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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.
So something big happened yesterday. There was a massive viral article. And do you know how big this something big is happening? How much that grew?
Speaker 2:It went big. I was getting texts about
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 1:It has over a 100,000 likes now. It's quickly becoming the most read thing in the world. I don't know. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:75,000,000.
Speaker 1:75,000,000 views? Views. Okay. And 100 They're
Speaker 2:saying that only 200 people actually read it, but everyone has an opinion.
Speaker 1:Everyone has an opinion. I had an opinion. I wrote a piece about it yesterday comparing, saying AI is not like COVID. I kind of got one shot by the COVID analogy just from a mathematical perspective. But the best reaction to something big is happening, it's got to be John Palmer.
Speaker 1:Something small is happening. I was reading this this morning, actually laughing out loud. So we'll read through it. John Palmer says
Speaker 2:Yeah, you were reading it to yourself. Yes. And then you just started belly laughing. And so then I started filming. Then I asked you what I you were was filming you.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:I sent that to John
Speaker 1:Oh, I missed that.
Speaker 2:To get his reaction.
Speaker 1:Was to
Speaker 2:you reacting to his.
Speaker 1:Think back to 2014, a little over a decade ago. If you wanted a burrito, you had to get in your car and drive to the restaurant. You had to stand in line. You had to talk to a person. If someone told you that one day a stranger would bring you a burrito to your front door because you pressed a button on your phone, you would have said that sounds dystopian and also incredible.
Speaker 1:Then over the course of about three years, it just became normal. And this was before Chipotle started skimping out on the portions too. I think we're at that same inflection point right now, except of instead of burritos, it's your entire job. I've spent the last two weeks reading about AI and watching clips of people building things with it. I live in this world now.
Speaker 1:The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people, a few 100 researchers at a handful of companies. I'm not one of these people, says John Palmer. I work in crypto, but I am close enough to feel the ground shake. I follow several AI researchers on X, and I also recently purchased a Mac Mini. I haven't set it up yet, but I think you can understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:I know this is real because it happened to other people first. Here's the thing nobody outside of tech understands yet. The people sounding alarm aren't making predictions. They're telling you what already happened to them. I am relaying this information to you secondhand with conviction.
Speaker 1:For years, AI had been improving steadily. I absorbed these improvements fine because I wasn't really paying attention, to be honest. Then, apparently, in 2025, everything got much faster and then faster again. I know this because I watched a three hour podcast about it last Wednesday. The host was visibly shaken.
Speaker 1:I could tell because he wasn't even able to finish a single pint of Guinness. Then on February 5, two major AI labs released new models on the same day and something clicked. Not for me personally, I was at a birthday dinner for my wife's coworker. But for the people who tried the models that day, it was apparently a huge deal. One guy said he tells his AI what to build, walks away for a few hours, and comes back to find the work done.
Speaker 1:This will very likely be what my life is like as well once I set up my acne. AI will be doing things while I'm in the other room. That's potentially huge. Huge. Let me give you an example so you can understand what this looks like in practice.
Speaker 1:The guy on Twitter built an entire app just by describing it. The AI wrote the code, opened the app, tested the buttons, decided it didn't like the layout, fixed it, and only then said, it's ready. I'm going to do something I'm going to use something like that with my Mac Mini, some type of cool app or something. I'm still figuring it out, but I have all the hardware. And I'm definitely going to optimize my setup with all types of skills and plug ins.
Speaker 1:I'm not exaggerating. That's what my Tuesday
Speaker 3:could look like But I
Speaker 1:tried AI, and it wasn't that good. People would say this. They say this, I tried AI. It wasn't that good. Here's John Palmer's response.
Speaker 1:He says, I hear this constantly. I understand it because I also thought this. But the models today are apparently unrecognizable from what existed six months ago. Some of the people who are saying this have hundreds of thousands of followers and make sure you're not on the free plan. Have to get on the paid plan.
Speaker 2:That's key.
Speaker 1:How fast is this actually moving? Let's answer that question. In 2022, AI couldn't do basic math. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software.
Speaker 1:And by 2025, some of the best engineers in the world had handed over most of their coding work to AI. In February 2026, you can make AI send you a morning summary of the top posts on Reddit from your Mac Mini. What should you actually do? I'm not writing this to scare you, says John Palmer. I'm writing this because the single biggest advantage you can have right now is being early.
Speaker 1:Early to understand it, early to buy the hardware, early to subscribe to the paid tier and ask it to make a meal. You can start using it for real work. If you're an engineer, give it a Not
Speaker 2:a meal. A meal plan.
Speaker 1:A meal plan. Oh, a meal plan. Yeah. Actually, make a meal. That would be cool.
Speaker 1:If you're an engineer, give it a GitHub repo. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet. If you're in other industries, definitely figure out what you can give it. Then give But it give it something for sure. I just need to think about it more.
Speaker 1:Mention it to your coworkers. Right now, there's a brief window where most people are still ignoring this. You can be the person ignoring it less, which puts you ahead. Be the person who walks into a meeting and says, I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days. It's fine if it actually took you three days.
Speaker 1:The point is people will respect you. Get a Mac Mini. This is point number three.
Speaker 2:This one And was by the way, you can actually get a Mac Mini on DoorDash.
Speaker 1:You can, just like a burrito.
Speaker 2:It's important.
Speaker 1:Every single account I've seen posting this stuff has a Mac Mini. It's the ultimate tool for this stuff. You got to get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial adviser, says John Palmer. That said, I did just spend $599 on a Mac Mini plus AppleCare and $50 on clawed tokens.
Speaker 1:But if it gets too expensive, have a backup plan to switch to an open source Chinese model. Fourth, watch the podcasts. Actually, don't just watch. Study, TBPN, Door Cash, etcetera. The good thing is that these shows are several hours long, so you can basically fill up your entire day with just watching them.
Speaker 2:Or making them. Or making them, in our case.
Speaker 1:Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook, good grades, good college, stable job, it's over. Tell them it's likely not looking good for them. Go to your four year old and tell them,
Speaker 3:it's not looking good It's looking good, buddy.
Speaker 1:It's not looking good.
Speaker 2:It's not looking good.
Speaker 1:What I know, I know this isn't a fad. The technology works and the richest institutions in history are pouring trillions into it. I know this because I've seen it mentioned pretty frequently over the last few months. I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now, not with fear, but with curiosity, a sense of urgency. Ideally, The a Mac future is already here.
Speaker 1:It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to. And when it does, I will be ready. My Mac Mini will be unboxed. My agent will be configured.
Speaker 1:I will describe what I want in plain English, and it will appear. I just have to optimize everything first to make sure my setup is super legit. Most people won't want to hear about it until it's too late. You can be the reason someone you care about buys a Mac Mini. So funny.
Speaker 2:A banger.
Speaker 1:Such a banger. So, so good. I went and I described in plain English to Codex 5.3. Build me an app, an amazing app, the best app ever, one that will win awards and make me a legend in Silicon Valley. An award winning app.
Speaker 1:An award winning app. And it appears to be working.
Speaker 2:And more seriously, John John Palmer's post feels like a response to Will's essay, Tool Shaped Objects, which is fantastic. Is nearing completion of a deal to raise more than 20,000,000,000 in a funding round led by investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, D. E. Shaw, and Dragoneer. Let's dig in.
Speaker 2:Being a little bit silly with the pronunciation, Sydney over on X said, British AI researcher be like anthropic. Anthropic. Anthropic is nearing the completion of a deal to raise more than $20,000,000,000 in a funding round led by the group I just mentioned. The deal is set to value Anthropic at about $350,000,000,000 nearly doubling its prior value. The funding round includes a range of investors, including Kotu, Singapore's GIC, Microsoft's, Nvidia, and has become a who's who of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Speaker 1:So Founders Fund is known for the monopoly thesis. Like, there's power law. You want to be in the best company in the category. You want the best ownership. Put all your money in that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll go all in, famously. They did some other social networking deals, but obviously, like Facebook was the big one at seed, and that was enough to return that fund many times over. And so the whole thesis of the fund for a long time has been, like, this concentrated bets, concentrated bets. AI has been an interesting one.
Speaker 1:They're now in three major labs because they have a huge position in SpaceX, which now owns xAI. And so they're in that lab, sort of coincidentally. Peter Thiel, I believe, is listed on Wikipedia as a co founder of OpenAI, or at least he was like an initial donor and got like a co founder title, and so has been involved in OpenAI for a long time. And then they invested, I believe, in like the $60,000,000,000 round right right when ChatGPT was launching. And it was an odd deal because the company had not yet converted.
Speaker 1:It was very unclear what Microsoft would get, what the employees would get, what the investors would get, what the nonprofit would get because the nonprofit was going to keep a stake. And so it was this, like, wild bet. And I know a lot of investors
Speaker 2:It was a leap of faith.
Speaker 1:Was a leap of faith. A lot of investors were scared off because there was, you know, what am I investing in? Like, I'm not getting shares. I'm getting units. Structure.
Speaker 1:And I know many investors that were scared off by that.
Speaker 2:I'm an absolute unit, I'm used to buying shares.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So you had to do a lot of sort of leaps of faith. The thesis at the time, how big can this be? What is the market? What are the opportunities for really, really huge categories.
Speaker 1:A lot of founders funds investments like SpaceX, it's like this massive category that's very, very hard. But if you crack it, it's going to be an entirely new market. Social media was certainly as well. That made a lot of sense. Obviously, they're in X.
Speaker 1:Now they're in Anthropic. Sequoia is also in all three. And the interesting thing is, like, PT has given a number of talks where he's sort of been anti AI. You've seen this whole thing about like crypto is libertarian, AI is communist, and that AI is a consolidating force. He's never been one to say, oh, wow, the tools are so amazing.
Speaker 1:It's been a lot of, is this just doing your homework for you?
Speaker 2:He's not putting out threads about No. Using his Mac Mini.
Speaker 1:I don't even know if he has Mac
Speaker 2:Mini. You should send John Palmer's So, piece to
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, reading into this, does this say that the Founders Fund team thinks that there's like a divergence in the market, that there's actually two there are actually two markets going on here, one in consumer AI, advertising, knowledge retrieval, the other in code and developer tooling and code gen, and that Anthropic has actually carved out a separate space. So they're less competitive than people think. Maybe they're just more competitive, and it just makes sense to get into both.
Speaker 2:And we have some breaking news.
Speaker 1:What's the breaking news?
Speaker 2:Anthropic has formally announced the round.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:They said, we've raised $30,000,000,000 so they upsized it. 20 was they are now at a $14,000,000,000 run rate Wow. With this figure growing over 10% annually in each of those past three years. We'll see if they got another 10 x in them.
Speaker 1:The biggest update for me is that the forward deployed engineer thing is like very real. Even if the tools can build themselves, there's still so many blockers to actually rolling these out that you're gonna need a lot of people inside these organizations who are actually playing with Mac Minis on the weekend and getting obsessed with these tools and then bring them into the enterprise because it's very easy for a lot of people in Fortune 500 companies to just show up and do their job the way they always do it because no one gets fired for switching things up. But if you roll out some tool and it doesn't work the way you intended or it sucks about a bunch of your time, even if you're just, I have eight hours of work to do in my traditional system, where do you get the extra hours to automate your work? It takes time, and that's where the forward deployed engineers come in. So great gig for anyone who wants to go implement enterprise agentic workflows because that will be the theme.
Speaker 2:We can see Anthropix run rate revenue growth.
Speaker 1:Wow. You
Speaker 2:can see here quite the pop from $0 in 2023 to 100,000,000 in 2024 to a clean 1,000,000,000 in January 2025 and now sitting at 14,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:This is acceleration. This is this is true Are
Speaker 2:you feeling it yet? True acceleration.
Speaker 1:Dario sort of underplayed 2027, I guess. Or I guess he said that he he was like, I don't think we have another 10 x. If they go to a 100,000,000,000
Speaker 3:Well, he said like, we've been 10 x ing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, we'll see if we do it again. Yeah. Like, wink wink.
Speaker 1:If they hit a 140,000,000,000 run rate by the end of the year, that would be insane. But strange times. Strange times. You love this effect. That's all, folks.
Speaker 2:I mean Tyler Tyler's been saying stuff along these lines for some time. More on Anthropic, Nathan Lambert was quoting their announcement from yesterday saying, we're committing to covering electricity price increases from our data centers. This is Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:To ensure rate payers aren't picking up the tab, we'll pay 100% of grid upgrade costs, work to bring new power online, and invest in systems to reduce grid strain.
Speaker 1:Which makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Maybe this should have been their Super Bowl ad. When you look at clearly how much energy the industry put into the Super Bowl and what the net effect was for the average American, I don't think the average American came away from that having more positive feelings towards If anything, they were like, I'm sick of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meme was like, oh, beer ads, like refreshing. It's pretty easy to say, hey, my electricity bill is going up. I don't want a data center in my county, in my city. And you call your city county representative and they say, Yeah, I don't like the slop either.
Speaker 1:I see a bunch of junk that doesn't seem that valuable. Why do we need it here? It's not going to create that many jobs. It's not going to be that good for taxes, blah, blah, blah. And other companies that do this, too, Google had their clean transition tariff, and Amazon also pays a surplus above electricity costs already.
Speaker 1:The anti AI issue is remarkably bipartisan. Data Center Watch claims that 55% of Republicans and 45% Democrat in affected districts. So 55, 45. So it's not really like a red a right issue or a left issue, like there's pushback on both sides. So Anthropic is putting $20,000,000 into a super PAC operation that is meant as a direct counter to the OpenAI super PAC operation.
Speaker 1:The midterms are a battleground between these two rival AI labs, says Teddy Schleffer at The New York Times. And so we're going see some attack ads. It's like Sam and Dario are running for election, and we're going to see some
Speaker 2:Be the president of AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But I mean, just said that, like, that overwhelmingly on both sides, there's, like, a lot of pushback. Right? So it's like, what what are the actual differences between their their approaches? Yeah.
Speaker 3:That is interesting. Maybe, I guess, maybe Antarct will be more, about the the China chip issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like there's they they should be more in alliance than against each other.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's like every There's crypto super pack. Yeah. It's like the big one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's no like big AI one right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It it would it would be weird if there was like a USDC super PAC and then a USDT super PAC and they were like fighting each other and just constantly surfacing bodies that are buried in the closets or skeletons in the closet. Because every time there's a successful attack on OpenAI, yes, people might be like, oh, Okay, I like Anthropic a little bit more. But most people just come away being like, I don't like AI.
Speaker 2:If you were falsely accused of a crime and it went to trial, who would you prefer to listen to the arguments and give the verdict?
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:the options are a jury of your peers or Claude Opus 4.6. 63% of people prefer Claude.
Speaker 1:Yes. Might be the audience here. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2:a little biased.
Speaker 1:I think the jury of your peers will be around for a very, very long time. I mean, they still have courtroom sonographers,
Speaker 3:and we have I think Vlad's going be around a long time, too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. If you're thinking in centuries, maybe. But I mean, the courtroom sketch artist. We've had cameras for 100 Like, the jury's
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm not saying that I think this will ever happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. But you'd prefer it. You would you would ideally. Yeah. I mean, how many jurors will be sitting there being like, okay, Claude, how should I vote?
Speaker 1:I haven't really been paying attention. Like, I've been playing Candy Crush.
Speaker 2:What's up with Warner Brothers? The situation intensified this week as Paramount CEO David Ellison and a vocal investor made new moves to thwart rival Netflix's planned takeover.
Speaker 1:The storied Hollywood asset in the home of Batman, Harry Potter, and the White Lotus.
Speaker 2:Paramount, the long, robust suitor for Warner Brothers Discovery enhanced its $77,900,000,000 all cash offer for the entire company Tuesday in an effort to bring Warner to the negotiating table and ultimately abandon its deal with Netflix. Also an all cash transaction valued at $75,000,000,000 Cleveland investor and Cora Holdings entered the fray by acquiring a small stake in Warner with an eye toward increasing its holdings and pressuring the company to negotiate with Paramount. I wonder if they're friends with the Ellisons. Interesting. Paramount's gamble.
Speaker 2:Paramount is hoping its latest pitch can persuade Warner to ditch its agreement and sell its movie and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. Unlike Netflix, Paramount also intends to buy Warner Discovery's cable networks, which include CNN, TVS, and Food Network. Warner has so far shown little interest in engaging with Paramount, telling investors that Ellison's previous offer was not even comparable to the Netflix agreement. On Tuesday, Warner said its board will review Paramount's new offer, but it but isn't modifying its recommendation regarding its agreement with Netflix. The company advised shareholders to not take any action now regarding Paramount's amended tender offer.
Speaker 2:The bar for Warner to reopen talks with Paramount is very high given its contract with Netflix.
Speaker 1:A massive termination fee.
Speaker 2:Paramount said it would pay the 2,800,000,000.0. Let's give it up for multi billion dollar termination fees. Warner would owe Netflix should the agreed to deal collapse and pay a ticking fee of $0.25 a share to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn't closed.
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:We got ticking fees.
Speaker 1:Ticking time bomb.
Speaker 2:Some stakeholders are holding out for Paramount to further boost its bid. I'm not surprised, given that they've repeatedly said, with their offers, this is not our best and final offer. So everyone is waiting around saying, let's get those numbers up.
Speaker 1:Remind me of how Paramount is doing right now. They have UFC. And the experience watching UFC was a downgrade from pay per view but cheaper. What was the takeaway?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I don't think we can give an analysis of Paramount as an entire business. Everything looks good. The experience was not as good as paying for the pay per view.
Speaker 1:And was that because you had through all the you had to jump through all the hoops to sign up for Paramount plus and you weren't already a member?
Speaker 2:Like the viewing experience was different because it's now subscription and ad supported, whereas previously pay per views had ads, but not nearly as much. So the thing you're missing now watching is in round commentary, walkouts, things that hardcore fans really like.
Speaker 1:Is there less Joe Rogan commentary?
Speaker 2:Basically.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Brutal. This is
Speaker 2:extremely bearable. Well, markets are reacting. Paramount's down 7% today.
Speaker 1:Paramount needs to test Netflix's pain threshold without having to bid too high. The revised offer does exactly that without further constraining its balance sheet. For now, the ball is now with Netflix. Warner and Netflix are focusing on getting their deal approved by the Justice Department as well as regulatory authorities in Europe. As part of its investigation, the DOJ is looking into whether Netflix has engaged in anticompetitive practices.
Speaker 1:Last week, president Trump reversed course and said in an interview with NBC News that he didn't think he should weigh in on the deal and would instead leave it to the justice department. I've decided I shouldn't be involved, Trump said in the interview. He previously expressed concerns about the size and scale of a Netflix Warner combination, saying the combined company would command significant market share, but he's clearly been watching YouTube. And he just says YouTube's too dominant. Too many watch hours on YouTube.
Speaker 1:It's fine. Let it rip.
Speaker 2:Erica over on X posted that Aileen Gu to join Benchmark as a senior associate when she returns from the Olympics. She photoshopped this. Of course, we did not put this out, but it's a good bit. Aileen competes for China in the Olympics, even though she's a US citizen.
Speaker 1:And an American student. And an
Speaker 2:American student. Bill Gurley responded.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of Americans do this. I have a buddy who was able to go play ping pong in the Olympics because he had dual citizenship. Or he wasn't even like a dual citizen. He just like his parents were from another country, so he was able to go beyond that team. Because a lot of the other teams are like way less competitive.
Speaker 1:So it's like you wouldn't make the US team, but you want to play anyway, you go with the other country.
Speaker 2:But I think with Aileen, it's because the sponsorship dollars
Speaker 1:she
Speaker 2:can make by being a Chinese star. Oh. There's all these Chinese brands.
Speaker 1:I thought you couldn't
Speaker 2:She's a global star.
Speaker 1:You can just get paid? You can get a
Speaker 2:bunch of it not to compete in the Olympics, but broader endorsement deals. Yeah,
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah. You're on the Wheaties box.
Speaker 2:Getting a gold medal is like UBI because you'll be able to do You'll
Speaker 1:be turned into a libou, potentially.
Speaker 2:Well, In this yeah. But Bill Gurley actually responded
Speaker 1:What'd he say?
Speaker 2:And said, I can't believe you actually found out about this. We were planning to keep it a secret. But he wrote it in Chinese.
Speaker 1:He's leaning in. He's leaning into the meme.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Influencer marketing has helped AI company Hicksfield hit $300,000,000 in annual revenue run rate in just eleven months. But misleading marketing tactics and a social media strategy based on shock has led to backlash among creators. In late January, Tim Sohrut, a London based video game director, received a message on a social media site from the marketing team at Higgs Field, a fast growing AI generation startup. This is the biggest moment in Higgs Field history, and we want you to be a part of it at Red, the $1,300,000,000 startup whose tools are used by some 15,000,000 creators and ad agencies to churn out four and a half million video clips every day, was about to launch a new tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models convert text prompts into motion graphics.
Speaker 1:You like good vibes? You have motion? Use Vibe Motion.
Speaker 2:The offer of Zorit shared the startup social media post along with a video clip from preassembled marketing materials, the company would pay him $200.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But Zorit, who has spent years designing graphics both manually and with AI tools, could tell something was off. Videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the visual quirks of AI. He's like, this is simply too good.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:And he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren't generated with AI at all.
Speaker 1:I said this was a huge alpha in just taking a cinema camera, filming yourself, and being like, this is AI generated, and I'm raising. It's fraud, but alpha. This happens a lot with open AI stuff, where people will see a video, and they'll be like, wow, they definitely have a new model. And it's like, they also have a production budget. They can't just hire actors.
Speaker 2:So when Sam launched Monaco yesterday, was his video AI? Because it looked it was fiftyfifty for me. And it's kind of a funny thing if you're launching an AI company to show Why not? I made this with AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's that good.
Speaker 1:It's good enough.
Speaker 2:Anyways Yeah. So this guy gets media kit Mhmm. Says, hey, can you share some of these AI outputs? Yep. But he found out and said there were video templates that appear to have been lifted from a stock site in Vato and went Oh, I know and Paste it's own logos.
Speaker 2:While Sora didn't share the videos, others did circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Hicksfield. Wow. All this hype is fake and it's bought, Sora told Forbes, Hicksfield's co founder, with its library of 400 presets of camera motions and visual effects. SF based Hicksfield offers an easy way for creators and advertisers to produce cinematic short videos through text based prompts. You guys already know this.
Speaker 2:Last month, the startup claimed it doubled its annualized revenue to $200,000,000 in just two weeks, Yeah. Driven largely by subscriptions from its 300,000 paying users. By early February, its annual run rate crossed 300,000,000.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:CEO Alex told Forbes that he hopes to reach 1,000,000,000 by the end of the year after raising 80,000,000 from firms like Excel and Menlo in mid January. The startup is now in talks to raise money again. But that rapid growth appears to be driven by aggressive, shocking, and sometimes misleading marketing tactics. Anyways, they're moving very quickly. It was interesting when we asked Alex about his margins, he gave kind of a concerning response.
Speaker 2:He immediately was like
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, when you're reselling a model, you are at risk there. At the same time, with a different business model, with a different customer acquisition flow, it's possible to have good margins on top of models if it's deeply embedded.
Speaker 2:Here's maybe where Higgs Field kind of crossed the line. Apparently, they they were sharing a Google Drive folder with the creators that had popular children's characters like Shrek, Moana, and Mickey Mouse saying saying things that are
Speaker 1:agree on the show, but
Speaker 2:sound a little racist. And then non consensual deep fakes of public figures like Sydney Sweeney and Zendaya and President Trump. So the challenge here is like companies like Higgs Field Yeah. Are competing with these Chinese open source models
Speaker 1:Oh, way
Speaker 2:that have no rules.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:They'll generate whatever you want. Yep. And clearly, there's an insane amount of demand for video models that have no rules. Of course. And so this isn't surprising even though it's wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, goes back to the the BitTorrent Napster analogy where, like, the demand for things that just can't be done legally is really, really high. You can't view that as a business opportunity because, of course, you'll see really, really high demand for completely free music if you're not paying anything, right? You'll see really high demand for generate a Mickey Mouse character. The question is the business question is, can you actually do the deal, license it, make sure all the stakeholders and all the legal parties are represented and happy with the deal and everyone's paying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they did launch a program called Higgs Field Earn, which was basically like a clipping thing. You could make stuff, share it. Depending Depending on how much engagement it got, you'd earn some money. That led to them getting banned from X or their account shut down.
Speaker 1:Woah. I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we'll I see how this nets
Speaker 1:do think that there's an interesting opportunity right now for a little bit of what CapCut's doing plus Nano Banana Sora stuff, where you have a lot of video generation, but then you also have the ability to lay over just actual text, actual motion graphics. And if you pair up some of the more deterministic tools, like basically tool use, like how ChatGPT can also do a math problem in Python and be 100% accurate, you could imagine if you want to just draw a rectangle on top of the video that you've generated or make it black and white, That's something that doesn't require a generative AI model. You can just call a tool that has the same functionality as Premiere Pro, and then it'll just do that. But you have to actually wire all that up, make it all work together. And maybe that's where this goes.
Speaker 1:And then I don't really know how defensible that is, but we'll see.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I was just going to say, like, I mean, kind of just describing like a rapper, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So at
Speaker 3:least in the text field, it seems like rappers, at least of late, have not been Yeah. You know, people are much less bullish on rappers now than they were like a year and a half ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably. I don't know. SDKid, pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 2:We got one more post. Yeah. People are reacting to the men's luge doubles. They're saying it's one of the most baffling things I've ever watched. National champion speaker says, how do you find out you're good at this?
Speaker 2:What's the conversation look like? I guess I I may have seen this before. I I remember as a kid watching Singles. Yeah. But this is baffling.
Speaker 1:There's also something called skeleton.
Speaker 2:Like, what are you what are you
Speaker 1:think it's an evolution. I think it starts with, like, a toboggan, and you have, like, a bunch of people essentially in, like, a rowboat. And then you're just like, let's do one less. Let's do one less. Let's optimize and reduce weight.
Speaker 1:And then they're finally down to just two people, and they're basically just on this, like, sled together. And, yeah, I guess you get here. Very, very funny. Personal injury attorney in his fifties is on the cusp of becoming the oldest American Winter Olympian in history. All he needs is for one of his teammates to slip and fall.
Speaker 1:This guy is elite.
Speaker 2:I feel like being a personal injury attorney is probably a great gig if you're in one of these kind of fringe Olympic sports. You know, you wanna have some flexibility in your schedule. You wanna be able to make enough to reinvest into the sport. Yeah. This guy's clearly locked It's been an honor.
Speaker 3:It has.
Speaker 2:Have the best evening of your entire life.
Speaker 3:Yes. And we'll
Speaker 1:see Friday. Goodbye.