:you think it'll go? Could be
Speaker 1:an inch. Could be a thousand feet, could be a 100 feet, could be 10,000 feet. Can't be higher than 10,000 feet. Can't be than Right. We know it's in between there.
Speaker 1:We have the bounds now.
Speaker 8:I think it's... I think it'll be more than zero.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Pretty sure. I'm thinking I'm thinking I'm thinking we're gonna get 10 feet.
Speaker 1:10 feet? I like it.
Speaker 2:Here's the new here's the newest. I gotta get foil under here. I've been thinking about it more, it really seems like he never wanted to act... Once he got into this whole thing and humanoids, he doesn't really wanna make this car. Right?
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. He really doesn't wanna make this car. Right? Okay.
Speaker 2:People have been sitting there for nine years Yeah. Having their money locked out. They're like, I hope this year I get my car. He doesn't want to make it, right? Okay.
Speaker 2:But he... We know he can make it. Yeah. And we know that he could make something so incredible. We know he could make a flying car.
Speaker 2:Right? I don't think anyone doubts like, oh... Yeah. I'm not saying it's gonna be super safe. Okay.
Speaker 2:But but let's say...
Speaker 8:I'm saying it's gonna ship?
Speaker 1:Shit. Let's say this.
Speaker 2:He makes something that is... No. So he makes something that is just like an insane demo, but it just instantly gets like hard ban hammer by...
Speaker 1:Oh, and he's like, oh, I can't make it. It won't let me.
Speaker 2:Or it gets into another five year of like legal battle. Gotta keep the deposits.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:We gotta get through these legal battles.
Speaker 1:Deposits are that big. But also there's a wild card which is that it could be more or less a normal car but they cleared the airspace because it's doing sort of an Evel Knievel style jump and they set up a ramp. And that will throw all of our predictions Quite possible. Because it could easily go 30 feet in the air if there's a ramp and it could just be a normal car. Just wouldn't be a
Speaker 8:flying car. Know, like, so... Like, he has he has he has the resources. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 8:And and Yeah. I'm sure at some point someone was like, well, what if it flies? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know
Speaker 8:what I mean? Yeah. And so, he would have been like, well, let's get a team on that. Yeah. And I believe that if you you can attach engines to this thing and Yeah.
Speaker 8:Fly like I...
Speaker 1:I I was going no ramp six feet up but after seeing the 10,000 foot news, think you might be flying around like a plane or something. It might be getting up there. We'll see.
Speaker 8:You think so?
Speaker 1:Maybe. And even... Know why......
Speaker 8:Test flights. That's the thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. There would have been spies
Speaker 8:or There would have been pilots and there would have been... Yeah. I I think...
Speaker 1:I don't know. They might have it locked down. It's a pretty secure Self driving? Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Self
Speaker 7:That's real.
Speaker 1:That's... That's the easy part. Yeah. Yeah. I think the hard part is to actually make a make a rocket car that doesn't explode when you Passive bay.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. Anyway, thank you so much for coming Congratulations. On the
Speaker 8:See you guys.
Speaker 1:Have good one.
Speaker 8:Of course. We will
Speaker 2:hang Happy to the show. Something like that.
Speaker 1:And our next guest will be joining in just a minute. We have some other breaking news we got to run through. We just set up our our our next guest. I think it'd be worth talking about Paramount.
Speaker 2:Let's get a quick tip of the hat for
Speaker 1:Tip of the hat.
Speaker 2:Friends over at Raindrop.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Of course. So Paramount is officially not leaving California.
Speaker 1:It's been a back and forth. The company going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG, attorneys general in California. The company said Monday, that's Paramount, said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its $111,000,000,000 acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal. California attorney general Rob Bonta and a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July arguing that combining the two companies would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks, and other media properties to resolve the case, Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing through at least 30 movies theatrically each year and spend an additional $1,500,000,000 on film production over the next five years.
Speaker 1:Paramount did not agree to more structural changes. They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Brothers under the same roof along with Paramount plus HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and franchises and films including Superman, Minecraft, and Sinners. Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming companies like Netflix. If you if you subscribe to every Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery premium service now, you're probably giving them like $60 a month, maybe more.
Speaker 1:HBO Max is an independent subscription. Paramount Plus, that gets pricey if you get the... Don't they have UFC now? CBS, I think, an all access. CNN launched something, I think they shuttered it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville. Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing at... As the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded.
Speaker 1:So this is extremely bad news for everyone that was hoping that the Paramount Lot would be converted into a data center in Yeah. Part of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro data center crowd were optimistic about a large scale data center coming in Los Angeles using up a lot of the water, lot of the energy here in Los Angeles. But looks like they're gonna be making movies instead.
Speaker 2:Well, let's check-in with professor
Speaker 1:Let's go to the top. Zhang Oh, what happened?
Speaker 2:Who went on Jack Neal's podcast
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:To talk about AI.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. Yes. We need to... This is the funniest clip. This is like half true, half false.
Speaker 1:Let's play
Speaker 6:generated by the AI? I guarantee you, it's not true. I guarantee you, it's being manipulated by humans somewhere in India. Human in
Speaker 1:the loop. Chat GBT.
Speaker 3:Human in
Speaker 1:the loop at scale. Billion billion weekly active users, billion people answering questions.
Speaker 6:I think what happened was a human first wrote that
Speaker 1:and then... He's sort of right. He's like describing training data and like it's half crazy like no there's no human in the loop when you ask a question. It answers with superhuman speed. How is that possible?
Speaker 1:But at the same time like, yes, scale AI exists. Merkur exists. There is a lot of training data.
Speaker 2:Professor Zhang is willing to actually guarantee this too.
Speaker 1:He did guarantee. He did guarantee.
Speaker 2:He's not just saying it. He's willing to guarantee it. Yes. It seems that that the new meta for governments globally
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is to just have like a podcast guy Okay. That just goes around saying insane things, half of which is true Yeah. Half of which are are made up. Yeah. And then it just sort of is exciting and confusing for people but but very stimulating.
Speaker 2:John John Kiriaku is another guy. Similar. Another guy like this it seems. Although he's taken a turn into fashion. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He walked at Fashion Week. There's an interesting thing. David Sachs is the AI czar and he's also the co chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology which abbreviates to PCAST. Sounds like podcast.
Speaker 1:It sounds like he's the podcaster in chief. Isn't that isn't that a random title? He just happens to be the the co chair of PCAST.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:I thought that was a fun fact. Anyway, we have Lucas Shaw in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV and auction realm. Welcome to show, Lucas. What's going on?
Speaker 7:Great to be here. How you guys doing?
Speaker 2:Been wanting to make this happen for a while. Yes. Anytime. We are... We we go live from Hollywood most days of the year, but I still don't fully understand Hollywood.
Speaker 2:So stuff is happening in the news. I usually just think I'm gonna wait till you write about it, then I'll get a good understanding of it. Yeah. It's an honor to have you here today to talk about everything with Paramount and then I wanna get into Netflix and YouTube as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please.
Speaker 7:I'm sorry I did not bring my hat. Then we could all be mad.
Speaker 2:We should have prepared you. We're trying these John has a theory that...
Speaker 1:I think you do have a pair of sunglasses that you could put on him potentially with a button if you if you wanna give him a pair of shades at some point in the...
Speaker 2:We we can figure that out. Anyway... But John John's trying to bring back the fedora. So I'm just I'm just
Speaker 7:emotional trying support. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm just here to I'm just here to support.
Speaker 1:It looks like old Hollywood. I think we can pull it off. I think with with the suit and the tie, it it reads a little bit more like like nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2:Sane over overconfident. I think I I'm gonna bring back the fedora. I can pull it off. I can... Anyways, how was how was your weekend covering everything going on with with Paramount?
Speaker 7:It was fine. I was actually at a a relative's wedding in Rhode Island. Mhmm. So I I helped where I could. We also had some really good colleagues of mine who handled it.
Speaker 7:I mean, I've been covering Ellis and Paramount, this deal for the last year and and the players in it for far longer. I think we're all happy that it is finally over. Obviously, are some people who are not happy that the deal is gonna go forward, but those of us covering it didn't need the the proceedings to drag out for
Speaker 4:forever Talk and
Speaker 2:about your read today on on the sort of winners and losers and and where where the different parties kind of gave ground and and where they they kind of maybe came out on top?
Speaker 7:Well, settlement looks for the most part like a big win for David Ellison. Right? He was looking at, you know, months of uncertainty. This trial wasn't gonna start until next year. Yes, there were hearings between now and then, but if that had happened, he was going to owe hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to this ticking fee that he had in the deal between Paramount's guidance and Warner Brothers Discovery.
Speaker 7:And instead, he mostly agrees to do things he's already said he was gonna do, you know, release 30 movies a year in theaters, only 20 of them have to be wide releases. There's a commitment to, you know, make a certain amount of production or make a certain amount of movies and television in this country. But again, I think he was gonna do that stuff anyways. Maybe this, you know, forces him to do it because there's always a chance, you know, he says he's gonna do x and and gets in and he he he instead does y. But it doesn't seem like Rob Bonta, the attorney general of of California, or any of the attorneys general who are involved in the suit or the Writers Guild got some big win where they can say, you know, they they were calling for structural changes which would have meant selling something and there is nothing being sold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is this real cause for optimism for the entertainment industry in LA? Is there is there is there already plenty of cause for optimism? Living here, I don't I don't... You know, when I when I talk to folks, I don't get this sort of sense that, like, they're super excited about the state of things, but maybe it's it's darkest before dawn.
Speaker 7:Well, the last few years have been pretty rough. Right? There was kind of an unprecedented explosion, particularly on the television side, kind of starting around Netflix and House of Cards. And really, like, the TV business was a cash machine for the... For decades.
Speaker 7:Streaming seemed like a really great business for for a lot of these people. And then around 2223, there has been this kind of correction or rightsizing and from which the industry has never fully recovered. So, yeah, you're right that most people who work in Hollywood don't feel great about it. I don't think that they believe that this deal is gonna be the the solution for that. Right?
Speaker 7:They're looking at what will likely be thousands in in job cuts and the combination of two of the original kind of six Hollywood studios. But other people feel great because it means they they think that David Ellison will finally be the one to kind of create a scaled player to compete with Netflix and Amazon and and Disney. Look, Warner Brothers has traded hands a lot over the last decade. It got bought by AT and T, then it got bought by Discovery, now it's getting bought by David Allison. Everyone has said that they're gonna be the ones to figure out how to make HBO kind of a a real competitor in streaming.
Speaker 7:They haven't done it so far, but maybe David Ellison will have the magic touch.
Speaker 1:How is Hollywood processing the... It seems like TV's in a rough spot, but it it it feels like it's starting to be a good year for movies, at least financially. I mean, we had the three breakout sort of like crossover YouTubers, obsession, iron lung, backrooms. Then you have $2,000,000,000 outcomes with the Odyssey and Spider Man and then you're going into the back half of the year, it's tech focused and you get the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes documentary. There's an OpenAI movie.
Speaker 1:There's another Facebook movie. Like at least from my world, I feel like there's more stories around the movie business. But how is Hollywood perceiving this year? Will this be remembered as like a good year for the movie making business potentially?
Speaker 7:I think it depends on who you ask. Top line, it's the highest grossing year since before the pandemic, since 2019. You have the second most billion dollar movies ever. You know, you have the Odyssey, you have the Spider Man movie, you had Toy Story five, you had the new Super Mario Brothers movie, and then a lot of the ones that you referenced, whether it was kind of the YouTube breakouts or even Devil Wears Prada two was a big hit. Sure.
Speaker 7:I think where people counter that is that if you look just in terms of ticket sales, ticket sales are still down a lot. The that grosses are stronger is in part because going to the movies is just more expensive. Mhmm. And so we've entered a phase where movie going as a habit is just not what it used to be. But, yeah, I think this is...
Speaker 7:If you talk to people in the movie business, they feel better about it this year than they have since before the pandemic closed theaters. And the question that they all have is, is this going to continue? How do we make sure that this isn't a blip and we actually are back on kind of a growth trajectory which the business hasn't really been on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seen some some crazy stats about movie going before the dawn of television. I think in like the forties and fifties, like, the average American bought like something like 10 or 20 movie tickets a month. Like it was like the only thing to do. And so everyone was going to movies constantly and then and then once people could watch...
Speaker 2:Gotta get your screen time somehow.
Speaker 7:Well, think about think about when you... Yes, there there's what happened, you know, before television where it was like... Yeah. So it was pretty much... It was that or reading books Yeah.
Speaker 7:Or playing playing cards. Yeah. But even when when you were growing up, going to the movies on a Friday night was
Speaker 1:Every weekend.
Speaker 7:Something that Correct.
Speaker 1:Every weekend. And that's just not the case now. Right?
Speaker 7:No. You go when there is an event. A movie is competing
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:With TikTok, it's competing with YouTube, it's competing with live sports, it's competing with concerts, it's competing with, you know, anything and everything. And so, it has to be loud and has to feel like something one needs to leave the house to go see. Yeah. And that's something that the movie business struggles with because they were in the habit of people just showing up on a Friday night and saying, what do I want to see? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Switching gears. Please. YouTube and Yeah. Netflix. You had an interesting post this morning on a creator that was potentially trying to rework rework their deal with Netflix seemingly because they're worried about losing something to do with their their...
Speaker 2:The Golden Goose, which is their YouTube channel. Break it down.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's been this fight for talent between YouTube and Netflix over the course of this year. Right? They're the two leaders in streaming video for most of their existence. They were competitive but operating in different lanes.
Speaker 7:Right? You know, Netflix was Hollywood programming, professional film and TV. YouTube was UGC and Yep. And just shorter form videos. Over time, they've gotten closer and closer together.
Speaker 7:And what's happened this year is Netflix, in trying to increase the amount of time people are spending and stay relevant with people under the age of 25, 30, in particular 20, they have done deals with a lot of big YouTube talent. And that's they, you know, they've done business with YouTube before. It used to be, okay, Cocomelon, package together your videos and make highlights for Netflix. Now, it's like with this with this person I mentioned, the chef Nick DiGiovanni, and they've done it with with a bunch of people. It's post your new videos to Netflix and YouTube at the same time.
Speaker 7:We will pay you millions of dollars on top of what you already get from YouTube, and we're happy to talk about whether we should, you know, work on some kind of original programming. YouTube got upset about this. Right? YouTube, even though they are the the the biggest player on the block, they seem to, you know, break records in terms of how much time people are spending it with it every quarter. I think Netflix trying to get people to post sync...
Speaker 7:At the same time on both places just... How you? How dare you?
Speaker 2:You? No. It's so funny to me because they they've been through this like, oh, it's like everything. It's like rainbows and butter flies like... YouTube.
Speaker 1:It's about you, the creator. We're all
Speaker 2:just creators and like we're here to just empower creators and it's like we're here to empower creators that maintain our monopoly on human attention. You know? It's like, it it's really it's really kind of exposing just the realities of like business. They're gonna make a bunch of like rational decisions to try to maintain their monopoly on like streaming UGC and and... But but having to go kind of...
Speaker 2:It feels like they just had to go very much like mascot. Mascot. If you do this, we're gonna kill your reach. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 7:We will punish you. And by the way, if you go back and work with us, we will reward you. It is very Machiavellian. They do... They did not care.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It was interesting when I first started reporting on it how... And what YouTube was doing in response. Like YouTube thought what they were doing to your point was very reasonable and rational and just what any business would do. And then Netflix folks were like, I can't believe what YouTube is doing.
Speaker 7:And probably some of that comes from what you're talking about which is YouTube has cultivated this reputation as this very creator friendly platform which of course, they're, you know, they're ultimately about the bottom line and creators are Yeah. Means to an end for
Speaker 2:And the other thing that's interesting is like when when podcasters were like, hey, I could just... I'm posting my podcast to the RSS feed, could just post it on YouTube at the same time. Yeah. Maybe I get some additional views. Creators are now just trying to do that.
Speaker 2:They're like, I'm creating this video asset that I slaved away making for any number of hours. I made this thing. It's my IP. I own it. I should be able to post it anywhere.
Speaker 2:And now YouTube is saying like we're gonna cut your reach, you know, by however much. And it just feels like it it is deeply misaligned with the creator which is the person that built Yeah. YouTube. And it's my hope that it's my hope that that the creators like win here because it's so much better. It'll be so much better if a creator can be like, yeah, I get I get views all over the place.
Speaker 2:And and... But but I don't know, YouTube... Well, be better for YouTube shareholders though.
Speaker 7:They may be misaligned but it it... I would actually say that this competition for creators at least in the short term is a net positive because there are multiple people. It's not... YouTube for the longest time was kind of the only game in town, right? Yes, you had TikTok and Instagram and Twitch.
Speaker 2:Well, that's I'm saying that competition is like amazing. I want more... I want permanent competition not
Speaker 1:be the state because because right now if YouTube is that stick then Netflix has to increase the amount of carats to say, hey, yeah, you are gonna get crushed, but we're gonna double what we were gonna pay you. So... And then all of a sudden somebody says, you know what? Yeah. I'll get rid of my YouTube channel at that price.
Speaker 1:I'm down. Right? And then that's good, potentially.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And you see Disney and Fox and other Yeah. Have legacy entertainment companies trying to get into. And so if there are just more people trying to compete for Creator's Dollar, that's good. Right?
Speaker 7:We've seen it... You brought up... You were... You're talking about podcasting earlier. When there were a bunch of companies trying to get podcast deals and trying to sign podcast talent, that's when you started to see people like Joe Rogan and Al Cooper and all those folks getting huge paydays.
Speaker 7:So yeah, the the more folks who want their Yeah. You know, want their videos...
Speaker 2:Do you think that do you think that Netflix could think about trying to cultivate like emerging talent? Like they're so used to being like, hey, let's put a million dollars towards this like single production. If you take a million dollars, you divide it by 20, you could seed 20 creators that are just showing like any... You know, I I'm very excited for... A lot of the content that I like most on YouTube is is like highly produced twenty, thirty minute videos from a super passionate creator that just and it's like real time.
Speaker 2:Right? And so what what Netflix has been missing is just like... And they've kinda done this with some documentary projects where they'll like come out with a documentary on like Trump's flight from Turkey.
Speaker 7:Right. They're doing these quick turn documentaries Yeah. Right
Speaker 2:but but they should be doing that across like Insta docs. Every single every single category basically. Sure. Like.
Speaker 7:They could. I think Netflix is really wary of... They would sort of categorize that maybe as user generated programming, and I don't think they feel like they can win at that. But it... I I...
Speaker 7:It... Like, Netflix's strength has been, yes, that that really high production value type of programming and YouTube's strength has more been the long tail of being the place that you can go for anything and everything.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think if you... Most people at Netflix feel like they they can't beat YouTube at at that game. But it would be interesting certainly to see them, you know, go to twenty, thirty creators they like and say, here's $50,000 to make whatever you want.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. Well, would just like to see that because those creators, if they're if they're just starting their journey, have nothing to lose. Like, they don't have this like amazing, you know, platform and business built on YouTube yet. So it would take a lot of money.
Speaker 2:But some way or another, they're gonna need to get to the point... They're gonna need a benefit from like having creative talent that's distributed all over the world that can make this more like real time content. And and I've always I've always felt like Netflix in the slop era that we're in, Netflix has amazing opportunity to just curate UGC better than YouTube because I actually can't stand when YouTube surfaces some video to me. And historically, would've been like, oh, cool. There's a video.
Speaker 2:It looks like it's well produced. It only has 4,000 views. Maybe it's like someone great. And then now more than ever, it's like some like AI script from a... And and and there's actually no substance to
Speaker 4:the content. And I
Speaker 2:think like...
Speaker 1:If
Speaker 2:Netflix can create a slop shield of sorts, curation layer, I'd be optimistic.
Speaker 1:I like that. What's the status or the status of Apple in this ecosystem? I talked to I talked to a filmmaker before they really launched, you know, real Apple TV plus productions. And he was saying like it's gonna be challenging for them because movies are... It's a hits driven business.
Speaker 1:You're going to have flops and that's sort of antithetical to the Apple culture of like everything needs to be polished and perfect. And then I think they've done well and they've developed a portfolio of really well reviewed and Emmy winning, Golden Globe winning, you know, they've won a whole bunch of awards. But how do people in Hollywood see them? Are they an important buyer in the ecosystem? Are they just one of many?
Speaker 1:It feels like they're sort of sitting out this YouTube versus Netflix battle. But is there a battle coming, you know, years down the line as they try and expand or are they sort of happy with where they are?
Speaker 7:They're definitely sitting out the the Netflix YouTube skirmish. I mean, when they first showed up, I think they were seen as, you know, Captain Moneybags. They just... They would outspend anyone and everyone. They're kind of seen as Starfuckers because every show that they do, they want to have big name talent in.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But over time, they've developed a reputation as one of the of the best program or one of the best streaming services in terms of programming. Right? You you mentioned Emmy Awards. They just won the most Emmys of of any streaming service, of any company.
Speaker 1:Is that Widow's Bay?
Speaker 7:It was... Widow's Bay was their biggest winner, they, know, they got a lot of nominations across that and your friends and neighbors and shrinking and a bunch of their shows. They get really good critical praise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like they've sort of jumped straight into more of an HBO competitor than a Netflix. Yes.
Speaker 7:They have well, that's... But remember that's where Netflix started. Right? Netflix started as competing with HBO and then went mainstream. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I don't know. Amazon started as competing with HBO and then decided to speak to the middle of the country with Yeah. Reacher and other stuff like that. I don't know that I see Apple making that same transition to your point about sort of what Apple is. It doesn't feel like in keeping with their brand to try to be CBS.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The the knock that most people have on Apple is just their shows aren't very popular or
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:You know, they they do really well with a particular type of viewer. Yeah. But only a couple other shows have broken through in the culture in a big way. But I
Speaker 1:estimated ratings and it was like 70,000 views an episode or something, which is like a small podcast. Right? It's not...
Speaker 7:They they may not care. Right? That if you're John Turnis and you're like, oh, I just went to the Emmys and we won all these awards and talent wants to work with us, That's good for our brand.
Speaker 1:Well, that's been the the four d chess argument in tech is that it gives them something to talk about that's not just App Store rents because they're like, oh, yeah. Our services business? You want to talk about services? Let's talk about, you know, Widows Bay.
Speaker 7:Not Right.
Speaker 1:We've made another $10,000,000,000 charging 30%.
Speaker 2:Think any of the major platforms will take a... Are are taking a hard look at at short form dramas or any of these these apps that are charting. I think a lot of them are basically like adult content that's sort of like...
Speaker 7:Romantic some people would say. Yeah....
Speaker 1:And and like true crime stuff in there.
Speaker 7:They're all looking at it. I think Peacock, I think, has already added some verticals. I know that Netflix and others have said that they're looking at it. That again doesn't feel like one for Apple per se, but most of the other ones... Look.
Speaker 7:All these services... Because streaming isn't growing as fast as it once was, they're all looking at ways to bring in more people. So they're all looking at YouTube creators, they're all looking at podcasts, they're all looking at vertical dramas. Anything that people are paying attention to, if they can find a sensible way to integrate it, they will.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Is it fair to say that the Warner Brothers story was somewhat predictable just by the actions of David Zaslov even before the first bid came out? Was... This was something that you and other folks in the industry were tracking. Correct?
Speaker 7:There was a feeling that what was happening... That Warner Brothers Discovery wasn't working as a public company. Right? The stock was low. Stock was doing badly.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. The company was shrinking just in terms of revenue. The streaming service was doing okay. Mhmm. And so we we knew they had to do something.
Speaker 7:What they were doing was they were splitting it. Right? They were going to cast off the cable networks into one business because that's the part that generates a lot of profit but isn't growing. Then they were gonna put the the studio and the streaming service into another. And my belief is that is what David says have wanted because he liked being the mayor of Hollywood.
Speaker 7:He wasn't the mayor, but he liked being a big shot in Hollywood. Right? He's in Bob Evans house. He gets to hang out with movie stars and dinner with those people. He didn't want to give that Sure.
Speaker 7:And that's why when David Allison first came calling or one of the reasons that David's as of his board said, you're not valuing us high enough. We don't want this. We don't want it. And Allison just kept coming. You know, you got to give him credit In the case of both buying Paramount from from Sherry Redstone and in this Warner Brothers deal, he faced a lot of resistance and he, you know, in in part because he has the resources from his family, but he just kept coming.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. You have any predictions?...
Speaker 2:Negotiating against himself.
Speaker 1:Do you have any predictions for what what what the next big Hollywood story might be either through the end of the year or next year? Something that people are feeling like, okay, we're in act one or act two there. There might be a crescendo, some big deal, some change, some structural moment. Could be sort of across any any storyline. But what what are you tracking?
Speaker 7:Well, look, in the immediate there's going be a lot of attention paid to what does David Ellison do. Combining two companies is going to mean Sure. Not only firing a lot of people, but who's going to run the streaming business. He's got a high profile person in charge of streaming at Paramount and a high profile person in charge of streaming at Warner Brothers Discovery.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Setting that aside, a lot of people are wondering what is going on at Netflix. I think, you know, they've had a pretty rocky year ever since they walked away from Warner Brothers Discovery. It's led to a lot of questions about the future and, you know, whether they have a plan for their next act and how they're going to grow. There's been a lot of rumors about changes in leadership there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And so I think people are keeping an eye on that. Comcast is doing what Warner Brothers Discovery once was planning to do, know, they're splitting their cable business from the entertainment business. And a lot of people are wondering is that the first move in, you know, NBCUniversal ends up getting combined with something. You know, AI is a much bigger conversation, I'd say, in the music business than in Hollywood right now, but it's lurking, obviously, as it is in all sectors of society. Are probably the big ones.
Speaker 1:No. That makes sense.
Speaker 7:Oh, and and the federal film tax credit. A lot of people are wondering. There's a there's a push to try to pass a a tax credit for shooting in in The United States, which would bring a lot of production back from Europe and Canada. And Trump came out for it, and people are trying to get that done basically between now and when the next Congress seats
Speaker 1:in January. I I think Avengers is going to London or The UK. And I don't know if that's because that's where they actually wanna shoot or it's a financial decision. But it'd be exciting to get back to making movies in Hollywood. It's a good town.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, get booted out of our studio. That would that would be a bullish indicator for for It
Speaker 1:was way too easy to find studio space in Hollywood for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Way too easy.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for joining, Lucas. Really really enjoyed it. Let's do it again you have more stories.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 7:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. Bye. Well...
Speaker 2:And that's our show, folks.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for tuning in
Speaker 2:to
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