Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
There was some big news, this week. Of course, everyone knew that Apple was launching new products, but there were some surprises. And, there's some cool stuff starting with the MacBook Neo. The more downstream take is, like, how is Apple affected by the AI boom? But let's start with the actual products because this thing in the video, it looks so small.
Speaker 1:It looks like an eight inch laptop. So this is the MacBook Neo sort of designed to compete with the Chromebook. It comes in at $599
Speaker 2:Well, not even just the Chromebook, just all PCs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, I mean, you're not going to get this for, like, if you're in a professional work place, go to a desktop with multiple monitors plug in, you're doing like advanced work. Like this is for students. This is for the low end and Or just a
Speaker 2:personal computer. Think it's designed for people that have an iPhone, but don't have a Mac because of costs. And now they can have an integrated suite.
Speaker 1:I love the launch video too. It's very weird when they start because it's just this blank bold block. And then they're adding features to it with CGI. It does a really good job. It's sort of anticomactive because every feature they add is just like what you'd expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was kind of like, oh, is this going be a touch screen? And then it's like, oh, no, it's just a normal screen. It's just like, like, guess It has a keyboard. Boom, mic drop.
Speaker 1:Oh, it has two USB C ports. Is It kinda cool that they put the the headphone jack a little bit further down. And then they're like, check it out. You're never gonna guess this. A camera, we put it on the computer.
Speaker 1:They're
Speaker 2:like, hey. We heard you liked having an iPad
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That you could attach a keyboard to. So we basically took an iPad and put
Speaker 1:a keyboard. But it's very cool how how they like sort of expand the product, like show you, okay, there's the speaker. It's pretty big. It goes on the side. There's two of them.
Speaker 1:13 inch display, sixteen hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So $5.99. For students, it's a $100 cheaper. So $4.99, that is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple Air Pods Max cost like $500. Remarkably cheap. A 18 pro chip, 256 gigs or five twelve of storage, four colors. They got it in ramp yellow.
Speaker 1:They call it citrus, but I think everyone's gonna
Speaker 2:be And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone Yeah. 17E.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are sort of like, oh, it's underpowered. But look at the price. This is this is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap was in 2014.
Speaker 1:So twelve years ago, they sold the MacBook Air for $8.99. And now they have this down at $4.99 or $5.99, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap, cheap for $20.26, cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops. So this is sort of like their their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more because if you're price sensitive, well, they have a product for you.
Speaker 1:And there was something similar that happened with the the new suite of iPhones where the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face and the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful. And a lot of people want that. But there were also a lot of people who were complaining, I just want a thinner phone. Well, then you have the iPhone Air.
Speaker 1:And there's gonna be crazy trade offs you only get. I think one camera, the battery life's not nearly as good. Lags. It lags. But for some people, if they're gonna be complaining about the all the features of the Pro Max, it's like, well, we got the Air for you.
Speaker 1:Stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. The other products they launched, MacBook Air with an with an m five chip, MacBook Pro with the m five Pro and m How five Max much memory did you wind up going with?
Speaker 2:48.
Speaker 1:48. Is that enough?
Speaker 2:I feel a little I feel a little soft.
Speaker 1:Is that enough to pull up tweets and react to them on a livestream? Time Time will you actually have been maxing out something like 32 gigs of RAM, which shook me by surprise. I have not had I've not been memory constrained. But I do I do actually love the idea of getting the top end memory, which is the thing that constrains you on running LLMs locally. Is that correct, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, you can always, like if you have a relink model, you can, like, get around the memory thing.
Speaker 2:But Okay.
Speaker 3:It gets, super slow because you're loading it in and out.
Speaker 1:Oh, Okay. You're loading it in and out for every token that you're generating.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You need a lot of memory to Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if I go with the 128 gig, the top of the line chip, I should be able to inference like a pretty smart model locally, pretty reliably.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 3:it's also like the you can always just quantize the models down.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and so like, you can actually run like really frontier, like Yeah. Source models on like pretty normal hardware now.
Speaker 1:I'm just purely thinking for doomsday prepping, the idea of you have your library in case you're bored during the apocalypse. You have your DVD collection. You can watch all the movies from start. That's the big one for you because you're going be able to watch all of American cinema from the beginning.
Speaker 2:I I still I still don't think I'd actually watch.
Speaker 1:You wouldn't do that. What would you be doing? Assuming that the Internet's down in this apocalyptic scenario, you can't scroll.
Speaker 2:There's Plenty of other things to do.
Speaker 1:What would you do?
Speaker 2:Take a walk on the beach.
Speaker 1:What if you can't go outside because there's nuclear fallout everywhere? You're stuck in your bunker. What are you doing? Whittling? Did you get into whittling?
Speaker 2:I actually used to love whittling as a kid.
Speaker 1:Called it. What else did they launch? In a world where computers keep going up in price, it's kinda wild to see Apple drop a $5.99 laptop, says Theo.
Speaker 2:A phone Price. Could
Speaker 1:not agree more.
Speaker 2:Fry
Speaker 1:says, oh, man, they're gonna sell 5,000,000,000 of these things. Yeah. This is this feels like more of a no brainer for kids than an iPad for some reason. I don't know if I'm just like old school, and I'm like, it has a keyboard, it's a
Speaker 2:iPad iPads with kids just have really bad aesthetics.
Speaker 1:It does.
Speaker 2:Kids with an iPad just zoning out. Right?
Speaker 1:You get them a keyboard, they're locked in.
Speaker 2:But you get them there.
Speaker 1:I I think there's something here.
Speaker 2:And you're like, are they are they day trading?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're doing something. I I I think there's something about, you know, typing on a keyboard that does lend itself to more creation and less consumption. Like, the iPad is a media consumption device. That's where where most people use it for.
Speaker 1:Throw on Netflix, play a game, do something. There there aren't that many people that are power users. But as soon as you get the keyboard, you're ready to type. You're ready to you're ready to work. Hilarious chart from Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaker 1:Apple on CapEx? No. We're good. They looked at the standard standardized quarterly capital expenditure for Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple. All of the four companies that are working on AI, Amazon, obviously, through AWS and Anthropic, Microsoft through OpenAI, Alphabet through Gemini, and Meta through MSL, they are all absolutely off to the races going to the moon on CapEx, and Apple is down 19% since 2015.
Speaker 1:Very, very funny. And it's just interesting that Apple has been so unaffected by AI costs, not just on the CapEx side, which is where every hyperscaler sort of had to say, yep, you know what? Our business is fundamentally different now. We are not the high margin cash flow generating business. We're going to draw down on that cash.
Speaker 1:We might be taking on some debt. Like, this is a big, financial model. It's a very different financial model from years past. And buckle up. You're coming with us, shareholders.
Speaker 1:And the stocks have done well because a lot of shareholders have believed in the goal, believed in the value of AI, believed in the value of building compute infrastructure broadly. And they've been rewarded for it in most cases. But Apple's just sort of sat that out and said, hey, we're not we're not going to train a foundation model. We're not gonna build a whole bunch of compute infrastructure. We're gonna serve Gemini.
Speaker 1:We're gonna serve Gemini. And we'll pay them what? A billion dollars a year or something like that? Yeah. It's like
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, this this year will be really interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what the new Siri actually looks like, what it can really do. We'll start to see that I think in Q2. Yes.
Speaker 2:And then separately, we're expecting new devices from OpenAI, right? Oh yeah. Teasing the POC, Dime, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if they can kind of break the AI hardware curse that I feel like is
Speaker 1:Well, wanted to think about that because I wonder if the story's over for some of those like cursed bad launches product. Like we saw Friend apparently has found a little niche, very controversial, but Humane has sold to HP. It seems like they're not working on that product anymore, the pin, the AI pin. But the Rabbit R1, I think his name is Jesse, that product, there's something there where with enough iterations I feel like that might sell well. There's still these niche applications that I think you could potentially if you have a hardware team, you have the ability to sell something.
Speaker 1:It wasn't polished. The AI wasn't good enough. Well, AI got better. You still have the supply chain. Maybe there's a way to cut through, but it probably needs to be a little bit more niche.
Speaker 1:Like everyone's going to have one. Tyler, what do you think about hardware in the age of AI?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think the Mac mini is like a good example of like AI hardware right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No, that's a great example. I wonder what like how exposed the Gemini APIs will be in iOS. Because if you fully expose Gemini Kit in iOS, just like you can call a weather API or a maps API, Uber exists because there was a GPS API that you could just call within an iOS application with a couple lines of code. And you didn't have to figure out where the user was because the iPhone just told you that as long as you click like, yeah, share my location with Uber.
Speaker 1:If you now get an app that has not just Apple's local LLMs that are sort of mediocre, but it can go and call Gemini and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, you start running into like, will someone build an Open Cloth app or something? Like how much of Apple's AI strategy will wind up being vended into the third party ecosystem, which has served them so well for so long, they've sort of turned their back on it. They locked down Apple Vision Pro a little bit more. There was way less uptake there. And there's a ton of risk because if I develop like a free iOS app that then incurs like a ton of Gemini tokens and ton of charges, how do those get passed through?
Speaker 1:Is Apple just biting the bullet on it? But there's something interesting there where turning app developers loose to build software that takes advantage not just of local LLM capabilities, but Gemini under the hood and sort of wrap it up in a neat bow that is available to the consumer could be very cool. The big question that I had so Apple's unaffected by CapEx costs, but they've also, with this release, been unaffected by memory costs and the ramageddon. I get the strategy of Apple saying, look. We're good with Google handling the AI inference stuff.
Speaker 1:They have GCP. They have the TPU. They got Demis, who's got a book written about him by Sebastian Malabai. Like, DeepMind is great. We're working with them.
Speaker 1:CapEx, unaffected. I understand that. How are they not affected by memory prices? Ramageddon has come for us all. Apple always overcharges for RAM.
Speaker 1:If you went to build a computer or a phone or laptop or iPad equivalent, you just went to retail, getting an extra 128 gigs of memory or a slight memory upgrade might cost you $30 In the Apple ecosystem, that's like $200 So Apple has built in this, this pricing buffer for a very, very long time. Many companies are dealing with Rammageddon this year. And some stats that are interesting. DRAM prices rose a 172% throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since September 2025.
Speaker 1:TrendForce expects PC DRAM to roughly double in price just in 2026, with LPDDR pricing seeing the steepest increases in history. So every wafer that's allocated to an HBM stack, a high bandwidth memory stack for an NVIDIA GPU, is literally a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid range smartphone or consumer laptop SSD. So they are truly commodities. There's only so many of them and they can only go to one place or the other. Apparently OpenAI's Stargate initiative alone could consume up to 40% of global DRAM output as it stands today.
Speaker 1:And this is the problem because there's only three major companies in the memory category. It's Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Together, they control 95% of the global DRAM production.
Speaker 2:Remember, Micron has been trying to build a new facility in New York. Yes. And six people basically blocked it. The rumor is that it's like foreign funding. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:Actually trying to hold Micron up.
Speaker 1:Mean, Micron has been very they've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices. So much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called Crucial. So if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found Crucial Ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X Games branded, like PC gamer DDR memory.
Speaker 2:Like the monster energy of RAM.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is. Gamers will be rising up soon with monster energies in hand take the RAM by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time.
Speaker 1:I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen, just absolute junk. And then the caption will be like, so this is why I can't afford RAM? You know, or this is why RAM is $800 a stick or whatever. And then on the flip side, people will say, you know, occasionally there'll be a good AI slot video and people will be like, okay, it's worth paying $800 for RAM because this is so good. Right?
Speaker 2:It goes both ways.
Speaker 1:It goes both ways. But clearly people are feeling the the the pinch. But Apple fans will be sitting out the fight, thanks to a few key moves from Apple that help them avoid disaster this year. So one, Apple has long term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory twelve to twenty four months in advance. They also benefit from vertical integration and custom silicon.
Speaker 1:So instead of buying consumer grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or NVIDIA GPUs, for example, they negotiate multiyear contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I Yeah. So this is like
Speaker 2:RAM's always been cyclical. And so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to say basically lock up pricing. Samsung's locking up the demand. Don't even think Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three, four years ago. Otherwise, they may not have priced it in the way that they did.
Speaker 2:Of course. The other thing that maybe you get to is
Speaker 1:And Samsung's still making their default margin. They're just like the opportunity cost is so high. We could reallocate.
Speaker 2:The other thing is they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression still be.
Speaker 1:So Apple at various times has had over $100,000,000,000 in cash. They currently have over $66,000,000,000 in cash. Like they can take the hit there. They can also just take a hit to their margins.
Speaker 2:Every AI lab looking at that cash being like, Tim, I could really put that
Speaker 1:to you right now. Yeah. They're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of $10.20, 30,000,000,000 into one of the frontier frontier labs. My takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple to pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation six is allegedly going to be delayed until 2028 or 2029 because of rising memory costs.
Speaker 1:They're going to wait it out. Because there are three players, it's not just TSMC in this case, it does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas the TSMC, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and increase margins once the next contracts go up for renewal. Whereas if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, like Samsung wins. And so there's more of this game theoretic like they got to they have to build.
Speaker 1:Hal Harrison says that quote, We ran the math. OpenAI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term. The most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning. The less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on device AI before it starts. Well, if the on device AI happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario.
Speaker 1:But it is an interesting thesis. Across the frontier labs, everyone is just very AGI pilled. They're seeing the increase in capabilities, but also sort of like stacked exponentials. When you went from LLMs to reasoning, the number of tokens, the number of compute required just to get a single answer went like 10x all of a sudden. And then we saw the same thing with coding agents where these long running tasks are squaring the amount of compute.
Speaker 1:And so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand, but you get more economic output. So it winds up being all worth it. When will Apple release the iPhone 18? Call she has before October at 35%, before 2027 at 34%. What is the chance that they don't release it this year?
Speaker 1:That would be probably zero and I think it is it is zero.
Speaker 2:Just submitted a new semiconductor fab construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science Park last week.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The site is located on Tainan's Andeng District adjacent to the f 18 fab Mhmm. And covers 15.46 hectares.
Speaker 1:They're doing more two nanometer production, the leading edge, with eight hectares allocated for the production area and one hectare for administrative facilities. The project is expected for completion and production start in 2028, says semi analysis. So
Speaker 2:More importantly, Wendy's US president posts new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Let's let's watch.
Speaker 2:Let's rate it. Put Okay. I like the way that he's holding it.
Speaker 1:You know? He's Okay. Seems normal. Yeah. Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Kinda.
Speaker 2:That's a burger. This is good. I like talking This is
Speaker 1:talking about exactly food
Speaker 2:in his mouth. Okay. Yeah. Going going going back for a second and
Speaker 1:You gotta top it off with fries.
Speaker 3:He's saying burger. He's not saying product. Product.
Speaker 1:What did he do at the end there? He Amazing. Dips a french fry in the frosty? Woah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Doesn't call it a product. No hesitation. Talking with the food in his mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's bold. That's bold. Bold.
Speaker 2:I'm giving this an eight out of 10.
Speaker 1:If you scrolled out, I like Colonel Sanders after seeing this, just knowing
Speaker 2:Yeah, also the way he kind of puts the fry in Yeah. And quickly, you know, kind of pulls pulls the hand back. It's got style points.
Speaker 1:Dude, here's a good job if you're looking for a gig that will bring home the bacon. Apply for the job of CEO at McDonald's. Apparently, the guy makes 18,000,000 a year. It is funny that there's just like one after another of CEOs. This is probably good for all of them.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I want no jump cuts. Somebody should have seen somebody should be seen swallowing the food. Oh. Okay.
Speaker 1:People are people are analyzing
Speaker 2:That's somewhat somewhat fair. Analyzing the details. Altman defended OpenAI's defense department contract in an all hands yesterday calling the backlash, quote, really painful. This was an example of a complex but the right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us. In the short term, he told staff, I still stand by that given given the events that have transpired in the world Yeah.
Speaker 2:Since last week, being there to like meet meet the government Yeah. Feels like being on the right path.
Speaker 1:It was just odd that Google's strategy was to not say anything. Do nothing win, basically, I would think. Or do nothing, don't go up or down. Gemini just
Speaker 2:But I don't think Gemini is involved in this contract. It's Grok. It's Grok? Grok was the other one that came in with the same term.
Speaker 1:So Gemini doesn't have any relation with the Department of War? I think they do. I thought that there was an announcement. I
Speaker 2:might be. They might. Just don't think they were involved in this contract negotiation.
Speaker 1:OpenAI announced its Defense Department deal on Friday, hours after the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated rival Anthropic as supply chain risk. There's still a question as to whether or not that's going to go through. So Khalshi has it at a 42.8% chance, and it hasn't really moved. I mean, I have to imagine that at this point, both the Department of War and Anthropic are talking to each other. Do have more information?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Gemini does have deals with
Speaker 1:They do.
Speaker 3:The DoD. Yeah. Yeah. So there's the 200,000,001 that was in July. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was Anthropic was also in that one. Yeah. And then they did there was the recent like, genai.mil, but they're, like, involved in that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I I am what what I'm so shocked by is how does AWS have an advantage in 2026 on FedRAMP and, like, federal classified network? But I I don't know. I guess I guess AWS does have, like, a a material advantage there still.
Speaker 2:Scott Besson went on CNBC this morning and said no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security. Anthropics attempts to push to push use clauses into their contracts with the United States government are unacceptable and their products will no longer be utilized by the US Treasury or any other government agency. So doubling down there. There was also a story in in in Semaphore Yeah. This morning from Reed.
Speaker 2:Anthropics investors don't have its back in its fight with the Pentagon. Is This very interesting. Anthropic may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter, its own high profile backers. Despite the company's defiance, Silicon Valley's biggest players have remained silent. In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Pete Hegseth, the issue of Anthropic came up according to two people.
Speaker 2:Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon's custom chip strategy as the largest consumer of the company's Tranium AI chips. And Hagstaff has been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would make it impossible for many of the military suppliers to do business with the company. Jassy demurred declining to take Anthropic's side, the people said. He wasn't alone. Despite Anthropic CEO, Dari Amadeh's very vocal opposition to the Pentagon's demands and rival OpenAI, Sam Altman's running commentary on the matter, a number of Anthropic investors have remained silent.
Speaker 2:One investor told Semaphore that speaking up might further inflame things with the admin and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. Another said that Anthropic requested they say nothing. Anthropic and Amazon declined to comment.
Speaker 1:Most important thing here is that we get Pete Hegseth on Twitch. Amazon, Andy Jassy is sitting down with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth likes Twitter. He likes X. Got him livestreaming those press conferences.
Speaker 1:Put him on Twitch. That's the goal here.
Speaker 2:Go direct.
Speaker 1:We gotta talk about this. Me and me and Tyler were were were talking about the the just the general, like, AI safety discourse on both sides always ends with people just saying, like, we gotta talk about this.
Speaker 3:No one has any answer to, you know, we gotta figure this out, guys. We all gotta we gotta talk. We gotta talk to each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No one's like no one's like, I have a clear plan. You might disagree with me, but this is my plan, and this is what we're gonna do. And here are the steps.
Speaker 1:And, like, I think this gets us the good the the good outcome. Everyone's everyone's just like, I don't know. It's very, very weird. It just from a comms perspective, it's very
Speaker 2:I mean, I feel like that's how decisions get get made in companies. Like if a decision is really obvious, you can handle it over text. If it's not, it's like, let's discuss live.
Speaker 1:Anyway, portfolio every day at the opening bell looks like D Day says, Hooman. This is an absolute disaster. It really is so crazy. I was trying to explain yesterday to a friend how the market I was like, you're probably getting destroyed, right? And he was like, yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 1:And I was like, well
Speaker 2:Is this your retail investor friend?
Speaker 1:Yes. It might shock you to learn that the market overall is Only down flat half for year. It's an absolute tale. Korean stocks are crashing. The COSPI index, the Korea Stock Exchange, is down 10%.
Speaker 1:Korean stocks are are crashing, says Joe Wiesenthal. The South Korean stock market fell over 8% and triggered a circuit breaker. Jim Kramer said beware of South Korean spillover to our markets, WDC, STX, SNDK. MU all still vulnerable, so there's lots of companies that are at risk.
Speaker 2:Pseudo says, developers are cooked. I vibe coded a worse version of an existing product in four weeks with serious security flaws.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's a wild time. Be careful out there. There's new data on on serious, serious traffic declines across tech publications. This is from Danny Crichton.
Speaker 1:It says, no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact. In the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. This is, of course, a reaction to Trey Stevens' proposal that maybe that he should buy Wired. And it's unclear if he's just having fun, but there's been a call from the tech community like, bring back the Wired we read in the magazines as a kid. You know, it used to be so techno optimistic.
Speaker 1:Now it's this hypercritical, maybe semi political outlet. But what Danny is pointing to is that these publications have seen just in the last two years since 2024 traffic declines of between 3097% for digital trends. The interesting one there, I think it was, of course, Wired. In November 2024, Wired was putting up 7,000,000 7,700,000 views in traffic. Now, it's down at 2.9.
Speaker 2:I wonder how much of this is due to AI overviews and and, you know, Google search results now Yeah. Are more ad, more more paid links than organic links.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of that. Most searches. There's a lot
Speaker 2:of But I think I think the bigger issue
Speaker 1:is get screenshotted and shared on
Speaker 2:Yeah. Next steps.
Speaker 1:It's pretty new.
Speaker 2:The there's a 100 each one of these publications, there's a 100 or a thousand people that will take whatever news
Speaker 1:And reconstitute it.
Speaker 2:And just make it more socially native. Yep. So I would imagine that the stories these companies are telling are getting a similar amount of impressions overall. That's just not happening.
Speaker 1:Potentially more because a lot of stories that they write about, at least the ones that do scoops, are are are more interesting than ever Well publication.
Speaker 2:We're not seeing a decline in VC podcast viewership.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:That's There are a number of VC podcasts that are racking up a million views
Speaker 1:A million for
Speaker 2:interviews with series A or series B founders. Yeah. Very, very impressive numbers.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's why Phil, a lot of people think that, you know, technology is niche. Some Series A founder that you haven't heard on, they can attract a million people to sit down and watch them on Zoom talk about their business for an hour. But apparently, they can. And many venture capital firms have showed us that it's possible. You do have to pay the people to watch.
Speaker 1:And the views might be a little low quality. But if you pay the viewers And people
Speaker 2:won't comment.
Speaker 1:If you pay yeah, they won't comment. That's an extra bill you got to pay. And it's very unclear why they aren't buying comments. Because if you're buying the views No. No.
Speaker 1:Just buying comments too.
Speaker 2:Is that the reason is that they are running paid traffic on Meta at their own YouTube videos. Oh, that's going on. How they're getting the views. Okay. The the Meta ads as of a couple days ago were public, so you could see them.
Speaker 2:They're just like Oh. You're if you're on Instagram, you'll get an ad for a podcast and then people
Speaker 1:That was that was on meta. I thought because And Google. Because you can actually just run ads for your content on YouTube. And then you get people who are in YouTube to click on that content. Now, are they less likely to comment?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Like the the example on the right is Dwar Cash. He got a million views and it had 4,700 comments. What else
Speaker 2:Kyle Corbett says is highlighting some news. The New York legislature is rapidly pushing through a 2025 bill that would prohibit LLMs from providing substantive legal analysis or advice in New York.
Speaker 1:And It
Speaker 2:seems that LMs could still provide substantive help to lawyers under this bill as written. Yeah. Consumers, however, would be stuck with the chatbot refusing to answer their legal questions. So again, this just seems bad. The entire point of LLMs and AI is to give intelligence to anyone.
Speaker 2:Right? Like the fact that an individual can get the equivalent of five hours of legal work in a single prompt Yeah. By like uploading a contract is very good con for consumers. I don't even know how bad it'll be for lawyers especially given that at least right now even if I could generate entire legal docs, I still want a lawyer to you know play a part in it. Again, Kyle Corbett says, I sold my company last year.
Speaker 2:GPT-five Pro was at least as valuable in that negotiation as our attorneys who billed us $450,000.
Speaker 1:Things that were not on my bingo card. One, anthropic marked as a US supply chain risk by the government, same as Huawei. Again, that hasn't actually happened, but it's predicted. Two, clog going viral across nontech people as a result, number one on the App Store. Three, mass chat GBT cancellations, thanks to OpenAI becoming the government AI supplier, and Prime Agents says.
Speaker 1:Then they will release 5.4. Everyone will say AGI and forget all about the last week and this week. That's why it's so fun to cover AI because everything changes every two weeks.
Speaker 2:What else? Julian Weiser interviewed a founder named Ben Serra. He's building a company called Pulsia.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They've gotten to one and a half million of ARR in two weeks with zero human teammates. Very, very cool progress. But Zareem says, why is the company named AISlop backwards?
Speaker 1:Is that intentional? Is that a nod? Or do they
Speaker 2:just get like No. Think was a maybe a happy accident.
Speaker 1:That's so funny.
Speaker 2:Donald Trump is at a round table, I I believe on the the data center build out. And Donald Trump, according to Mike Isaac, wistfully at the tech round table speaking about OpenAI's Brad Lightcap. Brad, so young. Look at how young.
Speaker 1:That's so funny. Brad Lightcap does look very youthful. He has aged very,
Speaker 2:very businessman.
Speaker 1:Also, an absolute dog who's been on a generational run and done fantastic things throughout his career. That's a total like record scratch freeze frame. Yep. That's me. Here's how I wound up at a White House roundtable with the president of the of The United States saying, so young.
Speaker 1:Look at how young. Thanks, Mike, for a good that up.
Speaker 2:Place to close out the show. Brian Johnson walked at a fashion show at Paris Fashion Week. A capital says, from immortal unk to runway unk. The only thing is it kind of looks like a futuristic funeral.
Speaker 1:It does. Like a jacked. He's looking jacked. That is true. He is looking very strong.
Speaker 1:This some mass surveillance going on. They're surveilling his mass.
Speaker 2:We hope you have a wonderful Wonderful day. Evening. We'll be back We'll be back tomorrow. For a big show. Goodbye.