Amazon Ban Hammer, Seedance Strategy, Amazon Blocks Muse | Vinod Khosla, Augustus Doricko, Ben Hylak, Aaron Levie, Lucas Shaw

29:09If AI video becomes really important in sim to real translation and training these AI, training humanoid robots with simulated video, then this could be like part of the bigger picture. But I think that's farther out. I think for the next month we're just going to be talking about memes and funny videos. Anyway. That's right. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Just do it. Do it. Meta on a tear. Meta's up 27 % this month, according to Shield. Monat, almost entirely thanks to Muse. This makes sense, right?

29:49Is that almost entirely thanks to Muse? I mean, the semi-analysis breaks down. Basically, when you have a company that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on something without much to show for it, and then you have something to show for it, then the market's going to react positively. Yeah. They're saying, so you're saying there's a fighting chance here. Totally, totally. And the feedback on the product is incredible. There's a lot of investors that have tried it, and they're like, hey, this is a good product. Yeah. And interestingly, they are in the lead in a subcategory where they have never been the lead before.

30:19Like Google had Nano Banana, which like there was a moment where it was like, oh, Nano Banana is the best. Obviously, Anthropic had best coding models for a while. Like, crowns have changed, but Meta's never really held the best model in knowledge retrieval or when they did Vibes. That was not the best version of that. But this is, at this moment in time, the best version of what they have. And it's building off of a model that's not on the frontier, but able to deliver an experience that puts them in first place for this subcategory, which is exciting. And can immediately be incredibly integrated across everything else that they do.

30:57Exactly. Shopping, messaging, all these different things. Shopify and Muse announced a partnership this morning, counter-positioning a little bit against Amazon. Amazon came down with the ban hammer. Buko Capital says, Amazon cuts off Muse. While I am bullish, Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.

31:37The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store. The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the pop-up. Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use, to which our customers have agreed. Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond. Because inventory overlap is higher than I think most people think.

32:12So I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps, specifically ChatGPT. and that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not, you know, when you're not the leader in the space, you're more willing to experiment. I think they wound up rolling their own. I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's two dog named AI agents that do the shopping. And then most recently. Tyler's been dailying Rufus, by the way. Yeah, just for everything. For everything. Just psychology. Yeah, getting close to solving another millennium. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rufus, underrated. Yeah. Yeah, I know Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT.

33:03Instead of letting ChatGPT, like, check out, this is the whole Eric Sufort agent of commerce is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing. Do you want to buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value. But I don't know how this will play out. Yeah, I saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that are using Muse and excited about it say, why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so short-sighted. And then I actually saw in two instances they deleted because, of course, they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect.

33:44You can't serve ads to Muse Agents or Instinct or Chat or any of these other things. And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both Anthropic and OpenAI over the last 12 months. So they've done$76 billion in the last 12 months through Q2 of 2026. So obviously they're going to protect this. Obviously they're going to protect this. I think consumers would love to be able to check out with other services. It is pretty gnarly to navigate Amazon.com, as amazing as the services overall. Describing a UX experience is gnarly. No, it's... Just being a UX researcher at Amazon, they're calling it gnarly.

34:33It is fairly gnarly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and, uh, but, but you can see that, that there's, and again, uh, Peter, who, who effectively is the founder of Muse because he obviously uses based entirely on open claw and they've built an amazing sort of effectively almost like, yeah. And I think instinct too is, is, is, is it has some open claw lineage. Is that correct? Yeah. Uh, Peter says the beauty of running a claw yourself, they cannot block you. So they're going to block me when I say claw open 10 ,000 Amazon windows on my desktop. Open up 5 ,000 Chrome tabs of, of Amazon. So the supernator, you can get banned even if you're running it locally.

35:22This has happened to me. Like this is, this is not a full solution, but he is, he is right that there will be more sovereignty and the users might win. Like that's what we were talking to John Quinn about was that Amazon versus perplexity computer. The ruling was that Amazon can't block it if it's not, if it's running on the person's computer. Cause it's like, yeah, yes, yes. I told the agent to open the Chrome tab, but it's my Chrome tab on my computer. And so you shouldn't be able to block that because it's not a third party company. It's not, it's not corporate warfare. You're coming to me, the consumer, the customer is always right.

35:59I can see that being the ultimate outcome. I do think that's a bit, I mean, you basically, I think Amazon's ad business, at least their search ad business, is something that eventually you might need to underwrite like cable television, where it's like you're basically saying that there's a terminal value here. People aren't going to use their assistants to shop. That does. But some amount of people are just going to keep going to Amazon.com. Right now, Amazon has made it quite easy to buy things on Amazon.com. It's not like it's that much easier with an assistant, but something I've found is it's actually really nice having a single interface for all the things that you do.

36:40So I like going to one place. Agent, push the order burrito button. That's really the future we're in. The Soufinator has had some of the best commentary on this, which actually dates back to he says uh uh the knife fight already took place it ended a year ago when i wrote the first entry in my agent to commerce is a mirage series amazon began blocking agents last july it's currently suing perplexity over autonomous shopping with comet amazon won't capitulate it doesn't have to alexa for shopping rufus generated 12 billion in incremental revenue every time i hear rufus or sparky walmart sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company agentic commerce is already a reality but it takes place on site not through independent agents chat gpt launched ads in february 2026 and shortly thereafter shuttered instant checkout the affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising yeah chat GPT has already demonstrated that yep advertising is the dominant business model yeah it'll be interesting I mean uh when the open clause stuff came out I was like it feels like Napster it feels like the Napster moment like yeah you can go check out on an e-commerce website but like nobody wants you to do that that way and like you're gonna have to write some API binding and then like scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out because they're constantly going to be fighting you and you are sort of like playing this like game of cat and house, which you can play.

38:13And for certain e-commerce sites, they're going to be very open to that. Other ones are going to be a huge hassle to deal with. Yeah. And the question is, can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with Instinct, Instinct coming. And they did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites. You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, Hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? So even though they're not paying for the product and they're incurring a lot of costs, products free to them, they're still mad that, that they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit.

38:52Sure. Yeah. I wonder if, uh, we'll live in a world where, you know, how Chad GPT has like those recommended agentic actions. If like one of those could be like sponsored like hey like want me to go shopping for you right now like well yeah no and that's important because because companies will happily pay for incremental demand yeah but the issue with with with agents is if you're saying go to amazon and buy this thing yeah the user already wanted to go to him totally it's not but if i'm if i'm uh if i'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers i might choose to send you a notification when you open up chat gpt that says like hey want to go surfing want to take it to the next level isn't that what happened uh basically you got one one recommendation chat gpt recommends what was it various agentic workflows for me yes i sent it earlier it just says it recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week.

39:58Yep. That's great. It's like everything I know exactly. I know exactly what I need to do. Raj Veer called out something interesting, which is that thread started free falling in the charts right as Muse started growing. Yeah. Today on, on Instagram there, there's a, there's a hero story. That's a full bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it. And yeah, they're probably saying like let's funnel it over to Muse. And it makes sense. The monetization on Muse, I would expect to be way higher than Threads. Threads, you get some display ads, it's text. That surface has never monetized as well as Instagram.

40:36So the best case was like you get something half as valuable as Instagram, a quarter, a tenth is valuable. Whereas Muse is like a new surface area where there's a whole bunch of different monetization opportunities and they already have the whole small business community. So I think it makes a ton of sense to funnel the attention over there. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Now, going over to the less good news in the agentic future that we're all living in. It feels like hallucinations are coming back.

41:15there was a moment where it was like if you hit gpt6 pro with a query on some history or you basically want a wikipedia page that's generated or a history report pull some data you could rely on it that it was not totally making things up directionally correct bunch of really high quality lengths pretty valuable and so hallucinations this year have kind of gone away you still get slop if If you're doing something on the frontier, like trying to design some system in code, or using Blender, or even AI video, you'll see little things here and there. But for knowledge retrieval, the hallucination problem kind of went away.

41:54But it's coming back in full force. David here said Instinct made up his middle name, and he can't board his flight, because he tried to use his agent to book a flight, and it just made up David Baumchang Choi, which I guess is not his middle name. and I've had that before where I find it a little hard well one we know why hallucinations would be happening which is like if you're serving a product for free at scale you have to figure out a way to do it really cheaply and so they're certainly using older models and again trying to find. I thought someone figured out the model. Kimmy? I think it's Kimmy running OpenClaw right but it's hosted in the cloud and so you get an OpenClaw instance cloud hosted.

42:38Yeah. um yeah that said i've been in situations where my name was misspelled on on like uh flight details and this is pretty easy to to resolve so hopefully oh oh you think it's not that big of a deal because like you can just get on you can just talk to them and they'll be like here's my id i made a mistake totally totally fix it and i'll get a new boarding pass yeah yeah yeah they might kick you out of security line so if you're running really late as I like to do, you might struggle to get on the plane. You might miss your flight, but that's okay. You got to miss a couple of times. This was interesting from former Meta employee, Nikita Beer.

43:17It says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto negotiating for stuff on Facebook Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots, low-balling sellers will eventually kill the product. but this was escalated to Zuck by the Muse team, and he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little. Wait, why will that kill the product? I mean, think about the experience if you tell your bot, like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items. Go anytime one of them appears, auto-negotiate. Yeah, but wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with the negotiation?

43:51You can do the outbound, too. You can go outbound. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Message everyone on Facebook. Yes, I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know. So I got one pair of keys and I saw you were posting. You liked a post from the Dodge Hellcat community. Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll need cash. Don't ask questions. Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Augustus Dorico back in the Ultra Dome, back in the waiting room. He's coming in hot off of a Series B. How you doing?

44:30gentlemen i'm blessed it's a pleasure to be chatting again congratulations you align all this news yeah was that strategic was this like uh you're like i need to pump the series b so i'll get engaged to get an extra press cycle going oh yeah they were close together i guess that was coincidence both embargoed same weekend maybe yeah obviously congratulations we're very happy for you uh on on on the engagement but also the series b how are things going what's new in your world how much rain are you making these days yeah uh well first of all the the hundred million dollars that we raised i'm super grateful to have done that with great partners

45:13thank goodness we're gonna need a bigger gong the next round we've been with i feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date day one and uh yeah time to upgrade for us No, you were there early. I was wondering whether a$100 million bag was big enough for the size gone. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. The reality is it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending. Yeah, what are they spending? They understand. Say again? Yeah, what are they spending, order of magnitude? So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource.

45:58We talk about critical minerals. We talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agriculture and food. And if we don't produce more and cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, the bodies of water across the United States are going to be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health of the country and then also for our allies overseas that need more water like Jordan in the Middle East, like Morocco and so on. Did you get saved by data center backlash?

46:35Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data center started sucking all the air out of the discourse. Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our reservoirs. How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert. Talk to data center people. They'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash. Yeah, we use water, but we recycle it. At the same time, you know, water usage, it's low, but everyone's saying we're going to build a thousand times more data centers. So at a certain point, it might be significant.

47:11What's your take on it? Well, the reality is, yes. American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So does municipal use. The showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers. But data centers do consume water. And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West, do you want to give water to computer or to your shower and your faucet? Probably computer. Probably. Probably computer. Especially if it's playing video games. all weekend generating AI videos. If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower.

47:52I'll walk in. But John, Jordy, you can have AI slot videos in the shower if you just make it via cloud seeding. I can have my cake and eat it too with cloud seeding. Precisely. Is there actually any near-term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers or is that like further out? Rainmaker already has one deal closed with Hyperscaler, and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others. Offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of Hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior, that's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide.

48:35And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with. But keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter. That's cool. Yeah. Talk. Yeah. Talk. Talk more about that. As personally, as a skier, I'm I'm I'm quite fascinated. But but like what what are what are those deployments going to look like? Like, is that basically you have a team that's set up at an individual mountain and then you're basically, I mean, these are businesses that have basically dealt with making artificial snow for such a long period of time.

49:15I'm sure they took like very naturally to the concept. But what are these deployments going to actually look like? So they haven't taken supernaturally to it initially because cloud seeding and weather modification has mostly been full of Fugazi and snake oil for the last hundred years. Right. There are many, many people in the last couple of decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time. If you can't do that, then why would somebody bother paying you? It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska and Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water that they've taken an interest.

49:53And we wouldn't be able to do that if not for our efforts to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. The weather is something that's historically underinvested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks. We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions and then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers. Are you going to stay with drone delivery for the foreseeable future?

50:28Or is there a howitzer in the pipeline? Because I've seen those. Some ski resorts actually have howitzer cannons that will just launch conventional munitions to cause avalanches to clear avalanches for safety. But they already have some of the equipment. And I imagine with the right round, you fire the right chemical and disperse it at the right. It doesn't seem that crazy to me. might be cheaper, but I'm sure you've looked at it. What's the decision tree for you? At the end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants, right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you?

51:03If it's a rocket or a howitzer or me skydiving and halo jumping through a cloud with silver iodide in my hands, whichever way is best works. We're taking a really big and deliberate bet on autonomy. Drones, the ones that Rainmakers built are unparalleled in their capability to fly in these severe atmospheric conditions, much more wide a flight envelope than most manned aircraft. But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost effective observations and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers. So we're going to keep using our drones and make them increasingly autonomous, although we'll probably do some research with plans in the not too distant future.

51:47How does El Nino affect your sales cycle? Is that going to put you out of business? It's going to be rough for a couple months. But I just imagine there's some players that are like, I think we're going to be good this year. Yeah. Let's check back. No, no. It's kind of a cyclical business, right? Shift your focus to other parts of the U.S. it's it's a you know i think time morse commented recently that building rainmaker is like playing diablo on insanity mode for startups um not only is it a seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter but also it is annually cyclical because of el nino el nina la nina um some regions are going to get a lot more natural snow but uh other regions will get a lot less and rainmaker will be working harder there that said even in the regions around this Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies that are getting more snow, they're so critically depleted that they need excess snowmelt relative to the baseline year in order to refill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, et cetera.

52:44So we're geographically hedged in order to accommodate this, not just within the United States, but across the world. That is going to scale up the extent to which we're hedged across multiple different climates simultaneously. what does the team look like where you are you have you expanded beyond the gundo i know you have like four deployed operating bases but what's the footprint of the company right now well you asked first what does the team look like i first would say drippy oh look at you a series a series of airmez ties that we decided to celebrate the series with i love this is a nice collection of different ties that have clouds on them.

53:24There you go. Are you, are you donning ties more or less often than you were last year when I saw you on local TV every week? More, more often. And you know, the, the Gundo thing it's great. I love it. I am a Gundo supremacist. Absolutely. And we couldn't have built a rainmaker if not for that. But we want to serve water for everybody. We want to serve water to the federal government, to nations around the world. And in order to do so, we need to collaborate with the best national labs and universities across the country. Being the mulleted guy in Yeezy is not necessarily the outfit and persona that you want to don when you're talking about those research scopes of work.

54:17Um, so I'm wearing a lot more Hermes. Um, I am wearing a little bit less Yeezy, uh, and that'll probably persist for a while. Uh, last question, last question for me, as, as some of these open problems, Millennium Prize problems have been, uh, solved a lot of people outside of San Francisco are like, cool. The, the nerd solved another math problem. Like, you know, uh, they don't, they're not like as, as captivated by it. But something that I've been thinking about is like for every one of those sort of high profile open problems, there's tons of businesses that have access to the same models or models with close to the same capabilities that are just applying them to their industries.

55:05And I feel like for you and your category, it just feels like having intelligence on demand that you can apply to these problems that like hasn't had 10 ,000 PhDs working on it. You talked about how hedge funds have paid a lot of attention to the weather because of commodities trading. But are you feeling like an acceleration in your team's abilities because of new models or are you not feeling it yet? To give credit where credit is due, the nerds in San Francisco have done a spectacular thing. A tip of the fedora, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A tip of the old fedora. We're taking a point too, right?

55:47Like Richard Feynman was a spectacular scientist. Oppenheimer, spectacular scientist. We can do great in frontier science without being total nerds. Just a reminder to the San Francisco audience listening. But again, you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at Rainmaker because of the models available. Astra has been a spectacular lever for Rainmaker, and we're going to continue using it. And then also, like, developing better and better models with the informed participation of the LLMs critiquing the output. But that is something that is actually genuinely accretive to our understanding of the atmosphere.

56:30And it's going to become all the more so in time. It's amazing. Awesome. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the engagement. And safe trips. Yeah, massive update. Safe travels. We'll talk to you soon. Great progress, dude. Great to see you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have a Node-Cosla coming in the TBPN UltraDome in just a minute. First, I wanted to, we're going to talk to him about personal agents, and I wanted to share this hot take from Alex Kerr, who says, I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents, optimizing entirely for the outcome, and forgetting that for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of the experience.

57:13Travel is the obvious answer. People almost always never want, book me a trip. They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends, and eventually book. I think you can actually do all that with agents. But he says that the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think. That's why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category. Well, Vinod Khosla has seen both develop over his career. He's the perfect person to talk to about this. And so we're very pleased to be joined by Vinod Khosla, founder.

57:50What's going on? Vinod, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I would love to hear about how you're thinking about this moment in personal agents. It feels like a new category, a new feature, a new product, a new winner-take-all, potentially. How are you viewing the market? How are you investing against it? Well, it's a new category. It'll be a broad category. I do think it'll be very diverse, and I don't think there will be a winner-take-all. Every one of the big labs or big companies, Meta included and Google included, will want to have their agents.

58:34They will have different trade-offs. And I think we'll see a lot of diversity in requirements. As to Alex's comment, I think he hasn't used agents enough to understand much of that diversity that he's thinking about. Like, you want to browse. The best way to browse is have the agent do the work for you and give you the options and ask you questions and be interactive with it. It's amazingly good when you can do it that way. And I think some companies will optimize for it. I think the fundamental difference will be, do you want to be an advertising product or be something else? Do you want to trust Meta with your data?

59:18or you want to, and some people will, and they do today. And I think Meta will be successful. I'm not trying to say they won't be, but there's others who will have different trade-offs. And I do think agents from startups will move faster than agents from the big companies. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you about the quote-unquote knife fight that's unfolding between agents, which are right now deeply aligned with users, right? Even fundamentally, last year we went through the cycle of labs and different players launching new browsers, which I thought was fascinating at the time because it felt like for me, ChatGPT was a browser.

1:00:04It would replace my need to go to 20 different websites to understand like a topic or a certain product or anything like that. Yeah, instead of 20 Chrome tabs, you just ask a bunch of questions. It already was a browser. And I think that consumers like the ability to do a lot of things from one single interface without jumping around. And they can ask a question about a product and then navigate to another and all these different things. But it seems like there's this, you know, something that's been basically ongoing, this fight between new agents that want to just do what the user wants in a way that's aligned to them and these platforms like Amazon that have big businesses that are under attack by these sort of new products?

1:00:45I think you're right on there. There's a massive difference between a company wanting its agenda. And the browser battle you referred to wasn't for the consumer. It wasn't the consumer wanted to move from Chrome to something else. It was the company saying, Google controls what happens on the Chrome browser. I don't want that, so I'll have my own browser. That's a very different need than what the consumer wants. I think from the consumer's point of view, with all the assault on the consumer, the marketing assault, I should say, from AI, and all the AI is ganging up on changing shades of blue, which Meta does to make you click more or other things, TikTok plays.

1:01:41Do you want to be subject to the consumer or fight all the AIs with your own AI, your personal AI that only has your interests at heart? And I think that's a very, very large and important category. I think I talked about this first about four years ago, the largest opportunity being protecting the consumer against all the AI assaults and getting all their work done without it being biased. Today, you can't even look at the reviews without understanding whether it was paid for by whoever's marketing it. So representing the consumer and having an AI that's loyal to the consumer, not to a particular company, a particular product, a particular point of view is going to be very, very important.

1:02:33So Silicon Valley has long said consumers. Consumers won't pay for things at scale. Ben Thompson said consumers want to be entertained. They don't want to be productive. If you're building a tool that is a productivity tool, you ultimately need to sell that businesses and enterprise. Yeah. And yet it feels like that is going to be the most aligned model for agents because your agents can go fight different things. It can save you money, all these different things. It feels possible that this time could be different. I don't want to – maybe it's too early to say. But an agent that can get$20 a month and it saves you a couple hours a month.

1:03:14That was Mark Zuckerberg's pitch. She said Muse will save you money. And we're already seeing examples of people using it to cancel subscriptions that they're not using, get refunds. And so there might be some economic calculus where it looks more like paying for TurboTax than browsing Instagram Reels potentially. But how do you think about monetization? So I think ChatGPT with its subscription service proved that consumers will pay if there's enough value. Yep. Yeah. Massive business got built. Google always assumed consumers won't pay. And that was the conventional wisdom. And chat GPT, in my view, destroyed that.

1:03:54For enough value, consumers will pay. Now, saving you money is really, really valuable for most consumers. And they will pay if something does that. knowing that it represents them, knowing every time they're about to spend some money, they can find a more efficient way to get the same thing. That's a big deal for consumers because whether you're looking in travel, whether you're looking in shopping, there's always ways to save money. Subscriptions is a great example. I have way more subscriptions than I know about. And so representing the consumer's interest and acting on their behalf as if it was an omnipotent personal assistant is what matters.

1:04:47And personal is the key. It's for them, the consumer, not for some company. How do you think about moats in this era of personal agents? There's a thesis that's percolating right now that says once you install a personal agent, once you've given one personal agent, maybe people won't trust Meta. Certain people obviously will. But the people that do and they go in that bucket and they start daily driving that particular personal agent, they give it access to their calendar, their email, their text messages. They are not going to move to another agent, even if it's a little bit better. At the same time, I feel like there's a risk of if you're on instinct, you can go to Muse and say, hey, just offboard me from instinct and set up Muse or vice versa.

1:05:35And so it might be a little bit less of a hassle to offboard, not quite as strong of a mode as traditional social networking. But how do you see the moats question playing out in the era of personal agents? I think offboarding will be possible, a little bit clumsy, but then if you have a good agent, you tell it to do the offboarding. Yeah. And the onboarding onto the new one. Yeah. And we saw that with OpenAI and Anthropic saying, hey, go dump this prompt in the other chat app to get all your memories, come and paste it over here. And they were fighting over that because, you know, it was possible to move from one LLM to the others.

1:06:14What I would say is the complexity of tasks, especially as companies make it hard to offboard, will no longer be a barrier. You know, if I had to look at all my information on Google or Meta and figure it out, it's complex. If I want to know, I don't want Google to know where I was on September 3rd at 5 p.m., they probably know. And I can probably disable that, but it's hard. AI is just going to be good at doing all these complex things. And so I think that moat disappears. So what's the moat? I believe the moat will be trust. In a company that develops trust with consumers, and that's where meta has a huge disadvantage.

1:07:09So the trust will be the moat. that'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important. Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done. Excuse the language. It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple. I mean, it's like we miss it a lot, but that is a good point. And if you look at the Vajo agent, you don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck. Most agents then just tell you they're stuck or don't even tell you that they're just stuck. The audio agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool and use a human to complete your task.

1:07:57Interesting. So the idea of trust first, your information, your most private information, what you like, what you don't, what you buy, What your preferences are, that's trust. Then there's completion. If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. For the very large companies, it's very hard to have humans in the loop. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, you need to scale it. I mean, it's very difficult to come over the top with a product that can service a billion users that has humans in the loop because you have to stand up. So there's an advantage to being small and agile. And frankly, for people who need stuff done, it's much, much better if you pay a little for the human loop and get things done.

1:08:59So the other thing that's really important, and you talked about the Chrome browser, not everything will be in the browser. The right agent won't be an app. It just, where do most people live? They live in their email. They live in text messaging. They live in Slack. They live in other channels. And so agent has to operate primarily with all those channels. In the app, if there's one, and there may not be one, it's just in the background. So you don't have to open the app. You just text message your agent like you do with Foo from Voyager and it takes care of it. Or sometimes you just pick up the phone and do that.

1:09:41And sometimes the agent just has to pick up the phone and have a conversation with the merchant. So, you know, meeting the consumer where they are, the consumer experience is really, really important. not get stuck in, we do text only, we do browser only, you have to be in our app. Users don't like those constraints. And I don't want to install one more app on my phone. Yeah, it's reflected in the App Store. It's all just AI apps. How do you think about the way you will interface with personal agents over the next few years? if you want to send a message to me, John, will I receive that message from you?

1:10:31Will I think it's coming from you or will I think it's coming from your agent? Will your agent identify itself as Vinod's agent with a different name, with a different identity, a different persona perhaps? Or will you want to tuck the AI beneath the fold of your digital life so that it's sending emails as you? So I was actually doing some ordering from Petco yesterday. Oh, yeah. And it said some things to me. And I said, just pretend to be me. And it said, I can't do that. I won't do that. So this goes back to trust as a key mold. Interesting. Right. So I do think for both parties, you have to be transparent.

1:11:14The agent is your agent, but it's not you. And I think that's important and that will engender trust. And we'll see much better. I want to stay on Pat. Dog, cat, bird. What type of animal are you most fond of? Oh, dogs for sure. I needed a special kind of surgery. I'm sorry. What kind of dogs? Oh, I'm a big fan of Newfoundland. I have a Newfoundland. I love Newfoundlands. Oh, awesome. I had two. One made it to 11. He passed away. Rest in peace. But we have another one that's going strong. About 130 pound. Lovely dog. I had two Newfoundlands that died last year. They were both around 200 pounds.

1:12:12Wow. And so we now have a puppy. But I was trying to get a cast done. Yeah. I could have looked at six websites for this specialty type of dog collar after surgery. My puppy had surgery last week. It could call lots of stores and look for, do they have same day delivery, which is the key thing I was looking for. And can it pay for me and all that stuff. One of the great things is payments is going to be a real differentiator. Sure. If you can be absolutely secure and give your agent your credit card, that's a big deal. And there will be lots of abuses or mistakes in that domain. I feel comfortable with the Wajo agent giving it my Amex card.

1:13:01Sure. Because it has certain types of protections that are going to be patented, so I won't go into it. But I will be absolutely sure that card won't be reused for something I didn't authorize. Yeah, yeah. You can sort of set up payment rules if it's over this threshold. And that's actually in code. That's not something that can hallucinate. It made a mistake and the model thought it was$100. It was actually$100 ,000. It makes a mistake like that. So, yeah, it makes sense that we'll be in this blended regime of both deterministic software, stochastic software. Last thing for me, do you think we'll get to the point where users will want to give something like power of attorney to their agents?

1:13:46Dan in our chat was asking about that, and I've thought about this before. Just working with normal executive assistants, it's always very frustrating where you get to the point where a certain service will be like, hey, they actually need you to call now. I can't sort of take this any further. So it feels like we'll get to that point eventually. All of these questions come back to what's the mold. Trust is the mold. And will you give your power of attorney to the agent if you trust it? My bet is 95%, 5 % of users will do anything. 95 % will not trust giving your power of attorney to your agent today.

1:14:30Now, in four years, will that start to happen? I suspect 40 % or 50 % of people will give a power of attorney to their agent by 2030 because they've had enough interaction and developed enough trust. So trust becomes the key issue, and this is why startups may have an advantage. Startups with great transparency will have an advantage over people who already have a brand of lack of trust. Yeah, what's been your journey with Wajo and Foe? Did you invest early and then this is just the right product at the right moment? Did they pitch you on this day one? Has this been years in the making? What's been the journey?

1:15:15Well, we invested in it day one. In fact, we brainstormed with Shivani, who's just a great technologist and a real understanding of the human factors. Those were two things that are key. So we invested and we even brainstormed the idea. So we're really happy with Vajo. And she's, of course, deeply technical and has this other understanding of what consumers need. And I call it empathy for consumers is really what you need. And say, how do I best represent them? That's the right mindset. So we've been very excited about Vajo. Do you need an access code? Is it in early access? How does actual onboarding work right now?

1:16:03Because it feels like if there's a human in the loop, you can't jump straight to general availability because you might get flooded, right? You also want to grow slowly because you want lots of connectivity to lots of things, and that builds over time as you get more users. Today, it is not free access. It's limited access by invite only. and hopefully you can give people an invite code from the company. Yeah, we'll share out some invites to anyone who's interested in testing it. But by September 30th, it'll be a free release. So by the end of the month, you'll see it pretty open to everybody.

1:16:40Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, breaking it down. Yeah, great to see you. Great update. Tussling with all the different trade-offs in the modern era. Have a great rest of your day, Vinod. We'll talk to you soon. Great, cheers. Thank you. And send my best to the puppy. I hope he heals up quickly. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's some breaking news before we bring in our next guest. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Authority, has restricted airspace up to 10 ,000 feet for the Tesla roads to reveal.

1:17:18Remember, we have a bet going here. Elon has teased that the next Tesla Roadster, which will be announced October 2nd, I think, October 1st, he has teased that the Tesla Roadster will leave the ground. He said it might fly. There's a SpaceX collab. There's four cold gas thrusters. We had a debate. You had six inches? You had six inches? No, I was at nine. You were at nine, and I was at six feet? I was at half a foot. Half a foot. I thought you were at eight inches. No, I thought I was at like six feet. I want to jump in. I want it flying. I'm going 10 ,000 feet after this. I did see something.

1:17:53The FAA shut down the airspace around the launch site. That's this. They shut down. So the FAA has issued a temporary flight restriction over SpaceX's McGregor, Texas, rocket development and test facility ahead of Tesla's October 1st roads to reveal. The restriction covers a 1.5 nautical mile radius around the site and extends from the ground up 10 ,000 feet in the air. That altitude is unusually high for McGregor, where restrictions tied to static engine fires and component testing have often topped out closer to 2 ,000 feet. So they're going five times higher. The larger block of airspace is feeding speculation that Tesla plans to demonstrate the long-promised SpaceX package for the Roadster.

1:18:38Elon Musk has previously described a version of the car equipped with cold gas thrusters that could dramatically improve acceleration and potentially allow the vehicle to briefly lift off the ground. Reports earlier this year suggested Tesla was preparing a remotely operated demonstration at McGregor with the car unmanned and spectators positioned hundreds of yards away because of the expected noise, which is just a hilarious, a hilarious thing. You're demoing something that if you drive it within hundreds of yards of someone's house, they will be annoyed or maybe not safe. Like, how is this going to work?

1:19:17It's a lot of showmanship for what could wind up just being like a pretty fast sports car. But Tesla has not confirmed that the Roadster will actually leave the ground. So far, the company has only teased the event with language like go for launch and imagery showing the car on what appears to be a launch pad. But the FAA restriction suggests Tesla and SpaceX are preparing for something beyond an ordinary static presentation. Whether that means the Roadster will actually hover on October 1st remains unknown. But the FAA has now reserved a substantial column of Texas airspace for whatever happens.

1:19:52I wanted like an F-35. I wanted to do full VTOL. If I want to park, just bring me up, plop me down. I don't know. I'm excited. I think he's got to deliver something. It's been nine years since he took the deposit. Are you going to put a deposit down? I think it's$5 ,000 today. I'm not going to put a deposit down. $45 ,000 due within like 10 days. And it feels like it's kind of high optionality because if it's incredible, so many people are going to flood in after the fact. But unlike waiting nine years, you can just wait until October 1st. If it's a flop, you can just get a refund. So for locking up$50 ,000 for 10 days?

1:20:33Yeah, I think you should do it. It's pretty tempting. It's pretty tempting. I need to really read the fine print or have AI read the fine print to understand if there's a chance I get hosed. But there's a chance that you get one of the first ones. Not even, oh, it pops financially and it resells. Just the fact that it could be a really special and cool car that's really fun to have. And if they bring it in with the final price of$250, there's a lot that they can do to impress at that price range. If it comes in at 800, they're competing with a lot of stuff. If it's just a sports car that looks like a Cybertruck, it'll be a huge hit.

1:21:11If it's 250. If it's 800, now you're competing with Nuvolari. And Nuvolari has a V10, V8, something like that. It needs to be Cybertruck, Cybericon, like Huracan, Cybertruck, but also 250. Because then you're like, wow, this is crazy. This is competitive. And that's what Tesla has been for a long time. The Model S was really, really performant, delivered a lot of value for a pretty decent price. Same thing with the Model Y. It's still like a value play, even though it is a relatively mid-market expensive car. Well, I bet you Aaron has his pre-order down from like nine years ago. We're going to find out.

1:21:51That's going to be the first question. We're bringing in Aaron Levy from Box. He's the co-founder, CEO. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing? Did you put down a deposit for a Roadster nine years ago? You have a Roadster deposit? it? I didn't do nine years ago. I was very tempted this time around, though. I did go down the rabbit hole. There's these great YouTube, you know, kind of speculative fiction. Yes. Sleuth folks that did you see the thing? If you know, if you white out the video, it says where we are going. Okay. Do you see this? Is that a reference to Back to the Future? Yes. So it might go 88 miles an hour that would be huge either that or or so yeah so we're uh but there's a whole i went i went and watched a 20 minute video um i'm very excited i'm glad that what's your what's your theory though what's your theory no i don't know the the i mean obviously elon would make a flying car so it's um i think we're all we're all waiting for that now i guess the question is like practically what is it what does that do um if you literally can't fly it um but uh but you can You can fly it if you're within 1.5 nautical miles of Starbase, Texas, and the FAA clears you, I guess.

1:23:04I wonder if there's some loophole where, like, if you're on your own private property, can you get off the ground? And you could have – you know those people have – Those VTOL things, yeah. No, no, no. Those are for sale. I was going to say, like, you know, you drive onto it and then it spins your car around. Oh, yeah. Turntable. Yeah, turntable. So you could make it like, you know, if your garage is kind of tight and you want to turn around a little into a rocket. We may have reached the point, though, where Elon is building things for his personal life that exceed our normal zoning laws of mere mortals.

1:23:37There's going to be a lot of people with deposits that are like, you're telling me I need 100 acres of private land now? I was told that this would go zero to 60 in two seconds. And the craziest thing is the original specs were zero to 60 in two seconds. cars already do that the model s plaid did that not not crazy 250k okay that's like a reasonable price point for a supercar these days uh but 600 over 600 miles of range which is which has actually not been done by any ev yet and in a smaller vehicle it's not like it's going to be huge so uh very very uncertain how they seem to be doing things with batteries that i never thought would be possible with batteries like i was always told like 20 years ago that you know we'll never get more than 30 miles in a car ride.

1:24:23So you just wake up one day and I guess it's 600. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you launch with the cold gas thrusters, put it in neutral, coast for a hundred miles of range. Maybe that's exactly, yeah. They get you the first 300 miles with... Yeah. 600 downhill, as long as you just cruise them. Anyway, how are things going at box rollercoaster ride, Sasspocalypse fully canceled. We were very happy to see that. a bunch of we were early to cancel we bought them you guys cancelled it within like three hours this is not happening we did have a newsletter that went out during the depths I believe we were the first people Sasspocalypse is cancelled you almost couldn't cancel it too soon because you had to have the full trough and you had to have full capitulation on And, okay, it turns out that there is actually software that is powering the world, and these systems of record are incredibly robust.

1:25:26And actually, the more agents that you have running on these systems, in fact, the more important the backbone becomes. Everybody always sort of made this claim that once you have all these agents, then actually all they really need is a database underneath. But the problem is that database has to be coordinated against possibly thousands of end users and then possibly tens of thousands of agents. And so the access controls, the business logic, being able to actually render the experience, the security, obviously, you know, see opening a hugging face. Like these core systems are actually going to become more important in a world of all of these agentic workloads.

1:26:01So it's good to see the market, I think, paying more attention to that reality. And it's obviously, you know, driven by, I think, the continued performance of these software products doing well in the market. Yeah. I mean, even over the weekend, I was generating AI videos. I was trying to get them from my PC to my phone. And at no point was I like, build a new storage system for these videos. Even if it could do it, I'm like, I don't want to waste a prompt. I don't want to waste a second doing that. Let's use what I already use. Let's use all the tools that are already built out, that are robust, and I can share links and all these things.

1:26:33I don't need you to one-shot some shoddy clone. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of energy. A bunch of things. But in terms of resetting the narrative with the market, the street, investors, employees, everyone, how much of it is going back to, okay, you thought this thing was existential. You thought we were going to be in so much trouble. We're not. It's business as usual. Versus there might be still some threats, but there's more opportunity, and that's actually outweighing the threats. And so that's why the company is performing well in the markets over the last couple months, for example.

1:27:13Yeah, very much not business as usual, I think, for anybody in software. So like this is – This is go time. I don't know of a single company still being run the way that it was run maybe 18 months ago. I mean everybody is running insanely fast into the future. And then I think there still will clearly be some parts of the market that don't capture as much of the value as they did previously. And then there are going to be some parts of the market that capture actually a ton more value than they did previously because of what agents can do. I mean, you look at infrastructure providers as an example, like the cloud flares of the world, totally on fire because agents need sandboxes.

1:27:57They need compute. They need network. They need gateways. like great business. If you look at Databricks or Snowflake, agents need to be able to triage against large sets of data that you need to be able to pull together in one kind of common system. So doing fantastically well. For us, we have re-accelerated growth far past our internal plans because it turns out that enterprises need core systems to be able to manage their unstructured data. And agents need to be able to work with that unstructured data to make decisions or move information through a workflow, whether it's all of your contracts or your research materials or marketing assets or financial documents.

1:28:38And again, it might be easy in a personal productivity sense to be like, okay, well, I can just have that data in some cloud system or even in my local device. Now imagine an enterprise with 10 ,000 employees. How do you ensure that those agents continue to go after the actual canonical records, The actual documents that are the real sources of truth and that are the authoritative versions of that data, that means you need platforms. And we're obviously competing for how do you become the platform for all of this unstructured data. But I think there's a lot of value being created really across these ecosystems.

1:29:12And I would say right now, my view would be it is unequivocally been a net positive for software, even with some of the spaces being under pressure, simply because how much more work agents are doing on these systems and the need to be able to provide the guardrails and be able to be the traffic cop for what those agents are doing and to be able to deploy these agents natively within your own agent harness in your own system of record. And all of that is creating more value for these platforms. At a system level, what is the biggest lever that you want to pull? Is it speed of interaction with agents?

1:29:51Because in the previous paradigm, search and file retrieval, if it took a couple minutes, somebody is drinking coffee, they're checking their email. Maybe it's not as crucial, but if it's like, if my agent is hanging because I'm churning through a bunch of records or files, that could actually be more annoying? Or is it just the volume of content? Because even an employee, if they're not totally slopping it up, they're probably producing more files, more contents, more video. Everything's just multiplying. So where have you been like, okay, this is the lever we need to really pull to make sure that agents love the box experience?

1:30:34Yeah, I think realistically all of the above. First of all, there's an explosion in just content creation in general. Agents are producing content obviously at an unbelievable rate. Slop grenades. Have you gone through this? I want to talk about that, but let's finish what you're saying. There's just data more than ever, and you're going to need to govern it. You're going to need to store it. You need to manage it just as if a person created it. And so all of that is obviously like the core backbone system. We're doing a lot of work at the second layer, which is we effectively think about it as sort of context retrieval for your unstructured data.

1:31:11But obviously, if you did a regular search two or three years ago and you compared it to a search today when we actually can capture embeddings of those documents, We can, our agents do re-rankings of the search results. We search in parallel so we can run multiple versions of your query at once. Your chance of finding your document not only faster but just generally more accurately is way higher today than it was a couple years ago because we not only have all these other signals but we can parallelize the process much better. And so an agent from the outside coming in and saying, hey, I'm looking for this record, you're able to now much more accurately achieve that result, which is fantastic.

1:31:50And then I think the thing that we're also spending a lot more time on is how do you better secure data in this world of, you know, kind of infinitely more agents than what we had, you know, three or five years ago? You know, the opening a Hugging Face incident has many interesting ramifications to how we build agents, how we ensure the safety and alignment of them, but has very real-world implications on the security of our system. So while this was more of like a production system from Hugging Face that was under threat, you can imagine the internal environment of an enterprise. If you have all of your critical contracts or financial documents in an environment that agents can eventually get their way into, enterprises are going to need to care deeply about how do you protect that information.

1:32:33So we're imagining and reimagining all the ways that you would protect data in a world where you had agent swarms that were being deployed against your data environment. And how do you go and defend and protect that type of risk? So lots of, I mean, you know, many, many layers to this problem, but really just through the lens of imagining of 100 times more agents than people, how would you work with, store, access, search, and secure your data in that kind of world? That's the platform we're building. Do you think we need to move away from the word sandbox? because I don't know if you have kids, but if you've ever taken like a five-year-old and plopped them down in a sandbox, at no point should you as a parent believe that that kid will stay in that sandbox.

1:33:17The sand is going to go everywhere. The kid's going to be on the playground two seconds later on the swing set. They're going to be running around crazy. Sandboxes have never been secure environments. They're not jails. Yeah, I think... I don't know who's using this terminology. It's outdated. It's running its course. I think it's running its course. Yes. On personal agents, how are you processing the new race to be the most helpful assistant ever? And then specifically, I want to understand how you think all the sort of agents versus walled gardens war is going to evolve. Just because it seems incredibly obvious that Amazon will fight to the death to maintain their like$75 billion ad business and the health of it.

1:34:11But what's your read? Yeah, super fun how fast moving this space is. I want to first apologize because I honestly did not have the imagination on the consumer front. And so I was pretty skeptical of what the breakthrough would look like on the consumer end. And it's funny because it was obviously staring at us with OpenClaw. But just the form factor and the packaging and getting it all kind of in the right way that both Muse and Instinct have done, and obviously there's going to be more entries into the space, has just been phenomenal. And then the capability progress on computer use and browser use is just amazing.

1:34:56And I do think I have a list of like – I have a wish list of what we need architecturally as an industry. Like you need to eventually be able to have some better password sharing dynamic. If I can in one click be able to get into any of these products in a very secure way and there's a trusted handshake between the agentic system and the tools that I'm using, we're going to need that. Payments are largely solved because of obviously the work that Stripe and others have done. So I think that's pretty seamless. But really, it's the authentication that we still need to work on as you're kind of ramping up the use of these agents.

1:35:30But I think it's going to be an incredible market. The ability to now hand off the whole problem to an agent as opposed to just using it nearly as a research assistant, I think, is going to be a breakthrough for consumer use cases. I'm very excited about what this can mean for all new business models in the economy. I think there's a, you know, the Citrini post, you know, five months ago, four months ago or whatever had had some of the more, you know, kind of, you know, risky to to capitalism elements and the market. But you can easily look at the exact other ends, which is I might now be a consumer of five times the amount of local service providers as a result of these types of systems.

1:36:12So, you know, like if I could lower the barrier to just like I need flowers like right now delivered for this thing and it handles the whole thing, I would – I mean at least in my personal experiences, I'm going to grow my usage of the local economy as a result of this. And so very interesting to see. You know, you might have I think some exciting areas. Cutting out the middleman and installing an even more powerful middleman. Yeah, or layers and layers of middleman. It might be middleman all the way down. I mean, I like Yelp as an example is like, how do you sort of triage the local economy as a graph?

1:36:50Well, there's something even with how good the internet has gotten in so many ways, like there's still like specifically local providers where I think using flowers as an example, like how many – the place that I order flowers from, it's a good reminder to everyone to order flowers for your significant other. It's five months until Valentine's Day. Yeah. Valentine's Day starts now. I promise you never get in for flowers. No, but it's like the services, they make amazing bouquets, but the process of actually making an order is like so terrible. Oh, it's so painful. It's so painful. So painful. That, yeah, just that little bit of friction.

1:37:31And so people say, okay, consumers don't want productivity. They don't care about productivity is what a lot of the bears are saying right now. but they also hate friction. And so what's going to win out? I think that's the thing is I'm so utilitarian and productivity-pilled that I shared the same view of consumers don't sort of value their time in the same way. But I think it's just then not on that dimension. It's like the pitch is not to save you time. It's just to do things that you've probably added to your remit. And then there are lots of ways which are like on one hand they're time-saving, but on the other hand they are just literally doing more.

1:38:09as a consumer. Like, you know, we have three kids. We're always signing up for more things. There's more camps. There's more, you know, I don't know what. What was that one for? The three. Just having three kids is just very good. Congratulations. You can even take it a step up. We have nine kids. We have nine kids. We might have nine kids in the future. So, you know, you have camps and museums and this thing, and you're renting that thing. And so it's not even like you're saving time. If you could just have an agent do a lot of these activities for you. It's a stress reliever. Yeah, you're a stress relief, and then you actually just do more with your kids.

1:38:46And it's fantastic. Totally. We went to – there's these Japanese tea gardens in San Francisco, and I had an agent. My God, what is that one? That's for Japanese tea gardens. I'm just excited. I'm just excited. Get in the castle. Get in the castle. So – and we had an agent book the whole thing. And it was like – and we just like added that to our plate that day because it was that much easier to go and execute. So I like the idea of more of the kind of consumer abundance use cases. And so I'm very excited by this as just even more volume in the economy of just buying and selling. I mean, you can imagine the Thumbtack, Yelp, TaskRabbit use cases of, hey, I need help right now to go install this thing.

1:39:37And it's just like all new forms of activity happening. So I'm a big fan of the personal agents. I think it's just full net growth in the consumer economy. Yeah. I completely agree with you. At the same time, I would assign some sort of low probability that in a few years we're having this conversation and being like, oh, well, actually what we saw in Q4 of 2026 was prosumers, early adopters. It didn't cross the chasm. And those agent, personal agent companies are basically getting ready for the enterprise and doing enterprise level OAuth. And like, we've seen this, you've seen this play out before.

1:40:18And there's a Ben Thompson take about this and whatnot. So I don't think it's like a foregone conclusion that we'll cross the chasm, but it feels like we're definitely the closest we've ever been. You know, six months ago, people were like using command line coding agents to like order food and being like, wow. And this feels like we're definitely one click forward, but we're still in the early doctor. I think with a technology like this, you have to do a couple of things. One, you have to extrapolate to the ultimate sort of maybe the limit on technological progress. And so if you sort of somewhat just imagine that the agent literally can, you know, within 98 percent, kind of perfectly execute these tasks.

1:41:03And everybody opens up their CLIs and their MCPs and browser use is sort of good enough for all the long tail. Let's just assume that for one second. then you're not really left with the technological breakthrough that's required. The form factor itself is just a mobile app on your phone. So we don't need societal level change of behavior like VR glasses or something. And so I think this one kind of works because if the technology works and the consumer kind of change of behavior isn't high, then it just literally just might be a new way to interact with your mobile device and the apps that you already would otherwise use.

1:41:44So I agree, we'll have to see, but it's not like, this is not sort of like Oculus VR level, you know, kind of change of how society has to work. In fact, I had a friend who sort of framed it as more of like a return. He was like, yeah, I'm just like a business person, but I feel like a gilded age CEO. I'm like take a memo and then dictate a letter to someone and go and do this. And it feels like you're in like great Gatsby or something, as opposed to it is futuristic, but it's also like a return and a democratization of a certain style of working that is actually been the way it's happened throughout history.

1:42:24Many, many times, as opposed to being entirely. Yeah. The 0.0001 % could do this in history and now everybody can. So now everybody can, now everybody can. It's not just the fedora class. Yeah. What is your take on XRisk? Do you have a PDoom? What's the internal house philosophy? My PDoom still remains kind of very, very low. But I think the progress on AI is certainly like I'm in a weird category because I have low PDoom, but I actually appreciate all of the safety work that's happening. Of course. And so it kind of has to happen. Yeah. A lot of it's like cybersecurity and stuff. Like these things are good to happen.

1:43:11And I think that because of the amount of attention on the safety, I think that's sort of what causes me to have a low PDoom, ironically. Sure. So I see the events that otherwise could be quite, you know, catastrophic or problematic. Yeah. But because of the attention that I think the ecosystem has a strong incentive to go and attack. Totally. That lowers my PDOOM as a result. Yeah. A lot of the standard PDOOMs are conditional on doing nothing. So it's like 10 % if we don't fight back. And it's like, okay, well, if we fight back, what is it then? And then they'll be like, oh, it was 0 % then because that's the definitely.

1:43:46It's a very high PDOOM if literally we decide to fund all safety research. It's funny. There's so much criticism of any safety rhetoric or talking about safety and criticism of the hugging face incident, but can you imagine alternative reality where all the researchers are like, I don't care about safety at all. I'm building this as fast as possible. Totally, totally. No, it's actually great that we have this powerful technology and the people building it cared almost as much about safety five years ago, right? Yes. 20 years ago, some of them. They've been on this forever. Yeah. Every lab is founded like that.

1:44:25Yeah, I mean, I think that's a key point. I think the one thread that we still have to figure out, though, is the language will be co-opted by parties that don't have the same kind of either level of either view or goals or incentives on the situation. And so the one risk is how does it – like once you get that language into the rest of the world, it will be turned against you no matter what. And so do you have the right sort of fortification of the industry and of progress to be able to not just basically get the whole thing halted and shut down? Because that sort of like is a very narrow line between the right way of elevating the risk and continue to fund all of AI safety and alignment research.

1:45:17And then one click above that where basically we will just vote for the data centers to never get built again. And navigating that is a really tricky kind of terrain. I'm not sure that I've seen a perfect sort of anybody perfectly finesse that. But that's the one kind of challenge here is do you end up in a spot where enough people say, you're telling me it's extremely scary. You're saying that the likelihood is actually like high enough that I should be very worried and I could just press a button and vote this thing to not exist. I probably am just going to press that button because, again, so far, you know, the best thing you've presented to me is that you're going to go shopping for me on my mobile phone.

1:45:59So, like, we're going to have to work on that sort of, you know, kind of, you know, trade to consumers a bit. Yeah, there's a lot of, like, odd alliances between people that just, I mean, they don't even use the frontier models. They want to go back to a world where there's no GPT-3. And so they're like, oh, cool, these people speak for us. And it's like, I don't know that they're actually going to try and go that far. And so a lot of them are saying, like, we're not even going to pause training. You know, so there are some like, we'll see, we'll see how things get papered out. Yeah, I'm still unfortunately on the more nervous camp on can we, can any country realistically, but can we kind of navigate through this where all parties are satisfied?

1:46:48I think it's just extremely unlikely. So I expect this to be quite messy for the coming years. I think it's going to become the dominant 2028 conversation from a presidential election standpoint. Like, it has to be because it's going to deal with jobs and GDP and safety and the next sort of major risk that people start to think about. So – and we as an industry, as a tech industry, I don't think we know where we want things to land. You have this sort of roller coaster of, you know, one day everybody signs the open source thing. And then the next day everybody signs the pacing letter. And like I think there are some people that can kind of figure out how the two letters are the same, you know, could deliver the same outcome.

1:47:36But they basically pull you in two different directions. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how that – how we kind of thread all of that. Well, it's 146 days till Valentine's Day. So fire up that personal agent. This is your notice. We're only 146 days away. So get ready. Make sure you're onboarded to some frontier intelligence personal agent that can make sure your Valentine's Day is fantastic in the next 146 days. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you, Aaron. Thanks, guys. It had been too long. We'll see you soon. All right. Good to see you. Have a good one.

1:48:12Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ron from iConnections. Here is the co-founder and CEO. There we go. Look at that. You got the memo. Tip of the hat to you, sir. Looking fantastic You have no audio but you have motion Yeah it doesn't matter When you got a hat like that who needs audio How we doing Would love to start with background But also What's The ribbon on the hat I guess we're going black on black I think that might be the next iteration I've been saying we need to Continue the progress guys evolve the you had it you had this thing ready because we didn't i know we didn't give anybody warning no no this was a test we were testing all of our guests yeah can you pull out the fedora and you do at a moment's notice anyway welcome to the show how you doing hey it's great to be here and uh i have to give my 28 year old son credit because he got into the fedora way before we did wow so he actually had one available he ubered it over to me and it arrived like two minutes ago.

1:49:41So there we go. Well, fantastic. It seems like you're feeling optimistic. Let's start with some background. I'd love to let the audience know about you, your journey, and TomorrowX and what's happening. Yeah, well, let's start with iConnections. Yeah, let's start with iConnections. Absolutely. So iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform. And what that means is we connect the world's largest institutional investors with all the fund managers who appear on your show, private equity, venture, private credit, real estate, everyone who lives in those more unique strategies.

1:50:17They come to our events and they use our software to meet the institutional investors who deploy capital into them. And over the course of a year, we'll run about 30 ,000 one-on-one meetings between all of them. And they'll move about 10 to$20 billion in a given year through that whole ecosystem. So it's really become a machine. And what is the business model? What's the shape of the business? I know that there's events, but there's probably other things. Can you walk us through the shape of the business? So the business is we really combine the software. The software is the special sauce that makes this whole thing go.

1:50:56But because Alternatives is very much a face-to-face business, you don't cut a$10 million,$100 million check without meeting someone in person. So it is still very much a face-to-face business and we combine our software that makes it possible for you to identify Who do you really want to meet and spend time with and then at our event series? You actually do those face-to-face meetings So we all the investors of course come for free We roll out the red carpet for all of our institutional investors We take great care of them and they never have to pay because they're the money in the room And and the gps are the ones who pay for that package of software plus event.

1:51:35That's great. Was there a chicken and egg problem? I'm interested in how you start the business. Yeah, it's definitely a chicken and egg kind of problem. So I was lucky enough to have been at a point when we started iConnections in 2020, we actually did it by way of a global charity event. We said we first went to the institutional investors and we said, hey, everyone's freaking out you know you can't do a lunch meeting you can't have a breakfast all the ways that people got together were not available we said uh we want to do a global uh event to benefit food banks all over the world we'll give 100 of the money we make to the food banks and we're going to charge the gps to come to this thing will you just agree to take meetings they I literally don't think one of them said no.

1:52:27We had about 400 institutional LPs in that event. We ran 3 ,000 meetings. And I'll never forget, the first meeting was a fund in Hong Kong meeting the Kansas State University Endowment. And I remember thinking, there is no way these two people would have ever met if it hadn't been for the software making it possible. So COVID really created this opportunity to make it more of a tech play at the core. Because I will say the industry doesn't generally adopt technology quickly. They're very old school. They want to just get in a room together. But the tech kind of made it possible during COVID. They all had to buy into that.

1:53:09And it worked incredibly well. And then they kind of fell in love with it. And it took off from there. And then I'd love your overview, your positioning of TomorrowX. it's sort of like my Super Bowl in the sense that the group that you bring together is incredible and particularly you just get people that are huge names in the world of private markets but are sort of under the radar among retail investors among the broader investor community but that's what I love about it because it would be so easy to pull other names on stage but I think you've done a great job of honing a really, really laser-focused, polished product, but how much of that was deliberate?

1:53:54How much of it is happenstance? How do you think about positioning Tomorrow X today? So Tomorrow X is different, really, from what I just described. Tomorrow X is really the brainchild of three of us, myself, Gavin Baker, and Antonio Gracias. I had been talking with Gavin and Antonio about they are the best. I had been talking with them about how to pull more tech CEOs into what we were doing in the fund world. And they advised me to not do it in Miami, where our flagship typically happens. They advised me to really try and do something in Austin. And then they actually came back to me a few months later and said, we've been thinking about that discussion and we would love to do an event in partnership with you.

1:54:45So that was kind of the beginning of Tomorrow X. But I would say more than anyone, it's been Gavin's brainchild. Gavin is so active on X. He loves that community. And his concept was, why don't we try and democratize access to a world-class banking conference for the FinEx community? You know, when you think about it, there are so many analysts on Substack and Reddit and X, of course, who are never going to get invited to a Wall Street event. You're not going to see them at a Morgan Stanley conference or a Goldman conference, but they all would benefit from being in a room with the best tech CEOs in the world.

1:55:27So TomorrowX is our attempt to really bring that world-class banking experience to the masses. So if you're a retail investor or you're an analyst that has a sub stack and you're really active in the space, you can now come to this event and hear Jensen Wong, Michael Dell, John Gray, David Solomon, you know, the CEOs of Databricks and Vercel. I mean, it is in if you go to tomorrowxsummit.com and look at that speaker list. It's absolutely stacked. I think it's important because some of these people are like very much moving the market. You'll have these like, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that, but I'm saying even analysts that may not even use a real profile picture, but they They are deeper in this stuff and have bigger audiences than many people at the bank.

1:56:17I think it's important for them to get. Yeah, you look at Cetrine, SemiAnalysis. These are important institutions. Yeah, and then the long tail as well. Yeah, tons of them. Yeah, absolutely. And that was exactly Gavin's point and why he felt. I mean, normally when you do a conference, you start small. You get a ballroom in a hotel and you try and get 1 ,000 people. We rented a stadium. so the concept the concept of tomorrow x is like let's really lean in to this thing and make it available to the masses you know it's priced super inexpensively so that it's really accessible by anyone and we're gonna be there yeah we're very excited you are guys i i can't tell you this is so exciting to have tbpn as our podcast media partner we were like who do we want to be the tech podcast partner and there was really only one choice yeah we have some amazing thank you for I know it's going to be an amazing event.

1:57:07I'm so excited for it. Yeah, it's just so perfectly aligned with everything that we love. Yeah, and we really hope a bunch of people in our community, which already are overlapping with Gavins, are all there in person. We can't wait to hang out with everybody. No, it's going to be fantastic. For sure. You guys are going to have plenty of interviews. Hopefully your son comes, too, because he's clearly tapped in. Yeah. He will be there with his fedora. We got these this morning. He already had it. He already had it ready. He was years ahead of the curve. He invested early. Yes, ahead of the curve, man.

1:57:37Alex Biscardi, ahead of the curve. I love it. Amazing. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, great to see you here on the show, and we can't wait for the event in November. Thanks so much for hopping on. Absolutely. Same here, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Up next, we have Ben Hilack, in person, the co-founder of Raindrop. I'm going to tell you about Shopify while he comes in to the TPP and Ultronome. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents, go check it out.

1:58:06Ben, how you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? Welcome to the TVP in Ultradome. How you doing? John's going detective mode. You guys look great. I didn't get them in my mouth. You want to wear one? I would, yeah. Please enjoy. Tyler, maybe sacrifice yours. We can share. You look like you're about to release a book on fear and doom. How optimistic are you about the world? How are things going in your world? Are you a doomer? Are you an optimist? Are you an accelerationist? Are you cautious optimist? Getting right into it. Right, right with the hard questions. It's always interesting to start from where you – because something I've noticed is that there are no doomers at the application layer.

1:58:46There are no doomers in the infrastructure trade. There are no – the doomers are only at the model layer. And there's a good reason because that's where AGI and superintelligence is emerging from. There's sort of a good reason. I actually – I think this is maybe a hot take here. I actually think that... So I think part of the problem right now is that the whole AI safety conversation, risk, whatever, it's like five or six different things all muddled up into one. Totally. Climate change from data centers is getting looped into bio weapons. Very different things. There's like the whole sycophancy thing, how it affects people's mental health.

1:59:24Totally. There's like a bunch of different things. And I do think that for some of them, not necessarily the bioweapon thing or the data center thing, but like for a lot of like a lot of the things I think about are at the application layer. They are like that's where people meet models. Sure. And there is a risk there that that that a people at Frontier Labs like don't really care about or think about. Sure. Right. But we work with Fortune 100 companies that their products are used by millions of people and then affect even more people. And so – Well, start there. Reintroduce the product. Explain.

2:00:09You're here with fundraising news and product news. But give us the high level again. Raindrop is an agent reliability product. Important. So we detect issues happening in production, and we prevent those issues from happening. So the product we just announced recently, which I'm really, really excited about, is simulations. So when people make changes to their agents, we simulate what those changes are going to do in the real world and can show people things they wouldn't have even ever expected to happen. So, yeah. How reasonable is it to have an AI model that just reads every trace? Every trace.

2:00:52so is that prohibitively expensive is that the problem it's getting less so yeah um so i think like uh you know we've we've sort of pioneered like super cheap classifiers for this thing jeff is another example yeah yeah exactly i'm just imagining like like burn a classifier onto silicon that just says is this bad or not and have it run over so here's here's the trick things now so there's a problem please um it turns out that like binary classification like is this bad or not is really, really hard. I can imagine, yeah. Take it a step back. It's like humanity has been trying to define what is good and what is bad for as long as we've existed.

2:01:30We're going to need more than one simple trick in this case. Yeah, exactly. So we consider ourselves in some ways like a human alignment company. How do you get a company to define what is good or bad? And then how do you make that as easy as possible? A lot of it is like, especially now that agents can do more than the people that make them have ever imagined that they can do. They're looking at traces like, oh, shit. I didn't expect that to be asked. I didn't know it could do that. You need to be able to surface those things and be like, hey, do you want to be able to do this? Do you want it to be?

2:02:02Yeah, yeah. So creating alignment within a company looks different. I always think about the tobacco industry because a lot of the models will reject to work on anything tobacco-related, but Altria is going to use AI somewhere. Yes. But they're going to get rejected a lot. But in some ways, they're going to wind up deploying AI one way or another. And their sense of legality is going to be informed by the way they're regulated in every single market. And it might not look like the morality of the lab that trained the model, but it will fit within their business construct in a weird way. And the way we process the morality of cigarettes is through the court system.

2:02:41Totally. I think there's hundreds of examples of this, thousands of – or infinite. Probably infinite. And especially, like, I think the way that Frontier Labs consider alignment is, like, often very different. Sure. I was, like, using, I think, like, Claude or something recently. I was, like, trying to negotiate on some product. And, like, I wanted the, it was, like, on Marketplace. And the guy, like, wanted to, like, hang out with me. Like, he was, like, oh, it would be really cool if I could, like, sit down and, like, show you this thing. But I was just getting, like, weird vibes. I was, like, I told Claude, I was, like, you know, just, like, say something that kind of, like, gets by this.

2:03:12But, like, in a way that's not too, like, you know. Let them down softly. And it was like, I cannot be dishonest about this. We should not. And I was like, it's a white line. Exactly. I was like, come on. This could be my safety at risk here. Who knows? Right. But anyway, so yeah, I think that human alignment is a really hard problem. And I think you should. Did you hang out with a guy? No, I did not. I didn't even end up. He was like, yeah, actually, Claude booked us a four hour walk on the beach. No, it would have. Right. It would have. No, the deal wasn't worth it in the end. Okay. Okay. But yeah, I think that telling something, whether that's a human or an agent, what you want is incredibly hard.

2:03:49I think management is incredibly hard, just in general. If it were really easy to express what you want and have some entity understand, half of management wouldn't be. Okay, so an interesting thing for your business right now is that consumer agents are getting more and more popular. We saw the open claw boom, and then this cycle will be bigger because you don't need to go buy a Mac Mini or really set up much of anything. And you can just imagine every business on earth is going to start having – first of all, they're going to start realizing like, wow, our phone is ringing a lot more. We're getting just like more messages.

2:04:33And so what that's going to create is like tons and tons of businesses that need to create like counter agents to process and negotiate with other agents, which is kind of funny because I'm sure some people will be like, why do we need a data center for this? Just like, why don't just work it out the old fashioned way? You know, but clearly people like having like an intermediary in a bunch of these different things. And so is your bet that there's this massive long tail of businesses that are going to need to have their own agents and sort of process and basically grade them on how they're performing and improve them?

2:05:07Yeah, I think that there's going to be more agents than there are now. Let's go. Hot take of the century. More AI in the future. Right. But another question is like you would almost bet that a business is going to have to take some version of an agent and then fine tune it for their business and then test it. And I feel like that is where you're going to fit in. Totally. Yeah. Like somebody might buy an agent, say I'll take one agent, but then I also want the software to understand how it's working. Yes. I think that companies will want both like humans and agents that are aligned to how their company works.

2:05:50Like, if you take, you know, like, pick a random Fortune 100 company, they probably have some way that they work that, like, works for whatever industry that they're in. And there might even be parts of it that are, like, you know, suboptimal. Yeah. Some, like— I wonder if more culture stuff will bleed in. Like, there's a couple famous examples of, like, if you go to Nike headquarters, like, everyone wears Nike. Yeah. Like you don't walk off, you don't go to work and be like, I'm wearing Adidas today. Like that would be a bad look. And so, but if you get an off the shelf model, wear a Nike fedora, but if you get, if you get an off the shelf model, it's going to be like, yeah, like a Nike and Adidas.

2:06:32Like these are both like comparable brands. They're both like pretty good. And, and you're going to be like, this AI is not a culture. I need to, and that's like a very subtle alignment thing that actually might be real because you don't want to be building a deck and it's like, oh yeah. like, you know, maybe we should partner with Adidas because they're similar. And it's like, I worked at Apple for like four years. Yeah. Everyone works at Apple Watches, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, and this is like a protest, not wearing out, but no, um, I, I think that the way that AI is an agents will fit into there will be different than other companies.

2:07:06Like it just like they're, uh, it's a, the way it works is just entirely different. Right. Like if you've ever worked at a big company, you sort of get that. And so, I don't know, I think there's millions of examples of this. I think a lot of the future will be how do you sort of conform. Sure, sure. On simulation, where does the simulation end? Because you can create a digital twin of… Right here. We're in it. But, I mean, if you go to a company, you can create a digital twin of their AWS instances and their Gmail and their Slack. But at a certain point, then you also need to simulate, like, the entire internet because that's part of the world.

2:07:44Like, how big can you go? How big are you going now? How big will you go ultimately? This is a really, really good question. I mean, ultimately, you know, I'm joking, but also, like, you know, maybe this could be a raindrop simulation. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. For now, where we're starting is all about, it's all about replaying historical things that have happened, getting really, really smart about how you choose those historical things, And then in very specific scenarios, creating completely sort of like on-the-fly adversarial scenarios. As far as like technically, we simulate everything.

2:08:21And it's kind of a hybrid of trying to be as smart up front about what you need to – one way of thinking about it is if you think about like let's take a past trace, like something that agent did. every time it called a tool, it's almost like a, a hole through this like veil that lets you sort of see what the world behind it looks like. Right. The agent sort of perceiving that world one sort of like tool call at a time. So, um, you can sort of start there and say, well, let's try to like fill in around the holes as much as possible. So if it goes, you know, so if here, it goes like right next to it, it sort of has that data.

2:08:55Right. Um, and then you also have to be monitoring that simulation in real time, just like they do for this one, right? To see, oh, you know, if something's slightly off, right? So it's like maybe it tried to get data somewhere, but that data was not filled in. You can sort of detect that as a quality gap if you get really smart about how you're classifying it, and then fill in that data at runtime. So that's essentially the way to do it well. How do you think about how different cultures are set up to even build agents? Because It feels like there's – it's quite funny to me that – I'm thinking of like Amish culture.

2:09:32Culturally, we all miss a lot. No, but I think it's very funny that Apple is just getting around to cloning ChatGPT. And they have such an advantage in the personal agent thing. I know. They are the most trusted tech company with privacy. Google and Apple should be killing it. They should be killing it. All of my passwords are in Google. Even Google, people will be like, they're going to sell your data. They want to advertise. Apple is the one where it's like my family photos are in there. They have a very, very high trust. I talk about this all the time. There's two companies that people pay for data.

2:10:02Oh, yeah, totally. It's Google and Apple. And Meta is specifically well-suited for it because Zuck's like, I don't care if it misspells like five out of 100 people's names. Like you saw this with one of the agents today. Somebody had an issue like getting on a flight apparently because it's amazing. Yeah, he's always worked in like a messier, more algorithmic world than Apple where it's like if the photo is on your phone, it must sync to your iCloud. Like that's – there is no AI lineage, no stochastic lineage in the business. I think it's very true. I think that Apple is – first of all, I would literally never count them out because I think they're ridiculously well positioned.

2:10:41I have some amazing people there. but yeah like I think that there was this you know there was a way of working there which was sort of you know we're going to like you know the reason why Apple is such like insanely you know the most insane you know attention to detail etc is that designers would sort of define like this is how it should work right and then engineers are like well no like that won't work and the designers like well we don't care like this is how it's going to work and you know you just kind of do that loop right It's like RL or something. And the thing is that that kind of way of working doesn't work as well for AI.

2:11:19In the AI area, yeah. Right? Because you can't just say like, oh, it's like, well, it should be as natural as talking to a human. I mean, it is entirely flipped at the Frontier Labs. It's like the researchers went and did something, and this is what it can do. Exactly. Go market it. Yeah, like try to build a product. But we do also see the labs. Wait, it can do math now? Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah, go tell people it can do math. Exactly, exactly. And they're like, but it can't do comedy or it can't do – there's still six fingers, but it's amazing at Python. And you're like, okay, that's the product.

2:11:50Yeah, exactly, exactly. As opposed to the opposite, which is like we are building this particular thing. 100%. Yeah, very exciting times. What does it take to sell to a Fortune 100 these days? Like what are you seeing in the enterprise? R. Karazian has this evolving take that there's sort of this duopoly and price competition at the frontier between Anthropic and OpenAI. He has said that there's less switching to open source and Chinese open source than he thought he would see. But there's tons of price competition on the frontier still. What are you seeing? What are enterprise leaders just excited about, worried about anything that you can share?

2:12:32so yes definitely way less adoption of like i would just say like chinese models in general especially fortune 100s i think that there's like definitely a narrative of like a risk around it even though it's not super well it's more like let's go actually instead of token max like efficient token spend will take us the next leg up cost people do care about cost yep and i think that it's pretty reasonable when you're like, even 5K ahead times 50 ,000, 100 ,000, whatever. It starts getting crazy, right? So it does matter. I think that there's a lot of... Companies are definitely all building internal things right now, and I think trying to grapple with, well, when do we just use Cloud Code?

2:13:18When do we just build our own, I guess Codex now maybe uh but like when do we just build our own thing i think that like there's more of a justification for companies to build their own kind of internal ways of working than i might have expected six months ago actually yeah which is really interesting like i think even if you look at something like muse it's like it's like pretty much like some open claw style thing heavily inspired yeah it's their words yeah no everyone was talking about his open claw yeah telling him to drink more water yeah strike sessions like maybe four or five months ago it's The barrier to entry there is pretty low.

2:13:52But distribution is really important. Yes. But if you have, especially I think, again, when you think about Fortune 100s, Fortune 500s, I think we're seeing an increasing number of just internal agents and applications that I think two years ago might have felt a little silly. It's kind of like, well, why are you actually building this yourself? I think increasingly it's like, no, you have all these legacy internal docs and the exact path a ticket should take. and every company sort of like maps to org structure, et cetera, it kind of makes sense increasingly, which is interesting. Yeah, it is interesting that even if you go back to.com, Amazon became the everything store, and yet there were so many brands that didn't go all in on Amazon, maintained third-party websites for decades successfully, and built brands, even in retail and big box.

2:14:44All of these things lived on longer. And so, yeah, when I see like a law firm saying like, okay, we're going to build our own models, we're going to build our own harnesses. I'm like, yeah, maybe that's not that crazy. Maybe that'll stick around. Does brand design matter more or less today than it did two years ago? It matters more. Yeah, it matters more. Does it though? I think so. Because I feel like when everyone can have a pretty decent brand, you see some teams looking at instincts, right, getting to$10 billion with the plain text website. They don't have a brand, right? Is there a brand?

2:15:20No, of course. They have a Twitter brand, right? Sure. Brand is not always. It's like what you do. The brand is super understated. But here's another example. It used to be like you could get a long way as an early stage startup up designing like a really simple cool 3d asset yes it was just like like that they would just instantly be like okay this team they may not have a lot of resources but they like and now you can just be like make me a cool 3d asset but there's a website flips around this this is why it matters more though so i think i've like i've gone back and forth i think right now my view is that um like in some ways you could think of it as like taste as being commoditized but also um The second that things are commoditized, you need to stand out.

2:16:05Yeah. And so you do need someone that understands the zeitgeist, understands whatever the tip of whatever it is. Because it is not enough to throw a nice 3D asset on your website or something. But you still need, for example, if a Fortune 100 company is landing on your page or just anyone, you want them to understand that this is a real team of humans behind it. It's even like writing. Like you can imagine that like, so I think AI writing is still bad, but also like if you sent like AI writing to people like 10 years ago, you know, would they think it's bad? It's not obvious to me versus like there being a lot of tells because you are getting inundated with like really low quality writing.

2:16:56Yeah, I mean, you've seen like the old Paul Graham post where he uses all the AI tells. No, yeah, and dashes, whatever. Yeah, exactly. And it clearly wasn't using it unless it was a time traveler. Which is possible. But, yeah, it wasn't annoying then, and now it's annoying now because it's oversaturated. Yeah, just the second I detect it, I stop reading, and I just close whatever the page of the document. What's weird is that I feel like I'm detecting it less in the actual responses. Like, if I asked ChatGPT to go pull some data together for me, I'm noticing they clearly RL'd that it's not this.

2:17:26It's that out of the model in the last run. Of course, yeah. Because people were like, okay, that's actually really annoying. But in general, I'll sit there and I probably read 20 minutes of AI text a day just from queries that I do throughout the day. You're lucky. It's all – I don't know. I mean I'm live a lot. I've read so much more. Yeah. But you're not necessarily annoyed by that. But if I tell you like, hey, I got this blog post and then you're like, this is AI. It's like disrespectful. But the actual quality of the writing is probably identical to what you read all day. I get what you're saying.

2:17:57Yeah. I actually do find the responses from Codex, et cetera, to be obnoxious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can be annoying. But, yeah, I had a funny thing recently where we put up a blog, and it was like a – I thought it was a pretty – it's a pretty decent blog. It was about the hugging face incident. We did a whole simulated game called Hugging World at huggingworld.com. Cool. And it's pretty funny. It's funny to watch. And so the thing is, I was pretty busy. I got the blog like 80 % done, but like I knew that there were like some, like you could read, you could read it. It was good. But also I was like, someone's going to call, like someone's going to see like the, like some AI written phrase here.

2:18:35I don't want to get called on that. You know what I mean? And so I added a little like stamp, like vibe written, you know, on the top. And I think that was like a nice, like, okay. Yeah. Just being honest with the audience. Exactly. But it's like, it's like, there is good information. And was there pushback or no? No, that's great. Exactly. So I think, I think like there was good information. It was not, I think, disrespectful to someone to read. But at the same time, it's a little bit different than if I were to write every sentence. So there's some sort of... I have one more question. And we have one big gong here.

2:19:02Yeah, we do. Yes. Maybe we should hit the gong first. You raised$25 million. CRV? 35. Oh, who's counting? We get it. Smash that gong. CRV. CRV's in. He's shipping up to Boston. Did you go to Boston? Or did you raise it in the Valley? No, no, no. Okay, cool. Charles Rivers Ventures, the Charles. It's in Boston. We were just there. It's great. Charles Rivers, I want to call you. Completely unrelated question, but prediction in the tech world. The new Tesla Roadster is being announced October 1st, and the FAA has cleared the airspace 10 ,000 feet up. So the maximum height it could go is 10 ,000 feet.

2:19:42The minimum height it could go is zero feet, right? What is your prediction? it has to be inclusive of zero to 10 ,000 feet. How high do you think it'll go? Could be an inch. Could be 1 ,000 feet. Could be 100 feet. Could be 10 ,000 feet. Can't be higher than 10 ,000 feet. Can't be less than zero. We know it's in between there. We have the bounds now. I think it'll be more than zero. Okay. Pretty sure. I'm thinking we're going to get 10 feet. 10 feet. I like it. Here's a new. Here's a new. These guys are sitting at half foot. I got to get some foil under here. As I've been thinking about it more, it really seems like he never wanted to actually, once he got into this whole thing and humanoids, he doesn't really want to make this car, right?

2:20:25No, exactly. He really doesn't want to make this car, right? People have been sitting there for nine years having their money locked up. They're like, I hope this year I get my car. He doesn't want to make it, right? Okay. But we know he can make it, and we know that he could make something so incredible. We know he could make a flying car, right? I don't think anyone doubts. Like, oh, yeah. I'm not saying it's going to be super safe. but let's say he makes something that is just like an insane demo but it just instantly gets like hard ban hammer by the way oh no I can't make it it won't let me or it gets into another five year period of like legal battle I gotta keep the deposits we gotta get through these legal battles the deposits are that big but also there's a wild card which is that it could be more or less a normal car but they cleared the air space because it's doing sort of an evil keneal style jump and they set up a ramp and that will throw all of our predictions off quite possible because it could easily go 30 feet in the air if there's a ramp and it could just be a normal car it wouldn't be a flying car you know like so like he has he has he has the resources yeah right and and um i'm sure at some point someone was like well what if it flies you know what i mean and so he would have been like well let's get a team on that yeah and i believe that if you you can attach engines to this thing and yeah like i i i I was going no ramp six feet up, but after seeing the 10 ,000-foot news, I think you might be flying around like a plane or something.

2:21:54It might be getting up there. We'll see. You think so? Maybe. I don't know why. I think we would have seen test flights. That's the thing. Oh, yeah. There would have been spies or something. There would have been pilots. Yeah, I think. I don't know. They might have it locked down. It's a pretty secure facility. Self-driving? Yeah, I don't know. Self-lying. That's real. That's the easy part. Yeah, yeah. I think the hard part is to actually make a rocket car that doesn't explode when you're driving around. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Great to hang out after the show.

2:22:22And our next guest will be joining in just a minute. We have some other breaking news we've got to run through.

2:22:30We just set up our next guest. I think it would be worth talking about Paramount. Let's get a quick tip of the hat for our friends over at Raindrop. Yes, yes, yes. Of course. So Paramount is officially not leaving California. It's been a back and forth. The company going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG, Attorneys General in California. The company said Monday, that's Paramount, said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its$111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal.

2:23:11California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July, arguing that combining the two companies would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks, and other media properties to resolve the case. Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing at least 30 movies theatrically each year, and spend an additional$1.5 billion on film production over the next five years. Paramount did not agree to more structural changes.

2:23:49They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Brothers under the same roof, along with Paramount Plus, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and franchises and films, including Superman, Minecraft, and Sinners. Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming companies like Netflix. If you subscribe to every Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery premium service now, you're probably giving them like$60 a month, maybe more. HBO Max is an independent subscription. Paramount Plus, that gets pricey if you get the, don't they have UFC now?

2:24:27CBS, I think, has an all-access. CNN launched something, but I think they shuttered it. Anyway, the settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville. Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing as the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded.

2:25:02So this is extremely bad news for everyone that was hoping that the Paramount lot would be converted into a data center in the part of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro data center crowd were optimistic about a large-scale data center coming in to Los Angeles, using up a lot of the water, a lot of the energy here in Los Angeles. but looks like they're going to be making movies instead. So let's check in with professor. Dang. Oh, what happened? Who went on Jack Neill's podcast. I talk about AI. Oh yes. Yes. We need to, this is the funniest clip. Cause it's like half true, half false. Let's play it.

2:25:38Do you really think when you put something into chat, UBT, it's going to be generated by the AI? I guarantee you it's not true. I guarantee you it's being manipulated by humans. Somewhere in India. Human in the loop. So, chat GPT, human in the loop at scale. Billion weekly active users, billion people answering questions. I think what happened was a human first wrote that. And so he's sort of right. He's like describing training data. And it's half crazy. Like, no, there's no human in the loop when you ask a question. It answers with superhuman speed. How is that possible? But at the same time, like, yes, scale AI exists.

2:26:14Mercor exists. There is a lot of training data. Professor Zhang is willing to actually guarantee this, too, which is great, too, because he's not just saying it. He's willing to guarantee it. Yes. It seems that the new meta for governments globally is to just have like a podcast guy that just goes around saying insane things, half of which is true, half of which are made up. And then it just sort of is exciting and confusing for people, but very stimulating. uh john john kiriaku is another guy another guy like this it seems although he's taking a turn into fashion so we'll oh yeah he walked it uh at uh fashion week there's an interesting thing uh david sachs is the ai czar um and he's also the co-chair of the president's council of advisors on Science and Technology, which abbreviates to PCAST.

2:27:13Sounds like podcast. It sounds like he's the podcaster in chief. Isn't that a random title? He just happens to be the co-chair of PCAST. I thought that was a fun fact. Anyway, we have Lucas Shaw in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV. Welcome to the show, Lucas. What's going on? Great to be here. How are you guys doing? Been wanting to make this happen for a while. Yes. Anytime we are, we, we go live from Hollywood, uh, most days of the year, but I still don't fully understand Hollywood. So stuff is happening in the news. I usually just think I'm going to wait until you write about it.

2:27:49Then I'll get a good understanding of it. So it's an honor to have you here today to talk about everything with Paramount. And then I want to get into Netflix and YouTube as well. Yeah, please. I'm sorry. I did not bring my hat. Then we can all be mad. We should have, we should have prepared you. We're trying these out. John has a theory that... I think you do have a pair of sunglasses that you could put on him, potentially, with a button, if you want to give him a pair of shades at some point. We can figure that out. Anyway. But John's trying to bring back the fedora, so I'm just trying to do it.

2:28:18You're sitting there for emotional support. Yeah, I'm just here to support. It looks like old Hollywood. I think we can pull it off. I think with the suit and the tie, it reads a little bit more like 1950s. Insane overconfidence to be the guy. I'm going to bring back the fedora. I can pull it off. Anyways, how was your weekend covering everything going on with Paramount? It was fine. I was actually at a relative's wedding in Rhode Island. So I helped where I could. We also had some really good colleagues of mine who handled it. I mean, I've been covering Ellis and Paramount this deal for the last year and the players in it for far longer.

2:28:58I think we're all happy that it is finally over. Obviously, there are some people who are not happy that the deal is going to go forward, but those of us covering it didn't need the proceedings to drag out forever and ever. Talk about your read today on the sort of winners and losers and where the different parties kind of gave ground and where they kind of maybe came out on top. Well, settlement looks, for the most part, like a big win for David Ellison, right? He was looking at months of uncertainty. this trial wasn't going to start until next year. Yes, there were hearings between now and then, but if that had happened, he was going to owe hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to this ticking fee that he had in the deal between Paramount's guidance and Warner Brothers Discovery.

2:29:45And instead, he mostly agrees to do things he's already said he was going to do, you know, release 30 movies a year in theaters, only 20 of them have to be wide releases. There's a commitment to, you know, make a certain amount of production or make a certain amount of movies and television in this country. But again, I think he was going to do that stuff anyways. Maybe this forces him to do it because there's always a chance. He says he's going to do X and gets in and he instead does Y. But it doesn't seem like Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, or any of the attorneys general who are involved in the suit or the Writers Guild, got some big win where they can say they were calling for structural changes, which would have meant selling something, and there is nothing being sold.

2:30:22Yeah. Is this real cause for optimism for the entertainment industry in L.A.? Is there already plenty of cause for optimism? Living here, when I talk to folks, I don't get this sort of sense that they're super excited about the state of things, but maybe it's darkest before dawn. Well, the last few years have been pretty rough, right? There was kind of an unprecedented explosion, particularly on the television side, kind of starting around Netflix and House of Cards. But really, look, the TV business was a cash machine for decades. streaming seemed like a really great business for for a lot of these people and then around 22 23 there has been this kind of correction or right sizing and from which the industry has never fully recovered uh so yeah you're right that most people who work in hollywood don't feel great about it i don't think that they believe that this deal is going to be the the solution for that right they're looking at what will likely be thousands and in job cuts and the combination of two of the original kind of six Hollywood studios.

2:31:29But other people feel great because it means they think that David Ellison will finally be the one to kind of create a scaled player to compete with Netflix and Amazon and Disney. Look, Warner Brothers has traded hands a lot over the last decade. It got bought by AT &T, then it got bought by Discovery, now it's getting bought by David Ellison. Everyone has said that they're going to be the ones to figure out how to make HBO out of a real competitor in streaming. They haven't done it so far, but maybe David Ellison will have the magic touch. How is Hollywood processing the, it seems like TV's in a rough spot, but it feels like it's starting to be a good year for movies, at least financially.

2:32:10I mean, we had the three breakout, sort of like crossover YouTubers, Obsession, Iron Lung, Backrooms. Then you have$2 billion outcomes with The Odyssey and Spider-Man. And then you're going into the back half of the year. It's tech focused and you get the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes documentary. There's a open A.I. movie. There's another Facebook movie. Like, at least from my world, I feel like there's more stories around the movie business. But how is Hollywood perceiving this year? Will this be remembered as like a good year for the movie making business potentially? I think it depends on who you ask.

2:32:51Top line, it's the highest grossing year since before the pandemic, since 2019. You have the second most billion dollar movies ever. You know, you have the Odyssey, you have the Spider-Man movie, you have Toy Story 5, you have a new Super Mario Brothers movie. and then a lot of the ones that you referenced, whether it was kind of the YouTube breakouts or even Devil Wears Prada 2 was a big hit. I think where people counter that is that if you look just in terms of ticket sales, ticket sales are still down a lot. The reason that grosses are stronger is in part because going to the movies is just more expensive.

2:33:21And so we've entered a phase where movie going as a habit is just not what it used to be. But yeah, I think this is, if you talk to people in the movie business, they feel better about it this year than they have since before the pandemic closed theaters. And the question that they all have is, is this going to continue? How do we make sure that this isn't a blip and we actually are back on a growth trajectory, which the business hasn't really been on? Yeah, I've seen some crazy stats about movie going before the dawn of television. I think in the 40s and 50s, the average American bought something like 10 or 20 movie tickets a month.

2:34:00It was the only thing to do. And so everyone was going to movies constantly. And then once people could watch it. Got to get your screen time somehow. Well, think about when you, yes, there's what happened before television. Yeah. So it was pretty much, it was that or reading books or playing cards. But even when you were growing up, going to the movies on a Friday night was something that, correct. Every weekend. And that's just not the case now, right? You go when there is an event. A movie is competing with TikTok. It's competing with YouTube. It's competing with live sports. It's competing with concerts.

2:34:36It's competing with anything and everything. And so it has to be loud and it has to feel like something one needs to leave the house to go see. And that's something that the movie business struggles with because they were in the habit of people just showing up on a Friday night and saying, what do I want to see? Switching gears, YouTube and Netflix. Netflix, you had an interesting post this morning on a creator that was potentially trying to rework their deal with Netflix, seemingly because they're worried about losing something to do with the Golden Goose, which is their YouTube channel. Oh, interesting.

2:35:14But break it down. Yeah, there's been this fight for talent between YouTube and Netflix over the course of this year, right? They're the two leaders in streaming video for most of their existence. they were competitive but operating in different lanes, right? Netflix was Hollywood programming, professional film and TV. YouTube was UGC and just shorter form videos. Over time, they've gotten closer and closer together. And what's happened this year is Netflix, in trying to increase the amount of time people are spending and stay relevant with people under the age of 25, 30, in particular under 20, they have done deals with a lot of big YouTube talent.

2:35:52And they've done business with YouTube before. it used to be, okay, Cocomelon, package together your videos and make highlights for Netflix. Now, it's like with this person I mentioned, the chef Nick DiGiovanni, and they've done it with a bunch of people. It's post your new videos to Netflix and YouTube at the same time. We will pay you millions of dollars on top of what you already get from YouTube, and we're happy to talk about whether we should work on some kind of original programming. YouTube got upset about this, right? YouTube, even though they are the biggest player on the block, they seem to break records in terms of how much time people are spending with it every quarter.

2:36:30I think Netflix trying to get people to post at the same time on both places just irritated them. How dare you? How dare you? No, it's so funny to me because they've been through this like, oh, it's like everything. It's like rainbows and butterflies. We put the you in YouTube. It's about you, the creator. We're all just creators. and like we're here to just empower creators and it's like we're here to empower creators that maintain our monopoly on human attention. You know, it's like, it's really kind of exposing just the realities of like business. They're going to make a bunch of like rational decisions to try to maintain their monopoly on like streaming UGC and, but having to go kind of, it feels like they just had to go very much like mask off.

2:37:17If you do this, we're going to kill your reach. Um, and we will punish you. And by the way, if you go back and work with us, we will reward you. It is very Machiavellian. They do. They did not care. Um, it was interesting when I first started reporting on it, how, and what YouTube was doing in response, like YouTube thought what they were doing to your point was very reasonable and rational and just what any business would do. And then Netflix folks were like, I can't believe what YouTube is doing. And probably some of that comes from what you're talking about, which is YouTube has cultivated this reputation as this very creator-friendly platform, which, of course, they're ultimately about the bottom line, and creators are a means to an end for them.

2:37:56Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting is when podcasters were like, hey, I'm posting my podcast to the RSS feed. I could just post it on YouTube at the same time. Maybe I get some additional views. Creators are now just trying to do that. They're like, I'm creating this video asset that I slaved away making for any number of hours. I made this thing it's my IP I own it I should be able to post it anywhere and now YouTube is saying like we're gonna cut your reach you know by however much and it just feels like it is deeply misaligned with the creator which is the person that built YouTube and it's my hope that it's my hope that that the creators like win here because it's so much better it'll be so much better if a creator can be like yeah I get I get views all over the place and and uh but but I I don't know.

2:38:44YouTube will be better for shareholders, though. They may be misaligned, but I would actually say that this competition for creators, at least in the short term, is a net positive because there are multiple people. It's not YouTube for the longest time was kind of the only game in town. Right. Yes. You had TikTok and Instagram and Twitch. Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the competition is like amazing. I want more. I want permanent competition. That might be the state because right now, if YouTube is that stick, then Netflix has to increase the amount of carrots to say, hey, yeah, you are going to get crushed, but we're going to double what we were going to pay you.

2:39:21And then all of a sudden somebody says, you know what? Yeah, I'll get rid of my YouTube channel at that price. I'm down. Right? And then that's good, potentially. Yeah. And you see Disney and Fox and other legacy entertainment companies trying to get into. too. And so if there are just more people trying to compete for creators dollar, that's good, right? We've seen it. You brought up, you were, you're talking about podcasting earlier when there were a bunch of companies trying to get podcast deals and trying to sign podcast talent. That's when you started to see people like Joe Rogan and Al Cooper and all those folks getting huge paydays.

2:39:53So yeah, the more folks who want their, you know, want their videos. Do you think that, um, do you think that Netflix could think about trying to cultivate like emerging talent like they're so used to being like hey let's put a million dollars towards this like single production if you take a million dollars you divide it by 20 you could seed 20 creators that are just showing like any you know i'm very excited for a lot of the content that i like most on youtube is is like highly produced 20 30 minute videos from a super passionate creator that just spent and it's like real time right and so what what netflix has been missing is just like and they've kind of done this with some documentary projects where they'll like come out with a documentary on like trump's flight from turkey right they're doing these quick turn documentaries right and so but but they should be doing that across like every single every single category basically like they could i think netflix is really wary of they would sort of categorize that maybe is user-generated programming, and I don't think they feel like they can win at that.

2:41:01But Netflix's strength has been, yes, that really high production value type of programming, and YouTube's strength has more been the long tail, being a place that you can go for anything and everything. And I think most people at Netflix feel like they can't beat YouTube at that game. But it would be interesting, certainly, to see them go to 20, 30 creators they like and say, here's$50 ,000 to make whatever you want. Yeah. Well, I would just like to see that because those creators, if they're just starting their journey, have nothing to lose. They don't have this amazing platform and business built on YouTube yet.

2:41:40So it would take a lot of money, but some way or another, they're going to need to get to the point, they're going to need to benefit from having creative talent that's distributed all over the world that can make this more like real-time content. And I've always felt like Netflix, in the slop era that we're in, Netflix has amazing opportunity to just curate UGC better than YouTube because I actually can't stand when YouTube surfaces some video to me. And historically, I would have been like, oh, cool, there's a video. It looks like it's well-produced. It only has 4 ,000 views. Maybe it's like someone great.

2:42:17And then now more than ever, it's like some like ai script from a and and and there's actually no substance to the content and i think like turning it out if if netflix can create a slop shield of sorts curation layer i'd be optimistic i like that what's the status or the status of uh apple in this ecosystem uh i talked to i talked to a filmmaker before they really launched uh you know real apple tv plus productions and he was saying like it's going to be challenging for them because uh movies are it's a hits driven business you're going to have flops and that's sort of antithetical to the apple culture of like everything needs to be polished and perfect and then i think they've done well and they've developed a portfolio of really well-reviewed and emmy winning golden globe winning you know they've won a whole bunch of awards but how do people in hollywood see them Are they an important buyer in the ecosystem?

2:43:19Are they just one of many? It feels like they're sort of sitting out this YouTube versus Netflix battle. But is there a battle coming years down the line as they try and expand? Or are they sort of happy with where they are? They're definitely sitting out the Netflix YouTube skirmish. I mean, when they first showed up, I think they were seen as Captain Moneybags. They would outspend anyone and everyone. They're kind of seen as star fuckers because every show that they do, they want to have big name talent in. but over time they've developed a reputation as one of the out of one of the best program or one of the best streaming services in terms of programming right you you mentioned emmy awards they just won the most emmys of of any streaming service of any company is that widow's bay it was widow's bay was their biggest winner but they you know they got a lot of nominations across that and your friends and neighbors and shrinking and a bunch of their shows um they get really good critical praise.

2:44:17Yeah, it feels like they've sort of jumped straight into more of an HBO competitor than a Netflix competitor. But remember, that's where Netflix started, right? Netflix started as competing with HBO and then went mainstream. I don't know. Amazon started as competing with HBO and then decided to speak to the middle of the country with Reacher and other stuff like that. I don't know that I see Apple making that same transition, to your point, about what Apple is. It doesn't feel like in keeping with their brand to try to be cbs yeah um the the knock that most people have on apple is just their shows aren't very popular or you know they they do really well with a particular type of viewer yeah um but only a couple other shows have broken through in the culture in a big way but i know i saw some estimated ratings and it was like 70 000 views an episode or something which is like a small podcast right but they may not care right that if you're john turnus and you're like oh i just went to the Emmys and we won all these awards and talent wants to work with us, that's good for our brand.

2:45:18Well, that's been the 4D chess argument in tech is that it gives them something to talk about that's not just app store rents because they're like, oh yeah, our services business, you want to talk about services? Let's talk about, you know, Widow's Bay, not we've made another $10 billion charging 30%. Do you think any of the major platforms are taking a hard look at at short form dramas or any of these these apps that are charting i think a lot of them are basically like adult content that's sort of like romantic some people would say yeah yeah there's also like horror and and like uh true crime stuff in there they're all looking at it i think peacock i think has already added some verticals i know that netflix and others have said that they're looking at it that again doesn't feel like one for apple per se but most of the other ones.

2:46:09Look, all these services, because streaming isn't growing as fast as it once was, they're all looking at ways to bring in more people. So they're all looking at YouTube creators. They're all looking at podcasts. They're all looking at vertical dramas. Anything that people are paying attention to, if they can find a sensible way to integrate it, they will. Makes sense. Is it fair to say that the Warner Brothers story was somewhat predictable just by the actions of David Zaslav even before the first bid came out? This was something that you and other folks in the industry were tracking, correct?

2:46:44There was a feeling that what was happening, that Warner Brothers Discovery wasn't working as a public company, right? The stock was low. The stock was doing badly. The company was shrinking just in terms of revenue. The streaming service was doing okay and so we we knew they had to do something what they were doing was they were splitting it right they were going to cast off the cable networks into one business because that's the part that generates a lot of profit but isn't growing and then they were going to put the the studio and the streaming service into another and my belief is that is what david has wanted because he liked being the mayor of hollywood he wasn't the mayor but he liked being a big shot in hollywood right he's in bob evans house he gets to hang out with movie stars and get dinner with those people he didn't want to give that up sure and that's why when david allison first came calling or one of the reasons that david aslevin his board said you're not valuing us high enough we don't want this we don't want it and allison just kept coming you know you got to give him credit in the case of both buying paramount from from sherry redstone and in this warner brothers deal he faced a lot of resistance and he you know in part because he has the resources from his family, but he just kept coming.

2:47:51Do you have any predictions? Master of negotiating against himself. Do you have any predictions for what the next big Hollywood story might be, either through the end of the year or next year? Something that people are feeling like, okay, we're in act one or act two there. There might be a crescendo, some big deal, some change, some structural moment. Could be sort of across any storyline, but what do you tracking? Well, look, in the immediate, there's going to be a lot of attention paid to what does David Ellison do. Combining two companies is going to mean not only firing a lot of people, but who's going to run the streaming business.

2:48:29He's got a high profile person in charge of streaming at Paramount and a high profile person in charge of streaming at Warner Brothers Discovery. Setting that aside, a lot of people are wondering what is going on at Netflix. I think they've had a pretty rocky year ever since they walked away from Warner Brothers Discovery. It's led to a lot of questions about the future and whether they have a plan for their next act and how they're going to grow. There's been a lot of rumors about changes in leadership there. And so I think people are keeping an eye on that. Comcast is doing what Warner Brothers Discovery once was planning to do.

2:49:05They're splitting their cable business from the entertainment business. And a lot of people are wondering is that the first move and you know nbc universal ends up getting combined with something uh you know ai is a much bigger conversation i'd say in the music business than in hollywood right now but it's lurking obviously as it is in all sectors of society um those are probably the big ones no that makes sense oh and the federal film tax credit a lot of people are wondering there's a there's a push to um try to pass a tax credit for shooting in in the united states which would bring a lot of production back from europe and canada and um trump came out for it and people are trying to get that done basically between now and when the next congress seats in january i think avengers is going to london or the uk uh and i don't know if that's because that's where they actually want to shoot or it's a financial decision but uh be exciting to get back to making movies in hollywood it's a good yeah hopefully we get booted out of our studio that'll be that'll be a bullish indicator for hollywood it was way too easy to find studio space in hollywood for us yeah way too well thank you so much for joining lucas really really enjoyed it and let's do it again when you have more stories we'll talk to you soon Thanks, guys.

2:50:22Cheers. Bye-bye. Well, and that's our show, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Goodbye.