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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Tuesday, 04/28/2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the Portions Finance. We got a quick show because John Gray from Blackstone is joining in twenty minutes. We're gonna run through a bunch of stuff. I wrote about this in car surveillance thing.
Speaker 2:It's going viral. It's sort of fake news. We gotta sort of truth zone it, also it's coming, it might not matter because if you get in a robotaxi, there's definitely gonna be a camera on you. But the fear is centered around this idea that there will be a requirement from the federal government that every new car sold in The United States will be required by law to have technology, uh-oh, that puts constant surveillance on the driver. And this is happening sooner than you think by 2027.
Speaker 2:That's just twelve months away. AI in your car will determine if you're sober and fit to drive automatically turning off the vehicle.
Speaker 1:It's almost May, by the way.
Speaker 2:I know. We're we're we're what? Eight months away, I guess, from 2027? This is the real AI 2027 problem. This is this is a big We
Speaker 1:are having audio issues. It's most likely a nation state. Potentially. We are under attack. Potentially.
Speaker 1:We are working on it.
Speaker 2:It's like watching a dubbed foreign film. Well, maybe we can play this video of what happened the last time America tried to, pull back on, on driving a car while intoxicated, and some of the some of the response, some of the backlash from
Speaker 3:Any attempt to restrict drinking and driving here is viewed
Speaker 2:Can we pull this up? Okay. We're working on it.
Speaker 1:Anyway Production team is being humbled this morning.
Speaker 2:Humbled. Anyway, let me read through some of my take, then we'll play that funny video. So sounds scary. Okay. John actually says audio sounds good to me for what it's worth.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Let's see. How about this? And not the sound okay? Does this sound okay?
Speaker 2:Does Does this sound okay? Relax. It all sounds good. You know, yeah, let's play this video.
Speaker 3:And driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic. It's kinda
Speaker 4:getting common is when a fellow can't put in a hard day's work, put in eleven, twelve hours a day, and then get in your truck and the lease ring one or two beers.
Speaker 5:They're making it laws where you can't drink when you want to. You can't you have to wear a seat belt when you're driving. Pretty soon we're gonna be calm in this country. Calm in this country.
Speaker 1:What what when was that? Was that the
Speaker 2:Apparently, that's real. I I always I saw I've seen that video before. I always thought it was fake. I didn't realize that that was real. That feels like eighties, seventies, something.
Speaker 2:Eighties. Eighties? Okay. Well, there was backlash then and there's backlash now. Some of it's a little bit overblown.
Speaker 2:This sounds very scary, you know, constant surveillance. The real the real crazy version is a camera that's watching you at all times. The government, the police, and the automaker can just turn off your car whenever they want. That sounds bad. What's actually being proposed?
Speaker 2:What's actually on the timetable? So the rationale for this is good. And I I think most people would agree that that it is a reasonable thing to do to try and curb alcohol related vehicle accidents, drunk driving. There's more than ten thousand alcohol related deaths each year on U. S.
Speaker 2:Roads. That's a ton. Anything we can do to stop that, reduce that, totally worth working on, totally worth pursuing as long as it doesn't violate a whole bunch of other liberties or create more problems than it solves, right? We want net positive impact here. Technology is getting better at detecting intoxication and it's getting a lot cheaper.
Speaker 2:So why not just ship drunk driver detection system with every car from the factory? That's the proposal. There are a bunch of potential downsides that we can get into, but it's important to about where we actually stand today. So the core concept here is generally correct. Congress did pass a mandate directing the NHTSA to create a standard for advanced drunk driving prevention technology in new passenger vehicles.
Speaker 2:Now the twenty twenty seven date that people are citing, that's not a hard deadline. The law was passed back in 2024. And in the actual law, it basically allowed for delays. So they said, The NHTSA will only issue a binding mandate requiring automakers to actually roll out this tech when the tech is ready and the NHTSA currently says that the technology is not ready. So in theory, the tech feels close, but the scale of the problem is so big, you can see why there's a delay here.
Speaker 2:Alcohol detection systems exist and are typically deployed for drivers with DUIs. You're familiar with blowing in the tube, probably. Hopefully not personally. But the problem is that those little hoses that you blow into, those are active systems. They require you to actually sit there and do that for a minute.
Speaker 2:The government doesn't want that. That's not what the proposal They want passive. They want passive, which means breath sensing. So there's just like smell o vision, basically. If it smells alcohol, it doesn't turn on the car.
Speaker 2:The other one is fingerprint reading. So you put your finger on the start button and it scans into your finger and and and sees how many alcohol particles are inside, I guess. That that sounds sci fi, but we're close, I guess. There's a couple other ways you can solve that. And then camera system.
Speaker 2:Just look at the at the driver. If they look drunk, then don't turn on the car. So all of these seem like they could be close to being roughly accurate right now. Like, you can imagine an AI startup or a university lab putting something together at a hackathon that's 90% of the way there, maybe 99% of the way there, maybe even 99.9% of the way there. But the problem is that Americans drive a lot.
Speaker 2:The rough estimate is that there are almost a quarter trillion driving trips per year in America. It's basically every American, all 350,000,000 of them basically, taking an average of two trips every single day of the year. So two twenty four billion trips a year is what the rough back of the envelope I did was. And what that means in practice is that if this system is 99.9 accurate, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results every year. And the fact that probably 99.9% of these trips are not inebriated, like drunk driving is not 50% of trips.
Speaker 2:It's not 1% of trips. It's a very small amount.
Speaker 1:Think about how people would would abuse this new system. It'd be like students being like, sorry. Couldn't make it to the exam.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Dog ate my lunch. My car wouldn't start because of a false positive on this. And so even if you're at 99%, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results. The vast majority of those are going to be people who are sober.
Speaker 2:Somebody wants to get in their car for their morning commute. They're a little sleepy or they wore some cologne that triggered some sensor. System flags them as intoxicated and prevents them from starting their car, and it's infuriating. The tech will probably get there with enough time and effort, so it's worth looking into who supports this and opposes it. The mandate was actually bipartisan, but there's starting to be a backlash from libertarian conservatives who are worried about Orwellian government controls.
Speaker 2:There's an idea that there will be a remote kill switch, which leads to a bunch of dystopian possibilities. That is not in the current provision. That's not what's actually being proposed right now. But, you know, it's possible that at the end that the end result of this process of back and forth, you do wind up with that exact capability. And so people are worried about the system going off while you're driving at speed on the on the roads, and then the car just shuts off and you get in a crash, and that's, like, actually more dangerous than potentially the alternative.
Speaker 2:And so the middle ground seems to be what's called pre drive lockout.
Speaker 1:We need a tinfoil expert because haven't the tinfoil enthusiasts have been saying that the sort of remote
Speaker 2:Are you using tinfoil enthusiasts to mean conspiracy theories? I've never heard that before.
Speaker 6:It's good though.
Speaker 1:That's a that's a new one. Okay. Yes. So tinfoil enthusiasts
Speaker 2:Yes. Will definitely
Speaker 1:Will have been making have been have been claiming Yes. That the remote shut off button has existed forever.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Since the since the '19
Speaker 1:when '85 some sort of like, you know, witness or or something like that just gets in a very inconveniently timed high speed wreck Oh. That is That's shut down.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. I was unfamiliar with this conspiracy theory. It's interesting though. But yeah. So I mean the current the current, like, consensus is around maybe pre drive lockout being the more moderate solution than actually shutting the car off once it's driving.
Speaker 2:Still incredibly incredibly inconvenient if there's false positives. And then you also do still run into some potential negatives outcomes where you go to the beach, you have a couple of glasses of wine, you're not planning on leaving, but then the tsunami warning goes off. You need to get back in your car and your car says no. Like, I don't care that there's a tsunami. Oh.
Speaker 2:I don't care that there's a tsunami. You have had two glasses of wine. You're at point o eight. You can't drive right now. And you need to tell the car, well, in this case, I I'm okay with driving drunk because the tsunami's coming and I'm at the beach and I had a couple of glasses of wine.
Speaker 2:And the car won't be able to, you know, potentially, you know, deal with that nuance. Right?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And there's a whole bunch of other yeah. And there's a whole bunch of other scenarios that could potentially play out where the just judiciousness is is difficult. But potentially unlocked, know, AI agents. I don't know. You know, you ask these models, what would they do in some certain scenario?
Speaker 2:Maybe there's a solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think there's a much much stronger argument for rolling this out as soon as the average vehicle
Speaker 2:Is just full self driving.
Speaker 1:Has has full self driving capability.
Speaker 2:But then but then you don't need it because you can be as drunk as you want.
Speaker 1:No. I still I still think there's gonna be this big window where where where you're not gonna be able to specifically because if you need I I don't know. As long as somebody as long as somebody needs to sit in the front seat of their car
Speaker 2:Sure. Essentially take Yeah. Over
Speaker 1:on in in any type of situation.
Speaker 2:I like the idea of level four self driving. You get in the car. There's one button you push to say, hey, just put it in self driving mode. I've had a couple drinks. Don't let me take the wheel.
Speaker 1:No matter how hard I try
Speaker 2:to negotiate. Matter I try It's all disabled. It's just play mobile level. And then but then but then there's a second button. And for that, you have to do a full blood transfusion.
Speaker 2:They centrifuge your blood and make sure that you have the purest blood possible to take to take the wheel and be able to actually drive the vehicle.
Speaker 1:Don't Maybe something there.
Speaker 2:I did have I did have a take on this though, which is that Doug Gemaro, friend of the show, founder of carswithbids.com, has always talked about the eras of cars. You know, the air cooled Porsches, then you have the the fully manual, no no no electronic systems, no stability control, no traction control, those types of cars. Then you get into the the manual gear boxes, the no turbos, no hybrid systems. And then the modern supercar era is just a bonus if it's not a full electric car. It's like, you know it's going to be a hybrid, but it at least there's an engine of some sort.
Speaker 2:And that's what car collectors are sort of marking these moments where it's like, it's the last manual. It's the last non, you know, non hybrid supercar made by Ferrari or something like that. Yeah. And there's gonna be a world where you're like, oh, that was the last one that didn't have the camera that looked at you twenty four seven or whatever. I And think it creates this like new class of like vintage cars.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Not investment grade, but certainly something that people I mean, you can already see people reacting to this even though the post is like a little bit overhyped. You can already see people reacting to it being like, I gotta buy a 2026 and hold on to it forever and keep it in great condition because I don't want that. But anyway, there there there's been a pushback on this stuff for a long time. Tyler, you have anything on on cars?
Speaker 2:Are you old enough to drive?
Speaker 7:I was just thinking like like what do you think the premium is for a car that you can still like drunk driving?
Speaker 2:I think I think your car is is is gonna go Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is not this is not even worth joking about. Yeah. Anyway Bad joke. Move on.
Speaker 2:Moving on. What else is going on? Oh, we gotta talk about the GPT 5.5 prompt for Codex, which seems to have a duplicated line trying to get it to not talk about creatures. Tyler, you dug into this. What is actually going on?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it just seems like there's there's some like emergent property of the new model where it always tries to talk about like kind of creatures and goblins Raccoons. Yeah. Ogres are in there. Trolls, ogres, pigeons.
Speaker 2:And so So they
Speaker 7:have to counteract this. Right? You have to put in the system prompt, tell them not to do this.
Speaker 2:Where where is this creatures? Do not do not talk about never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. This reminds me of those old image prompts where there would be a negative prompt that specifically said like, do not put six fingers on the human's hand. But what weird one and what an odd an odd line to throw into a coding agent. Like, do we know anything else about this?
Speaker 2:Have people dug into like what is actually going on here?
Speaker 1:Do we know?
Speaker 7:Mean, it it might not be just the coding agent.
Speaker 1:I don't It's probably just the model in general It's the model itself. It's goblin mode. The model itself yearns to discuss creatures, goblins, raccoons. It is an emergent property of super Vi
Speaker 2:says, they had to put this in due to my effect on the company. Goblins, creatures sort of followed me in through the front door when I joined and we are only just now starting to understand the downstream effects of their presence. And TBo says, never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons or other animals or creatures unless it's absolutely no
Speaker 1:There's so many
Speaker 2:If you know, you know.
Speaker 1:So somebody says my my 5.5 codec codec said goblin with a flashlight when referring to a bug fix yesterday. What?
Speaker 2:There's a billion goblins inside your model weights. You just have to get them out, says Tyler Cosgrove. Anyway, we can dig more into that. There's a whole bunch more OpenAI news that we can go in to throughout the show today. But we are very fortunate to be joined by John Gray.
Speaker 2:He's the president and CEO COO of Blackstone. And he's in the waiting room, and we will bring him into the TBPN UltraDome. John, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 8:Great to be with you guys. I've never had a preamble on ogres and goblins. Very excited.
Speaker 2:We are in we are in odd territory, odd times with the AI boom. I'm sure we'll talk about all sorts of different elements of it, different machinations in the global economy. But I'd love to start with a little bit of background on you. I know you've been with Blackstone for a long time. I'm fascinated by the decision to join, what the firm was like when you joined and how it's evolved over your tenure.
Speaker 8:Well, I came here in 1992 straight out of college, straight out of Penn. My senior year in college, I met a young woman in romantic poetry class, and a month later, I got a job, and now thirty four and a half years later, same woman, same firm. So very simple, very boring. Amazing. And when I joined this place, it was small.
Speaker 8:We had 75 people, We had a small m and a advisory business, and then we had an investment business with $750,000,000 of capital. Wow. And it was exciting because we were doing the private equity business and investing, and you flash ahead to today, and we've got a firm that manages over $1,300,000,000,000.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it's been a remarkable ride. Exactly. It it it would be hard to imagine because when we started at the firm, when you go to meetings, you'd have to tell people what Blackstone is and what we do. And that's obviously changed quite a bit, and credit to the founders, Pete Peterson, Steve Schwarzman, who continues to drive things today. They just had a vision that they could do more.
Speaker 8:And the alternatives business, private markets, was a tiny industry. And it started in private equity, but Steve in particular had this idea that we could do other things. So we went into real estate where I moved after about a year at the firm. We expanded into hedge funds, ultimately into credit, and later on into infrastructure and growth equity to the point now where we have this massive scale and can give almost any sort of capital solution in the private market. And I'd say the key thing that's really changed is what was a very much of a niche business serving a small number of endowments and pension funds and just doing a a high octane investing in private markets, private equity, real estate private equity has evolved today to serving insurance companies and individual investors and sovereign wealth and all different people around the world and doing things at high returning strategies and low returning strategies all around the globe.
Speaker 8:So but the most exciting thing I'd say is that the firm has stayed remarkably constant, that the commitment to excellence around the place to drive the entrepreneurial spirit, that's what it allowed it to grow. And it still feels like, even at this scale, like we're running a small business, which is not what maybe your viewers would expect, but we still have tons of pride of ownership, doing the right thing for our customers, and we know at the end of the day, the only thing that ultimately matters is that we deliver great performance. Yeah. If we don't deliver a premium to our clients, they're not going to come back. And so everything's focused around that and obviously operate with integrity as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I want to talk about the entrepreneurial DNA of the firm. It feels like the partnership is extremely entrepreneurial. That's definitely a core value. As Blackstone has grown from one strategy to 80 strategies, 80 plus strategies, I think, what is the process for standing up a new strategy?
Speaker 2:How organic is that? We've seen venture capital firms go from they were doing Series As, now they're doing growth equities. They just sort of like bleed into the other strategy. And I'm wondering if there's a more deliberate process where there's someone on the team who's going out and exploring, finding a new opportunity or you notice that, hey, we're doing a type of we're engaged in a strategy and we actually need to sort of split this off and it's like cell division.
Speaker 8:I think it's all of the above. There is no master plan, but somebody comes along to us. In fact, yesterday we got a about an opportunity in an area that's adjacent to something we do, where we don't have a focus. It was somebody who wants to give us a serious amount of capital and said, hey, would you be willing to do a business? So in that case, it it came from sort of reverse solicitation.
Speaker 8:Obviously, when we were a smaller firm, you didn't get a lot of those. But I would say it was always this sort of basic idea of adjacency, where we were doing something, you know, you're doing private equity, you're doing real estate, and infrastructure sits right in between those two. Mhmm. Or you're doing, you know, higher risk debt capital, but maybe we can move a little more senior, and then ultimately you move to very senior capital. And the same thing in real estate, opportunistic, then more stabilized, then debt.
Speaker 8:And I think the key is, can you use the intellectual capital? That's really one of the great assets. It's the people here and all the insights. And if you think about investing as pattern recognition, which is you connect dots. If you have a broader platform and you can connect a bunch of dots, then you can be better at these adjacent things.
Speaker 8:And you end up serving the same customers who would prefer you to show up and say, oh, you can do private equity really well, and you can do real estate, and you can do credit. I'd love to work with you. We we really trust your organization. But the key is there's got to be a market opportunity. You've got to be able to deliver that return, and then you've got to have the people to do it right.
Speaker 8:Because the worst thing is to say, oh, there's a great opportunity. I can raise money for SPAC. Right? And then you raise tons of money and you end up not delivering for the customers. So the standard has to be, can we deliver a premium return?
Speaker 8:Do we have the expertise? And do we have the people to do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure we're going talk about artificial intelligence, but is there a second macro trend that you have locked onto that is an overarching thesis? I mean, we've been following the peptide boom and what's going on in GLP-one. Are big stories in financial markets broadly.
Speaker 1:Manufacturing is
Speaker 2:And another one with lot of interesting I'm just wondering if there's anything else that's actually
Speaker 8:I'd give you a bunch of those. Yeah. Mean, and we spend a lot of time trying to be thematic. Know, one of the things I've learned over time as investors is you you're so focused on your model. What is page 52 of the model?
Speaker 8:This assumption, whatever. But when you look back over time, I often say it's the first paragraph that matters. What's the basic business, the industry you're going after, definitely matters who your management team is. But theme,
Speaker 1:the theme,
Speaker 8:right neighborhood makes all the difference. I don't care if you're the greatest investor operator in the world, if you buy department store chains or legacy media companies. Right? There are just businesses where the wind's at your in your face, and you'd love to do things where the wind's at your back. Now you can still overpay, you could have the wrong business model in a good neighborhood, but your chance of success is much higher.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So as an organization, we're constantly saying to ourselves, what are those things? And so to the question, I'd say there are some basic ones. There's a global shortage of housing since the GFC. We've been investing against that.
Speaker 8:We've been selling goods obviously, really now for twenty five years increasingly online. Owning last mile logistics has been an incredible business. Mhmm. Because every time you buy something from Amazon, it goes through one of these last mile logistics hubs. There are geographies.
Speaker 8:India has been moving towards capitalism, you know, more physical, legal, capital markets infrastructure. And so building a great team there, investing in the right sectors, that has been an unbelievably successful theme for us. Japan has really reemerged in the last three or four years as a place that's open to foreign capital, that's allowing companies to restructure, allowing people like us to take companies private, and that's creating a lot of energy and excitement. You mentioned life sciences. I mean, you think about this AI and the number of products that can be created, and yet it's all still going to have to go through phase three trials, and we've got a big business that does just that.
Speaker 8:We love that. That's an area where obviously human beings are going to continue to invest a bunch of capital. The physical world, the re industrialization is massive. Probably the biggest theme beyond the data centers for us today, which we can talk about, is what's happening in electricity. I mean, all of the things.
Speaker 8:The data centers, the robots, the autonomous vehicles, that reindustrialization, it all needs power. Mhmm. And it's everything from LNG to renewables to pipelines to electrical equipment to utility services. The way to think about it is you try to find some great thing, like data centers. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then you turn it upside down and say, what are all the inputs that go into that? Mhmm. Or today, sadly, defense feels like it's gonna be a massive tailwind business. Right? Every country around the world is gonna be spending more on defense.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And so I think as investors, getting your heads around that and positioning your portfolio in private markets or public markets to say, these are the areas I have the highest conviction. The best is when you can find something one derivative off because today, as you guys know, the hottest things tend to get really high multiples. Yep. But can I find that thing that's not quite as sexy?
Speaker 8:And for us, of course, the data centers have been an unbelievable way to play it. Then you get the benefit of this without necessarily having to pay a huge price.
Speaker 2:How are you grounding the your thesis around artificial intelligence and the growth there? Like, are you obviously, there's a million data points about revenue and and multiples and valuations and there's a lot of good news where no matter where you look. But do you ever zoom out and look at how you at Blackstone are using artificial intelligence, the value that you're getting for it, where it's working, where it's not working, and use that to sort of level set on how real, how impactful this technology will be?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing driving us is seeing the power of this technology as it gets deployed. Now I think all of us are frustrated that the technology is so powerful, but getting it inside of companies is hard. Yeah. It's sort of the beaker to bedside problem in clinical trials, right?
Speaker 8:Like, we've got this great medicine, how do we get it to the patients? How do we turn it into something usable? That is the challenge. But we are definitely finding more and more use cases. The first thing I'd point out, and our companies, their LLM spend and we have by the way, we have 270 companies, 13,000 pieces of real estate.
Speaker 8:It's massive in its scale. Our company's spend on LLMs was up 15 fold q one of this year over last. It's off a small base. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 8:But it tells you what's happening. Yeah. And all of these companies are trying to find ways to be more efficient. Yep. We own an accounting firm.
Speaker 8:They're trying to make obviously tax and audit much more automated using this technology. We own ancestry.com, and they're trying to do things with content creation, which is telling an immersive story based on your family history as opposed to just giving you a bunch of dates and geographies and so forth. And by the way, content creation in a lot of ways is the easiest. Yeah. You know, coding, music, movies, because it's not the rules aren't as important.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:Probabilistic works better than you know, software's great because it's deterministic. There's yes or no. Yeah. But content is the easiest place we're seeing pickup. But I could go through we have a company that does lab grown diamond grading, and of course, reviewing these things visually with the AI is improving the efficiency of that company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:At Blackstone, we're trying to make our investment process better. Take in all this data from what we have in the outside world. Look at our historical memos. Read the diligence that's here and say to the teams, these are the areas you should focus on. It's not making the decisions, but it's a tool that's making us much more efficient.
Speaker 8:So I I would say to us on the compute side, it still feels like it's very early days in the implementation, but we can see particularly in rules based businesses, you know, transaction processing, legal, what is a billable hour going to be? This feels like the path of travel in a big way, but I think it's taking more time than most of us would hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How have you been processing the idea that certain moats might be eroded? There might be more more competition in certain sectors of the economy going forward. Is the moat section of every investment memo getting longer these days? How are you investigating that?
Speaker 8:I would say the uncertainty section of every one of these memos is getting longer because investing is hard and what you did historically was look at the, you know, ten or twenty year history of a business and industry and it just may not apply. Right? And we've seen this in the past, The yellow pages, I may be dating myself with you guys, but used to get a plumber opening up your yellow pages, find them. When the internet came along, they disappeared. Taxi cab business, which still exists, but obviously when Uber and Lyft showed up, it changed the world in a really profound way.
Speaker 8:Now the issue is in 50 different verticals, there are gonna be impacts. Mhmm. And how do I think about it? Autonomous vehicles, which reduce the accident rate by ninety five percent on serious accidents, like, won't that happen and what does that mean for collision repair? What does that mean for auto insurance?
Speaker 8:So I would say the areas of greatest risk today are obviously in sort of the white collar world.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:It's the software, it's professional services, information services, and there you're spending a lot of time trying to understand what the world may look like. Mhmm. And as a result, what you're beginning to see both in the public markets and the private markets, describe it almost like the red sea parting, where obviously there are companies viewed as AI winners, could be LLMs, application software, could be the digital energy infrastructure. That's easy. Then there are companies in the physical world that are pretty unaffected.
Speaker 8:We took a company Medline public at the end of last year. It's in medical supplies. Manufacturers distribute them. No impact basically from this, and that's easy to underwrite. And I think what you're gonna see, I think you'll see a recovery for instance in an area like real estate that's been very much out of favor the last four years because of higher rates and a bit of overbuilding, that's gonna come back because people are gonna say, oh, that warehouse, it's gonna exist.
Speaker 8:That hotel is gonna exist. I think sports, obviously. And so I think there's definitely a tendency from investors now to look at this physical unaffected AI world, certainly the AI benefiting world. And then this other area is fascinating because some of these companies could end up being very attractively priced, and they may need to change their business model, but they have real incumbency. So we have a business that does revenue management for hospitals, helps them with their billing, basically.
Speaker 8:What do you charge for certain procedures? Now, they need to incorporate AI into the business. But if they do that, they should be a winner because they have the trust of their customers.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And that's super valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So I would just say the risk levels on investing have gone up Mhmm. But I also at the same time the opportunities have gone up as well, the upside.
Speaker 1:How's your recall on your thinking around the .com era? There was very similar fears around how the internet would disrupt different businesses. We had Rick Caruso sitting here yesterday and we were asking him about this and he's like, I never I never thought I never thought my my category of retail would go under even though at the time everyone was projecting that like, hey, why no one's gonna would somebody go to the store to get something if they could get it shipped directly to their house? And so, yeah, I'm curious if you've reflected back on on that era when you started your career and and kind of tried to understand where you were where you had good intuition, where you were maybe off.
Speaker 8:I I think it's a great analogy, and Rick is a very good man. It's funny. If you look at retail, I think that does resonate with what we're talking about in software. So if you go back twenty five years ago, you know, just as the bubble's bursting, as Amazon's starting to become a marketplace for everything, you could have said retail will be an apocalypse. And by the way, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us did not make it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:On the other hand, Walmart, I think it's up sevenfold. Costco's up like 20 fivefold. TJ Maxx is up 40 times and has a $180,000,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 8:And for those companies that won, they either had something that was infrastructure like groceries or had a great value proposition, really understood their customers. They they found a way to navigate it. And I think that is the kind of way to think about what's coming to so many businesses. Mhmm. Which is if they just sit and operate the way they have, they have enormous vulnerability.
Speaker 8:If they do something and have a market position that's protected, you know, they can end up doing much better. In terms of my own accuracy, I think I probably at times may have been too negative on some of the retail if I look back at it, and some of it obviously ended up thriving and doing quite well. And so you try to have a little bit of mental flexibility.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's good to have a mental model of like am I looking at a am I looking at a Sears management team or a Costco management team?
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Yeah. And it makes all the difference in the world. I've been the chairman of Hilton now for almost twenty years, and when Airbnb came out, which is an amazing business model they built, a bunch of people were saying it's the end of Hilton. Whatever, you know, the stock has been a rocket ship.
Speaker 8:Chris Nissette, the CEO's done an amazing job. It had a differentiated business model. It offered something fundamentally different. And so both of those companies ended up thriving and doing great. So I do think that is the hardest part today because the technology is moving so quickly and is so capable, it's making it harder.
Speaker 8:What I would say as investors is anything in this AI uncertainty world will see these multiples come down. Because people are until there's a sense that there's terra firma, that hey, this business model is gonna survive or may end up thriving. But right now, I think people are taking a step back, and I do think there'll be some baby thrown out with the bathwater. They'll end up being some software companies that you could buy at very reasonable prices, but this is the sort of stuff. The other thing I would just point out for us, because of the risks that exist, one of the easiest ways is to be in the picks and shovels.
Speaker 8:So invest in that electricity, invest in those data centers, because you don't know who's going to win of the incumbents, who's going to win of the new model companies, but you do know they're all going to need AI factories, they're all going to need power. And that for us has been really the biggest strategic pivot we've made, and we think it's going to pay huge dividends for our investors.
Speaker 2:Well, we appreciate you taking the time to hop on the show today. We've kept you already five minutes long. We would love to have you back and go way deeper. This was a fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1:No. Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your week. My name, John. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 8:Hey. Was an honor to be with you guys. Have a Take great care.
Speaker 2:You. You're the man. Up next we have Colleen Aubrey from Amazon Web Services. You know it as AWS. She's the SVP of Applied AI Solutions here with us in the waiting room.
Speaker 2:We'll bring Colleen in to the TBPN UltraDome in just a minute. Last question I wanted to ask, we didn't get a chance was the barbell strategy. I wanted to hear his take on this idea that you have Josh Kushner buying the Giants, the most legacy thing possible and then the AI labs and then you have Ellison owning Bugs Bunny and a bunch of data centers. And it's this weird new normal of you buy the oldest possible thing that is resistant to any sort of disruption and then the exact opposite. But we are joined by Colleen Aubrey from AWS in the waiting room.
Speaker 2:Let's bring her in to the TBPN UltraDome if we can. Let's give it a try. Hello. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 10:Good morning. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what's going on today with AWS.
Speaker 10:Sure. So Colleen Aubrey. Been at Amazon for over twenty years now and joined AWS two years ago. Okay. And I've been on this journey of of looking at how can we bring to life some of the operational expertise that we've developed at Amazon Yeah.
Speaker 10:Into Agentyx products and put them in the hands of AWS customers. And today, it was really sort of great to announce two new products, Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Talent. We announced Amazon Connect Health a couple of weeks ago, and this really expands the family of Connect products that we have adding to Amazon Connect customer, which is a nine year old product that we've been developing.
Speaker 2:So can you help me understand? I think most people will be familiar with AI chatbots and many people will be familiar with AI agents and coding agents that they fire off a prompt and maybe it goes for five, six, eight hours sometimes and then comes back with a fantastic response. But when you're deploying an advanced model, a frontier model, an agent into an into an enterprise system that's deployed on AWS, what are what are your clients looking for? How are they thinking about integrating an agent into a platform? Is it that they're vending the agentic workflow to their customers in turn?
Speaker 2:Can you walk me through some of the examples of how enterprises are actually deploying agents in practice when most people are probably familiar with the more point solution they type the prompt themselves?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, let me first by start by saying that I think we're early in that journey. Yeah. And, certainly, in my conversations with customers, a lot of what I hear is people looking to automate processes.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 10:And so and and for me, what that triggers is that the mental model is looking at how work gets done today Yeah. And then putting AI to work to do that same process. Totally. And personally, my point of view is that that misses the bigger opportunity. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:I think the bigger opportunity is much more transformative, and we can't assume that how we work today is the sort of gold standard for how we might work when we have this new capability in our in our hands, which is to be able to develop fairly complex agentic teammates Yeah. That can work alongside people in the business. So we're really going after this this mission of how do you develop an agentic teammate, which is in the business with people and is actually transforming how work gets done and and do that in a way which is intuitive and natural so that transformation doesn't come with heavyweight change management. And so we really have gone back to the drawing board and and trying to think about how will work happen in a number of different areas, in decision making within supply and demand planning, in health care, in recruiting, and in customer journeys.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. I I feel like AWS' strong suit has always been understanding complex systems, being able to deploy a ton of resources, but then also being able to monitor, understand everything from cost to performance. How is that changing in the age of AI agents? I imagine if I have a bunch of digital workers doing stuff, I want a water cooler where I can tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, how's it going?
Speaker 2:I want analytics on how different work processes, even if they are fully automated, are continuing and progressing. What what does the analytics stack look like in the future?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think it's a good question. And certainly, in the agentic teammates that we're building Yeah. There's a good amount of thought that we put into the observability Mhmm. The trustworthiness, like, an an AI's an agentic teammate's ability to explain why they've taken some action, why they've come to some conclusion, reasoning that they've gone through.
Speaker 10:And an example of that is in Amazon Connect Health. In this case, we're working on behalf of providers, preparing sort of summarization of a patient's history before they meet with the patient. And in that case, every reference, every conclusion is traceable into labs, into previous visits, into medications, so that the physician in this case versus builder or an SDE has the opportunity to be able to observe the work, to be able to reason over the work, to be able to also course correct as And so for me, I'm really much more thinking about how I make an agentic teammate trustworthy and part of the team, and that that observability comes to life in different ways. Of course, the covers, we have to solve for price performance. We have to solve for latency.
Speaker 10:We have to solve for managing the efficiency of deploying many agents under the cover to be actually be able to deliver the experience, and and that's something some of the hard work that we're doing on behalf of customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I feel like it's potentially underappreciated, And maybe this is a side an outgrowth of the fact that the first AI models that most people interacted with were sort of low powered chatbots that did hallucinate. But the hallucination problem has, at least to my experience, basically gone away. And it feels like the next challenge is actually educating people on the reliability, the traceability that you mentioned. And of course, I'd be interested to hear a few different there's a whole bunch of different projects that you can embark on to build confidence around the traceability and reliability.
Speaker 2:I did have one last question though. I want since you've been with Amazon for twenty years, I'd love to know how has the company changed? How has it stayed the same?
Speaker 10:You know, I think, certainly for me, this sort of passion for inventing on behalf of customers
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Has remained pretty consistent through, like, the time that I've been at the company. And so really going deep to understand a customer problem, but then also pulling back and asking ourselves, is there a better way? Is there is can we invent a way of solving this problem which is meaningfully better than what exists today? And do we have a new unique point of view about how we would do that? And that's really what we're trying to do with this connect family of products is really, know, ask ourselves honestly, what is the unique capability, the unique operational experience that we have that we can bring to life?
Speaker 10:And I think that has remained consistent. Otherwise, you know, Amazon's always evolving, always changing. Yeah. And, you know, our our businesses go through inception. They go through scale.
Speaker 10:They go through reinvention. And now is a great time for all Amazon teams to be thinking about reinvention and how do they deliver their products and services to customers now that we have this new AI capability on our hands? And it's exciting to see the energy around that, and I feel sort of like sort of just freshness in the organization as we go through this next phase.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, thank you for coming on the show, and congrats on the progress. We'll kick it over to Anthony next. Thank Have a for great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Up next, we have Anthony, who is a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS as well, to continue our segment on AWS and detail a little bit of the OpenAI integration and new stateful runtime for agentic systems. And so we have Anthony in the TBPN Ultra. Anthony, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 11:What's going on? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time to join. There's been a lot of discussion back and forth, and I think it would helpful to start with just like a one on one zero one of what is a stateful runtime? How are you thinking about agentic systems? I think everyone knows LLMs are next token predictors. Maybe they're stochastic parrots.
Speaker 2:But how are you thinking about the capabilities that come from this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then how does that tie into the announcements Sure. Today Yeah. Around around some of the new models being available?
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 11:Yeah. The the best way I would describe it is that we've seen kind of an evolution of how folks interact with these AI models over the last few years. Mhmm. It started out exactly as you mentioned with just token prediction. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Early completions API from OpenAI was exactly this. You give it a string, it gives you some more strings.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:These APIs have advanced over the years to where that string starts to get parsed and you get tool calls
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Or you get reasoning or you get other kind of capabilities. And, what we're seeing now with agentic development is that folks are taking those tool calls, executing tools, performing things like compaction or extracting memory. And, this is a super powerful mechanism. This is really the thing that has caused, at least like my career, to dramatically change in terms of productivity and what can be accomplished now. I think the next phase for AI, I truly believe, is taking a lot of what we've learned in the coding space where most of what's happening is happening locally on a person's laptop or maybe their development machine and making that be deeply integrated within the cloud where real enterprise applications live and getting all those same benefits.
Speaker 11:And so, what we announced with Amazon Managed Bedrock or sorry, Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI is a new API that really has three parts. So the first part allows you to create what we call a runtime. And you can think of the runtime as the definition of the agent. Mhmm. This contains skills which tell the model how to do new tasks.
Speaker 11:This includes, like, tools like MCP servers that you want to configure or other built in tools and a memory policy. So, you can tell it how to maintain short term memory or long term memory or whatever new memory mechanisms might come over time. And then, the next part, and this part is really the special bit, is the environment. Today, most people are using tools like Codex, they're running them on their laptop and the agent effectively lives on your laptop. Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's good and bad. It means you can do all the things that that person can do, but it also means that agent doesn't have its own identity. You can't create agent specific policies, and a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to strike the balance of enabling these agents to work, but also making sure that you can set the right guardrails on them. Environments in Bedrock Managed Agents really solves this. It allows you to give a dedicated compute environment for that agent.
Speaker 11:It allows you to create specific policies around governance. And most critically, it gives that agent a unique identity within AWS. So, security team or an administrator, you can create policies around what that agent can do. We think these things are absolutely critical to enable agents to be used in real world enterprise applications. Then finally, there's the inference API, the thing that you actually talk to the agent through.
Speaker 11:That API is very familiar to existing APIs like the responses API from OpenAI. So, a lot of existing applications can just work once you've created this agent.
Speaker 2:Can you can you reflect a little bit as a as a distinguished engineer on
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 12:Before we before we move on.
Speaker 1:If I'm a an AWS customer today, what should I do to experience what you just described? Because it was a
Speaker 13:lot of it was a lot of a
Speaker 1:lot of a lot of corporate lingo, which I love. I'm an enthusiast. Okay. But I wanna I wanna like, what would be a recommendation of the you know, given given this new set of capabilities, what should I what should I try doing to start? What kind of value might might be unlocked in the organization in a in a maybe a more straightforward way?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Today, Bedrock Managed Agents is in limited preview, and that will expand over the next coming weeks. And so, you probably have to wait a couple of weeks. Got it. But in order to actually use this, it's really as simple as making two API calls.
Speaker 11:So, you can go into your AWS account and make an API call to create a runtime. Then once you have that runtime, you decide what type of compute you want to associate with the agent, and then you make another API to create that environment. Once you've done those two API calls, that's it. You now have an endpoint that you can take an existing tool. It can be codex.
Speaker 11:It can be like a web chat based system, or you can just use the OpenAI SDK and integrate it deeply within your application. But it's really that simple. It's just a couple of additional API calls, and then you're off to the races. Interesting.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the the different roles of engineers right now? There's been this trend of managers and CTOs becoming individual contributors at labs, And then simultaneously, there's been individual contributors who are effectively becoming the manager of many agents. And so we're sort of going both ways. But where is the highest leverage point for someone who is on the distinguished engineer path, like the ultimate individual contributor, but the world is changing?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I can tell you that, like, in my role, I am coding almost every day.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 11:I took the day off today to come and do this event, but I'm spending almost all of my time coding. I'm having probably the best time of my career. Yeah. What my experience has been with all of these coding tools is that once you make coding fast, once you make the actual art of generating the code quickly, what really matters is your understanding of algorithms and data structures, architecture patterns, and things like that. I think what you're finding is that a lot of very senior ICs, folks that have a deep understanding of software architecture, are now able to do really amazing things because they understand how to prompt these models in a way to be able to generate new things.
Speaker 2:Is it less frustrating? Are you having the most fun you've ever had?
Speaker 11:I've always felt in my career that I was limited by typing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Like, I don't care. I don't mind typing. I don't mind writing I love writing code.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:But, you know, you can think about a problem and you can think about solutions. Yeah. And then you're like, okay, this is going to take me weeks to actually implement.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:And that's just something I had always become resigned to is that it's going to take me weeks to solve that problem. Now, I think about the solution to that problem. I do some prompting in Codex. Yep. And I have the solution by the end of the day.
Speaker 11:And that is so incredibly rewarding as an engineer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much taking the time to come chat with
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Us for your Great to meet you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Colin Zima from Omni. He is the cofounder and CEO building semantic layer powering AI driven analytics. Do I blink? Do you do you not blink?
Speaker 1:Apparently not, but I was blinking at them once I saw that.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I was You weren't a bad diet coke with I communicating picking up on the diet
Speaker 2:coke with two two hands thing. They they they demand that they
Speaker 1:Oh, wasn't gonna wasn't gonna do that.
Speaker 2:You you stared them down, said no.
Speaker 1:I saw But
Speaker 2:I oblige every once in a while with the two handed diet coke. If I see somebody who's like, oh, they're not reading the chat, drink the Diet Coke with two hands if you're if you're reading. I'm I'm gonna sip a Diet Coke with two hands. Anyway, our next guest is in
Speaker 12:the waiting room. Let's bring him into
Speaker 2:the TBPN Ultradome. Colin, how you doing?
Speaker 14:I'm great.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 14:I can do a two handed drink for you.
Speaker 15:There we
Speaker 2:go. We go. He's reading chat. This is great. Introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Introduce the company. Tell us the news.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Colin Zimmer, CEO at Omni Analytics. We are building the next great data platform. So a product that can do everything from AI to spreadsheets to dashboards. We're trying to consolidate all of BI into one tool Okay.
Speaker 14:And we're doing it on top of a semantic layer. So a a layer that can explain how everything in the business works so that AI does stuff reliably.
Speaker 2:How generalizable is the semantic layer? Like, has got to be some trade off because the different businesses have different ontologies. How how are you thinking about creating something that's flexible but simultaneously uniform?
Speaker 14:So I mean, on the one hand, a semantic layer is actually pretty straightforward. It's just a bunch of text about the business. Mhmm. So if I'm gonna go write a a semantic layer for ChattyPT or Claude Sure. Right now, that is what the skills framework looks like.
Speaker 14:It's a document that has lists of stuff about the business, and that is completely unique to every single company. On the flip side, we've had semantic layers in data for fifty years at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And it's the specifics of how all the tables in a warehouse fit together. And what we're doing is just bringing the like, bridging those two worlds together. It is completely specific to every business. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 14:Like a Snowflake or a Databricks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So are I mean, I imagine that there's still a world for databases in the future. How are you thinking about that? Do migrations get easier or changing schemas get easier in the future? Does this get harder because the data is just so much more?
Speaker 2:How how are you thinking about the evolution of databases and how you'll use them?
Speaker 14:Yeah. I mean, using sort of public trading as a proxy for this, it seems like the data warehouses have found, like, a nice middle ground in between the, like, the SaaS apocalypse
Speaker 16:and the
Speaker 14:pure play AI companies. Yeah. Like, we need somewhere to hold all of the data. Yeah. And so I I think the databases will probably be here for a long time.
Speaker 14:Yeah. I I think what has gotten interesting is that picking up your data infrastructure from one tool and moving it to another tool has gotten substantially easier. Like, SaaS used to have a good bit more lock in than it does today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And you you still need a database that's holding all the stuff. Yeah. But the portability of it, think, is the new question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is is there a piece of this pitch that's, like, cost driven? Because with some of the advanced models, it feels like if I just threw a million dollars of compute at a problem, I can have it go and parse through every PDF and turn turn use an API to turn it into text and turn it into CSVs and write custom Python for it and just to answer the question of like what was revenue last month. Right? And that feels inefficient.
Speaker 2:It feels like this is a good solution. But is that is that the goal or is it something faster, speed, cost, everything?
Speaker 14:I don't think that we started there, but I think that to your point, like savvy people are sort of coming around to this. Because on one side, these models are smart enough that you can just sort of throw it at, you know, Google Drive and Slack in your warehouse Yeah. And you can actually answer every single question. So you can get 80% of the way there with literally no thought
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Which on the one hand is a little bit scary to build your data company because it's sort of like, again, why don't you do this?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:I think to your point, you probably don't want to reinvent your ARR metric every single time you query. Yeah. And ultimately, if it's a one second answer that you're gonna ask every single day, a dashboard is probably a pretty decent place to go get that. We don't need to rebuild the dashboard on the fly every single time. So people are starting to come around to realize that this is a cost performance optimization problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And it turns out that the analytics products that have existed for the last twenty years or fifty years or whatever it is actually do have some sort of good solutions to these things. I think at the same time, trying to fight the idea that you can just bring ChatTPT to the warehouse and get an answer is a naive version of building product now. Yeah. Every single person is gonna compare your SaaS product to sitting the thing on the warehouse or just setting it up yourself Yep. And doing it in flawed.
Speaker 14:Okay. And so figuring out that balance is, like, the goal of every SaaS company now. Yep. And cost is a part of it.
Speaker 2:Okay. That, like, bit of a bit of a hot take I want you to respond to. There there is like a muttering around like AI psychosis in the enterprise, like people vibe coding like things that don't actually create value yet. And there's a question about like where's the use what's the useful token spend versus just the explorative sort of performative token spend? I think there's lot of real stuff to be done.
Speaker 2:But there's also some crazy just some crazy internal tools that are just like Yep. You know, self perpetuating. And it reminds me of people had dashboard psychosis like a decade ago. I worked at a company where somebody was like oh we need all the every dashboard. We got to have every metric.
Speaker 2:And I'm like you kind of just oftentimes you have a question and you just need to go answer that question. You don't need to be checking like, what's the website traffic on my website every single minute? Like, sometimes that's not useful. Sometimes there's already a dashboard for it. So how do you think about rolling out, like, dashboards or analytic products that are actually effective, and, like, what coaching needs to happen versus just, like, raw consumption?
Speaker 14:It's it it really comes down to pragmatism. Mhmm. So the example I love to give is Guitar Center is a customer of ours.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 14:They have sent spreadsheets to every single store for the last thirty years that have every single SKU and, like, the week over week, day over day sales. Yep. That's not a process that needs reinventing. Yep. Like, they're gonna send the spreadsheets to the stores for the next twenty five years.
Speaker 14:You need products that can do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:You're also gonna have a dashboard. Like, I I wanna know what our plan is, and I wanna go compare, like, our ARR on a weekly basis to where it is relative to plan. Yeah. You're also gonna just have a question that you need answered that you didn't predict in advance and need to go answer questions. And I think the challenge is that every vendor sort of has this point of view that's like, you know, dashboards are the way or Tableau was visualizations are the way to do everything.
Speaker 14:And then I was at Looker, and semantic layers were the way to do everything.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 14:And I think what you see is that there's a little bit of truth in all of these things. And and quite frankly, right now, it's AI is the way to do everything. Yeah. And we're into, you know, how many billion tokens can you spend to go answer your question. Yeah.
Speaker 14:We probably want a tool that does all of those things and actually makes them fit together.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And it's sort of like the it's not the sexiest pitch. You know, every single thing that you are doing is right, and you need a little bit of all of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:But I I think that there is space for pragmatism in the world where we can invent things on the fly sometimes, and that is a great way of doing it, we don't need UI. And we have good UIs, and they do things, and, you know, websites are good, and we can go back to them again. Yeah. So it's both.
Speaker 2:It's not the sexiest pitch, but it was sexy enough to get the series c done. How much did you raise? Tell me about the round.
Speaker 14:Half we $120,000,005.01 plus valuation.
Speaker 1:Massive. Massive. Quick could could you could you give
Speaker 12:us a quick history of the company?
Speaker 1:When did you actually start the company?
Speaker 14:Yeah. February 22, so four years and a little bit old. Yeah. We raised about $27,000,000 as we got the company started. Did our b about twelve months ago at a $6,650,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 14:So Another we're building for about a year and a half, and we've been selling for two and a half.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 14:business has been pretty good.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:And what were you doing what were
Speaker 12:you doing before this?
Speaker 14:I was at a company called Looker that got acquired by Google. So
Speaker 1:Okay. Makes you feel
Speaker 14:a very direct competitor to my previous company.
Speaker 1:You know what
Speaker 2:you're doing. Well, congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 1:Love the the chat loves the pink by the way. I love the pink.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:Are you guys like fully just are you gonna own pink? Yeah.
Speaker 14:Embraced the pink. We we sort of fell into it.
Speaker 1:We I think it's
Speaker 11:so smart.
Speaker 1:We were
Speaker 14:going to a conference that was all blue and gray. Yeah. And one of our marketing leaders was like, hey, wear some pink. People will notice you.
Speaker 2:I'll stand out.
Speaker 14:And then we just turned into a pink company. So we embraced it.
Speaker 15:Fantastic. I love it.
Speaker 1:Very smart.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations. Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat
Speaker 1:with us. Collin.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having
Speaker 1:me, guys.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next.
Speaker 1:Interesting username. I didn't get to ask him about it.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 1:It's at drink zima. It sounds like some type of Interesting. Like cool caffeinated beverage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That does is a Zico coconut water.
Speaker 1:Get a very cool caffeinated energy. Maybe
Speaker 2:that's the next job the the next thing he can buy Sobe, bring it back. Up next, we have Alex Epstein, the author of Fossil Future, live in the TBPN UltraDome, taking us through what's going on in the world, what's going on in energy markets, what's going on with OPEC. Great to see you again, Alex. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBPN UltraDome. Please, get us up to speed.
Speaker 2:What should we be paying attention
Speaker 1:to this black on black.
Speaker 2:You look
Speaker 6:fantastic. Oh,
Speaker 13:thank you. I'm good. With the the hair too. Oh my
Speaker 6:god. Do you guys remember what we talked about last time?
Speaker 1:The straight?
Speaker 6:The straight. Yeah. Yeah. So by the way, fun fact about AI. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So I think most of what I said last time was vindicated in terms of the main thing was this straight needs to open and there's no substitute for it. There's all these other little things you can do but nothing compares and that's that's still true. I would add you need to enduringly open the strait. So if you cut a deal with Iran and they have control over it, they're even if they give you control for a year or whatever, that's not then you've actually made the situation way worse than it was before the war where everyone figured we really have control
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:Over the strait. But fun fact since you're talking about AI tokens. Mhmm. So in preparation for that, in addition to consulting experts and thinking about the issue, I have my own internal AI called Alex AI Pro, which I've invested over $1,000,000 in and
Speaker 1:oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:It's it's nuts. So to talk about and one of the things I've invested in is A stack. I don't get enough compute A
Speaker 8:stack.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. I don't get enough compute off the shelf AI. So you need, you know, if you can run your own agents Yes. Then you can do it.
Speaker 6:So that query which I think led to very valuable content was 48 kilowatt hours. Woah. So that's half a Tesla. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 6:Think about that. That's that's three Powerwalls
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. In for one query.
Speaker 2:That's a tall that's a ton.
Speaker 6:So yes. I know How
Speaker 1:long was that running for?
Speaker 6:Ten or twenty minutes.
Speaker 9:What? Oh,
Speaker 2:that's crazy. And what is it doing like like like pulling data from the internet, pulling it together, writing?
Speaker 6:It's really god mode. I'll show it to you sometime. Okay. Well actually, so here's an announcement for the first time. Yeah.
Speaker 6:That a version of that AI is now free to everyone who works in government. So it's gov.alexepstein.ai.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's at so at some point, it's free. We're gonna if you use too many tokens we'll have to just charge you
Speaker 2:costs Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Beyond that. But yeah. I mean I have my I have a lobbying firm which is the only pro freedom lobbying firm, the energy freedom fund which is a five zero one c four that I'm I'm the unpaid president of. And I figure like one of the best ways to spend those dollars is to give people a pro freedom AI.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So I'm
Speaker 6:not gonna make any money off those queries, but I'll at least cover our our compute cost. So this is a real world example of I believe that if if you know how to intelligently integrate AI Yeah. You can make use of a lot of energy
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And and very profitably.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course. Because like the the the results that come from good research or good policies and good consulting fees and all sorts of
Speaker 6:But but you need to you need to train it. A lot of the work is just literally breaking down everything I do and my researchers do. So we just I just built one today which is the policy validator which is anyone is free to send us policies and we'll lobby for them in proportion to merit, not not in not in proportion of payment. We don't take payment for this kind of But I needed to replicate, hey, I have these two really brilliant researchers and then I'm pretty good and we have some other pretty good people. Like, how do you break that down?
Speaker 6:And there turns out there's about 25 questions you need to ask Mhmm. To get the credibility of the people. Is this a pro freedom policy? Is this going to increase energy abundance? Are there better ideas?
Speaker 6:And if you if you know how to really do it, you can get and you you have human validators at the end of it. Mhmm. It's it's wild in terms of what what you can do.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's start with there was a on the Strait, there was this interesting piece in The Economist that was arguing that the market was simply not processing or digesting the fact that even if the Strait were fully open today, there's still a massive shortage of energy that is effectively delayed Mhmm. And that that would have ripple effects on the economy, inflation, all sorts of things. Mhmm. How have you processed the the impacts, the downstream impacts?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people see it at the pump when they go and fill up their cars, if they drive gas cars. It's starting to show up in other places. But how are you thinking about just what's at stake? Why the straight being open is important from first principles? Yeah.
Speaker 6:I'm I'm very sympathetic to that argument. Mhmm. It would be just miraculous if it didn't get a lot worse in terms of in terms of prices. I mean, you're dealing with a situation we talked about last time. You have a certain amount of spare capacity, know, we we international agencies released a lot reasonable yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. In terms of their oil reserves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But these are all very temporary measures.
Speaker 2:It's like thirty days here, ninety days there, hundred and eighty
Speaker 6:Yeah. Days there was already a bunch of supply.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No one's sitting on like five thousand days of oil.
Speaker 6:And the thing you have to realize is, you know, in America we are very America centric.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So you know we don't even think about Canada let alone Asia.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And a lot of what's happening with the straight is oil that is intended for Asia and Asian consumption. Now the Chinese are in an interesting situation because they they did build up a bunch of spare oil. Yep. Now there's questions of other things they need like sulfur and helium that go through the strait and I've I've heard interesting Mhmm. Claims about we're already seeing in Asia various shortages
Speaker 16:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And you know one one analyst that I like likened it to, okay you're starting like one part of the Titanic is starting to fill Mhmm. And not everyone on the Titanic realizes this is happening. Mhmm. But you're cutting off a huge whether it's 14% or 20% or whatever
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:You're cutting off a huge percent of global oil supply.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:And that cannot last.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And even if you solved everything today, it takes a while To bring it back. To bring it back. Of course. And right now we're in ceasefire mode
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Which is not creating enduring.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:That that doesn't enduringly open
Speaker 14:it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I heard I think it was Rahm Emanuel was saying that the The Gulf States do not want Iran to have a veto over the strait even if the strait is opened. Now the conversation has shifted to what what does it take that America is potentially responsible or or is being held responsible for removing that vetoes. Right? Is that is that your perspective?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's my perspective is it needs to be enduring.
Speaker 2:So Okay.
Speaker 6:In advance of this, there was the idea that, hey, if America ever goes into this to Iran, obviously we're gonna keep the strait open, obviously we're gonna prioritize. That unfortunately did not happen to the extent that it did. I mean, you know, there are different people in the administration, but overall, I mean, we have to just be objective. I'll praise them where they deserve praise, but like they were not prepared for this. Sure.
Speaker 6:In terms of whatever the final decisions were. I think within a week of our last interview, not because of our last interview, but I just talking to people in the administration, they all became very clear that Hormuz is nondispensable. Before that, there had been people saying, oh, we have Venezuela. We have all it's just all nonsense. Yep.
Speaker 6:So they
Speaker 2:understand talked about that with Venezuela. It's like 1%, maybe.
Speaker 6:Yeah. One you might get to one no. At
Speaker 2:some You might point get to 1% and and we're talking about 20%. Yeah. We're talking about 30 Venezuelans no.
Speaker 6:In years.
Speaker 2:There's no one to do do do business with.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's like they understand the importance but it's still in this mode where Iran now is known to have like Iran has proven that they can control the Strait Of Hormuz in a way that The US cannot obviously counteract.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 6:if we cut a deal with them where they again, where it's where they have where they can use the same power to stop us anytime they want, then it's not open. Right? Open is a little bit ambiguous. Like it can be open momentarily Yeah. But it's open on their terms.
Speaker 6:Yep. So basically you need without giving any strategy because I don't know the exact strategy, it needs to open on our terms.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:That that's the only way you have a victory.
Speaker 14:Sure. So Sure.
Speaker 6:You yeah. That that's
Speaker 2:Let's shift to OPEC. Can you give me a primer on OPEC? It's the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. And now it's, you know, OPEC plus and
Speaker 2:OPEC plus. So, yeah, you're taking talk about history and the
Speaker 6:impact Let's of talk about the cartels. I think the easiest way to understand this it's it's important to understand cartels, I think people have a uniformly negative view of cartels, which is plausible but a little bit exaggerated. So you take the
Speaker 1:People that aren't a part of cartels. There's no eye in yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:Well, so you think about the the if we go look at the early oil industry where, you know, Rockefeller is criticized as a monopolist and we created this thing, the Sherman Antitrust Act and other things to prosecute so called monopolists, and I'm totally against these laws for for any number of reasons. I don't think the the government should not be able to create monopolies that it enforces by force saying, hey, there's one producer, nobody can compete. But nor should it be able to say, hey, you're really successful in this market and so I've
Speaker 1:You're too good.
Speaker 6:I've decided that you're too good. And and one of the things that people will counter with is, well, what if
Speaker 2:Economic deadweight loss.
Speaker 6:What do mean?
Speaker 2:Just the idea that if if if you actually do control 100% of a resource, you can charge dramatically above market rates, which are which reduce demand and wind up having like less human flourish. Yeah. I mean Because you have less energy produced in fact.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So what happens in practice is like if you look at what happened with Rockefeller. So Rockefeller took his focus was refining. You look at the peep the early people in the oil industry, the different producers, what would happen is oil prices are decent Mhmm. Then you get a flood of new oil Yeah.
Speaker 6:On the market and people just get wasted. They get ruined. And so what does that do? That disincentivizes people from investing over time because the volatility is so high. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So what Rockefeller was basically able to do is he said, okay. I'm gonna buy you up. You're you're exposing yourself to way too much risk. I'm gonna buy you up. I can run everything much more efficiently.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And so in the long term, we can have something that is a profitable, and b has much lower prices on average than the very volatile situation. And in fact, he dramatically lowered prices. Mhmm. So the interesting thing so you could think of Rockefeller, they call it, it's in a sense a cartel but it's it's a free market cartel which I think should be able to exist.
Speaker 6:But you can call
Speaker 2:it Yeah. And I believe that's in that's in the Sherman antitrust act in some ways. Like, you have to prove consumer harm and this is why it's hard to go
Speaker 6:after I mean, it Yeah. Yeah. It's very vague. It's like no comp you can't do restraint of trade, which what the hell does that mean? And then later they have these different things and I have a lot of reasons for being against it but it's it's notable that the volatility is a real a really really big thing in oil markets historically and that's why people And that yields Whether you're not you think free market cartels should exist as I do Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You have to understand why these things exist. Sure. Why any cartels OPEC is not a free market cartel, but why these exist is because the volatility is just so so high Mhmm. And oil is so so valuable. So people want steady oil, but and they want people to be comfortable being in the oil business instead of just getting wrecked all the time and getting thrown out.
Speaker 6:So we had this era of Rockefeller and then that was broken up. And then we have in The United The United States had something called the Texas Railroad Commission Mhmm. Which basically cartelized America was the dominant producer and so they did these things that basically rationed how much everyone could produce. Okay. So the term that's often used is swing producer.
Speaker 6:The US was the swing producer which meant that they could basically control the supply
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:In the world. Yeah. So if there were you know, and and and in particular if there was, you know, a cut in demand for some reason, they could cut supply. And if there's a huge increase in demand, they could increase supply. So that happens until, you know, the Mid East starts to boom the Mideast starts to become the swing producer with the rise of Saudi Arabia and others having very low cost oil.
Speaker 6:And so then you have the era of OPEC. Mhmm. But then you have fracking. And so for a little while, The US becomes the swing producer in the sense of we have unrestrained production.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We add a lot of oil to the market. And what happens? At a certain point, prices crash. There's overinvestment. Our US consumers benefit usually from fracking, but a lot of these companies just get wrecked.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:And then they start doing what they'd call fiscal discipline, which functions as a restraint on supply even though it's they're not doing any kind of cartel activity. They're basically saying, hey, we're not going to produce if prices go below this. We're not going to keep increasing our production, etcetera. So the reason if you take OPEC right now and OPEC plus, they have a lot of reasons even though there's a lot of unethical stuff and I don't think the government should own the oil and I think they stole the oil. So but if you just understand how they're thinking, they do not want a they want to sustain a certain level of price.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So you have the different swing producers particularly Saudi Arabia and then UAE who we're talking about. They want to keep like what happens if if if there's excess supply on the market relative to demand, they will cut this is the key. They will cut their supply as a swing producer to keep prices high because if they don't, then prices will go low Mhmm. And that will have a ruinous effect on many people including US shale by the way, because we have higher production costs, but including these economies that are dominated by oil.
Speaker 6:So you take Saudi Arabia, they're so dependent on oil and they have all of these alleged green ambitions that are totally fueled by oil and they have all these welfare schemes that are totally fueled by oil. UAE is a little bit less dependent. So the interesting thing about UAE saying they're going to withdraw is can they sustain this if there's a supply glut? Right now, there's supply shortage. So it's easy to say we're going to leave OPEC because there's there's just there's no there's no need from their perspective to cut supply and then everyone will take all the supply they get and Saudi Arabia doesn't really care if UAE produces more now.
Speaker 6:But when there's a supply glut is UAE gonna in is are they gonna stay out of OPEC or is Saudi Arabia gonna be able to pressure them back like they've done? Because Saudi Arabia can say, we've got the most oil, we can just flood the market too and ruin there
Speaker 1:a of major suppliers leaving and coming back?
Speaker 6:I don't know. I mean, there's at least been threats. Like, Saudi Arabia has been able to use a lot of force. Now the they've been able to do that in the past, but the argument so there's an argument that The UAE won't stay out of OPEC because Saudi Arabia can pressure them back in when there's a supply glut. There's also an argument that UAE has become more disentangled from oil now than it used to be because it's diversified its economy.
Speaker 6:It doesn't have all the welfare obligations of Saudi Arabia, and therefore it can call Saudi Arabia's bluff. Now now people will say both UAE and Saudi Arabia have incredibly low production costs. So it's very cheap for them to bring a barrel up from the ground. But they don't just have the production costs, they have all the governmental costs of actually how they're obligated to spend that oil. Like Saudi Arabia spends $5 a barrel on oil say, that doesn't mean at a $100 a barrel, they get $95 profit because they have to finance all these schemes that they're involved in.
Speaker 6:Sure. So that's that's gonna be the interesting
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's gonna be interesting thing. The other interesting thing is so if UAE stays out Mhmm. Here's one if if they stay out they're going to increase production.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Let's say on some timetable this Hormuz thing gets resolved then it's plausible in the next few years at some point you'll have a supply glut because you'll have added a million and a half barrels a day on top of everything else and you won't have a corresponding increase in demand and you won't have some other decrease in supply. So it's possible that they could that this could dramatically lower prices, which would be hardest for US shale. Now long term, I believe the best estimates I've seen is longer term, we're actually screwed in the other direction. We've had all of these anti fossil fuel policies that have disincentivized long term investment in oil, and oil is really hard to sustain. People need to remember oil depletes over time, so you don't just take the same well and keep tapping at the exact same amount.
Speaker 6:You have to do what's called reserve replacement, and And there are many credible arguments that our reserve replacement has been incredibly inadequate in the ESG era, and that takes a few years to show up. Mhmm. But that's actually my biggest fear. Like, my biggest fear I'm afraid of Hormuz keeping prices high, but I'm really afraid of insufficient reserve replacement with high oil demand. Because you're talking like $200
Speaker 1:That's drilling new wells
Speaker 6:or You have to drill so much. You have to replace so much. And the oil supply is so politically driven. Like, there's so much oil in the world that you could harness if everyone had the policy of The United States Mhmm. Under Trump and under a friendly congress, but most of the world has these national oil companies.
Speaker 6:We've had ESG all over the place. It's been hard to finance things. I mean, as recently as 2021, think about this, the International Energy Agency said there should be no new oil and gas development financed. So so, like, we could be really screwed in terms of higher prices.
Speaker 2:I mean, geographically, it's coming up on the map there. The UAE is directly affected by Hormuz. Like Yeah. Every barrel that they make will have to go through the pipeline. They
Speaker 6:do? They have one pipeline. It's about a million and a half barrels.
Speaker 2:Okay. So they can get some out. So
Speaker 6:Yeah. But they're they're oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:So if they become a swing producer, they are in fact they they are in fact important even in a world where the Strait is closed?
Speaker 6:No. No. It doesn't matter as much right now because they're saying we want the right to expand our production, but they can't none of them can produce as nearly as much as they want
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:Right now. This is why they're doing it now. They're not doing it in the time of a supply glut. Yeah. They're doing it in the time of a supply shortage.
Speaker 6:Sure. Because nobody really cares. It doesn't doesn't really affect things
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 6:For them to say, oh, yeah. We have a million and a half spare capacity that we'd like to use and we're planning on using it in the future. But right now, we can't bring most of that to market. No one can bring anything to market. That's different from a situation which we've had fairly recently where there's tons of supply on the mark.
Speaker 6:Like there's too much and US producers are saying, hey, we've got $50 a barrel oil. This is really hard to sustain. Imagine then a million and a half new barrels coming on
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:The market. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Who wins? Who saw the news this morning and was fist pumping?
Speaker 6:Well, I I don't think most people understand the consequences of these these things because I think many people think, oh, it's gonna be amazing for The US. Like OPEC bad, US good. But like OPEC, the the way it's set up, it it in a sense favors our shale producers because they have higher they're one of the higher cost set of higher cost producers in the world. So if you
Speaker 1:have OPEC collectively decided to just massively increase supply and flood the market, they could do real damage to our
Speaker 6:And this has happened already.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? This has happened
Speaker 8:in previous year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like you're saying, if you're if you're in in Shale and you're trying to make money at $50 a barrel, it's like very you're really hoping what what's the what's the sweet spot again? It's like somewhere between 70 and like 90?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, they they all yeah. Sweet spot is interesting. Right? Because they'll they'll take whatever they can get.
Speaker 6:But, yeah, if they get to $70.80, 90, it's it's a lot more profitable. And, basically, not much changes about their cost structure when prices go low, so it's almost pure profit. I mean, a little bit they can squeeze the what are called the oil field service companies. But you have to when you're thinking of oil and particularly oil, you're just thinking like every $10 it goes up, is almost pure profit for them and every $10 it goes down, that is almost pure loss of profit or loss Correct. In in absolute terms.
Speaker 6:Now in terms of policy, look, I think we should forcibly reopen the strait, and I and I don't believe that the US government should be directly trying to favor or disfavor its shell companies, but but it's just important for people to understand these these dynamics.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And it's it's not and also you have to understand The UAE is doing this at an opportunistic time. They're not doing it at a time when there's already a supply
Speaker 2:Sure. Gears. Where do you
Speaker 9:wanna go?
Speaker 1:I I wanted to ask you about beaming sun
Speaker 2:I had the exhaustion question.
Speaker 1:Into solar panels Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that you
Speaker 1:can get 24
Speaker 6:something In space?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're gonna put a mirror in space that that shines light onto a solar array so that they can get twenty four seven power to a data center potentially.
Speaker 6:They're do it on Earth.
Speaker 2:They're the the the recipient of the light will be on Earth, a solar panel next to a data center, but there will be a mirror in there's a specific orbit that is always in the sun. And so and and the sun will hit the mirror, and the and the light will bounce down onto this particular solar panel in their solar array, and so they will be able to get power from their solar panels twenty four seven.
Speaker 6:There's no weather that interferes
Speaker 2:with this? Weather might interfere a little bit. Okay. So I have not Closer twenty four seven than current.
Speaker 6:I mean, here's here's the dynamic is the obviously in space, you have twenty four seven solar Yeah. And it's really hard to do things in space. Yeah. So all all credit to people who are willing to invest their own money to try to do this. It's not there are a number of variables that might make it succeed or not.
Speaker 6:I mean, the more you're talking about chips that are evolving very quickly on Earth because we don't have this moon colony yet. Right? You're talking about you're replacing chips every year. Doing these very logistically difficult things in orbit. That tends to disfavor the energy advantage you're gonna get Yeah.
Speaker 6:From having the stuff in space. If you're doing something that some of these solar things work if the energy cost is high and you don't need to change a lot about it if it can run a long time. So my view is like my view of solar is always you need to recognize its its strengths and limitations and use it accordingly. My argument continues to be on Earth with the solar that we have right now. Solar is primarily a fuel saving technology not a real on demand power source and I read a long article about this and it is if go to alexepstein.substack.com Yep.
Speaker 6:To check it out. And so by the way, that means that in some places, solar is a lot more valuable than others. And in particular, it's in valuable in places with very high fuel costs, which The United States is not really one of those Sure. Places because we have really cheap natural gas
Speaker 2:Natural gas.
Speaker 6:And could get cheaper natural gas. But like in general, what we don't have, what the holy grail would be is if you got solar and batteries so cheap that you could have self sufficient solar by sufficiently overbuilding the panels and having multi day battery storage. So overbuilding the panels means, let's just say round numbers, you know, you you have a 100 megawatts of demand in a given location, so one tenth of a gigawatt. Well, if you overbuild it by 10, then you have a gigawatt. Well, even when the solar is fairly the sun is fairly low, you're gonna be able to meet your demand and then
Speaker 2:you batteries.
Speaker 6:You can get right.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then
Speaker 6:you can get rid of it and then you can charge the batteries. Yep. So you have more to charge the batteries but then to make that work because sun is not around at night, people really underestimate this as a problem. Night is a big it's it's not as much of a problem for wind but it's a big problem for sun. Like night is a huge huge huge problem.
Speaker 6:So you need to then and you know, think about a winter day like we had during winter storm fern. Even in Phoenix, can have storms that disrupt the sun for a week.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So you need lots and lots and lots of batteries and you need lots and lots of overbuilding. And the question is how cheap can you get it and China's not even nearly there yet, let alone The US Mhmm. But it's not a bad path to pursue. It's not bad to pursue because batteries are valuable anyway. Batteries are valuable number one to store reliable power and dispatch it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like that and Elon is in favor of that. I've said on the show before I'm in favor of that. So it's good to get the cost of solar lower. It's good to get the cost of batteries lower.
Speaker 6:We have to recognize primarily it's a fuel saving play not a replacement play. But if you could if we had twenty four seven all bets are off then you get the benefits of solar
Speaker 2:That's the mirror.
Speaker 6:The time
Speaker 2:That's the space mirror.
Speaker 6:But so I hope that as long as they're doing it in a safe way
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They should be free to try and it's interesting the schemes I've seen in the past haven't worked and I don't know if they have better energy people than they used to at Meta,
Speaker 2:so we'll see. And we'll see. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 6:Hi, man. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wish we had more time yesterday.
Speaker 6:Alright. Anytime.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Shira Lazar from What's Trending. She's the co founder and host of What's Trending, and we'll bring her in to the TBPN UltraDome in just a minute. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 3:Good. We're just diving in. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Of course. That is the nature of the show. We dive right in. Why don't we dive right in with an introduction on yourself?
Speaker 2:How are you introducing yourself these days? How what can you tell us about the shape of what's trending the platform?
Speaker 16:Yeah. So I've been in the digital media Sorry. Think there's a delay. But I've been in the digital media creator economy space for almost two decades. I'm aging myself.
Speaker 16:We started What's Trending, actually, was a live streaming show in 2011 in the last few weeks.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 16:So, we were playing around with this tech and these tools way back. One of the first to livestream in a really high quality way. But, you know, the space in some ways wasn't ready. It was us, the Young Turks at the time. Al Jazeera was doing a livestream, and we had a weekly show.
Speaker 16:We went daily actually with YouTube.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 16:Oh, shoot. Am I like What? Oh, is it I I look like I'm paused right now, but I don't know if that's
Speaker 4:We can
Speaker 2:hear you. We can hear and see you just fine.
Speaker 16:Okay. I'll continue. Welcome to tech. And then in future, stop by your studio. But, yeah, then we went daily with YouTube Yeah.
Speaker 16:And then it seemed like live just the platforms and the audience weren't ready yet. Mhmm. And then we went more into on demand
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 16:Grew more as a digital media brand and publisher, and that's who we are today. And we cover news, views, and culture for the social generation. And now, oddly enough, like seeing your success and what you're doing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:Starting to rethink like do we maybe go back to that? Who knows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Timing timing is so important. Mean, there's been, like Jason Kalakanis had TBPN effectively back, I don't know, the first year that he did it.
Speaker 2:2007 maybe?
Speaker 1:Like very, very early. Same same kind of era Yeah. When you started. But, yeah, people need to be ready for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm interested to hear about what is changing right now, what you are tracking. I was reading a piece in the journal about sort of a k shaped dynamic that's emerging with brands only want to partner with the biggest celebrities, the biggest podcast, and there's sort of a winner take all market. Are you seeing that? Or is there a way for sort of middle class of creators to emerge these days?
Speaker 16:Yeah. That's really interesting. I actually think there there's two extremes of opportunities. I think that definitely people that have skilled audience and those big names that are the the new wave of celebrity are definitely getting the deals as long as there's I would say conversions. Yeah.
Speaker 16:And they have that fandom audience. They are the new names that a lot of brands want to partner with. And of course, these streaming services, or the podcast. Like to really have a successful, I would say at scale podcast or platform, you need to have, you know, that audience, that big name. However, that doesn't mean that's the only way to succeed.
Speaker 16:Mhmm. Right? So we're seeing, as you might know, a lot of smaller creators that have niche audiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:The b to b creators now that are becoming big. The LinkedIn creators. Yeah. The knowledge creators. Yeah.
Speaker 16:And they've hunkered down on a very specific audience, and they're seeing high conversions even though they don't have a skilled audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:And so that creates a lot of success too, where they could have, you know, or be making half 1,000,000 to 1,000,000 a year possibly. They're relying on brands, They're maybe having courses. They're maybe having, you know, paid events, etcetera. So what I think is really interesting right now is we are at a time that there could be opportunity for big names, but also not such household names. Yeah.
Speaker 16:But again, it's really about understanding your why as a brand and what you're trying to go after.
Speaker 2:Now, do you like the term Nimsel? Niche internet micro celebrity? That's been a one that's been
Speaker 1:I've never. Never heard that.
Speaker 16:I don't know. Sounds like too much like an incel. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is a weird knockoff. But I I I think it does capture something that is real, which is that in there might be someone who is incredibly influential in a particular sub vertical or industry and and they might be a household name gets stopped for autographs at that industry's conference but never at a random Starbucks. Right? And so this is just an interesting who who is it? It was Colin Samir we were talking with and they said that Yeah.
Speaker 2:Something like 80 to 90% of the next generation, maybe Gen Alpha, is a super fan of someone that no one in their high school has heard of. So they all have individual relationships with some someone that they're a super fan of but they don't cross over. It's not everyone likes Tom Cruise, it's everyone likes their own individual unique Tom Cruise or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 16:I was talking about that with someone actually recently because it it creates I think again so much possibility, but then it's harder to figure out like if you can just find one name that everyone knows that will have that popularity. Again, like in the past, there were how many cable channels? Or even before cable, you know, TV channels, cable channels, and then shows that you watch, you know. We're we're such a fragmented audience right now.
Speaker 15:Yeah.
Speaker 16:And so there could be someone that is so popular, and you might have never heard about them. That's like the beauty of social media and the internet right now. And actually, know, you were mentioning the middle class. I do think there's something about the middle class that is difficult right now when it comes to the creator economy. Mhmm.
Speaker 16:Because I see people when they're at the 1% making a ton of money. I mean, not everyone is Mr. Beast. Right? And then niche creators are making a lot of money.
Speaker 16:When you're kind of stuck in that gray area, that's becoming, I would say, more and more of a challenge because you're getting underpriced, but then also, you know, the prices that you want, they're not necessarily being able to hit it because they're keeping that for like more of that macro creator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the other the other challenge is that there's gonna be new creators that are growing that are growing quickly that are that are that are hungry that maybe have figured out formats so the algorithms are rewarding Yep.
Speaker 1:More intensely. And if you're in that middle zone and you don't adapt quickly, you can quickly become irrelevant. I used to Yeah. I used to talk to YouTube creators that would try to this was back in 2018, that would try to set pricing based on the number of their the number of their subscribers Yeah. Because there was a period where you could basically say, like, I have this many subscribers.
Speaker 1:Like, you can assume that at least half of them will, click through and and and watch the video. There was a moment like that, and then it changed pretty rapidly Views. And I would I would talk to them and be like, hey, like unfortunately, like
Speaker 2:Average views. You can't Over the
Speaker 1:last couple of Take your last 10 videos Yep. And take the the average and like that
Speaker 2:For some creators, that's higher than their subscriber base. But for a lot of creators, it's 20% of their subscribers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lot lower.
Speaker 16:It's actually putting the videos. But then, you know, I think pricing is really important to talk about because, you know, I do think there's different types of creators that require different things. Like, you know, now there's a lot of the affiliate creators. And I liken that to like a QVC host, right? Yep.
Speaker 16:They're really good at selling through and having that affiliate model, and that's the only way they work, and they're really good at that. I don't think that's for everyone. And just because something works in the creator economy for a group of people doesn't mean it needs to be the end all be all.
Speaker 14:Do not
Speaker 2:tell that to Gary Vaynerchuk. If you get him going about TikTok shop, it's over for you. He will That's a lot of
Speaker 16:game like
Speaker 2:He loves it.
Speaker 16:Not everyone is meant to be a TikTok shop.
Speaker 2:Agree. I agree with you completely. And
Speaker 16:then where's the wait. On that note, and I love Gary. Where's Gary V's TikTok shop? I want to see him like, okay. So TikTok shop is hot.
Speaker 16:What are you selling? I wanna see you selling which he does these moments where he'll be selling or he'll go live for a week or week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 16:Okay. We're doing this again. Why am I live on TV? And, like, okay. By week two or three, he's like, okay.
Speaker 16:Have other shit to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. A 100%. I mean, I he he he does he I I think part of his benefit is that he's he's sampled from the smorgasbord of content creation and can speak to, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, there there is a gap here for some people, but not it's not all gonna be one size fits all. Just like I don't think everyone's going to be you know doing IRL streaming in the future even though that's having a moment and we could see many more creators do IRL streams outside of the kick streamers and the controversial folks and the political folks. You could see that instantiated in a whole bunch of other categories but it'll just take time to get there. We've been seeing with TBPN. People have made a version of this show for car dealerships or what's going on in Europe or what's going on in crypto and there's all these different twists on this format and that happens whenever there's a new thing but it's not gonna be perfect for every single vertical.
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 16:Exactly. And that's what they'll jump on it because it's a trend and there's a difference between the people that jump onto something and then build it as actually like a substantial career.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 16:So for instance, like I like to say, I'm like I'm looking at a career. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 16:I'm here in the digital space. It's something I'm very passionate about. And now, on my personal brand, I cover creator economy trends, emerging tech, AI, even mental health. We could get into that Mhmm. When it comes to the digital space.
Speaker 16:But I've been now working in this space for twenty years. I get to look at trends and how they've changed and not just report on them, but I've actually lived through them. So it gives it a different, approach at least for me and an edge when it comes to my coverage. I also think just sidebar, if you're a creator or someone looking to be in the space, like, I do believe as long as you get the right representation, agents or managers are important, as long as they don't take advantage. There's a lot of predatory behavior out there.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 16:Because they have other talent, they could see How
Speaker 12:much should you share with a
Speaker 1:manager, like 90%? Or or or would they want will they want more? No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 16:No. No. Usually agents, and I'm gonna say this, someone said don't talk about this. I was on a panel at the NAB show last week, and someone's like, are you revealing? And I'm like, these aren't secrets.
Speaker 16:These are kind of industry standards, and we needed talk about things more, and not cut people off from information. Like, I am not Mhmm. I do not wanna be that person.
Speaker 17:Mhmm.
Speaker 16:So, yeah. So agents typically take 10%, managers 20%. Mhmm. But again, this day and age, managers people are just becoming salespeople, and they're saying they're managers Mhmm. Which is crazy.
Speaker 16:Whereas in the past, a manager would actually build your strategy, and help you with your career, and like your longevity. Now, just run your email inbox, and like that is not a manager. But anyway, that's just my hot take on that. But Well said. I think things are, you know, things are changing.
Speaker 16:What?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. No. I like it.
Speaker 2:It's a good point. And I think it is important for these to for the yeah. Just the benchmarks or any sort of relative information getting out there is always good. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:What's your outlook on clipping? It feels like the legacy media don't
Speaker 16:ask that.
Speaker 1:It feels like the legacy media just just woke up to this.
Speaker 2:Well, it just started. The first clip I think went out like last week and so that's why everyone's talking about it.
Speaker 16:The first clip from a a legacy media company?
Speaker 1:No. No. We're we're joking. No.
Speaker 2:It's week. It's been around for years and it's now like having this big moment. It's just sort of funny to reflect on this thing that everyone's been aware of for a long time.
Speaker 16:Yeah. So I I it's interesting because I think when you Google even clipping and I was trying to find the platform that does it. There's like two sides of clipping. It's like the you're clipping up all your clips obviously and distributing them
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:At scale across everywhere. And then there's the clipping farms like where they'll you can pay people to post on their platforms and try to get views.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:Those are kind of two sides
Speaker 2:The clipping industrial complex.
Speaker 16:Yeah. And I find that fascinating. Like a lot of streamers are doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:I show speed and
Speaker 2:Well, for a long
Speaker 16:that's time somehow
Speaker 2:Rogan would be clipped, but just by people that were watching the show and were like this was
Speaker 16:an Organic. Interesting Organic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Authentic. Farm to table clipping. Now you got the industrialization of clipping and so thousands of people are being paid to clip a single streamer and it's part of a marketing process. But it seems to be effective for people, so it is becoming a trend and people are paying attention.
Speaker 16:And that how like is it clavicular?
Speaker 2:Clavicular has been a massive beneficiary of the clip industrial complex. Apparently, he has a 100 people working
Speaker 6:for him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's interesting because people like analyze his whole strategy
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And they put like they seemingly put like eighty ninety percent of the of the of the success Yep. And the growth Yep. Of his personal brand whether you believe it should grow or not
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:On the strategy Yep. When he was a unique figure
Speaker 2:And a controversial figure. A And if you if he had been saying there just, yeah, a little bit of sleep, diet, exercise, don't worry about it too much you're going to be fine and he had a billion clippers no one would know his name. Instead he's out there with the craziest hot takes possible, the craziest stunts He's
Speaker 1:saying that he's doing math.
Speaker 2:In jail and stuff like insane stuff and and so the clips really amplify that but there's a seed of virality there already on day one whether or not the clippers are paid or not I think.
Speaker 16:Yeah. No. That that is the thing. So I think it's interesting as a new marketing strategy that it'll be interesting to see if traditional media jumps on board. I don't think they will because they have a hard enough time building out their social strategy right now, let alone doing a whole like, I would say clipping strategy like that.
Speaker 16:I think that definitely benefits the individual personal brand, the person that's willing to take the risk. Again, there's still money that you need to spend on this, but if you want to become a social media celebrity one, yeah, you need to have the basic, I would say controversial hot take Yeah. And then being able to tap into this other stuff. But it's something to look out for in terms of the phenomenon of social media right now, and putting more out there. Right?
Speaker 16:And how do you do it faster? But then some of these, I would say I use Opus for instance. I know the team there. They're great if you have long form video and you want to cut it Yeah. But some of these tools, they do need to be better.
Speaker 16:It's like you can't just throw it in and spit it out.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:There's
Speaker 1:still Yeah. We tried a number of the tools early on and couldn't get Yeah. Any of them working. We ended up building our own internal software.
Speaker 2:Which which helps with the the cutting of the footage but does not do the selection for you. The selection is still editorial. That's still human, which is interesting.
Speaker 16:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 16:So you know a lot of creators are still worried about or anyone about AI taking their job, or this or that. Yeah. Which is real, which is why I think that you need to lean into like having a voice and an approach to things where you're not just being told what to do, but you can take a piece of content as an editor and be like, I'm gonna make this the best it can be like better than AI right now. I'm personally excited for when I could throw a clip in and it could spit it out for me and be awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 16:We are not there yet. It would save me so much time. So as a creator, I'm excited for these tools. I am not
Speaker 2:Clip super intelligence. It's gotta happen. It's gotta happen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great rest
Speaker 1:of your Yeah. To meet you. Come back on whenever you have. I I love all the spice. Come back whenever.
Speaker 1:The spice.
Speaker 16:Oh, I will be back. Maybe I'll be in studio. It's easier and I want to Fantastic. This tech. I'm just being a freeze frame right
Speaker 14:now.
Speaker 16:All good. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it. You came through
Speaker 12:loud and clear.
Speaker 1:Great to hang.
Speaker 16:Fantastic. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Talk soon. Alright.
Speaker 2:Flashbang out. Our next guest is Anshul Gupta from Actively AI. He's the co founder. He is the co founder and president. I think I got it right.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Last minute switch. Introduce yourself and the company, please. Sorry for being
Speaker 17:Hey, John. How are doing?
Speaker 2:Thanks for
Speaker 13:having me, guys. To Great to big
Speaker 12:fans of the big fans of
Speaker 17:the show and congrats obviously on the
Speaker 2:Thank you. The Yeah.
Speaker 17:A lot of folks on our team have switched from SportsCenter to to you guys. So I think that's a Oh.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize we were pulling people from SportsCenter. I like that. This is the new sport, the sport of enterprise revenue workflows. Tell us
Speaker 17:Amazing. So, yeah. Quickly, I'm Anshul, one of the cofounders of Actively, as you guys mentioned, and we build agents for for go to market teams. And effectively, we're the only platform that proactively guides revenue teams
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 17:On what to do next Yeah. And then actually helps them do it. And it it's it's based off this notion that we built called an agent for every account. So this concept called per account agent. Oh, the idea is as a rep, you're stretched really, really thin on all the possible actions that you could be doing to drive revenue.
Speaker 17:Mhmm. And so what actively does is we've created these agents that live with every single one agent that lives with every single account for the life cycle of that account Mhmm. Across the the funnel from, you know, top of funnel through close through through expansion
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 17:That are maintaining all that context and and as well as guiding you on what you should be doing next and then actually doing the doing the work. Which stands in stark contrast to, a lot of the solutions that require a human being to go point click to to to kind of decide what they Yeah. What they want to do. And our fundamental belief is that there's gonna be, and you know, it's true with our customers, there's gonna be a lot more agents than than sellers.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 17:Right? And so how do you build and plan for that world and that reality?
Speaker 2:Is software sales the beachhead? Or are you selling to car dealerships or Rolex ADs or HVAC salesmen? Like there's so many different people that would benefit from an agent on every account, but I imagine that you'll be accelerated in certain verticals. Have you narrowed down or are you going broad?
Speaker 17:So it's a great question. I think for us, ultimately, you know, the ICP is very clear, is we make revenue teams way more productive. The larger revenue teams you have, the more impact that we can make. Sure. To your point, however, the beachhead very much is within software sales.
Speaker 17:Sure. But we're starting to see organic demand from some of these other other verticals. Maybe maybe not car dealerships yet and that's, you know, hopefully a good maybe a good thing. But, you know, for
Speaker 1:the The watch services brand ADs, they could just be like, tell this person tell this person they're
Speaker 2:not Hey. I scraped your Instagram and I noticed that you had a bare wrist when you were going swimming. Do you need a dive watch potentially? Talk to me about what it actually takes because obviously you're scraping the emails, you're scraping the calendar invites and probably transcriptions, understanding what's going on with the interaction between the company. But are you also looking at like product analytics?
Speaker 2:I feel like so many times you sell a software product, they're like, great, we did the demo, cool. We were rolling it out. Yeah, it's going great. And you're like, we see that no one's logged in. We need to intervene.
Speaker 2:Is that part of what the agent's working on?
Speaker 17:Yeah. For for us, we we view the bright line as being very, you know, plain and clear, is full and complete context.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 17:And so in order if the the way I try to analogize it is, I had unlimited dollars and I was a CRO, I would put one seller. Ideally, I would figure out a way to clone my best seller and put one seller in each and every one of these accounts. And so, as part of that, if they're doing their job, John, to your to your question, they would be looking at every single data point, which today sellers don't do because Yeah. To your point, it's in so many different different systems Yeah. Right?
Speaker 17:Whether it's product analytics, calls, information that's not in your in your database. And so our account agents are kind of becoming the sort of continuously updating source of truth across all of those different different areas. And so, you know, because we're very enterprise focused, we have to build integrations into a pretty large large set of kind of technologies housing this information.
Speaker 2:Tell us about
Speaker 1:Do the round you track last last question. Do you do you track how long it takes to generate one of your customers their first like a dollar of revenue that you can attribute back
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 1:what metrics matter on your side?
Speaker 17:Yeah. It's a really good question. Yeah. I think ultimately, we're in the business of helping increase, you know, seller productivity revenue revenue per rep. And so, that's, you know, we we track based off our account agents sort of what what are they able to what are they able to drive and attributed kind of pipeline conversion rates, downstream revenue expansions.
Speaker 17:But then also, there's there's some interesting org change dynamics that as a result of having these really powerful agents, we're starting to see you know, we work with many publicly traded companies that as they're starting to see efficiency gains, they they can rethink their the the levels of maybe middle management that you have, the maybe the the levels of ratios between AEs to to to BDRs. Because as you gain more and more efficiencies with these with these account agents, you don't need as much in sort of those those different those different supporting functions. But I think, like, you know, the the other point that that I'll that I'll make is it's not just about the metrics that you're driving. It is a fully different way of doing go to market, right, which is every single other solution out there only works when the human goes into it and decides, I want to do this or I want to do that. But, like, what about when they're asleep or what if they're not thinking about asking that question?
Speaker 17:Mhmm. That is where and and there's a huge disparity in terms of seller performance in terms of a players in the in the in the rest. And so it's it's kind of this broader transformation that we're trying to trying to drive.
Speaker 2:Very exciting. Tell us about the round.
Speaker 17:Yep. Do I wait for the gun?
Speaker 15:Wait for the big
Speaker 1:Tell old us. Tell us.
Speaker 17:$45,000,000 series. Series eight. There we
Speaker 2:go. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:We will talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. To meet you. Congrats to the team on milestone. Awesome. We'll see you at the sea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a good one. Sure. Thanks. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Goodbye. Up next, we have Apurva from Avoca, the founder and co CEO, working on AI agents for the service economy, baby. Let's go.
Speaker 1:A lot of capital being deployed today.
Speaker 2:It is a boom time.
Speaker 1:Being announced.
Speaker 2:It's a boom time. Well, we are very fortunate to have our next guest here. We are in the TBPN UltraDome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 18:Hey, guys. I'm doing well. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for taking the time. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:We are doing great, but don't think we're doing office is right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Introduce yourself and the company, please.
Speaker 18:Yep. So my name is Apurva. I'm the founder and co CEO of Evoca. Yeah. We're basically building AI agents for physical service businesses, primarily, for example, home services where we've seen a lot of traction.
Speaker 18:And my cofounder is Tyson, and we started this business together in 2022.
Speaker 2:Cool. 2022.
Speaker 1:What did you see? Yeah. What what Were
Speaker 2:you thinking just like SaaS and then it just got a lot better with the AI tailwind?
Speaker 18:Well, it's kind of interesting. So this kind of happened during the time that the models that created ChatGeBT had come out, but ChatGeBT itself Yeah. Wasn't yet out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. GPT three was getting a lot better. Like 3.5 was like basically out. Da Vinci, like stuff was starting to work, but it was a little bit rough, but you could see glimpses.
Speaker 18:Exactly. Yep. So this is the time when like Da Vinci was out Yeah. But then you didn't really have the consumer adoption of ChatGPT yet. Mhmm.
Speaker 18:And, yeah, during that period of time, something interesting about both me and my cofounder is that we both came from backgrounds where so I grew up in Michigan. Tyson grew up in Pennsylvania. We We basically grew up in backgrounds where our moms owned these service businesses and we actually used to do the this kind of job every day where we'd have to actually be picking up phone calls, booking customers, figuring out how to properly book them, all of that fun stuff. And so we essentially, after we did that, I think when I saw AI was getting really good, I was immediately like, wait. I feel like businesses like that will have so much value and no one's really looking into it.
Speaker 18:And so we were like, what does it look like to bring value here? And we thought, let's start with the phone call.
Speaker 2:Okay. Oh, the phone call. Okay. Yeah. I I want to know more about just the data ingest points because you can imagine like, you know, ERPs, custom ERPs, CRMs.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of different touch points and you could even go into photos and three d scans of things that are going on in the physical world. But where is the beachhead? Where is like the light bulb moment for your customers?
Speaker 18:Yeah. So it's kind of like multiple phases. Would say for our customers, if you think about it, like our customers, their customers are basically just like us. You know, anytime we need like a new job for plumbing, new AC, etcetera, things like that, they're coming through a lot of source. So phone calls is actually how many businesses get most of the revenue.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 18:And then there's also like lead aggregators, some people are texting. And so, Avoca, we wanna first our first phase is like essentially responding and closing every lead, which is like how do we get you any lead that's coming from like Angie's for example. People often think of as a war room because now every single person's like fighting for that person. So we can have an AI that'll go respond to that lead immediately. We can have an AI that picks up every single phone call Mhmm.
Speaker 18:And sticks the script, does what you need, close that customer.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 18:Then there's kind of like a second phase, which is like, how do you, you know, figure out your capacity and get new customers? So based based off of what kind of availabilities and jobs you have, can you go reach out to the existing base? Who should you target to kind of, you know, fill up your board?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Our our voice models at a ChatGPT moment now, I had a really great experience booking a restaurant reservation at Fogo De Chao, Bain Capital backed. No surprises there. But but it but, you know, like I have grown up my entire life like do not talk to the robot, do not reject the clanker, demand the human, press 0 a bunch. But it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of magical experiences.
Speaker 2:How close are we? Have we crossed the Turing test? Do you have data on any of this? Like, how is it going on that front?
Speaker 18:Yeah. Absolutely. So we have now crossed the point where, like, if you wanted to, for the first thirty seconds to a minute of a conversation, people would not be able to tell that they're talking to an AI because the models have just gotten so good. But still to this day, we are not yet at like the point where we're at with text where you could literally have, you know, minutes long conversations because eventually the AI sounds robotic. It takes, like, an extra hundred milliseconds to respond, interrupts you when you're speaking, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 18:So we're not yet at the moment where it's like, oh, everything is gonna switch over, but we're at the moment where, in fact, you can have very good conversations. You can pick up the phone within a second and super efficient. Like, these average calls actually last about 30% faster than calls that humans would take. So it's even more efficient.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. That's great. Tell us about the round.
Speaker 1:Any any any of these different is there is there you have roofing, HVAC, plumbing. Is there a category that is more resistant to AI? Like, plumbers like, nah, I'm good. More than electricians or HVAC? Or is it is it pretty and and what is general sentiment across the board?
Speaker 18:Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. So I think like, the initial thought would be that, oh, people are probably not too excited about adopting AI or whatever AI is evil. But in fact, the nice part about our business is that the AI is not the main character of the job.
Speaker 13:What the main AI is doing is just making
Speaker 18:sure everything gets booked, making sure their customers are happy, making sure you're always getting new customers. But the main characters are actually the plumbers, the technicians, the, you know, HVAC guys. And so they are actually I mean, I would split them split them into multiple buckets, but a lot of them are very hungry and eager to actually adopt AI right now because they already see the overhead of like, oh, shoot. I forgot to follow-up with that customer or oh, wow. I can't believe we dropped that customer on their phone call.
Speaker 18:And so an AI can go in and solve that. They can do their job. They're still running the show, and the AI can help facilitate that. So still seeing actually really good adoption there.
Speaker 2:Cool. Tell us about the round. You raised a bunch of money. What happened?
Speaker 18:Yeah. So we actually this is our first time going public, so we're very happy and honored to be here. We've now raised a 125,000,000 at latest million dollar valuation. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:First time going public as in coming out of stealth. Right?
Speaker 18:Yeah. I mean, we were all all over LinkedIn, but we had never did a single press release. And so, Fortune
Speaker 2:Got the Inclusive. Let's go.
Speaker 1:They're like, let's just wait let's just wait till we till we hit a billion.
Speaker 2:Very impressive. Very, very good good progress. Congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Congrats on Awesome. Goodbye.
Speaker 18:Cool.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Up next, we have an Anand joining. We have Bubble Boy. I believe Bubble Boy is in the waiting room. Let's bring Bubble Boy in to the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:We have some important questions.
Speaker 15:Another one.
Speaker 1:He's coming. He has been on an absolute terror.
Speaker 13:There he is.
Speaker 2:Bubble boy. I like this golden retriever. Hello.
Speaker 13:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 2:Hello. Okay. So you said, yo TBPN put me on the show to talk about semis. I will make your listeners rich. Go.
Speaker 2:Make our listeners rich. Tell us about semis.
Speaker 1:Now let's start like, why why do you still have a normal job at this point? Let's start there.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So someone actually asked me this recently, and I think the answer I got was a lot of my ideas come from working on the same problems these engineers are actually trying to solve. So I really don't think I could have actually called Intel or called a lot of these other companies like Sandisk if I didn't have that experience and know how and expertise. So I actually think having a job is a bit of alpha, believe it or not. I think a lot of the engineers who are actually just making a killing in this market, I mean, these are just real experts in their field.
Speaker 15:And we look at the market every day and we just see, you know, big divergences. I don't think the finance bros really understand what advanced packaging is or what yields really mean. They understand it maybe from a financial aspect, but not from a competitive standpoint.
Speaker 1:Re rewind to a year ago, where did you think we were in the overall AI cycle? And where do you think we are today? Yeah.
Speaker 15:Probably the start. I I I think
Speaker 2:It's good.
Speaker 1:At the beginning of
Speaker 15:the year. At the beginning of the year Yeah. Every hyper scale basically said that they're gonna spend 680,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 15:So, I mean, we're just the start. I think we have at least three years of CapEx growth going crazy from my estimates. And from there, I mean, tokens are just looking like the new oil or electricity. Think at this point, I actually can't live my life without a token. So, yeah, I I think we're just at the start.
Speaker 15:I think right now is really when things are gonna be going crazy. Okay. If you actually look at the data center build out, nothing's actually been completed yet. We're just at the beginning.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you think everyone having access to LLMs, you know, these incredible research partners is changing the markets? Like, does that do do do things get priced in faster when everyone can can, is maybe asking the same questions?
Speaker 15:Absolutely. And that's a good question. I just need to shout out GPT 5.5, my preferred model for, you know, stock research. I think that I know for sure that the number one consumer of these tokens is these hedge funds and financial institutions. They are absolutely running through a bunch of research, and it allows you to get up to speed quickly.
Speaker 15:If you really think about it, like, five years ago, if I wanted to make a bet on, like, chemical epoxy for semis, that would have took in six months of my life and been a bit ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:and then and then so so share share your post yesterday which went viral, turned into news. You were just you were basically just showing that you could just make up stuff on the timeline and and I think you moved I think you moved the market. Give us the backstory.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What happened?
Speaker 15:So I was actually just researching these chemical suppliers, and I just realized, you know, you could really you could really talk to an LLM and get it to say whatever you wanted to say. I So I I just picked a random company, honestly, in Japan, and I just said, hey. Try to really pitch this as an AI bottleneck. Sadly, it's not a bottleneck. Right?
Speaker 15:But I I think they're doing well either way. Yeah. They've been I mean, we're in a good place. You know? Data centers will be built out.
Speaker 15:We don't need to wait for SumiTimo Bakelite to get their epoxy resins to scale. But yeah, so I I guess that's a harm. People need to definitely do their own research. I've seen a lot of people just piling into things they don't understand. So very interesting place to be in.
Speaker 2:What's your intel thesis right now?
Speaker 15:Great question. I think up to this point, intel was a talk intel's thesis was really a fab turnaround. It was about eighteen a and '14 a, which is coming. I think really now, I've completely changed my logic. It's about advanced packaging.
Speaker 15:Advanced packaging to me is the new Moore's Law. You've kind of already seen this with bilirubin, where they can't actually do four dyes on one package. They actually had to change that last second. If you look out to Feynman, I mean, these packages the the packaging of the silicon is a huge bottleneck. It already was a bottleneck.
Speaker 15:In twenty in twenty twenty five, NVIDIA was 60% of TSMC's advanced packaging. So everyone else was out there to fend for themselves. So any kind of advanced packaging that comes to market, that allows people to scale, compute way more than I think just shrinking a node. I mean, shrinking a node's great, but the way NVIDIA's timeline, and I think all the hyperscalers as well, they want more HBM. They want more radical sized dies, and they all want it in one package.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:So that's really where things are headed towards, and I think the market's not pricing that in. I think this is a real sea change to the semi industry. This really is just happening over the past year or so.
Speaker 2:What's the story with the dog?
Speaker 15:Oh, well, this is just kind of like how I look on a day to day basis when I'm sitting at my desk, sipping on a diet. Well, Pepsi in this case, but I just like to, you know That's for. Spread joy. Yeah. No.
Speaker 15:I think this is kind of like how you look when Intel beats on earnings and goes up 30% in a day, and you've been proven right after a year of being told you were wrong. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's good. What's any any any non financial advice predictions for the this tech earnings cycle? What are you expecting tomorrow?
Speaker 15:Well, I think we have Sandisk reporting soon. I think that's kind of been telegraphed that Sandisk can just increase the price of Flash until the customers cry. So I think, yeah, they they will be fine. I think the other story is people think there's a CPU shortage.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:I think that this is gonna be we're gonna get a yes or no definitely in this earning season.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 15:people actually just price up CPUs 25, 30%. And will people take it?
Speaker 1:When when you when you'd post a picture of your a screenshot of your returns on X, do you ever get worried that that it's a sign that you should at least go to cash somewhat or does does it just
Speaker 15:not. That's never not. I've never thought of going to cash. I I actually took some money out last year for taxes, and it was the biggest mistake of my life because that money, who knows where how much it would be by now. I see this as we have a three year run at least, and now it's time to really pull the trigger.
Speaker 15:If anything, I'm trying to borrow money at this point to go bigger.
Speaker 1:And that's why they call him Bubble Boy.
Speaker 2:That's why they call him Bubble Boy.
Speaker 1:You used to pray for a bubble like this.
Speaker 15:Yeah. I I definitely did. Yeah. And it's come to fruition so
Speaker 1:What what can people what can people expect from you? You you say that having a job is alpha. I'm sure you're getting people are trying to pitch you on new job opportunities. But what what can people expect from you this year besides making a lot of calls Mhmm.
Speaker 15:All the
Speaker 1:time and to date often being quite accurate?
Speaker 15:I think you'll I think I'll give a hint. You'll see me in the flash business somewhere, somehow, maybe at a pretty established flash company in supply chain. So I think flash is one of these technologies that I think scales a lot higher than the market expects. And I always have this joke. Say, like, if you want to, like, change the world, you can cure cancer, or you can come up with new kinds of memory.
Speaker 15:So I can't work on the first one, so I'm gonna look at the number two for now.
Speaker 1:And would this be an early stage
Speaker 2:get exposure. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Potentially or it could be really partnering with a very very large company.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 15:So there's some advantages to both.
Speaker 2:Well, good luck wherever the future takes you
Speaker 1:and This was fun. I I've I've deeply I've deeply enjoyed your your posting. Always been fun. And and yeah. You're clearly having a lot of fun and it's fun to watch.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you.
Speaker 15:Thank you guys both and big fan of the show. So thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having It's
Speaker 1:been an honor.
Speaker 2:We'll talk you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers Bubble Boy. We'll talk you. Cheers.
Speaker 15:Bye.
Speaker 2:Should close with an example of why memory is so expensive. Star Wars meets Pawn Stars. Have you seen this video? Have you watched this, Jordy?
Speaker 1:I did. It sounds crazy.
Speaker 2:I saw the first second. I haven't watched the full thing. But I think it's
Speaker 1:probably It's
Speaker 12:pretty incredible.
Speaker 9:I have items to pawn.
Speaker 12:Alright. Let's see what you got. Okay. So these are lightsabers.
Speaker 9:Correct.
Speaker 12:So where'd you get them?
Speaker 9:Estate sale.
Speaker 12:Estate sale.
Speaker 1:It's so funny that you can clock it by the audio or the video.
Speaker 2:It's very weird. Collector for many years.
Speaker 9:It is a great passion passion of mine. Each lightsaber has a story, and he's telling the people. There is a certain
Speaker 2:I guess the character is CGI to begin with. So it's it's it's hard to clock. But even he's probably fully AI
Speaker 9:is a lung condition.
Speaker 2:Video or maybe it's set it together. I don't know. But, yeah, you're a 100% right. It's the audio that's off.
Speaker 9:Sell my collection.
Speaker 12:That's rough, man. How much are you looking
Speaker 1:to get for him?
Speaker 9:A 100,000 prints.
Speaker 12:Look. I'll give you $50 for him.
Speaker 2:You fool. It's interesting that the like, why that's popular is because it's this mashup between two intellectual pieces of property, and they're not being compensated for that. And so there's, like, thing that can only exist in the piracy world, basically. Like, if someone if you had recreated this without leveraging Star Wars IP or Pawnstar's IP, doesn't go viral. Right?
Speaker 2:And so the the business case for AI video is still a little bit more narrow and I think it will be tucked in the tool section. I was I was, yeah, looking a lot at like the the Aflac projects that he sold to Netflix and some of the background replacements, some of the VFX stuff. Like, it feels like the way even though this is like this oh, it's like one shotting entertainment, it feels like the next the next moment of, like, AI in Hollywood is very much, like, tool driven, you know, leveraging things like, you know, green screen removal and object replacement, VFX workflows, and just sort of speeding up remote or like rote tasks. But people will continue to have fun with these mashups. I'm sure we'll see many more of them on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Anyway.
Speaker 1:The other news.
Speaker 2:What
Speaker 1:else? Mike Isaac and his team over at the New York Times are in the courtroom live blogging.
Speaker 2:They're blogging.
Speaker 1:They went. They're blogging. Yeah. They're blogging. It is There's some crazy moments already.
Speaker 2:The judge is like doing bits.
Speaker 1:Put some of them together. The judge is doing bits. The judge is doing bits. Apparently, Elon's lawyer's microphone turned off four times in the course of his opening statement.
Speaker 2:Maybe the screen turned off at one point. I saw some different on that.
Speaker 1:Apparently on the There were technical issues. Fifth or so time the judge says, what can I tell you? We are funded by the federal government. So
Speaker 2:That's wild.
Speaker 1:She's running she's running bits. But I highly recommend going over and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mike Isaac and some fantastic coverage.
Speaker 1:Posts are still rolling in. Yeah. It's a lot to go through because it's it's it's hours and hours and hours of content but we'll try to pull out some of the highlights and Yeah. And go through it on tomorrow's show.
Speaker 2:The other thing you should listen to is Patrick O'Shaughnessy had Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest macro traders of all time on invest like the best. It's an hour and eleven minutes and you should go listen to it. So go take a listen. It already has 5,000 likes, 1,700,000 views, not nearly enough downloads. So go add it to your podcast player right now.
Speaker 2:And enjoy that for the rest of the day. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow, 11AM. Lead us five stars now. Podcast, Spotify, sign up for our newsletter tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:Can't wait to see you tomorrow. Have the best afternoon of your life. We love you.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Flashback.
Speaker 16:You're going flashback.
Speaker 2:Out. Goodbye.