🟡 Evan Spiegel LIVE in the Ultradome | Colin & Samir, RJ Scaringe, Scott Kupor

26:33And so there's been this big question about like, like, are the private markets tapped? It appears it's the David Goggins thesis market. There's always more. The David Goggins thesis for life. I mean, if you if you went back, you know, I don't know, five years and you were like, yeah, like, do you think you could raise$40 billion in the private markets? Or would you have to go public for that? They're like, you know, the Saudi Aramco level funding. Yes, you'd have to be public. But turns out you do not have to be public because, in fact, 40 billion is available in the private markets if you're open AI.

27:03Let me tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Let me continue with this. Tech investors have privately complained. They're complaining? What do they have to complain about? We're in a bull market. They privately complained about the ballooning stock-based compensation associated with fast-growing AI startups, arguing that it eats into shareholder returns. Companies that are needing to be more competitive are dropping the traditional first-year vesting cliff, co-founder of Levels.FYI says. In August, after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched a full-scale raid on OpenAI staff and offered giant pay packages, OpenAI gave some of its top researchers and engineers a one-time bonus, with some employees receiving millions of dollars, the journal previously reported.

27:54Yeah, I was thinking about that with Mark Chen when on Ashley Vance was like, I don't compete with Meta dollar to dollar. Like, I won't match their offers. He won't go ban for ban. He won't go ban for ban, but it doesn't mean that he won't fight back. But he'll go cliff for cliff. He'll go cliff for cliff for sure. And also, he'll go like one-time bonus during a crazy raid. if the time calls for it. So it's not like he's not participating in the war at all. He is a little bit, but I think it's the right move. Yeah, I do think that there's been this, I don't know, is it hedonic treadmill? What is the correct metaphor for what's going on with these offers?

28:31But it's very clear that whoever, the details of the packages are leaking, at least through internal back channels. And so the next person that gets hired wants something a little sweeter, like something a little bit extra, a little cherry on top. And so you go from, you know, four-year vest, one-year cliff to three-year, six months to no cliff to, you know, add more zeros on the pay package, more guaranteed, more upfront. But at the same time, there is something to, I mean, the reason I would argue in favor of no vesting cliffs here is that it does feel like the value that you can get from a new engineer joining, from a competitor at least, is on day one.

29:20Like day one, okay, you just left Anthropoc. We're going to plug your brain. You just left OpenAI. You just left Meta. What's going on there? Just take us through it. Right? Like, that's going to be the day one orientation. And so are they adding value on day one? Like, basically, right? I would imagine. So to be capturing a little bit of that value, that seems like a win for the AI researcher. At the same time, it is just another sign of the froth in the AI market. Finn Barr says, okay, but seriously, why is everyone leaving meta? People are speculating in the comments. Jane says, vest. Finn says, but if you stay longer, you vest more.

30:00True. someone else says no direction for the company several major unannounced rl project canceled the hundred million boys reportedly do zero work because they know that if zuck fires them he'll look foolish i don't know i think i think some of these 100 million dollar uh men and women just that do they are about that life they do want to pursue greatness they do want to do the biggest run. So who knows? I'm sure there's some instances of that. Andrew says behind state of the art on their models. Of course, that's why Zuck, you know, overpaid for talent is to try to catch up. No PMF on their consumer AI products, even though they forced everyone on Instagram to see it.

30:49I think we got to wait a little bit for the Christmas season to come and go and see how see how these things are selling. They don't even use LLMA models internally to code. I mean, that makes sense. It is a tough position to be in because they don't have a public cloud. They don't have a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler. So, with

31:16Google, even if Google gets completely smoked by OpenAI and ChatGPT, and ChatGPT winds up being truly the Facebook of chat apps, and it's like 99 % people use, it captures 99 % of the consumer AI value. It's like, well, having a Gemini API is still extremely valuable because you have cloud services. It would be odd for Meta to wind up trying to build a public cloud service around the Lama models. I mean, even if they went close to stores. Zuck did say at one point, though, that they would be open to reselling capacity. but then you're going up against Anthropic directly it feels very very tricky I don't know anyway let me tell you about cognition the team behind the AI software engineer Devin crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team what else is going on VCs funded OpenAI and in return OpenAI automated them this is GPT 5.2 thinking is able to construct a cap table accurately in spreadsheets.

32:25This is what Fiji Simo was talking to us about, about emerging capabilities. Seems like they might have RL'd on some spreadsheets. That's pretty cool. Truly everyone is going after spreadsheets at this point. There's everyone from our sponsor, Ramp, to Microsoft, to a number of startups that have been on this show talking about Excel agents, Excel plugins, Google Docs plugins. I'm so interested to see how that market actually shapes out. Who is? Because there's so many AI for Excel plays, some full stack, some plugins. Yeah, and it's not that Harvey was pitched as a Word plugin. Even though lawyers do a lot of work in Word, that was not the instantiation of that product.

33:10It was much more just like a full service product. It was interesting. Anyway, there's a clip of Sergei making a joke about automating away VCs. should we play this video? Do you have the ability to pull this up? Let's do it. What does he say?

33:30No audio on our side yet, folks. Any luck? Well, in the meantime, let me tell you about it. Oh, here we go. In due to that human majority of jobs that we know today, like more than 50 % might be replaced by machines that can do that human judgment piece better. Well, we've been working on the venture investment machine learning. No, I'm just kidding. It's kind of true, actually. As long as I can buy one, I'm good. You think you'll do it? That is kind of what Google Ventures does, no? They started that way. I don't know if they're actually doing that. I don't know. They keep hiring partners for whatever reason.

34:17This is actually hilarious. Where was this? Extremely candid. This is very funny. Love it. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. What is up with this? The CIA lost a nuclear device in the Himalayas. Did you read this article? Apparently, this is not new. It's not a new story, but there's some new reporting in here. Okay. What happened? How do you lose a nuclear device in the Himalayas? I want to go through this. My only concern is that it's going to potentially take like an hour to read through. Let's do it another day.

34:53Yeah, we can do it. Let's do it tomorrow. Let's summarize it and put it. Let's put a link to it in our newsletter where you can get tech analysis and news. Get our daily op-ed, top headlines, and more. Sign up at tbpn.com. There was a – oh, yeah. Do you want to go to some of this? Take us wherever. I was going to take us to Brett Adcock. Okay. He had a party over the weekend with Deadmau5. Okay. And let's play this video. So he posted earlier today that figure is looking quite cheap now in comparison to SpaceX. Okay. Because there's a new biggest line on the private markets chart. Is he drinking on here?

35:37What is he drinking? I think he's cracking open some cold ones. This is crazy. So my theory is that they have done billions of dollars in sales. Okay. And this is kind of their way of signaling. If you know, you know. Because, of course, it would be absolutely insane to have a party like this. Yeah. If you still hadn't shipped a product. If you still were kind of a sort of, I don't know if they're pre-revenue, but certainly being valued on vibe. So there's no way they would throw a party like this. Because SpaceX has$30 billion in revenue, right? Yeah. And it's going out at 1.5 trillion. So it's at like 50x revenue.

36:18So to be cheap, he's probably trading at like, what, 20x revenue? Something like that? That was my theory, at least. And then what's the market? So they're at around 40. They're at 40 billion? They're at around 40 billion. So, yeah, they could be doing like 2 to 4 billion in revenue, potentially. Yeah. If it's cheap on a dollar per revenue basis. I think this is very much a wink. On a price to sales ratio. A wink, wink moment. because seriously, I don't think any CEO would throw this crazy of a party if you weren't really printing. So expect an announcement soon. I would. I would. Expect an announcement soon on the revenue side over a figure.

37:00Anyway. That's wild. AstroCompute, Pranav. Are we getting him on the show? Have we taxed him? Yeah, I think he's coming on tomorrow. Okay, fantastic. So Pranav has done the math. He sat down and did the math on the data centers in space. He said, everyone and their mother has something to say about space compute, but no one has comprehensively broken down the physics, energy, cooling, economics, and the real work involved. So I built a first principles model to show you guys myself. Tyler, what was his conclusion? Yeah, so I mean - You can go through it, you can change all the different parameters and stuff, and then you can run the simulation and kind of see where it lands.

37:45I think the conclusion was that there are a lot of scenarios where it does make sense. Like today, right now, if we use current technology, probably not. But if you kind of use the trend line where things are going, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that there's a scenario where it does work. Okay. Yeah. What are you laughing at? Fiber Glass is clearly an OG. He says, that was some OG dry humor rage baiting, like from day one TVPN. That's true. We certainly, a year ago, that was certainly like 50 % of the show's content. For sure. For sure. Fiber, it's great to have you here. Thank you for being a day one.

38:29Andrew McCallup, who's building spacecraft over at Varda Space. he's gonna put data centers on a boat, potentially. He has a boat project that's very fun. He says, data centers in space, it might not be economically rational, but it might be physically possible. Oh, is he breaking rank from the co-founder of his company, Varda, Delian? He says, I'm trying to bring some quantitative structure to a conversation that's been mostly big number of vibes. So we have sort of dueling math equations at this point. What is he, this is vibe coded from public, so maybe we need to have a debate. Maybe we need to have them both on.

39:09But he says TLDR, the analysis is actually far more favorable than I thought. It's a close thing. I desperately want a Kardashev level civilization, but we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Interesting.

39:26Dallian's been saying like it's impossible. It's not gonna happen anytime soon. It's not gonna be a thing. but Andrew McAllib says there just might be a chance. Who else is talking about this? This post from Goth. Goth says, my dealer, I got some straight gas. This train called space data centers. You are going to effing fry, LOL. Me, yeah, whatever. 20 minutes later, dude, WTF, we just need to radiate the heat and then we can totally bypass terrestrial regulations. My friend pacing, I should buy magnet stocks to get ahead of all the rail guns. What is it? They're smoking space data centers, John.

40:01I don't get it. This is all over the place. Theo was happy about the Epic thing. Props to Epic for seeing it through to the end. This is an incredible win for developers. Quoting Tim Sweeney. EZ in the chat says, data centers in a volcano. Nobody's thinking of that. Nobody's talking about that. That does seem like free energy. Isn't that just like geothermal? I feel like that's like... I know, but that doesn't SPAC. That doesn't SPAC. Yeah, that's terrible vibes. Data center in a volcano SPACs immediately. For sure. Well, let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails.

40:40Securely spin up white-label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Anthropic has ordered$21 billion worth of TPUs to train large claws. Is that really what they're calling it? Texts from yesterday's Broadcom's earnings call. The scale at which we see this happening could be significant. As you are aware, last quarter, Q3, we received a$10 billion order to sell the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic. This was our fourth custom that we mentioned. In this quarter, we received an additional$11 billion order from the same customer for delivery in late 2026.

41:18But that does not mean our other two. Kaiju fights are the best kind of fights. From October, this is from Andrew Curran. He says, Anthropic is in discussions with Alphabet's Google about a deal that would provide the artificial intelligence company with additional computing power valued in the high tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan, which has not been finalized, involves Google providing cloud computing services to Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named. Google is a previous investor and cloud provider for Anthropic.

41:49Large Claude was just me having fun with words and is not anything official. I also considered Fat Claude. I'm saving Colossal Claude and Gargantuan Claude for 2027. Gigaclod. Fast Claude. In other news, Fermi, which is the energy company that went public at a$20 billion valuation, they talked about getting their kind of facilities online, I think, in the 2030s, and people were a little bit bearish about that. They've traded down almost 75 % since their IPO. So it seems like, yeah, we've basically seen this kind of rolling correction across every single AI pure play. You could even say that. But nobody's done volcano data centers yet.

42:39No one has done those. Where are you going to, the chat's asking, where do you put the heat? Just shoot it up into the air. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah, volcano data centers is funny because immediately they're like, but don't you want the chips to be cold? You need cooling, not heating. Yeah, the heat dissipates with the lava. It would be great to just hard light. But the heat's free. Heat's free. Data centers are hot. And in this one, we're getting the heat for free. Now, what happens after a correction? You're corrected. I think we're corrected. I think it's possible that the market is cracked.

43:11It's perfectly valued. I saw somebody saying that the BG2 interview with Sam, they were claiming it's very possibly helped us avoid a 2000-2001 style scenario. Yeah, things could have gotten a lot crazier. So maybe that was Brad's play the whole time. He was like, hey, we just need a little reset. He's a hero. He's a hero. I'm going to look like maybe a bad guy for two weeks, but now he looks like a hero. I mean, even in the moment, he didn't look like a bad guy. No, no. He asked the question. If he didn't ask that question, there would have been, I think, some rightful criticism. Everyone was wondering.

43:53It was an important question to ask. Yeah.

43:59I really like Young Macro. This guy's a great poster. Nick Land proclaims, may coldness be my God. What normies think he means, you know, techno-accelerationism, Operationism, techno-capitalism. I like that the circular AI deals made it in here as well. Just the stock charts. What he really means, he means Christmas. He means Coca-Cola. He means a nice, wintry retreat. Yes, exactly. Play some music. This is what may coldness be my God means. It means cozy up by the fire and get festive. I love it. Did you see this reporting on Jim Carrey and Grinch? No. Jim Carrey offered to return his$20 million Grinch salary and was going to quit the movie amid panic attacks over the makeup.

44:45Then a guy who trained the military on enduring torture was hired to help him. Richard Marcinko was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special ops people how to endure torture, Carrey told Vulture. He gave me a litany of things that I could do when I began to spiral, like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can, have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm, Eat everything in sight Changing patterns in the room If there's a TV on when you start to spiral Turn it off and turn the radio on Smoke cigarettes as much as possible There are pictures of me as the Grinch Sitting in a director's chair with a long cigarette holder I had to have the holder because the yak hair Would catch on fire if I got too close Later on I found out That gentleman had trained me to endure The Grinch also founded You founded Seal Team 6 My only kind of question here is I feel like all these things if you're being tortured they wouldn't exactly be like, oh, let him turn the TV off and on again.

45:41Let him turn the radio on. Oh, yeah, that is interesting. So I think these are probably great things to do if you're not getting tortured and you're just developing an anxiety attack. Yeah. I did resonate with this because when we had the Halloween makeup on. Well, I mean, to be fair, it could be like metaphorically being tortured in a foxhole as a member of Steel Team Six. If you have like, oh, you're staking out someplace and you're in a muddy pit and it's a hole. You're not actually being directly tortured by an enemy, but you have to deal with a really hard situation. And so you sit there chain-smoking, and I don't know why you have a TV in this scenario.

46:19Again, I didn't let the point out on that one. Yeah, this just resonated because when we were three hours into our Halloween episode and I started to realize. It didn't resonate for me. I was like, I am fully. It felt like very suffocating having. I was fine with it. two centimeters surrounding everywhere. And it was a very weird feeling. I think, I mean, he was doing like nine hours a day of makeup. Can we get the giga chat built around Tyler? That makes us look like, you know, wimps compared to him. We were only doing three hours of makeup. Nine hours is really, really heroic. Wow. Well, totally worth it.

46:57If you aren't watching The Grinch this Christmas, go watch something that's being restreamed. Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Merry Christmas. Will Brown says, ChatGPT is the only consumer app with regular pop-ups asking if I want to downgrade my subscription. This was hilarious. 3 ,000 likes. I mean, it's a testament to the importance of product development. They're running this as an A-B test. They're like, we tell people they can pay less, and they don't. They enjoy giving us money. Hey, maybe the pro plan results in more permanent churn.

47:33and so this is actually LTV. A downgrade is actually LTV positive. No way to prove that that's true, but it'd be very funny if that was the case. No, the polish around the product is potentially the way you win consumer. I really think we're in the era of productization more than the latest model. The product managers are the heroes now. I want to see a product manager getting a four-year,$1 billion package? It's not completely over for the AI researchers. The models are important. They do get better. And there's functionality under the hood that's research-driven that's valuable. But if you believe in the ILLIA, we're in the age of research, then what is the AI researcher doing?

48:23They are doing experiments that you have no idea the timeline. You're not just doing engineering. you can't just put one foot in front of the other and get easy wins. It's actually going and doing science and discovering new ideas, new ways to create new capabilities. And so in the age of research, the researchers should be off doing research and the user experience designers are the heroes, basically. I mean, the product managers are going to be more important as the apps fight for market share. What do you think, Tyler? You agree with that? Yeah, that makes sense. It's fun to think about like Elon and Ilya are like perfectly counterpositioned, right?

49:04Like Elon is like we don't have any researchers. They're all engineers. Yeah, they're gonna make small improvements and then you see like like Grok is like yeah It's largely undifferentiated from all the other LMs. They don't have like a like Anthropik has code. Yep. OpenAI has like the actual consumer. Grok is like still kind of undetermined. I would yeah, I wouldn't say that they're counterpositioned. They're actually they actually agree. They're consistent. I think they are opposites, but they both embrace a fundamental reality about the world, which is that you should either be doing pure research or pure engineering, and it's sort of hard to mix the two.

49:41Or just that research won't immediately translate to faster times on the racetrack, which is what's happening right now in the race. Yeah, but Elon is very AGI-pilled, right? but he still doesn't think about pursuing AGI as a research thing. That's true. Oh, interesting. Okay, okay. Yeah, maybe they are a little bit more different than I considered. I don't know. I mean, how do you interpret the fact that the Arc AGI scores are going through the roof, and yet qualitatively people are not shocked by the interaction of talking to 5.2 or the latest Claude 4.5? or yeah I think it's just like it's just about like the spikiness thing yeah like I just created a new spike I mean the spike just got longer right it's like the clue that the coding ability of the model I'm sure is much better yeah but the actual like ability to write prose is not that much better because it's just like not what they're pursuing sure it is bullish like this has been my take for a while where like if they can even if it's just benchmarking on or if you can create a spike in any direction you can solve any economic problem then Then the real problem...

50:49Just create every possible spike, and eventually it no longer looks like spiky intelligence. It looks like smooth. Yeah, like the engineering task is to find the RL environment that makes the model better at writing, which is like what they're doing. Like you see all these RL environment startups that basically just make these things that models, that labs train on. That specifically do things. Suspended Cap says OpenAI could probably save 25 % on their compute if they just taught the model to give me the answer and then shut the F up a bit. That's wild. This one resonated. Figma. Think bigger, build faster.

51:23Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started. Figma.com, of course. Jason Freed has a note here. He says, one of the best upgrades to ChatGPT is simply changing the bass style and tone to efficient and giving it a simple get right to the point, be practical above all instruction. No more praise. No more flourishes. Just the answers. Everyone appreciates Tyler Jolly Maxing. He really is in the Christmas spirit. It's fantastic. Hey, are you a miner? No, I'm here to sell shovels. Everyone's selling shovels. 20 ,000 likes on this just for different shovels.

52:02Some people are mining. Some people are mining. Some people are in the trenches. But it is just a few people that are not selling shovels. Big change from a year ago when everyone was just talking about how wrappers were cooked and people were talking somewhat negatively about wrappers. Yeah, it's interesting. Are wrappers selling shovels during? No. No, they're mining. It's mining. It's actually mining in like a very small side mine. Not the main mine, but like a smaller side mine, I guess. What do you think? I would think of mining as being like if you are actually like using the models to do like a roll-up or something.

52:42I think that's much more money. In the AI shovels mining analogy, the mining, I feel like it's Elon and it's Sam and Demis that are doing the mining. They're doing the core thing. And then everyone else is like, I'm drafting off of them. I'm supporting them with shovels. There's a gold mine that's being mined. And if I'm just riding the coattails of that, then I'm coming along. I think of the gold as being the output that you can get with the models when you use the models. The models are the shovels. The models are the shovels? Yeah. That is actually funny. Like if you're doing a roll-up of some, you know, whatever companies and you're using AI to just, you're not like, it's not an AI company, but you're using AI a lot.

53:30Typically, the way the whole shovels analogy is levied at startups is, oh, you don't have it in you to create a great mobile app. So you're going to build a developer tool that helps people ship mobile apps. That was the original, like, the shovels critique. And it's the same thing with AI is the idea of, like, why don't you solve a cool problem with AI? actually create some sort of like, you know, system that solves a particular problem versus saying like, we're a platform for running AI agents on top of it. Like we don't know what the agents will do, but we know that they need, you know, a database or something like that.

54:13That, that critique has never been, it's never hit that hard with me because like they're, they're both valuable. We need all of that. Yeah. That being said though, YC, I think it was a spring YC batch. There was a lot of people selling shovels and not a lot of like very specific. I'm creating a full stack solution for end customers. I'm creating AI agents to help you manage your AI agent infrastructure company. And it was like, well, what about, I think we need more actual end state agent companies that are selling to everyday consumers. Everyone talks about selling shovels during a gold rush.

54:48No one talks about selling just the wood shaft that goes into the shovel. I don't even sell the shovel. I'm a particular slice of the supply chain. In the shovel supply chain. I'm so deep in the shovel supply chain, I sell the screwdriver that makes the screws that assemble the shovel. That's my business. I'm seven layers of abstraction away from the gold. I sell the shovel-making machine. Yes, the shovel-making machine. That's where you want to be. Speaking of wrappers, I wonder if anybody's building a wrapper company to help people wrap presents. I'm assuming that all the different LLMs can do this pretty well.

55:26you take a picture of an item, they can, you know. Could they do that? That's sort of like your Rubik's Cube benchmark because it requires shape rotation, which the models have been notoriously bad at. I wonder, can they actually give you instructions on an arbitrary size present, the best way to wrap the present? You should - That would be an excellent demo. Well, speaking of holiday gifts, we did a snap demo today. We did. I was wearing the specs for how to have Avanon. Yes. And I asked my specs, I said, can you count the presents under the Christmas tree? and nailed it. Yes, fantastic. These are the important problems.

55:59I think it's about time. Yes, let's bring in Evan from Snapchat. Welcome to the stream. We're going to walk him in. Let me tell you about Fall, a generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Evan, great to see you. Thank you so much. I want you to set this for the tree. No way. Go for the tree? Thank you. Great to have you in the pool. Please have a seat there. And suit it up. Thank you so much. Look at this. You look fantastic. My wife told me to wear a suit. She was like, it's part of the... It is, it is. You know, we put on these suits sort of as a joke.

56:34It was sort of a... I mean, you're one of the many tech people who maybe popularized the T-shirt. And I wore the T-shirt for my entire career in technology. And we were like, we want to stand out. Everyone else in tech podcasting wears the T-shirt. Everyone wears the T-shirt, whether you're CEO of a public company or a podcaster, you wear a T-shirt. We're like, how do we stand out? Let's do the opposite. Let's wear the suit. I feel like it's like instant credibility, too. It is. So the funny thing, when some of our videos end up going viral in parts of the internet that aren't kind of familiar with what we're doing, there'll be comments of people like, look at these guys in suits.

57:09They don't know. How are they talking about software? They don't know anything about tech. It's like not getting the bit. It's very funny. Anyway, super, super excited to have you on today. There's so much to talk about. and I don't even necessarily know where we should start. I mean, I'd love to start with a demo that we got just an hour or two ago, SPACs. How are you thinking about hardware these days? What's the state of the organization? How much of your time are you spending on it? Because you have a monster business to manage. You have earnings calls. There's so much going on. How are you splitting your time?

57:44What does that team look like? What are your ambitions for hardware these days? Yeah, I mean, it's a really exciting moment for Snap because in 2026 we're releasing the first consumer version of our glasses. Obviously back, you know, maybe now more than 10 years ago, we released camera glasses, you know, and we kind of stepped our way into building out. What was the actual first release of that public release? I said probably 2016 broadly to the public. Spectacles. Yeah. Weren't they yellow? The original, they had a little yellow accent to flag the camera. Yeah. Back in the day people were, you know, and I think this is still a concern, but people were very, you know, worried about privacy.

58:18So big yellow ring around the camera and a light to let people know you're recording. There were a bunch of really cool little touches. I remember the ability to film. It was basically a square sensor, so you could film horizontal or vertical, and just those little touches. I'm wondering, do you think those small little wins are what help us break through to a world where everyone's daily driving some sort of augmented reality device? Is it a game of inches on the product feature side? Or is it just like more deeper in the supply chain? Once they're 50 bucks, everyone's going to be doing it. What's critical path to getting to...

59:02Phone level prevalence in face wearables. Yeah, I think they're going to have to be major breakthroughs in terms of the utility people get out of the product. I think the biggest challenge, and we learned this very early on with camera glasses, it's just not that much better than taking a photo with your phone. Maybe you're rock climbing, you're on a jet ski, you want to make a video hands-free. I think that's a totally reasonable use case, but that's not an everyday, all the time use case. And so a lot of what we did taking those early learnings, we sort of proved out people were willing to wear a camera, They were willing to wear glasses that had a computer inside.

59:35But then we just shifted our focus entirely to the platform and to driving more utility. So I think the latest version we put out in 2024 that you got to try for developers, which is very focused on all those platform components, so that developers could build all sorts of amazing... Now developers have built hundreds of these lenses. You probably got to try a couple of them. And so I think it's really about driving utility. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. it's always frustrating when you're in a technological platform shift. And I've seen this with virtual reality where it's so amazing.

1:00:11And then the demo is like, well, it's really good on a plane. And you're like, I'm just not on the plane that much. It's sort of the same thing where if the demo is a little too narrow. It's really good if you're watching a movie alone. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, actually, I want to watch a movie with people. And so the theater does work or the TV works. I'm wondering about how much AI is an accelerant in delivering value in the wearables context. Because I imagine it's useful for developers to write software faster now. But also, do you think that that's going to be a relevant precursor to mass adoption?

1:00:48I'll give you an example. So like the live translation functionality. And what's very cool about specs is like having the basically the heads up display like centered. So I can be talking to you and be getting like live translation, which to me is like the kind of thing that feels very sci-fi. And to be able to get it in a demo today, that feels like the kind of thing that AI is a real accelerant for. And you can imagine being in a situation where you actually have multiple, effectively, like subtitling happening all the time. But maybe on that note, I guess from my understanding, you guys are not saying we're going to build the hardware platform and we're going to build a foundation model lab.

1:01:34And maybe if you could talk more about that, because I think that's obviously quite a bit different than some other hardware players. Yeah, so far we just haven't seen a need to build foundational models outside of this sort of image and video and 3D, areas where we think we can really differentiate and where there aren't as compelling open source solutions. So we also are very focused on being able to offer experiences to our entire community, so nearly a billion people around the world. If you do that with back-end inference, it's just too expensive to be able to offer it. So a lot of our innovation starting several years ago was to be able to run models on device or with a hybrid solution where we can do some on the back and some on the device.

1:02:13And so that's really where our foundational work has happened. I think, you know, as you look at the glasses near term, I wouldn't expect AI to be a major accelerant because, again, I don't think it's meaningfully better than your phone. Right. And I think that's really the bar that we have to clear. These experiences have to be 10 times better than what's possible on your phone. And I do think over the long term, though, AI will be very, very meaningful. And less because of the, you know, sort of chatbot style use cases today, but more in terms of the way that like we change how we use computers.

1:02:41So if you think about today, we're spending what on average seven hours a day in front of screens. We're spending a huge amount of time operating computers to get work done. So like physically getting the work done ourselves. And I think what AI enables is a change in the way we relate to computers where we're going to spend less time operating computers and more time supervising AI. And in that transition, the glasses form factor, I think, is going to be really compelling because it essentially gets you away from this operational paradigm into the supervisory. Yeah. Or another, I mean, potentially more near term examples, like you're working on your car and you have this like AI assistant running permanently.

1:03:16And so you have full ability to use your hands and make changes. and it's kind of reasoning on the fly with you in a way that, you know, everyone's experienced, like, you know, watching a YouTube video and like pausing it and trying to do something and then, you know, playing it again. And I feel like, I feel like there are some very near term. How is that shift, like manifesting itself in your daily life as a CEO? Like, I found that since the dawn of ChatGPT, there's been this like urge for folks to like send ChatGPT written stuff to me. And I've always said, like, just send me the prompt and I can kind of rework it in my brain.

1:03:53Like, just send me the bullet points. I don't need to turn it into a paragraph. But I'm wondering if you can give me some color on how you're seeing like AI change your workflow or the folks that you work with on a daily basis. I think it's a really great thought partner. Like, I love to test ideas or try ideas or like I love to run simulated focus groups with AI, which is really fun. Like, what do you think different types of people will say or respond to in terms of a product or idea that we're working on. So I love it, of course, for all the visual stuff, video generation. I can test out ideas really, really quickly.

1:04:28I haven't actually found it yet to be particularly creative, but as a creative thought partner, it's fantastic. Yeah. How do you think about the instantiation of AI features within the core Snap product? It feels like there's an immense amount of energy all over AI with like super intelligent. It's going to do everything. It's going to make the full video. It's going to make the video and the audio. And then when I see it, it's like, yeah, you get like one or two viral videos out of one of those generators. But the much cooler thing is, I think, when there's AI riding alongside the rest of the creative suite.

1:05:03how are you thinking about setting up creators for unique experiences that are like AI enabled but there's still a lot of that creativity that's coming from them? Yeah I mean I think AI has been a core of the Snapchat experience for such a long time but we've never described it as that. Yeah like the original like actual like location mapping the AR stuff. And even all the transformations that are happening in our camera right a lot of the real-time on-device you know generative transformations and these sorts of things people just laugh and have fun with their friends doing They're not thinking like, oh, this is some AI.

1:05:34Yeah, yeah. AI-enabled servers. I mean, face tracking has been in there for so long, and that's always been AI, I'm sure. Yeah, and I think there is a lot of opportunity to rethink the way that people build lenses. So that's been really, really powerful. In the past, developer, it would take a really, really long time. You had to build the 3D assets yourself. I think there's a huge democratization that's happening right now because anyone, we have a tool called Easy Lens. you can, with a prompt, build all sorts of amazing experiences in AR. Yeah. What is the economic flywheel there? How do you think about allowing folks to monetize that, build businesses?

1:06:11What is your current mental model for the economy that's occurring on the platform? Well, one of the things we've thought a lot about is that there are a ton of models that are being created, but very few people actually have customers. We have a ton of customers. And so what we've done is created a service called LensPlus. So if you're a developer, you can publish your lens to LensPlus. That means it's behind our paywall. People get free generations. They can use some lenses for free for a certain amount of time. And then they convert to paying customers, and we revenue share with those developers.

1:06:42So I think, interestingly, Snapchat's become a bit of a front door, right, for folks who want to deploy their models or deploy a specific lens. Or sometimes people are even building more advanced game experiences inside of Snapchat. And with LensPlus, they get all that monetization for free. essentially we do that that one for them yeah how do you how do you uh process like the whole the like the metaverse boom and you know bust and maybe it's gonna boom again um just this idea of like uh just adding more and more functionality until you're effectively in like a game world unlimited uh content um do you do you think that uh like is that is the primary driver of giving people the ability to make games just better AI tools?

1:07:25Are there other things that you are actually thinking about integrating there? Or do you think that just partnering with all the models will eventually give people the ability to build whole game experiences? Well, it's interesting. The reason why we love games is actually the same reasons why we hate VR, right? Which is games actually bring people together in really interesting ways. And we see that on Snapchat all the time, right? It can be a conversation starter or a way for, you know, a way for two friends, you know, I play putt-putt with my wife on Snapchat, right? And we just send them back and forth.

1:07:55It's fun, right? It's a way to connect. And so I think for us, games on Snapchat are really about, you know, that like spark of connection between people. We've invested zero dollars into VR, right? Because we essentially think that it takes people out of the real world and away from the places, the people, you know, everything that they love. And so our view is that VR has a very, very limited and low use future because people love the real world. And so our bet for the last 11 years has been exclusively on augmented reality and trying to enhance the human experience rather than replace it with VR.

1:08:29Yeah. Is there anywhere where you think VR does make sense? Are there specific B2B use cases or some sort of, I don't know, maybe the enterprise is where all the stuff like goes to die but um but i'm wondering if there's any if there's any place but i guess the question is like that i think people assume that vr eventually will be good enough that a huge swath of the planet will be engaging in it a lot like at least that at least like that that my my personal theory and maybe you believe differently it sounds like you're even okay with a scenario where even if it does work you're like other people can kind of play in that and we're happy to kind of exist in this hybrid world yeah just philosophically like that's not a world that we want to support in any way uh shape or form you know i think what's really important is actually trying to create products that foster that human connection right and in doing so in person i think we're in a moment where people are really valuing that right and they want more of that and they're thinking about how to get get more and i think ar is coming about at a really important time when people are saying actually i'm spending a lot of time in front of a screen i'd like to spend more time together with my friends.

1:09:36I'd love to do that in a way that's more fun or entertaining. Our kids, at least three of them are still pretty little, but when I see them playing around with those specs, even though they're clunky and heavy or whatever, they're outside running around playing together. And you're like, that's a different vision for computing. Yeah. I mean, you should have seen us doing the demo this morning. I was running last drawing. I was playing this drawing game that you guys have where I was drawing. And the ability to have this shared space and have permanence in the different visuals that you're creating on a scene is just really cool.

1:10:13Do you think AR specifically means pass-through? Or if I'm doing reprojection, I have cameras on the outside of a VR headset, and I'm reprojecting that, and it's indistinguishable for the user, does that count in your mind? Is it a meaningful distinction? In our mind, it doesn't count. So you're describing pass-through on VR, where the cameras in very high fidelity. There was this quote from Palmer Luckey, where he was saying, why would you ever try and recycle photons? Just create new photons, take a video of the outside world, reproject it inside. The benefit of that is that if you're in a very bright world, or you're in a bright space, you can dim that and put something brighter on top of it.

1:10:56and there's certain, like the additive nature of physics around light, make it so that it does seem like there's limitations to pass-through augmented reality, even though the latency is zero and it's the real world and there is something that's better. I just know that you might be grappling with it. Yeah, we've definitely seen some real challenges there. So the big difference, obviously, is between pass-through and then see-through, see-through glasses that we're working on. You know, I think Snapchat's actually a really good example of pass-through. So it's a screen, right? And we do have, I think, the best pass through AR technology in the world.

1:11:28So we are able to real-time render out those experiences through the phone. I think the question is, do people really want to wear a screen on their face in front of their eyes? And then if you think about the compute that's necessary to reproject the world and the power required to power all of those pixels in real time. And it has to be real-time. And it's got to be real-time. You can't have a half-second of lag, otherwise you're just stumbling around. Yeah, exactly. So when you put that all together, you're just stuck in headset lanes. And I think it's just very clear that people don't want to wear giant headsets all day long.

1:12:00I think that's, yeah. In terms of stuff that they do want to wear, obviously everyone wants something light. But in a world where field of view is somewhat restricted in the short term, I'm sure it'll get better, wider and wider. What's the tradeoff between center of field, center view versus like Call of Duty mini-map, like locked in the corner? Well, I think what's really important is that you're actually able to control where objects are showing up in the world around you. So the big problem with the sort of heads-up display style products, I mean, I don't love that if you're looking at the screen, you're looking at somebody's crotch, too.

1:12:35It's sort of weird. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. You know, but the exciting thing about specs, and it sounds like you saw earlier today, is you can decide where to place things in the world where you want to draw. And I think that's a very big difference from these heads-up display products. That makes sense. How do you think about, like, when the iPhone came out, there was sort of, I mean, it was a little bit expensive. We were talking about the 700 bucks. You could compare it to the price of a phone. You could compare it to the price of an iPod. You could, Steve Jobs called it internet communicator, right?

1:13:07So you kind of bundle these few different products together. And you're like, well, I'm getting$700 worth of value or later$400 worth of value. Do you think that there's an important sort of anchoring point for augmented reality glasses where consumers need to underrate it against an external monitor for their computer or a TV at home? Is there some sort of like economic tradeoff point where, hey, I'm going to college and instead of getting a 42-inch TV and an external Apple display for my MacBook that I'm going to plug in, I'm just going to go with augmented reality glasses because it just makes more sense economically?

1:13:49Is that an important point? I think that's one way to think about it for sure. And, you know, the iPhone, when you add in the carrier subscription, was way more than that. So I think, you know, they were able to sort of have a$700 sticker price. But then, you know, I think some of the initial plans were like$50 a month and that kind of thing. Two or three years, I'm not sure. You know, that was a really meaningful outlay for that product. To me, I think, you know, the iPhone is maybe not the best reference point here. I think this feels to me a lot more like the Macintosh or like early computers.

1:14:22With the smartphone, Steve essentially said, hey, everyone else is doing the phone wrong. You had a Blackberry already or you had a flip phone or this kind of thing. And Steve was like, hey, you all are doing it wrong. This is what a phone should look like. And I think glasses are a little bit different because we have some similarities in the sense that on one hand you have these VR headsets that are very capable but that are essentially unwearable. And then you have the really lightweight glasses that are very wearable but do nothing. and our vision with specs is to have a very lightweight pair of glasses that's incredibly capable.

1:14:56So VR level of immersion and capability but in a see-through lightweight pair of glasses. So I think this is a little bit more of a Macintosh style moment where it's a new way to look at computing rather than a better version of something people are already familiar with. And that's a bigger challenge. So I do think, to your point, anchoring to you know, hey, a giant flat screen display costs$2 ,500, costs$2 ,500, or a laptop costs, you know,$1 ,500 or whatever it is, is an interesting way to think about it. But I think actually describing the utility of the product will be the biggest challenge.

1:15:31Interesting. Yeah, there's something to be said for if you just create a product that is incredibly fun and entertaining, like consumers will find, like, they're not saying like, oh, I'm not going to get the laptop anymore, because I can type on this thing. It's like, I have a device that is creating value in my life purely through fun and function, and it doesn't need to replace anything. Who do you think the earliest adopters will be? Do you think young people will drive the ultimate breakthrough adoption of augmented reality? I think the earliest adopters will be our developer community. So we already have hundreds of thousands of developers who are building lenses for our platform.

1:16:14There are already tons of developers using specs today, building all of these sorts of experiences. And so our strategy is actually to start with that core of folks who are super passionate about this product. And I think they'll be able to tell stories about all the amazing things that they're building, which can then help us transition to more mass market style adoption. So when a developer is building a lens, you can pop these on and stargaze. Or, hey, you can pop these on and play lawn games with your kids. or hey, pop them on and watch streaming video on a giant screen while you're playing or whatever you want to do without having to shut out the world.

1:16:50I think that those sorts of stories are really important. Yeah, I feel like Snap has been able to be remarkably resilient with young people in a way that a lot of other platforms, they just kind of like, they get their initial bucket of users, then they grow with them forever, and then they're monetizing when they get older. Do you think that there's some sort of benefit of having a young cohort that potentially could drive just the product being seen as cool? You know, I joke around with my wife all the time. You know, it's cool to be uncool. Like, we're not aiming for cool. We're really aiming for value, right?

1:17:27And I think ultimately, like, that value cuts across all sorts of demographics. So I actually think companies— Yeah, look at AirPods. I think you're a perfect example of this. They were mocked early on. It was like, oh, look at this guy with his little earbuds in. What a bozo. And then all of a sudden it was like$20 billion a year revenue line. And it just becomes totally normalized. And it was just because the function was there. Yeah, and I think being unapologetic about the value is what's so important. And so that's why, again, starting with our community that loves it, believes in it, and has wanted a product like this now for decades.

1:18:01I mean, some of the folks on our team have been working on glasses-based augmented reality for 25 years. We've only been working on it for 11 years. So the community of people who have wanted this product for a super long time are going to be the most excited about it. And that's really who we're looking to. How do you and the team think about timing out these bets? Because obviously you've been at it for 11 years. And to me, it seems from the outside that it's like trying to pull the future into the present, but at the same time being like patient and not betting the company on like, hey, we need to make, you know, 10x the progress in the next 12 months.

1:18:36Otherwise, we're killing this product. Like it feels like more, quite a bit more like steady and being open to, again, like not being impatient, but patient at the same time. Is that accurate? I really love that question, because I think that is exactly what has killed a lot of Glass's efforts to date. Like we're going to raise$200 million, spend it all in two years, and then And you're sitting there and being like, okay, we made progress, but it's not commercial. It's not a commercial. It feels like we're in an age of research for vision broadly, VR, AR, the entire category. There's just a lot of experiments that need to be run.

1:19:14And there's no guarantee that it's going to be, oh, next year is the year or five years. We don't know. This is one of the reasons why we thought it was so interesting to play in this space, because we have this huge advantage of being able to invest consistently over the long term. right and and that's that is a unique advantage especially when we're talking about this amount of capital right we've invested more than three billion dollars in glasses over 11 years and we've been able to do that very very consistently and so at the same time we've seen companies both large and small you know start a glass initiative shut it down start a new one fire the team hire a new team and just the whole time we have built a team of incredibly talented folks with a very very singular and focused vision and we've done that over the is that part of the pitch i mean over the summer we saw insane talent wars snap is in a unique position like somewhat isolated down here in southern california which which i think helps but uh is part of your pitch to talent like hey this is not a program that we're we just started up and we're going to you know work on for three years and then the budget might get cut by xyz is is like durability and longevity a part of the part of your pitch i think that's definitely a part of it but the most talented folks like they want to create the future, not copy the future.

1:20:26Right. And I think, you know, we have a reputation now for leading in terms of innovation in this space. And, you know, the folks who are really deeply in this space and who are experts in this space know that what we're doing is leading. Right. I mean, what you experienced with specs today, there's no other product that you can, that a developer can just sign up for today and have that type of experience doesn't exist. So I think folks who are really deep in this space understand our leadership here. And that's really Yeah, the pure depth of different experiences in the product, too. I mean, we only had 20 minutes or so, but there were so many different pages that we didn't even get to in experiences, which was very cool.

1:21:03We got to talk about copying because, I mean, we didn't invent this. We didn't invent television. But we've had a lot of success with it this year. You clearly innovated. You've been part of this. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. There's like a little bit of innovation here. and then there's been a lot of copying and it's driven us various levels of insane. It drives me more insane than it drives me. But at the same time, like there's no law that someone's breaking if they want to just like, you know, do exactly what we do. That's the way it works. So how, how do you stay sane when people are copying what you're doing?

1:21:39Yeah. Well, you know, in the early days we had no choice, but to just innovate as quickly as humanly possible because we were late to the social space, right? And Snapchat is not social media. We literally built the business as a response to social media. So Facebook came first and Instagram came first and Twitter came first. And we were using all these products and we were like, these are not very fun, right? Like this is not actually a great way to communicate with your friends. It's awesome if you're into like status and building your profile and collecting followers. It's not a great way to just have fun with your friends.

1:22:08And so we started building Snapchat. And I think, you know, there was just really a gravitation towards a service that is actually fun to use with your real friends. But as part of that, because we're competing with such giant companies, we just had to innovate as fast as we possibly could in a category that is essentially owned by other players, essentially owned by Meta. And I think part of that is understanding that one of the most important things you can do in that position is go and build a new category that's outside of the one that you're currently in. And that's what we identified with Glasses 11 years ago.

1:22:44that we wanted to help power this massive transformation in the way that people use computing, and in that if we invested over a very long period of time in very, very difficult things, and things that are incredibly challenging technically, and then built a platform, as you saw with lenses, all those different lens experiences, that those sorts of things are incredibly difficult to replicate. And so while I think app features are easy to replicate, the work that we've been doing over the last 11 years and where we're going with glasses is incredibly long. The example for us is people see the overlay, so they'll copy the overlay and not realize that that's not what...

1:23:21Overlays have existed for decades, right? I find oftentimes when people copy, they don't actually fully understand what they're copying, so they take an element out of it, not realizing that it's not necessarily that element that makes the other platform successful. How have you thought about partnering with different AI companies and labs? You recently announced a perplexity partnership, which I thought people were excited about. And then I feel like all this year people have been, as some of the labs have added hundreds of billions of dollars of value, there's been speculation on, saw people speculating on, you know, You could imagine Sam Altman trying to buy Snapchat because he sees your user base.

1:24:08And I can see a lot of reasons why there's no price that would make that appealing. But how have you thought about partnerships with different AI providers broadly? Yeah, well, I think one of the things that's been really interesting, obviously, Snapchat is so focused on messaging. And right now, the primary way people are interacting with AI is messaging. And so we saw a huge opportunity to help bring more of these AI services into Snapchat, into our messaging platform. Because, as I mentioned, whether it's the foundation companies or tons of businesses have built agents now, have built chatbots, but they don't have any distribution for them.

1:24:43And earlier this year, we launched Sponsored Snaps, which is a killer ad product for us. It shows up in the chat inbox, highly effective. But the vision is to transition the sponsored Snap from being something that you just view to now something you can interact with and chat with. And so part of that was opening up the platform, starting with perplexity, with an exclusive deal with them, but then over time adding more businesses who are bringing their chatbots and their services to Snapchat. Can you give me a little bit more of an example of that? Like if I'm Diet Coke and I want to advertise the sponsored Snap, but then you can chat with it.

1:25:19And so is it more like Q &A on an FAQ? You could ask questions about the product, or is there something more gamified than that? Like, what does that mean? Yeah, if you think about someone like, you know, Walmart, they've spent a lot of time building out a service called Sparky, right, that you can use to learn about products or buy products. So what they could do is send you an offer directly to your inbox, ideally highly relevant to something you've already been looking for at Walmart or based on how you've been engaging with Walmart. And then you can follow up, have a conversation, you know, potentially even convert in the chat.

1:25:48Oh, and that's like uniquely good in a chat app because you're used to that functionality, I suppose, as opposed to just kicking you out to some web page where the UI is a little bit more foreign or like abstract to you. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Snapchat is one of the largest messages, maybe after iMessage, the largest messenger, certainly bigger than WhatsApp, for example, in the United States. So I think, you know, in terms of people who are familiar with, you know, our messaging interface, that's where they go to have their conversations. Being able to have those conversations, not just with your best friend, but also with, you know, agents like Sparky, I think is an interesting opportunity.

1:26:18That's very cool. There's a whole bunch of news. OpenAI today shortened their vesting period. How do you think about aligning talent, aligning incentives for talent? You've, you know, this transition now, you're a public company. How do you think about whether or not a vesting cliff makes sense? We were going back and forth on it. I was saying that I'm so used to a one-year cliff growing up. Coming from the private markets. The private markets. At the same time, there's a lot of people that show up, and on day one, they're creating a lot of value. So how have you thought about incentivizing employees with stock?

1:26:52Our perspective on this has really evolved over the years, and we learned a ton. Actually, in the early days, we did something really different. We had a 10-20-30-40 vesting schedule. So you would only vest 10 % of your grant the first year, 20 % the second, 30%, 40%. And the idea, and we were in LA at the time, the idea was to really make sure if you were joining Snap that you were joining it because you loved it, you wanted to be there for the long term. It was very popular at the time. I think it's still very popular in the Valley to kind of hop, you know, spend one year. Yeah, why do four years when you can build a basket?

1:27:20Exactly, yeah. And I think, you know, I think that can be real, that can put a lot of pressure on the culture, especially in a startup where you really, you know, I think it's so important that the team is all in on what you're building. But, you know, I think over the time, our view has just been like to take as much friction out of the compensation conversation, you know, as possible. I think like a lot of this stuff is really, frankly, like irrelevant, right? Like what really matters, obviously, if you look at retention and building a team, it's your leader, right? The people that you're working with, obviously, what you're working on, the culture, you know, and that long-term orientation.

1:27:54So I think a lot of this compensation stuff is sort of like details. And the less complicated it is and the less time you spend talking about it or thinking about it, the better. Yeah. What about other just lessons from becoming a public company? We like to joke with Eric Leiman at Ramp, one of our buddies, that, you know, he's maybe about to go out. What is he preparing to do? What are your recommendations for CEOs that you counsel about the process and the transition that the company goes through in the IPO process, just culturally? I mean, the most substantive change is that people's compensation changes on like a minute-by-minute basis, right?

1:28:29And like that can be very distracting for people, especially in the early days. And when companies are newly public, there tends to be a lot of volatility, right? And so I think it's just really important, again, to create a company culture that's not focused on that, especially if you want to build something meaningful over the long term. I remember hearing a story about Enron putting the stock price in the elevator. So the exact opposite of what you said. Literally orient the entire company culture around the stock price. So you come in, stock price is up, everyone's having a good day, stock price is down.

1:28:58How did that work out for them? I don't think it worked out well. What about setting, you seem like, through this conversation, you seem very clear on your values, willing to say, yeah, we don't want to do VR specifically. There might be money to be made there, but we wouldn't even do it on a principles basis. How do you think about setting vision internally with the team and externally with shareholders? there's been so many companies this year that specifically in AI that kind of like to talk about a vision around, let's say like curing cancer, but then you look at what they're actually doing in practice and there's not always incredible.

1:29:38There can be like kind of a disconnect between those two things. And I feel like that, you know, it's confusing for people that are just users, spectators, shareholders, and then team as well. So how do you find that kind of alignment in vision? What a great question. So I think for us, like one of the things we always, you know, remind our team is that as we look at leadership at Snap, you know, a lot of people think about leadership in this like traditional hierarchy, right? Where you have like leaders and then the team. We have at Snap inverted that, right? So if you're a leader at Snap, you're at the bottom of the pyramid and an upside down pyramid, right?

1:30:15And then you have the team that you're responsible for. And then you have our community more broadly, right? And that includes our partners. And so that's also how we think a lot about communication. So when we're communicating to the world, when we're communicating to investors, we always try to remind our team that our investors are a subset of our community. And so it's really, really important that we speak in language that people actually understand. Instead of talking about, we can talk all day in fancy AI terms, but that doesn't really matter when it comes to communicating to your customer and the customer experience that they're having.

1:30:46And in fact, sometimes it can be more confusing. So I think as long as we put everything through that lens of, you know, putting our community first and foremost, and then communicating, you know, making sure that we're always talking to our community first, even if it's some investor update or, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Do you have any book recommendations? Did you read any good books this year? Oh, my gosh. What's Christmas gifts for people? I know it's a really wild question to just throw out at you. What's highly relevant, I think, for this forum, there's a great book that I read on, I'll have to find the name for you, but it's something about like, you know, it's very academic, but it's sort of like the economic impacts of technological disruption.

1:31:27Sure. And it really, kind of like textbooks, yeah, like textbook style. Okay. But what's great is that it just shows like, you know, from the railroads to semiconductors, et cetera, like the patterns that emerged with these sorts of large technological changes. And I think it's so important because I think we just need to be reminding folks that like these sorts of changes have happened before. There's actually quite a consistent rhyme and reason to what happens. And that means that all of us should be able to kind of think ahead and manage ahead, you know, through some of the consequences of I think what's going to happen through, you know, what will be quite a disruptive period of time.

1:32:02Do you think it's underrated that AI can potentially really help with moderation on big platforms, like scale platforms, where for the first time you might be able to effectively review every message that's going everywhere? Or is that a negative thing? Is that a positive thing? We were just talking to Dave Bazzucchi at Roblox. And obviously, the potential of screening every message seems like a really great opportunity for him. And I'm just wondering if there's so many opportunities, but also risks with this stuff. How have you processed this idea of AI as a moderation tool under the hood? So first of all, I do think AI moderation is already very widespread.

1:32:49I think that's already best practice. I think virtually everyone's already doing that. At least, obviously, we've embraced that at Snap. I think it's very important. And I also think it's a really powerful tool, again, for customers, if they want to fact check something, even if their friend told them, the ability to fact check using AI today is pretty compelling compared to what it was in the past. So when people are talking about concerns about misinformation and this sort of thing, I think AI is a pretty powerful counterbalance to that. What I'm more interested in, though, is the use of sequence models to find bad actors and to stop them before something bad happens.

1:33:23So that to me is what I think the frontier of like internet safety is, you know, currently, it's certainly an area of research for us and something that we're really excited about because we have a lot of information about what, you know, bad actors try to do on our platform. We catch a lot of them, right? But with almost a billion people, it's hard to catch all of them, but we're trying. But what's really interesting is, you know, we can train sequence models based on those patterns. What sequence of events are bad actors engaging and how are they using the platform so that but we can predict when someone is about to do something that is against our terms.

1:33:55And so to me, I think that's a lot of the paradigm that we're going to see in internet safety over the next couple of years. I think right now there's a big focus on features and trying to tease apart what sort of different features different platforms have. I think there's just going to be a massive shift to being able to identify bad actors, even before bad things happen, using tools like sequence models. Yeah, yeah. Are you seeing the level of bot activity or at least people trying stuff increasing? We've been talking to a lot of cybersecurity folks and it feels like all the bad guys on the internet, all the black hat hackers have more tools, but then also the white hat hackers have more tools.

1:34:33And so it's sort of like a cold war. But I'm wondering if like, do you feel like you're spending more time for just more headaches focused on, you know, defending against like endless bot armies? Or has that just been like a drone throughout the entire process, the entire career? I think for us, like if you look at cybersecurity, right, some of the like most significant threats are actually, you know, are human vulnerabilities. Sure. And I think that's where AI actually is is almost the most dangerous because today. Right. Our team members can get phone calls from Evan. Yep. Hey, I really need your help.

1:35:12I got to investigate this. Hey, I need 200 bucks. Wire me 200 bucks or buy some gift cards really quickly for this creator event we're doing. Right. Like that's like and I think like the ability for for bad actors to use AI to exploit our human vulnerabilities is something that we really worry about and think a lot. I mean, there were so many times when like the phishing email was clockable just by bad grammar or, you know, spelling mistakes. And it was like that was enough of a tell. And like one pass through any LLM and you get rid of all of those. I think another thing that's going to become increasingly important, you know, as we look at cybersecurity is the interconnectedness of all of these services.

1:35:50Right. Like a lot of companies today, especially young companies who aren't investing a ton in cybersecurity are using a huge number of vendors. And what's really interesting is, you know, today compromising a vendor and then using that vendor to compromise the, you know, core business. That's the sort of stuff that's really concerning, especially with phishing, right? So we saw an interesting one recently where one of our vendors was compromised. I received an email that looked like it was from the vendor, right? But it was actually a phishing email. And, you know, it's, again, very hard to tease apart.

1:36:20So I think the interconnectedness in terms of cybersecurity is something that folks just don't talk about as much as maybe we need to. We joked about some news organization acquiring paperless posts and then just understanding where all the different people going to events. Most powerful people. I do have one kind of more broad question, and then I know you got to jump. But Snapchat, I think of as like country scale, or it's the size of a nation state. You're basically the governor of a state or a country, and California specifically has gone through a really wild year. You grew up in the Palisades.

1:37:03I'm wondering if you were, like, what would you do? Like, how do you kind of, like, how do you feel California is today as a state, even Southern California more specifically? I think, you know, we I live in Malibu and John lives in Pasadena. We weren't affected by the fires, but there was this like extreme frustration during that moment because it felt like in many ways the government had had kind of failed the citizens. I'm curious if there's anything that like how you're thinking about the future of the state and how we can make positive change. Well, we could spend another another hour on this.

1:37:41So I love California so much. Obviously, I was born and raised here. I think it's an incredible state. And it's so important to the future of U.S. competitiveness, right? So I think people talk a lot about the competition between U.S. and China. I don't think people talk enough about the competition between China and California, which is a really, really interesting relationship because both China and California are deeply interconnected at the same time that we're competing a ton. So I think California is just unbelievably important to the future trajectory of the United States. 100%. I think if you look at California today, I mean, you obviously know all the stats, but like highest unemployment rate, highest poverty rate, most homelessness.

1:38:16Housing crisis. Massive housing crisis. The people saying, I'm moving to Austin for quality of life. I love Texas. Texas is amazing. But it can be like, well, it can be like, I mean, it's very cold in the winter. It's very hot in the summer. If you're moving somewhere like that for quality of life, it just means that housing is, I mean, housing affordability is like top of mind for a huge percentage of people. And, of course, here that's most elevated. Yeah, I think the affordability crisis here is incredibly concerning. I think one of the things, if we look historically at the way that our government has operated, we tend to fall in this pattern, it seems like, of very heavily regulating our industries, which, by the way, to some degree is important.

1:39:05One of the reasons why we love California, it's beautiful, right? It's clean, all these sorts of things we really love about California. but at the same time, we also then layer a ton of subsidy on top of that. So you dramatically restrict supply with very, very heavy regulation. And then, you know, we, we've got a very large economy. We've got the highest, one of the highest tax rates here in California. We put a ton of subsidy into that economy after dramatically restricting supply. And as a result in all these areas, you know, especially things like housing, I think you have massive increases in pricing.

1:39:35And I am optimistic in the sense that I think the legislature this year is really starting to pay attention to it, right? There's some progress on SQL form, for example, there's more attention being paid to, you know, how expensive it is to building affordable housing here. When the government pays for affordable housing, it's about 30 or 40 % more expensive than just market rate affordable housing. And so I think, you know, people are starting to pay attention to it. But another thing that's fascinating is I'm just not sure Californians are aware of how problematic things are right now, especially because our politics are so partisan.

1:40:07And I think if you look at the California voter base, they're saying, oh, well, at least it doesn't look like the federal government. So we're doing better here than, you know, than they're doing in D.C. So I'm OK with that. But so I think to me, part of the, you know, the journey over the next couple of years is California is really Californians really waking up to the fact that we can do a lot better here in our state. And in fact, we've got to do a lot better you know the u.s wants to continue to compete yeah and i i went growing up in in uh the bay area and living in southern california my adult life i went through a brief moment during 2020 where i started looking on zillow outside of the state because it was like they shut down the beach i was like i'm living like half a mile from the beach and i can't i can't go there and uh i made the very uh specific decision i was like no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna leave this this place is two beautiful, I've had family roots here going back to the early 1900s.

1:41:01We need to stay and people need to focus on making it better. It's the greatest place on earth that I've been to. And it's worth continuing to invest in and steward. And I felt like the fires were so symbolic too at the Palisades of like the, you know, everything burning to the ground, except Rick Caruso, the guy we couldn't elect as mayor, even though I believe, you know, again, And I believe he genuinely loves this city and wants to see it shine. So anyways, we'll have you. Can we open this present? We should. Because we could talk about politics for the rest of the show. What is in here? We don't talk about, we don't talk about.

1:41:40Oh, is this an ornament for the tree? No way. This is incredible. Ooh, I think this is going to be a new, new tradition. I like this. Yeah, we, we, oh, this is amazing. There we go. Wow, perfect. Thank you. This is remarkable. Great to the top. Great to the top. Would you mind signing this? Oh, wow. We love collecting autographs. We're building a museum of business. And then I think you got a chance to hang out in the front. That is incredible. We got to put that up at the very top. For sure. For sure. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Fantastic. We'll let that drive. That looks fantastic. Yeah.

1:42:19Congratulations. Thanks so much for having me. Almost one billion global Snapchatters. Can we have you hit the gong? You got to hit the gong, too. If you come to the Ultra Dome, please pick up this mallet here. Hit it as hard as you want. As hard as you want. I thought you labeled it, too. Just in case. That's our interview. In case you were ahead and used it. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Great hangover. I'd love to have you back on, too. Thank you. I really love the ornaments. I didn't even realize that that would be something that could happen given that we have a tree. Like this is going to be a thing now.

1:43:02We're going to grow an ornament collection. As merch. It's amazing. I love it. Well, that was a fantastic conversation. Thank you for everyone for listening. And let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. there is some Oracle news what else is going on? I've just pulled up this hilarious video of Oracle pivoting to AI I don't know if we should flip back to this we have RJ from Rivian coming on just a minute play this video while we wait for RJ to join this is perfectly on brand for us I put this in there for you John so the news here is that Oracle Oracle bondholders now sit on 9 % of unrealized losses on$18 billion of debt issued.

1:43:54Don't focus on that, John. Focus on this video. Matt Turk says, Oracle after pivoted to AI. You're pivoting to 80 years young. This guy looks great. This makes me want to own the stock. This is extremely bullish. This really does feel like the current state of Oracle. I mean, Larry Ellison looks fantastic. He's been on a tear. And, you know... This is your future, John. We'll probably retire somewhere around 70. So we got, we got a good, we got a good run ahead of us still, but then you're going to go and go back and hire an elite team and really make a run at the, at the Arnold classic in the, in the, in the vintage division.

1:44:35Yeah. Well, let's head over to Keller Clifton and Andrew Cote. Keller says next gen infra and the, the drone tower is really remarkable. like what is that uh four eight twelve drones in one tower all charging these are of course the zipline drones that deliver everything from chipotle burritos to uh i think blood transfusions and all sorts of stuff uh saving lives uh and andrew cote says we are not mentally prepared for just how cheap everything is about to become as robotics of all kinds explode into the market it. And Elon chimed in. He says, harnessing even a millionth of the sun's energy would make every human a billionaire in purchasing power.

1:45:24Wow. I'm not sure Deadmau5 concerts are going to get any cheaper, given that some of these robotics companies are hiring in order for their holiday. But Keller is locked in. Keller is on terror. He's not hiring Deadmau5. Yeah. Maybe we should see. I mean, we don't know that he didn't. It's possible he didn't. It's possible. Anything's possible. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries for every channel.

1:45:56Joe Longsdale says, older friend I admire. I'm having real liquidity trouble. Me. You own over 45 million of shares in a private company. X, I started. You backed us early. Take 10 million off. Not sure. I don't like to sell stuff. Me. Okay, FYI. It's QSBS. I'll think about it. Yeah. QSBS. In the chat, Ryan asks, are we going to cover Roomba? It's somewhere in the stack. Did you hear the news about Roomba? Yeah, total being a con victory. Very upsetting because, of course, they were going to sell to Amazon. Aren't Chinese companies are buying up the assets at auction? I'm sure. It does seem like they are, I don't know, is GoPro in the same, in the same bucket.

1:46:44I don't know. How's GoPro doing these days? But yeah, Roomba. So GoPro is down to 150 million market cap up, of course. It was in the billions at one point. And Roomba, you just get really heavy competition from international players. It compounds and and pounds and eventually there's nothing to do, but ideally hang out with the good folks over at Amazon. But that was of course blocked. And so they had to go their own way and their own way led to doom, unfortunately. But fortunately we have an American company that's bringing it back. This is not an intro to Matic. This is an intro to Matic, the Roomba competitor or new company that came on the show.

1:47:37And you have one at home. I do. You have the phoenix rising from the ashes. Okay, you want to know why. You have the reincarnation of Roomba. You want to know why I believe Matic is really going to go all the way? Why? It's because my children, specifically my one-year-old, is constantly messing with it, and it still works. Really? that's impressive my one-year-old is just constantly like sitting on it moving it taking it apart sure putting it back together uh and and not in a not in a very any type of more specific way she's just kind of messing with it uh and it still works it still runs every day uh yeah i don't you know some some of these things a device like that you you uh the concern is always okay it works, but do I have to spend a bunch of time thinking about it and kind of like managing this new robot?

1:48:29And then at that point, should I just have a vacuum and just use that? This thing has just been running perpetually on a schedule reliably. I've had it running for at least six months now and it's really fantastic. I have an idea. Okay. So you turn your kids loose on Julius.ai. We see if that still works once your kids have gone crazy all over the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, get insights in seconds. If it holds up, I think it's a good sign. I think it's built for. Goldrock says, I won Radio Shack's Innovation of the Month in 2009 for making an Arduino Roomba.

1:49:14That is cool. Early. Very early. I was hanging out with some mutual friends of my kids last night, some parents. And you know what they had in the driveway? Did you just call the parents of your kids mutual friends? No, sorry. So my son's friends' parents. What do you say? Playdate. I went on a playdate, okay? Shoot me. I went on a playdate. And the parents of my kids' friends, yeah, the parents of my kids' friends, right? They had an Arrivian R1S in the driveway. And they're very happy with it. And I'm very happy that we get to talk to RJ from Rivian here in the studio. Welcome to the show, RJ.

1:49:56How are you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us today. It's great to have you. Yeah, nice to be on. Yeah. I would love to, I mean, first set the table on, you know, like how the year went, where the business is. And then, of course, I want to go into the new chip and just self-driving broadly. But how are you describing the scale of Rivian at this point in time? Well, I mean, we've launched, as you just referenced, we launched a set of flagship products. We have an R1S, which is the best-selling premium SUV in the U.S., and then electric SUV in the U.S., and then we have a truck, R1T, and we make commercial vehicles.

1:50:39But we haven't launched our mass market product yet, which is coming in the form of what we call R2. And so that will dramatically expand the scale of the business. And I think a lot of the, in some ways, challenge we've had is we're investing to be a very large business. So we're investing in vertically integrated technology to enable us to be a multi-million vehicle a year business. And the technology investment has to happen before the products come. And so we have huge fixed costs to develop all this tech, whether it's, you referenced it already, whether it's in-house silicon or all of our compute platforms, our operating system, of course, all the high voltage work.

1:51:22But that all comes together really nicely with the launch of R2, which is what really gives us this scale to support all this R &D. Let's start with R1T. Electric truck felt very contrarian. It feels still a little contrarian. contrarian truck buyers, you know, not to generalize, but it's a very much like, I like my truck, reliable with gas. I don't like this new thing. Did it seem like a risk to you at the time when you put, when you said, okay, we're going to do the truck first, we're going to do that so early? Like what, what gave you confidence that it would deliver and you could actually win that market over?

1:52:06The truck market specifically, it's such a large market. I think we often think of it as one singular type of buyer, which is the person who's loading up 2 ,000 pounds of concrete in the back. The vast majority of trucks used in the United States are actually used more like cars. They're used as a daily driver. The bed is used more for lifestyle activities. Put a dirt bike in the back. you know, kids toys in the back, that kind of thing. And so we said, we're not as a company trying to address the contractor use case. So if you're, if you want to load concrete and some blocks in the back of the truck, this is probably not the vehicle you want to do it in.

1:52:45It could do that. It's capable of, but that's not the brand aspiration. And it was one of the reasons we also made it really clear that we had both the truck and then this sibling vehicle, the SUV. And there's so much shared content between the two. But the other thing we wanted to do is just to eliminate any questions of whether or not it was capable. You'll laugh, but in 2019, I would get questions like, well, what if it gets wet? Can it drive through deep puddles? So, it was just like a very low level of understanding, I'd say, generally around electrification, what that can do in terms of off-road and capabilities.

1:53:22And so, with R1, we made it really capable. So, it can go extreme rock crawling. It can go drive through three feet of water. It can, you know, it can accelerate faster than, you know, most hypercars. So our current quad does zero to 60 in like and a half seconds. It's sort of unnecessarily silly in terms of its capabilities, but it's a, it's a flagship product. So it's there to make a statement. It's there for, for building the brand. Yeah. On, on the SUV side, have you been surprised by how much runway you've had in that market for full-size SUVs because it feels like a lot of people went after trucks very quickly, but the fast followers haven't really come after the R1S.

1:54:13I mean, I grew up in a family with a Ford Explorer and I've always been full-size It feels like one of those things that in 20 years, people will look back at this window of time that Rivian had to just dominate that full-size SUV category and feel like this was the biggest possible blessing that you guys couldn't necessarily plan for, but it kind of worked out nicely. Yeah, I mean, to your point, in the space of electric vehicles priced over$70 ,000, these are all, depending on how you draw the boundary diagram, the way we look at it. we have about 35 % market share. And so it's the best-selling electric premium SUV in the United States by a significant degree.

1:54:57It's significantly outselling something like a Model X, which is also in that same category. But interestingly, in the state of California, it's the best-selling premium SUV, electric or non-electric. Oh, really? For those that are spending time in California, if you're driving around the Bay Area, they're just everywhere. So our hope is that with R2, it's a price point that starts at$45. It captures a lot of the magic and the essence that's in R1, but at a much lower price point. So if we can have even a fraction of the market share that we have with R1, with R2, we'll be very, very, very happy.

1:55:33Where did the headlight design come from? When I first saw it, I was like, it looks like cartoon eyes. It was not for me. and now it's completely grown on me and it's just completely been like oh that's just like it's it's become not only like i i think of it as cool i don't think of it as like cartoony or childish but also it's simultaneously become iconic because i see it from a mile away and i'm like oh that rivian and i feel like that's exactly what you how you wanted it to play out but what was the thinking with that because it does feel bold and different yeah definitely and you know Getting to something that starts to feel iconic, it's always hard because you can't design something and it immediately becomes iconic.

1:56:15So I think it has to start with a really strong point of view and a strong conviction around a certain direction. So in the case of the front end, I mean, in 2018, no one knew what a Rivian looked like. We didn't know what a Rivian looked like. So we were figuring out. So there's lots of different faces of the vehicle. So and one of the things we arrived at was the realization we wanted it to look technically capable, but also friendly. And so often if you go friendly, it starts to look like nice, but not tough. And so we wanted like nice, but still tough. So it was a really hard balance. The original Waymos from Google were like a little bit too nice.

1:56:54And they were like these goofy things. And then they finally, yeah. But yeah, continue. So it was like it was a lot of iteration. and one of the i grew up a car enthusiast and so i've always been drawn to cars that now we would consider be iconic but if you look at the history of those cars often in the beginning they're made fun of and so you know if you look at the volkswagen beetle uh as an example uh that was thought of as heck even volkswagen called it ugly uh they leaned into it well even on the on the other end of the spectrum the f40 was controversial yeah yeah and now it's obviously you know a car that a lot of supercars start out kind of mocked and then we're not being daring enough or something.

1:57:34Yeah, so we wanted to push the boundaries, but we also wanted to use really clean forms. And the benefit of a clean form like primitive shapes, in this case, like half circles with a stadium, it doesn't age. It's a form that has been around for ages, and so it feels very timeless. and the way we integrated it very seamlessly, the hope was is that it would become something that's very recognizable. You see it on the road, you say that's a Rivian, and then that it could scale to different sized vehicles, different vehicle segments. So yeah, there's still people that don't love it, but I'd say the vast majority of people who have been around it have liked it from the beginning or as you just described, have grown to really like it.

1:58:20I want to talk about R2, but first I want to ask you about R0. Are we going bigger? I mean, when the numbers go up, the vehicles get smaller, what do I have to do to get something that competes with like a Cadillac Escalade ESV out of you? Because I have a big family. I have two huge dogs and I want the absolute monster land yacht. And I'm just, my serious question is like, is there something about the physics of electric vehicles where it gets harder to make something that's really, really long or huge or big, or is it more just like, that's more of a niche thing and maybe you'll get to it or the market will get to it eventually, but it's not the highest priority right now.

1:59:01Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love this question because we as a company have so many different ideas. And so you can imagine there's like 50 different concepts or ideas we might have for a vehicle. We have to pick a few things to do. And so when you then look at the electrified space and you say, what's going to sell at volume? For a flagship product, we started with something that was larger. But as we move into mass market, the size of the market that exists for these very, very large vehicles, things that are bigger than R1 is very, very small. So there's not a lot of customers. It's like maybe 10 ,000 units a year, if that.

1:59:41And then you look at just the biggest segment by far is a two-row, five-passenger SUV. And I'd say there's probably like one highly compelling choice today under$50 ,000 since the Tesla Model Y. And so it's like wildly underserved you imagine there's 300 different choices in the in the combustion world and you've got like maybe one there's many choices but there's one that's highly compelling which how how uh molded like how how people wake up every day and they they tell themselves they're buying the car that that they want but in reality there's like a regulatory environment that that forces manufacturers to make certain decisions and trade-offs and push different vehicles with the new...

2:00:24You don't want seatbelts in your car, right? No, inside joke. But with the new, with cafe regulations going away, people are talking about America being flooded with these mini trucks. K-Trucks. I'm not convinced that there's actually that many buyers of those vehicles in the U.S. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But how much do you feel like the popularity of different vehicles is really just downstream of choices that manufacturers have had to make because of, for various regulatory reasons.

2:01:05Boy, we have this discussion all the time. I mean, the causality of demand is interesting because you don't have an infinite set of choices. So, before demand starts to look like what supply looks like. And we see this. We believe this is going to happen with R2, where there's very few choices in. Let's talk about it in detail. So, Tesla launch Model Y, very, very successful. It's a non-traditional form factor in terms of a midsize SUV. It's very car-like. That has its advantages. But you've found a lot of people that are coming out of more traditional SUV form factors into that, but they don't have another choice.

2:01:47And so what we saw happen is a bunch of other manufacturers create their own version of a Tesla Model Y. So the form factor is very similar to a Model Y. You know, if you look at the side view of it and draw a line over the profile of it, it looks, you know, it's a Model Y. It's like different OEMs versions of that, which was actually the wrong conclusion to draw because you didn't provide customers with better diversity of choice, but rather you gave them a less good version of a Tesla Model Y. If you want a Model Y, buy the Model Y, not some other company's version of it. And so we were very clear on the need to have a very different point of view and not fall into that trap of thinking everyone is going to want that exact vehicle form factor and profile package.

2:02:30And so I think that happens all the time in automotive. And it's sort of shocking. But if you were to think about, take like the sedan space. You have the BMW 3 Series, the Mercedes C-Class, the Audi A4. They're all like dimensionally very, very similar. And then you have the BMW 5 Series and the Mercedes E-Class and the Audi A6. And so you have like these interesting segments that are like very much because of this, like hard to trace causality. You just have a lot of people building very similar things with different fronts, different rears, maybe slightly different surfacing. But the specs of the vehicle are highly aligned.

2:03:13and so i think there is an opportunity with electrification to reset some of those uh expectations and to reset segments sizes performance characteristics some of the attributes one of the things we worked on really hard in r2 was the rear seat like comfort or space is completely unlike anything else in the segment so it's a lot of space yeah um but and then you look at all the cars in space and they're all like within 15 to 25 millimeters of each other for rear seat legroom and you're like why is why are there 30 cars that have almost identical rear seat configurations and well yeah when the when the team sees something like that or are they like are we missing some sort of like regulation that like requires like you ever and then and then you kind of trying to figure out wait do we actually have flexibility you know i i always you you end up wondering like are we missing something and then you realize well the mechanical nature of cars means that everybody can buy everybody's products.

2:04:11So every company, like Rivians are owned by every car company and they take them apart and they own all the other, you know, all the other things they're competing against. And so as a result, a lot of like the mechanical innovations, let's say welding techniques or casting techniques, they sort of very quickly become state of the art. But the downside of that ability to buy each other's products and so easily observe them is you do have this funneling towards like uh consensus around different segments and so we we sort of lose some of the uniqueness between the different vehicles and see like for car enthusiasts you find a lot of times car enthusiasts will say oh cars they all look the same they all feel the same yeah uh and so we we try hard to change that but there are certain expectations.

2:04:58I'll give you a really good example. On our R1T, we did a ton of research and we looked at what people put into the bed of the vehicle. And if you're using it for lifestyle, you want to be able to fit it in your garage. And if you're putting anything other than a motorcycle, in which case, or dirt bike, where you'd have the tailgate down, the bed length doesn't need to be longer than four and a half feet. It just doesn't. There's nothing that goes in that requires, unless you're doing like construction and you need to put some. And so we made the bed shorter with this articulating tailgate that goosenecks out.

2:05:35So it gives you, it's actually longer with the tailgate down. So it fits a really long motorcycle. But when it's up, it, it, everything fits in the, you know, it fits in the garage more easily. And so we, we look at most, if you drive through a neighborhood, you know how you know who has a truck in your hood? It's because it's parked in the driveway. Most trucks don't in the garage. And so we wanted to fit in 95 % of the garage in the United States. So we went through all this thought process, we built it, and the standard size is five foot. And the amount of times I've been asked, why don't you make the bed five feet long?

2:06:04Well, of course we could have. It was just a decision. We made the decision. We wanted the truck to more easily fit in a garage. So those are like, you sort of sometimes if you break the mold of like what's expected for dimensions, because customers, media, car journalists are so trained on a certain size, the battle may not be worth it. Yeah. Yeah, and also there's the decision to purchase a car, and you might just be looking at specs, and you're like, five is better than four and a half. But then you live with a car for four years, and you're like, oh, well, this is actually way better. I never needed that extra half foot.

2:06:35Yeah, it's fascinating. Where do you think Chinese EVs are overhyped or underhyped? No, give us a white pill. Overhyped. I want the overhyped. So recently there's been a lot of excitement around them, and fortunately we're not letting them flood our country with them. but we had a guest on the show recently that had said he was in China a few weeks ago, and there was one of the, I forget which manufacturer, but one of them were just like caught, like side of the road burning on fire. He felt like they were potentially overhyped because they do have some features that are kind of scroll stopping.

2:07:11I'm thinking of the one that can jump. The Yongwang U9. Yeah, but, you know, given that every manufacturer is free to assemble, I mean, disassemble any other vehicle and learn from it. What do you think American manufacturers can learn from what they're doing? Yeah, I do think it's important to sort of pull the curtain back on what sometimes I think gets presented as if it's magic, particularly around cost. So I think there's two things to take away from the Chinese electric vehicle space. First, there's over 100 different brands and manufacturers in China. And there's only a small fraction of those that I would consider to be in the category of what I'm going to talk about, leading in technology and having really robust architectures.

2:08:01But the two things with that said, so if you say there's more than five, less than 10 manufacturers that fall into the categories I'm about to describe, you have an interesting phenomenon where a lot of these newer companies in China, for the same reasons that Rivian or Tesla have very different software architectures, electronics architectures, and incumbent OEMs, is they started with a clean sheet. and when you start with a clean sheet you would very quickly arrive at a completely different technology topology than what evolved into cars over the last 50 or 60 years and what i mean by that is um prior to like 19 early 1960s cars were 100 analog so there are no computers in a car and the first computer to make its way into a car was ironically it was for the fuel injection system.

2:08:50And so for any of the car enthusiasts out there, this is like those original like Bosch, K-Tronic fuel injection systems that we started to see emerge in the 1960s and early 70s. And car companies at the time said, boy, we build engines, we design vehicle bodies, we assemble the cars, we don't need to make these little electronic modules. And so they pushed that work to suppliers. Companies like Bosch or Continental would make these little computers that run the fuel injection system. And then subsequent to that, over the currents of the last 50 years, a bunch of other things started to have a need for computers.

2:09:26And your seats suddenly became smart, and there was a computer that went with the seat. Your air conditioning became intelligent. There was a computer that went with that. Your sunroof had a computer. Before you knew it, the vehicle architecture was this proliferation of, you know, in some cars, 100 to 150 little mini, what we call electronic control units or computers, that run these specific domains. like the domain of an engine or the domain of a door or the domain of a seat. And it's precisely the opposite of what you would architect if you were thinking about it as a clean sheet. You would never say, I'm going to build a network architecture and software platform that has 150 different software code bases running 150 different little mini computers, which communicate through this sort of klutzy can architecture.

2:10:12That might all need to be independently updated at various points in the car's lifecycle. It's just like it's a total disaster. So what you'd say is I'd have as few computers as possible doing as much as they can. And so, you know, the fancy way we describe that now is it's a zonal architecture. It's a computer that controls a whole zone. And so Tessa, of course, developed their architecture like that. We, of course, developed our architecture like that. And a couple of the Chinese did as well. And the real benefit of this, besides just taking a lot of cost and complexity out, is that you can make updates really easily.

2:10:47And so if I want to change, let's say, the sequence of events that occur when you unlock the car, I don't have to coordinate amongst 15 different suppliers, the supplier for the horn ECU, the supplier for the door lock ECU, the supplier for the interior lighting ECU. I can do all of that in like a matter of minutes internally because it's running on our own software platform and it's all of our own code. And so just the emergence of regular updates, improved features, features that respond to dynamic customer needs, I think is a really big shift. And in the West, there's two companies that have that, Rivian and Tesla.

2:11:25And then in China, there's, as I said, more than five, less than 10 companies that have that. And if you don't do a software-defined architecture well, the ability to do like AI integrated into the vehicle or an AI-defined vehicle is enormously hard. So you have to have all these ingredients to be able to do like the broader architecture well. Anyway, so that's one big difference. And that actually underpins. We did a$5.8 billion software licensing deal with Volkswagen. and that technology I just described for network architecture, software OS, is what we license as part of a big partnership with Volkswagen Group.

2:12:00But the other is that the Chinese companies have just fundamentally lower cost structure. They have much lower labor costs. Their cost of capital is often free or more than free, meaning they get paid to build a plant or they get enormous government subsidies. And so you can just build a spreadsheet to look at this. It's not magic. They're building the cars. because they're not using some new type of material from outer space. It's using very consistent materials, what we use in the United States. Consistent joining and forming techniques and putting the cars together are very similar. They just have labor costs and capital costs are much, much lower than the United States.

2:12:37If you had to pick a gimmick that you do like, what's your favorite gimmick? Because the jumping car is a pretty good one. I showed that to my four-year-old, and he was like, I need that guard. I don't think it's good unless they're jumping a human. Oh, they've got to jump a human. They've got to give me a demo where they jump a human. Otherwise, it's just a cheap trick. I don't need to jump a paperclip. Okay. Or a pothole. Hey, you do need to jump a pothole. You've got a flat tire. I did blow out a tire. You blew out a tire this weekend. Anyway, favorite gimmick, if you had to pick one, what do you like?

2:13:10You know, there's the tank turn. There's a whole bunch of these different gimmicks. Are there any gimmicks that you think are fun? or maybe retro gimmick oh yeah i don't know um i mean they're just fun to watch i don't know if i we haven't again we haven't decided to put any of them in there there but in vehicles we do have something called kick steer in our vehicles which when you're operating because of a quad motor you can turn the vehicle on its axis that's good yeah it's sort of cool but yeah um i mean even there's a gear tunnel to some degree like stood out it was like the gear tunnel when that launched that was definitely like a, like a, Oh, wait, like this is different than normal.

2:13:48This is not something I see normally. And I feel like there's a balance. Like you don't want to be all, all gimmick all the time, but you need a little bit of style and a little bit of substance. You need some, we got to, we got to talk about, uh, we, we needed, I clearly needed an hour or 90 minutes. I know, I know. We got to, we got to talk about, uh, some of your guys' new releases, the chip, uh, and some of the new technical decisions that you guys are making around self-driving. Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So last week, we actually finally announced it. Amazingly, it didn't leak. We've been working on this since 2020, early 2022.

2:14:22But we've re-architected our whole self-driving platform around what we call an end-to-end train model. So the model is using the millions and millions of miles that are being accumulated through our deployed fleet of our Gen 2 vehicles, which launched a little more than a year ago, to build effectively a neural net or a foundation model for how to drive. And on our Gen 2 hardware stack, it's using an NVIDIA platform. It's got around 200 tops of compute. We've got 55 megapixels of cameras, a nice array of radars, but it's a great platform for building a data flywheel and for delivering. Ultimately, this will be able to deliver point-to-point autonomy, so you can put the address in the vehicle drive there.

2:15:04But to get to higher levels of autonomy, we've developed an in-house processor. Well, look at the timing. You guys did that perfectly. But the in-house processor, it's a significant step up. So it's 800 tops. It's got 35 billion transistors on the silicon. The neural net's capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. So this is like an incredibly powerful platform. and we brought it in-house just to, given the importance of vision, this is a vision-based robot, the vehicle, but we have other things we're doing in the vision-based robotic space as well. And so we came to the view that having our own inference was going to be really valuable.

2:15:47But it took the better part of almost four years to build the team, develop it. These are things that take a tremendous amount of capital. We're working with TSMC on making it. But yes, we're excited about that. And then we also include upgraded cameras, and we have a new LiDAR, which is another sensing modality that sits at the top of the windshield, which will help us raise the capability of the vehicle ultimately to what we call level four, which is think of it as the vehicle can operate empty or without anybody in the driver's seat. So it could pick your kids up from school or drop you at the airport, these kinds of things.

2:16:24Is LiDAR dangerous? I was telling Jordy that there was a LiDAR system that if you pointed your phone at it, it would damage the phone. And of course, you know, he said, well, if it's damaging the phone, can't be good for your eyes. How do you tell customers that, OK, our LiDAR is safe? Like what are the parameters to optimize around? Yeah, I mean, that was just a poorly designed LiDAR system that was doing that. this is our lighters up okay they don't burn out your phones and certainly don't burn out your eyes yeah okay as your boy this is great you're showing them in cheers so i mean the beauty of something a lot of light hours you can use the lidar and the radar array to help train our cameras because again this is a this is think of this as we're building a brain we're building a neural net driving the vehicle and it has the ability to see very very far distances much further than the human eye or a camera could see, but also see in perfectly dark conditions or perfectly bright conditions.

2:17:25And I imagine it helps with weather, like extreme weather as well? Yeah, well, the radar does particularly well where you have optical occlusion, like heavy fog or heavy rain or snow. Sure. And then the LiDAR does need line of sight because it is a laser. So the LiDAR is very helpful for training the cameras and training the radar system. But it's also very helpful for long range. So, I mean, it seems like you've solved the inference problem. Like the vehicle is ready to rock. Are you worried about or is it a challenge to like accumulate enough data? Are you getting enough data off the current fleet that you feel like you're competitive there?

2:18:13Are you GPU rich or GPU poor in the training phase? Is it about the algorithms? Do you need more AI researchers? What is the rate limiting factor to actually delivering something really top-notch? Yeah, so, I mean, the first is building this. When you say data flywheel, every vehicle that we, every Gen 2, so we launched in end of 2021, and that was what we called our Gen 1 vehicle. In the summer of 2024, we updated it with a complete new set of hardware under the skin, but really most importantly, changed the self-driving platform. And that's the beginning of this data accumulation platform. And what this is being used for is there's a whole host of trigger events that we identify interesting or important information from the vehicles that we're driving that gets back up through the cloud.

2:19:07And then we process them, as you said, on a large, you know, a large pool of GPUs. And this is, you know, we're talking like many thousands of GPUs, you know, enormous amount of investment in GPU spend here. But ultimately, that's being used to train the model. And so we create this very large model that runs offline, and then we distill it into something that's a little bit tighter and smaller that runs real-time in the vehicle on inference. And the beauty of expanding the inference capability with our Gen 3 platform is it allows us to run bigger models. And so as the model becomes larger and larger, I understand all the nuances and intricacies driving the need to compress that to run real time.

2:19:56I should say the ceiling of what it can run and therefore the need to compress it is reduced. We don't have to compress it as much. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. But this is by far biggest investment category. It's been interesting because when we first launched, a lot of the investment was going into the fundamentals of the business of ECUs, base software, high-voltage architectures, things like DC-DC converters, all this stuff to make the car real. Now those platforms are pretty stable, and we're now shifting. A lot of those R &D dollars are going really almost entirely towards AI and our self-driving platform.

2:20:33them. Yeah. Uh, we saw Luminar went bankrupt today. Uh, what, what do you think happens with that asset with their technology, uh, from here? Do you, do you think there's, uh, do you think there's a, I imagine, uh, there's a number, I can imagine a number of different types of businesses that would, uh, be interested in, in the technology and what they've built, but, uh, what's, what's your read uh yeah it's hard for me to comment it's it's not something we're looking at but you know i can't i can't comment on others it yeah there may be folks out there looking to buy it out of bankruptcy i don't know yeah we'll see convertibles are we you're selling my dad my dad really wants a convertible no i mean uh it uh correct me if i'm wrong the number one best-selling convertible in the united States, Jeep Wrangler.

2:21:32Yeah, Jeep Wrangler is very popular. Is it possible? So why don't we do it? Why don't you do it? So it's so funny you ask this because we, I don't think I've ever said this before, but why not say it here? We, on R1, we had a version of the roof that was removable early on and we actually tooled it and we decided not to launch it because it was just a lot of complexity. Yeah. but in the fullness of time at some point in ravine's life i'd love to have a version that has a top come off if nothing else just so that my dad will be satisfied amazing and i'll i'll buy i'll buy i'll buy one too i'll buy one confirmed within the long arc of history we are we are launching a convertible uh no thank you so much for coming on i'm excited to see like how you guys would approach the removable top.

2:22:22I think it would be very interesting. I don't like a lot of convertible design specifically, but if you guys were thinking about it and saying like, well, what's the actual technology we have today? What's the best way to make it? So anyways, this was a super fun conversation. And please come on again soon. We'll definitely reach out and have your team reach out as well if whenever you have news. Yeah. Thanks so much for hopping This is a lot of fun. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, RJ. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

2:23:04Let me also tell you about this post from Nihilism Disrespecter, who says, so is the U.S. economic plan really just build the machine god? Tyler, what do you think? Like, is the U.S.'s current economic plan really just build the machine? Yes. I would agree. I think it is. I think that is basically the plan. We need to nationalize the labs. Nationalize the labs? Why are we nationalizing the labs? That's the only way we can marshal the capital. Soon enough. It seems easy right now. Everyone's like, oh, you can raise so easily. Give me three years. Eventually, when you need$10 trillion. Or even, what is it?

2:23:42The$10 trillion training run is going to require. Yeah,$10 trillion cluster. There's only a couple ways you can get that. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's a way that the government can foot the bill. Well, not fully nationalizing, right? There's got to be a way. Yeah, but I mean, certainly, you know, maybe not nationalized, but there's a lot of ways where it's like it probably does make sense in some sense to subsidize intel, stuff like that. Well, react to this, the fact that Sergei Karayev says it's the annual reminder. the years left to escape the permanent underclass. It was infinity in 2020.

2:24:15It was infinity years to escape the permanent underclass in 2021. And for the last four years, it's been exactly two years to escape the permanent underclass. Feels like this AI thing isn't actually creating a permanent underclass like it was supposed to. Just two more years, bro. Just two more years. This time will touch different, yeah. Just two more years. Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless Vector in full text search built from first principles. on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Okay, so John, actually, I had a question. Please. So I'm always curious.

2:24:50It seems like in self-driving, there's Tesla and then there's Kama. And I think of those as kind of the leaders, right? Yes. But Kama, there's the open source. There's OpenPilot. Yes. So why? It seems like there just aren't that many manufacturers that are using OpenPilot. Is it like George Hodge? he just like hates big manufacturers and he wants to keep it. Well, so, so, I mean, I'm not exactly sure the open source license, I imagine that the open source license says you can't resell this. Now, the question is, if you bake it into a car, I would imagine most, most companies like Tesla sells self-driving as an upsell.

2:25:26So you buy a Tesla, it doesn't just give you the Tesla's full self-driving system for free. You have to pay an upgrade. I would imagine that Rivian matches that pricing model eventually. And so if you build on open source software that says you can reuse it, you can use this open source software, but you cannot sell it. I believe that, isn't that the Apache license? There's a few different licenses. I think MIT license, you can do whatever you want with. But there's one license that says you can use it, but you can't resell it. Yeah, not for commercial use. Exactly, exactly. Like the license transfers down the chain.

2:26:05And so if you're giving it away, if they give it to you, you have to give it to your customer. So you can't monetize that way. So there's that. There's also the possibility, again, this is just off the top of my head, but I would imagine that the NHTSA, National Highway Transport Authority, I believe that if it's coming from an OEM, from a vehicle manufacturer, and it's making claims about this is a level two system, the level three system, you can take your eyes off the road, you can take your hands off the wheel, that probably has to go through a certification that comma doesn't necessarily have to go through a certification for.

2:26:44Or so you're in this scenario where if you're effectively white labeling in comma, maybe you would be subject to a higher level of regulation because you're not a third-party product. So I would imagine that you still take a peek at the open pilot repo and see how they're doing it. But then ultimately, you go and build your own sort of proprietary stack. Yeah, I guess also for Rivian, they're using LIDAR, so it's just not compatible. Yeah, yeah, LiDAR. Also just like way more cameras too. Like the open pilot system is built on two cameras on the front of the device and then one on the back that looks at the driver's face.

2:27:27And so you have a wide angle and then sort of a telephoto that will show you the road far away and then the full surroundings. but most cars, Tesla, I'm sure the Rivian will typically have cameras on both side mirrors. They'll also have cameras on the back, cameras, you know, multiple on the front. So you just get way more data. And that's why I think he was pushing this concept of like the autonomy compute module three, ACM3 is capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. It's like, why do you need so many pixels? because you have multiple cameras that are feeding you 30 frames a second, 60 frames a second.

2:28:08And so you need to be processing all of that. Whereas OpenPilot is not designed for a camera that's mounted on the bumper because it doesn't have a wire that goes to the bumper. It's just a phone that's stuck to the windshield effectively. One more note. I believe Rivian uses Luminar as a supplier. Oh, interesting. And so hence why he couldn't comment. But he said he wasn't looking at buying, which is crazy. But I mean, they supply it for Volvo. But they might be using a different one going forward. Who knows? But they just made that announcement, so potentially. But I'm sure they have a variety of vendors that they're speaking with.

2:28:45Interesting. Oh, well. Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. How did you sleep last night? Are you back in the game fully? Holiday season's upon us. I slept absolutely. Holiday parties are here. Brutal night's sleep. I got a 93, though. Saturday. Caught up. Saturday was rough. The holiday party came through. I made it out with a 69. Not good. Avoid them. Avoid the VC holiday party entirely. If you care about your sleep, go to AIDSleep.com. It's an exceptional sleep without exception. I got a 54.

2:29:2054 on the night of the VC holiday party? Rough. Absolutely brutal. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized at AIDSleep.com. Well, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room, Scott Kapoor. Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Scott. How are you doing? Great to see you again. Thanks so much for hopping back on the show. I did not wear my elf outfit for today, but. No, we were this, just to do a little inside baseball, we were this close to putting on full Santa suits. and then the team said, you know, we're talking to a U.S. government official. I was going to say, I thought I was being aggressive.

2:30:01I went sans jacket today. I'm like, I took my... Very casual, very casual, but you're a serious guy. You're a serious guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're bridging the gap. But anyway, give us an update on what's new in Europe. Yeah, so we just announced a really exciting new program today that I'd love to tell you and your listeners about. Of course. It's called U.S. Tech Force. So this is a two-year program where we are recruiting a thousand engineers, product managers, data scientists, AI specialists into government. You'll work in government for two years. Literally every agency in the government basically is participating in this.

2:30:41So if you want to work at Department of War or Health and Human Services or State Department or IRS, whatever you want to do, like we've got opportunities. And the whole idea is how do we modernize the entire federal government infrastructure? So we've got a real challenge in government. Number one is just obviously we need more smart people who've got like modern software development, modern AI expertise. And then we're also really have not done a good job of recruiting early career people. So if you look at kind of people earlier in their career, only about 7 % of the federal workforce is early career.

2:31:09And at all the companies, all the companies that you guys talk to on a daily basis, I bet you that number is like 25 or 30%. So we are by at least a factor of three to one in a real world of hurt in terms of being able to recruit and retain early career people. So this is a two year program. We're doing this in partnership with about 25 of the tech companies that you all know and love. So, you know, Coinbase, Robinhood, Databricks, Snowflake, NVIDIA, XAI, OpenAI. And what those companies are doing is they're going to help us kind of create a program around this. So in addition to working in your day job in government, we will have a speaker series with, you know, we'll get Sam Altman to come, you know, talk to you and tell you about what it's like to work at OpenAI.

2:31:50We're going to do career development. And then at the end of the two years, these private companies have all agreed to kind of participate in a job fair where we're going to showcase all the work that these guys are done. And you know what? If you want to go in the private sector, God bless you. Go do that. If you want to stay in government, we'll find a job for you. But we're not asking you to make a 40-year commitment. We're asking people to do good for their country for two years, solve some of the world's biggest and toughest problems, and that we will gladly help you in terms of your private sector career opportunities.

2:32:16A thousand people, assuming this goes well, it feels extremely critical in this moment. Is this something you want to 10x for the next two-year period? Where does this go? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So I think there's two big opportunities here. One is just, look, there's way more demand than for 1 ,000 engineers and government. So yes, if this is 5 ,000, 10 ,000, I think we'll still be barely scratching the surface of what the needs are. And then more importantly, what we're trying to do is we're trying to do a more efficient way of hiring by centralizing a lot of the hiring. So at my department, OPM, we're going to do all the outbound recruitment.

2:32:53We're going to do all the initial screening. We're going to do all the initial assessments for people. And then we're going to hand the agencies a list of, you know, here's a thousand people who have passed like the technical qualifications you told us were necessary for the job. Now, you all, quite frankly, compete against one another and convince these people why they should work at HHS versus Department of War or others. And if this works, I think this is going to be a model for how we do kind of centralized hiring going forward in the government. So we hire a ton of program managers, HR people, financial analysts.

2:33:20Like there's no reason why an applicant should have to know that 40 different agencies are hiring for a program manager. All that person should need to know is like my skills are in demand by the U.S. government. I'm going to centrally apply to this, to OPM. And then my resume is going to basically get circulated to all the interested agencies. And then, you know, I basically kind of have my pick of the litter of figuring out which one is best aligned with my career objectives. Okay. Walk me through how someone in one of these roles in part of the tech force could actually have an impact. I worked at the Census Bureau.

2:33:56maybe 15 years ago. Yeah. And I would have been like a tech force person. Like I came in and they gave me like a stack of papers and a pencil. And they were like, we do stuff on pen and paper here. And I was like - Well, to be clear, John worked his way to managing a team of like 100 people very quickly as a college student. It was a very funny story. He made the most of it. But our job was to go around on a map and interview people in different houses. I was like, we should use Google Maps. Google, just put all of the, put all the addresses that you need to go to into Google Maps. And then you know exactly where you need to go that day.

2:34:31And of course they were like, no, no, no, we don't have a deal. That's heresy, my child. Exactly. Exactly. So like I didn't necessarily have the authority to just tell the entire, you know, organization as a, we're using Google now. Also, there's probably some sort of privacy thing. There's a whole bunch of reasons why, you know, you can't just fire it up. But how do you empower, like, the tech force folks to actually have, like, a positive impact that, like, reverberates throughout the organization? Yeah. So you are 100 % right. And this is why a lot of these programs traditionally have not accomplished what we'd hoped they'd accomplished.

2:35:02Because what happens is someone like you, a smart guy, let's assume that for a second, right? A smart guy gets dropped into the blob that is the U.S. government, basically, right? So you're right. Like, you will just – you basically have no authority. You have no ability to get things done. So what we're doing here is there's two critical differences we're doing here. Number one is if you are one of these thousand folks, you are going to go over as a team to an agency. So I'll give you an example. For example, at IRS, they probably could hire several hundred of these people. I don't know. So there are going to be several hundred people who will be part of this team.

2:35:34So number one, you're going to be part of that group. Number two, as I mentioned, we're going to create a programmatic piece around this. So your buddies who are at HHS or your buddies who are at State Department, you're going to see them, you know, once a month, twice a month at a speaker series, at dinners and stuff like that. So you're going to get real good networking across pollinization. And then thirdly, to avoid the problem you're talking about is we're not going to drop you into the blob. We're basically going to have you as a full unit basically reporting into kind of, you know, senior political leadership in those organizations.

2:36:03And they're going to decide what you do. So you're not going to come in here and like manage a contractor, which is unfortunately, you know, a lot of what does happen inside these organizations. But we're going to create basically a separate team that can do a lot of the bespoke development that has cover from the most senior political people in the organization. So you're totally right. And your experience is not unusual, by the way. That's that's a lot of what I've heard from people as we try to figure out what to do. And so our hope is that by combination of those things, we can avoid that problem.

2:36:29Because, look, for this to work, like what I'm trying to test is two things. One is like, you know, can we actually solve the modernization problem in government, which I'm quite convinced with smart people we can. And then two is we demonstrate that the work you do here is valuable, not just to the government, but valuable to the private sector, such that if you want to go get a private sector job, the private sector looks at what you did and says, wow, like those skills are generalizable to whatever Google, Facebook, you know, Coinbase, you name your favorite company. And so we've got to make sure that the people here are successful.

2:36:57What do you think are the most overlooked agencies, interesting kind of corners of the government that are going to be hiring through tech force? I think the guy from Gumroad, I saw him at the IRS. We've seen Doge people over at the Treasury. But what are some kind of overlooked opportunities? yeah so there's real i mean so like there are really good people quite frankly across the board but yes look the obvious ones of course are department of war you know it's really cool to do drone stuff and that's awesome and some people want to do that but you know like interior is doing a bunch of actually very cool stuff um uh energy so if you're interested in energy um you know they're doing a bunch of like supercomputer like stuff to basically you know make sure that uh they can have you know like quantum computing work and stuff like that they've got to solve like the broad energy grid problems.

2:37:50That's pretty cool. You know, CMS, so Dr. Oz over at CMS is trying to redesign kind of how consumers interact with CMS. So, you know, something like, for example, an integrated position directory, which I know sounds like very commonplace these days, but like that doesn't exist. So there's kind of a combination of what I would call like back-end infrastructure stuff. And then the other part of this that's going to be really cool is, you know, my friend and yours, I think you guys know Joe Jebbia, who's one of the co-founders of Airbnb, B, who's been sitting literally just behind me in the office here at OPM, helping us redesign our retirement services application.

2:38:22He's now starting this whole thing called Design for America, right, which is basically this very broad, like, you know, design-oriented relook at all the applications that are customer-facing in government. So you can think of this also as an opportunity to take the work he's doing on the front end, coupled with a lot of the modernization stuff that has to happen on the back end. And, you know, collectively, I think we can really transform kind of the way government services are delivered and, you know, quite frankly, provide a much better service to the American people. Fantastic. Very, very cool.

2:38:51Where can people go to get started? Is there just a web form to apply? Yes, there is. Yes, it turns out we have a web form. There we go. You can go. Joe Gebbia. Designed by Joe himself? By Gebbia? Exactly. Actually, Joe Gebbia. There we go. By the way, I just learned it's Jebbia, not Jebbia. So unless he's pulling a fast one on me, we all can correct our pronunciation. Joe Jebbia. So you go to TechForce. You can go to either at US TechForce, which is our X handle, or you can go to techforce.gov, or you can go to my Twitter at SKUPOR. All those places will point you to the right one. Apply. Tell your friends, tell your family.

2:39:34This will be a great like a dinner conversation over the Christmas table to say that, you know, you're now coming out of the closet in terms of working in the basement and you're ready to kind of get a real job. I love it. I'm very excited about this. I mean, I can see, I'm excited for people like all over the career kind of spectrum, people that have done 20 years in industry and see an opportunity to come back and serve the country in this way. And in the future, young people coming out of college that are highly motivated, have a skill set, and can apply it across all these different touch points.

2:40:12So very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Have a great holiday season. Yeah. Great to get the update. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about GetBezil.com. Shop over 26 ,500 monthly watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. And let me also tell you about Wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring views. What a great place to go for that. We're getting to the holiday ad reads. Hotel-grade amenities, treatment beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. You know the other really good gift this holiday season?

2:40:45Hit me. A billboard. Adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plant by measure out of home. Get your – put a billboard under the Christmas tree or at least a credit for a billboard. Yes, absolutely. Well, we have our next guests, Colin and Samir from, of course, the Colin and Samir Show. Welcome to the show. They're going to come and sit down here. Good to see you guys. Welcome, welcome. How are you? Good to see you in the Ultra Dome. Good to see you. How are you doing? Great to have you guys in person. Yeah, man. Finally. Can I raise this? Because everyone just became very aware of my height when you shook my hand.

2:41:27No, it's so bad. How do I do this? John's the tallest person here. He's the highest. I look like I'm under the desk right now. How do I raise it? Do you lean back? Stay off the wide. Stay on the tight, guys. Stay on the tight. Stay on the tight. You read my rider. Yeah, I know. I know. We're working. For a while, that wide was a 15 millimeter or something. No, it's too wide. And it looked insane. I looked way bigger than the guest. Now it's like evening out. What an incredible holiday vibe here, guys. Yeah, yeah. Look at this. Look at this signed. We got a signed holiday ornament. Wow. That's going straight to the top.

2:42:02We're excited for that. We were very, very close to being in full Santa suits. I had it out. It is Christmas week. You can see our little outfit. He's in it. He's in it. With the bells. I think we will be doing it. With the bells on the shoes. I do think we will be doing the Santa outfits tomorrow. This is maybe the last time we wear suits this year. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The rest is... Anyway, it's been a wild year for us. It's been a wild year for you. What have been the standout moments for you this year as you look back on it as two creators. I actually think we're in a standout moment right now in everything that's happening with Netflix and Warner.

2:42:39And the conversation around that, I actually think has a lot to do with YouTube creators and what has happened with YouTube. And I think between that and then what we just saw with Disney and Sora, I think these are two topics that it's worth getting into and giving our perspective as creators of what's happening. I feel like the notable thing is in all the antitrust debate and conversation, everyone's like, look, look at YouTube. Look at all that watch time. Look at all that watch time. Do you buy that? Do you buy the YouTube? Because there is a narrative in Hollywood that Warner Brothers and Netflix are too powerful together.

2:43:14It's too crazy. And then a lot of people are saying, hey, YouTube's like running away with the whole game. This is a sideshow. Where do you stand on it? Yeah, I mean, look, Greg Peter said that as a quote, which is right. That like, even if you put these two together, it's still smaller than YouTube, which is such an interesting justification of why the deal should go through. But I think the reality is like Neil Mohan was just named time CEO of the year. And I think his positioning and what YouTube has done really well, two guys who've been on the platform for 15 years, his positioning is they build the best stage.

2:43:48Essentially evaluate it like an open mic night for the internet. It's just anyone can go on there and see. You literally don't know. We don't know if like the greatest piece of content could be uploaded today. YouTube has no idea. And I don't think you can compete with that. The fact that they don't pay for content. Yeah. The fact that people will upload with the chance of getting distribution and not even looking for the economics. The economics are there. Like if you can create content, obviously that gets millions of views. Like there are many ways to monetize, but that's pretty dangerous in a good way for YouTube to sit in that place where like someone can just, there's a guy who spent two years making a documentary about birdwatching and was like, I'll just put it on YouTube for free.

2:44:32And it's incredible. His name's Owen Riser. It's an amazing documentary. It's called Listers. It's, it has like almost 3 million views now. And he didn't know how he wanted to monetize it. He had offers from streamers, but just didn't want to do it. We'll put it on YouTube and put his Venmo link in the description. No way. And he, in the time we talked to him, which was like two, three weeks after he put out the doc, he had been Venmoed$75 ,000. Which is unbelievable. But like that, that this model of just kind of like, I don't think we talk enough about the fact that you can just upload a video or what we're doing right now is just being, it's just live.

2:45:09Right. And like to do that 20 years ago was impossible. And so I think it's going to be really challenging when you're Netflix and you're, you know, spending money on something like Stranger Things and like you're, you're placing a bet, you're placing a bet that you think the audience will like it based on historical data or based on packaging actors and like old school Hollywood, you know, technique. Whereas YouTube's like, yeah, like I think you'll like this. And if you don't, I'll just get data to figure out what you'll like next. Well, and I think that's why Netflix and Paramount value this IP to such an extreme degree, because that's the one thing I feel like YouTube hasn't done, because creating really valuable IP, I think, takes decades.

2:45:54Like, you have to build it up. It seems like no amount of money can just create a new Superman or a new Spider-Man. And it feels like we would have gotten that out of YouTube, just the broad economic forces, or we certainly would have got it out of Netflix. And we have it a little bit with Squid Game and certain things, to your point. But it just, with all the tech money, all the money, there's so much of incentive, but there's just no shortcut for, okay, this has been, my dad watched this. And I watched it with my dad. And then I watched it with my kids. And like, I'm going on Generation 3 to Star Wars right now.

2:46:24When I think about YouTube IP, I think of like Miss Rachel, which is like, I think at some point she could trade herself out and have an actor. I think about Dude Perfect and Good Mythical Morning. So Rhett and Link with Good Mythical Morning, they're on 3 ,000 episodes right now of a morning show that people have grown up on. It's been around for near two decades now. It's daily. I think there's a lot of value to what they've built. They've built a big company with writers. They could either someone else could take over that show or they can sell this catalog of relatively evergreen content. Dude Perfect is expanding right now.

2:47:03They've been around also for almost two decades. They just launched Dude Perfect Outdoors. They launched a new podcast. Like they can expand that universe pretty well. So I do think like really good IP is building on YouTube. It's all going to take time. But again, the amazing thing about the platform that is YouTube is that, you know. I guess the question is like you pointed this out to me the first time you were on the show was that there are, I forget exactly the stat, but it was something like there's a ton of young kids where their favorite person is someone no one else knows. And it's sort of a referendum on the nim cell phenomenon that you can be niche, huge in that niche, like you are getting stopped for a signature by that fan or never heard of them.

2:47:49Like, you know, just a bunch of people that are like, I mean, the four of us could walk down the street here. Exactly. And there could be people who are like, holy shit it's John and Geordi and then and then have to explain who everything about what you do yes and then the opposite whereas that's not true for spider-man that's not true for star wars there's certain things that have broken through too it's it's household name level and I think mr. beast has done that yeah for sure um dude perfect yes to some degree but it just feels like it's a function it's not saying that it can't happen it's just a function of time more than money or anything else and I think if dude perfect 20 years super impressive incredible but it takes 50 to be a 50 year old property.

2:48:28Like there's just no, we had the acquired guys on the show and we were talking about like, why should we ring the gong for you? What is it? And, and the metric that I was the most like envious of was they've been doing it for 10 years. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, yeah, I wonder if it's actually a function of you need like three generations to grow up on the content in order for it to be durable IP. That is true. We're just getting to the point where there are creators like rent link or Dude Perfect that are going towards 20 years. So we're seeing these creators do this for the first time. I think on the point of Netflix, YouTube, Warner, we'll see what happens, but I do think it's interesting that Netflix, in order to compete, needs to acquire a bigger catalog.

2:49:10And maybe, maybe, maybe with what they're doing, they're starting to also offer deals to podcasters. At what point do they just open up the platform and say, here's an upload button? I think in 2026 there's going to be... Whoa! I think there's going to be a creator program of some sort. Because even if you... Maybe it's more curated, but... I've heard you can do that on Amazon Prime. I'm pretty sure if you have a document or you can just upload and say, I'm going to charge$20. Yes, you can do that. I think if you look what Netflix did with Mark Rober, massive YouTube creator, they took his top 10, basically greatest hits from YouTube, repackaged them.

2:49:43They're on Netflix right now and it was a top 10 show on Netflix, number one kids show. Wow. They also signed a deal with him to make a new series, a reality show. He also did a Christmas special with Elmo, directed by another creator, Daniel Thrasher. So very cool. But that shows me that they have an openness to content that I don't think they would have been open to a couple of years ago, that maybe they wouldn't have deemed premium enough. Sure, sure, sure. Right. But I mean, at a certain point, like just even just the AdSense is, if you just took the AdSense from a Mr. Beast video, like that's enough to go shoot a Hollywood.

2:50:15That is the budget of a Hollywood 20-minute production. Here's the other. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I think Jimmy's AdSense is very different than other people's AdSense. I think what you guys have probably experienced is sponsorship dollars are going to drive the majority of production. But my concern with Netflix and as they move into podcasting is like their appetite for niche communities. Because they tried this with fitness at one point. They did a partnership with Nike where they were trying to compete essentially with Peloton. They're like, maybe people will come here to work out. The audience was too small.

2:50:47And they don't do well with niche. And our world, like we just talked about, it's like it's choose your own adventure from a media perspective. And YouTube is great at that. Well, here's what. Like taking K-pop Demi Hunters and making it a national conversation, making Squid Game a national conversation. That's the game that they're in. The big thing that Netflix is missing and maybe their opportunity to grow watch time is there's nothing real time on Netflix at all. So much of the time that I want to watch content, it's like I'll watch some geopolitical like creator on YouTube. I'll watch like what happened, F1 commentary reaction.

2:51:25Netflix has nothing for me if I want to kind of understand what happened in the last 24 or 48 hours. And I just feel like a lot of watch time on the Internet is that kind of more real time. There's like evergreen entertainment content that Netflix is dominant in. And YouTube, but YouTube has both. And so I think that can explain some of the differential. Well, I think this actually, the conversation moves nicely into the Disney Sora thing. And largely because something - What was your immediate reaction to the news? To Disney Sora? Yeah. It's like, it was going to happen. I'm surprised they're the ones who did it.

2:52:01But I think what Colin and I have been kicking around is like the video gamification of everything, where even if you look at prediction markets, right? So like you guys obviously have a partnership with Polymarket. and you look at Kalshi, Polymarket, like everything is a video game, right? And if we look at the early origins of YouTube, it was video games. If you look at the early origins of Twitch, it was video games. And I think our expectation as audience members is that all of our media is interactive. We can play with it. We can touch and feel it. And it's only getting increasingly more interactive.

2:52:30So the Disney-Sora conversation, especially like as generative AI has come into the picture, it's like generative AI itself is entertainment. So me generating images and videos is time I'm spending entertaining myself. Right? It's not just utility. It's entertainment. And I think, obviously, if you have this IP you guys just talked about, it takes 50 years to build IP. Look at Disney's IP. It's hundreds of years. You have this IP. How do you monetize it? Well, what's really interesting, my assumption, I haven't read into this if this is what's happening, but with Sora is that if you use one of the 200 characters that's licensed to Sora over the next three years, there's likely some fraction, you know, micro payment going back to Disney.

2:53:10And if it's not, I think that will be the model where essentially, yeah, I'll give you Mickey Mouse. Just give me like a fraction of a penny every time someone uses Mickey Mouse. Now, like from an audience perspective, it's interactive media. It's more fun for me to prompt and generate Mickey Mouse in the context that I want him. And then for Disney, like they have this IP that can be generating like very small amounts of money, but you'd scale that out to like 30 million people using it or 20 million people using it. It's like that gets pretty significant. It's kind of their move towards UGC in the same way that Netflix needs to open up a creator model.

2:53:44Let's open up our IP for a lot of creators. And like they said, some of it's going to come to Disney plus. Yeah. I just, I think it's, I thought I was smart for a lot of reasons. I think, I think open AI specifically needed some competitive edge around. I think people were nano banana. has like really broken through. I have two accounts. I have an account that I just have free models for the different labs. So I did the same prompt yesterday with Gemini and ChatGPT for an image generation. And Gemini was like 10 seconds. ChatGPT on the free plan takes like, I didn't even come back. I didn't actually go back and see it, but it took like multiple minutes.

2:54:23And so having something that gives them a reason to drive a bunch of new paid subscriptions, I think, and like specifically get the next generation. Disney products are like a drug for children. They're addicted, right? And I think it's like adding a personalization layer that didn't really exist for Disney. Like you go to the parks and you could like do as a, have a meal with a character or whatever. And that was personalized or take a picture or something like that. But I think if you're Disney and you're trying to drive more signups to Disney +, more retention, more park visits. I think it's actually smart because if you put the only thing my three-year-old knows about AI and he doesn't even call it AI, but he's like, make a dino picture.

2:55:09He just, that's like stuck in his head because it's such a fun experience of like, we take a picture, we take a selfie and then we just make it, make us look like dinosaurs or whatever. He loves it. Right. So Disney doing that and getting, you know, I'm sure a lot of people will say this is like terrible and shouldn't happen, but getting a bunch of young people to have that experience of like making a Disney part of their like everyday experience in life I think is gonna be have like powerful downstream effects. I feel like Sora was a bit of a Napster moment for visuals like Sora came out and sort of broke the mold of what we would expect and a lot of people started using the IP anyway and we were like wait you're supposed to pay for this stuff yeah right and then like a new model of streaming has emerged and I don't think artists are particularly super excited about that model but they've adjusted right and i think this is another moment where it's like oh okay the way that we monetize this art has shifted because of technology and it has just happened and disney in a way is now i think just coming over me like this is already happening people are already using our ip in ways we didn't want them to on sora so let's just get involved some control and create the new model let's come up with the new model for how we monetize i actually think even if you look at what you guys are doing with this show, like I always think about a live show like yours as like your open source, you're giving open source material to the internet in a way, right?

2:56:26People can clip this and play with it and interact with it and talk about it and retweet it. And it's like, it's a playable medium. And I would assume that there's some clips of this show that have extremely high viewership that no one in this building made. For sure. Right? And so that - Some of the clips with, yeah. The best performance. If you probably took like individual assets that got the most views, probably at least five out of the top 10 were posted by other people that were just driving. The most viewed clips of the Colin and Samir show are not made by our team. Wow. For sure. If you go on TikTok, search Colin and Samir show, you search them on our interviews.

2:57:03Like they are all clipped by other people in ways that we wouldn't have clipped them. Or it's even reframed. Yeah, it's reframed. It's no longer reframed around your show. It's reframed around a clip. Totally. We can't even compete with our own clips. Yeah. You know, we try doing like, oh man, that person already put it out. We tried to compete with the internet for our own clips of our own show and we couldn't compete. And that's where I think the perspective of like Disney and Sora is like, yeah, just like here's material to play. Do you think a content ID type system will come for clips and from AI?

2:57:33I think it has to. I mean, I think YouTube has precedent with content ID. I think we'll all as creators live in the world where we're like, yeah, you can use my – the same way that Sora kind of showed it. It's like, yeah, you can use my face. But I think there will be, there'll have to be a revenue share model. Like I think for this to work properly, and maybe nobody cares about this. Well, it's not just revenue. So it's like multi-share because it can't just be what it is. I don't know exactly if it is this way currently, but there's the thing about like, I could be using some clips from your show and clips from this show and this.

2:58:08But as soon as I put Mariah Carey's like, you know, Christmas song in there, like she's getting 100 % of the revenue. She owns it, right? and there's like only one claimant right now. But they'll need to be like slices where it's like, okay, your face was on screen for this. I don't want to say it, but I'll say it. It feels like Web3 was starting to get onto this with fractional ownership, right? That's interesting. Where you can tokenize yourself in a way of like, yeah, if this token is used, I receive X percent. You may or may not actually need the blockchain underlined, but like there's this idea of fractionalization.

2:58:37But there was an idea of that where like Grimes gave her voice out, right? And like, it was like a 50-50 rev share if you used her voice. And like, I think that maybe will happen. But I also think just the internet and like YouTube specifically, I think will look pretty different in that not only will we say you can use my IP in my face, but I think you'll take like the full length episode of your guys show or let's say our show. And I think you'll just type in, you know, I got seven minutes. Can you just give this to me in seven minutes? Like you can use their voice and like their style of animation, but just like, give me the, give me the seven minute version of this.

2:59:10I think if you've ever played with Notebook LM, you start to see how manufacturing your own entertainment where I could go, give me TBBN, give me Colin and Samir, and give me Acquired last episode, but summarize it all for my 21-minute drive connected to Google Maps. Yeah, I'm always interested in where that lives. Like, does that live in the consumer side or on the platform side or on the creator side? Because, like, we literally do that. We have a 20 to 30-minute cut down of the three-hour show that we cut down, we edit. Diet TBP. Diet TBP. Very familiar. It's very, yeah, it's been really good.

2:59:48It's so funny because I've seen other people create, like, diet versions of their show now. and when we were first like conceptualizing the show based on people's feedback of like I want the show in 20, 30 minutes I was like oh we'll just call it Diet TVPN it's like all of the flavor like way less calories and John was like diet? like does that make any sense? but it is a good it's like not an industry term it's not an industry term but it makes more universal sense but anyway I think you'll be able to make your own version of Diet TV yes But you'll have to say yes to that. And again, there will have to be some new way of like, yes, so long as I'm compensated when that happens.

3:00:33But if it is us, you know, Ben and David and you guys in one episode, like also the question is who's weighted heavier. Yeah. Right. Is it acquired? Because they're like the luxury brand of the Rolex of the space. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. That's funny. You may not even have to ask the platform to do it from an audience perspective. You think the platform just does it? I think at some point, yeah, they're like, we know better than you based off of what you've already told us in your behavior. Potentially. But what's odd is that the AI models, they're really good at a lot of things, but they have not yet been good at clipping.

3:01:06Like you don't want to go up against the internet, but I would say, you know, if there's five mega viral Colin Samir clips that you guys didn't clip, those are clipped by humans, though. Those are humans. Those were not in AI. 100%. Because as soon as someone could do it, they would definitely run, oh, yeah, run the prompt over all their content. Let me put it out. I'll try and monetize it. There's decent platforms that can get you like 65 % of the way there. But, yeah, you're right. They're good as tools. They're good as tools alongside the human. But the editorial, it's an editorial question.

3:01:35There could be this show generated by AI, right? Like, I'm just saying, if you just look at the technology, like, we could ingest news and figure out how to give it in, like, an audio. Contextualize it. Yeah, form, contextualize. But it's not as fun. It's like, that has no, I'm not. It's also nowhere near as special. Like, there is something very special about what happens here day to day. Yeah. It's hard to put your finger on it. It's set and changing and, like, feeling like you're here in the moment. Totally. Yeah, I think to clarify, like, if anyone's listening to this being like, oh, my God, they're, like, this is the dystopian world of content.

3:02:07There is no world where I see, like your guys' show as an example is like there is more room for interesting creative now than ever. If you are thinking about what is, this is maybe a bizarre way to put it, but what is like a uniquely human format. It's why we've invested more in live events. Like we did our first big live event in New York in September. That was with Google, right? They were a sponsor, yeah, and it was super fun and it was great. and there's 500 people in a room. And I think you feel like there's going to be a rise in live events for sure. Obviously, I imagine you guys are going to do some version.

3:02:44We haven't cracked it. You'll do something where people can show up and people will die to show up to it. Yeah. Acquired, obviously, had 6 ,000 people in the Chase Center. Like, I think good creative will always win. But I do think, back to the Netflix conversation, the question is, like, who is the arbiter of taste in all of this? and I think the old Hollywood world is like, Hollywood is the arbiter of taste. We're going to show you what good is and Netflix is that, right? They're going to curate stuff editorially. I think that still matters. I don't want to suggest it doesn't matter. I enjoy that.

3:03:15The other side is that the audience is the arbiter of taste and the curators of what's good and that's the creator side. I would, as a Netflix subscriber, I would be excited for them to have a corner of Netflix that's just history content from independent creators. just like effectively like providing because johnny harris yeah stuff like that because i've been on youtube uh to fall asleep at night i can't watch anything tech or business related because it just riles you up a bunch of ideas so i have to just like it's got to be like 30 years old like it's got to be like history and something i've noticed recently is like there's a bunch of channels getting a lot of views that are getting served in the algorithm uh that are clear and i only clock that it's ai because they'll use images and then there'll be like a talk track and there's a bunch of creators that have just nailed this format over the years but i'm starting to hear like this battle wasn't just a fight it was it was a turning point in history and like very like clockable as ai and so now like in the same way on amazon as a consumer you're like i just want to buy stuff on amazon that's from brands that are over 50 years old because then i know that it's totally i know that it's not like somebody just you know that's how i feel shop.

3:04:30I sometimes will get caught with a product that I'm like, Thank you. hmm maybe i want that but if it's on tiktok shop i'm like i don't know i don't even know with TikTok right now. I've never been met with silence for that. It's the opposite. We're bad creators. We don't have TikTok on our phones. We have one friend that sends us TikTok links, and I've never watched any of them. Not a single one. When Larry comes out and says, I fully control TikTok now. It's mine. I've got it here on my phone. I trust it. You can trust it. Then I'll give You know what it is? You guys don't have TikTok, so we'll tell you about this.

3:05:22There's like AI creators now. And that is very bizarre and dystopian to me because even me, and maybe I'm getting to that age where I'm part of the cohort that can't tell, but I can't tell. Oh, so you're not talking about like there is a creator that creates various animals being pulled over at DUI checkpoints and like that's their shtick. I'm talking about like an AI I generated human creator who looks human. There's this. Are people in on the joke? It's just the pace. They're not. They're not in on the joke. It's the pace and the tools really have opened up a world where it is easy to create.

3:05:57I mean, I've seen these and I've been like, let's see if I can make one. Is that sort of the biggest trend of 25, you think? I'm super interested at a more tactical level, what's changing on YouTube? Because obviously we've been through the eight-minute shift and the 20-minute shift. and then clickbait to the counter switching to AVD and all these different little moments have happened. Is it fair to say that AI is the biggest change in 25 or was there another kind of meta shift that you sort of noticed? One that we talk a lot about is the shift from podcasts being the meta when you think about the last presidential election.

3:06:39Obviously, podcasts played a major part. if you look at the amount of podcast appearances and viewership that Trump got for Kamala Harris. Like, it's just, the graph is unbelievable. Yeah, and I had this whole take during the election that it was about watch time, too. Because the crazy thing is that not only would Kamala go on like a smaller show with a smaller audience, but she would only do a 45-minute hit and Trump would be there for three hours. And I'm like, we know AVD. Like, watch time is important. We actually clocked and we wrote down how much time And I think for Trump, it was like 16 hours available or maybe more.

3:07:14And for Kamala, it was like under two. And it's just like as a voter, if you want to just sit and be like, I want five hours of content from this person to make my decision. I'm going to listen to five hours of both. And there's not five hours of one. That's a tough sell. Anyway, that looks extremely real. I would never guess that. I don't know if I can show a camera. I don't even know what camera is looking at me right now. Oh, there you go. There you go. I don't know if you can tell. So here's the thing that's going to happen is people are going to start to realize if this person didn't post at all before 2025, they're not real.

3:07:49Because I feel like this year the models got good enough. Where were you in 2019? Check the early Instagram. My understanding of how things have changed on YouTube is that if I was to zoom back to when I first got on the internet, I think the amazing thing was like, it was all information. We could access information in a crazy way. Like at least when I was a kid, we would go to like the library and go to the library and try and find like a book about something. And that changed when we could search Ask Jeeves or Google or AOL or Yahoo. And like we could just find out things. And that was crazy.

3:08:27And I think the information era was capped with the rise of social media and like Facebook specifically. When Facebook came about, it wasn't just information about the world or fun facts. It was information about people. And information about people was like really interesting and had gossip connected to it and had like voyeurism connected to it. It was just like this fascinating world that mirrored celebrity culture. And that then ushered in the next era, which was the attention era. And the attention era was kind of brought all the way forward by, you know, someone like Mr. Beast, Jimmy, who was like, here's human psychology and here's how these algorithms, what they favor, what are the incentives of the internet, and let's push that forward.

3:09:05And that's like we got to that point with the meta of YouTube being all about information and attention. And I think this next era that we're in and the biggest shift that's happened in YouTube over the past year has been a shift towards perspective. Information and attention void of perspective is just completely uninteresting. And I think that actually wasn't the case. I mean, you're talking about like history YouTubers. We were talking to this car creator, James Pumphrey, who used to work at Donut Media. And he was telling us like he could, he, at Donut, they could get a million views of like the entire history of Volkswagen.

3:09:36Yeah. But that, he can't do that anymore. He has to add perspective to it. The title has to be like why, or how Volkswagen. Why Volkswagen is cooked. Yeah. Or how Volkswagen turned their back on us. Right. And that has perspective suggested. And I think we can access information now very easily through LLMs, through search, through anything. We can actually also access like attention driving things. meaning like scrolling TikTok captures my attention. I don't think I'll like remember any of it or it just won't matter, but it can fill my need for something to capture my attention. But perspective, I think is the thing that makes it stick in your brain of like, I'm coming to these guys, to Jordy and John for their perspective.

3:10:18I can get this information at other places. And so I think we actually saw that quite a bit on YouTube where the Mr. Beastification, the kind of like big idea that drives a ton of attention is like still kind of interesting, but it's not as interesting as it used to be. And, and someone like Marquez Brownlee, who does the smartphone awards, you're like dying for his perspective on what was the best phone of the year. And I think he has a lot of longevity because his content is rooted in perspective. Emily Sundberg's another great example, like that's perspective. And so I think perspective has always mattered, but it feels like that era has really been pushed.

3:10:56Using Marquez as an example, do you think that which offers more perspective or like Waveform podcast, his podcast, where he can kind of riff, it's unscripted versus a review where he has the requirements to tell you the price, the value, the specs. Does he have more, a longer leash to give more perspective in the unscripted format? Or is there an equal amount of perspective because he is who he is and he brings his perspective everywhere? I think Marquez in the face to camera is the best perspective to Marquez. And people had problems with that, like last year with Humane. Oh, yeah. People felt like his perspective carried so much weight that it could...

3:11:39Bankrupt a company. Same with Fisker. Same with Fisker. Yeah, Fisker. The car. The car review. But I think that also goes to show like how much his perspective matters and how much someone like that. So I remember he said, he said a bad, he told us a bad review doesn't tank a company, a bad product tanks a company. Yeah, of course. But yeah, I mean, all that to say again, like I think if you're, I would be wearing a humane pin. I think we're not for the review. I mean, it can accelerate a demise though. I think even if you look at like Ryan Trahan and like his videos, they lead with like something like a really fun idea of like, I stayed in one star hotels or something.

3:12:15but then his perspective gets layered within 30 seconds on top where he's like his, his job is to leave a five-star review at this one-star place because like he wants to find the good in the world. And that even that is like perspective. Yeah. Right. And so I think, I think POV is like, that's the era we're in on the internet. Like if you're just delivering me information. I mean, and POV can be style. It can be tone. Like I think you guys are a great example. There are a lot of people talking about what you're talking about. They're not talking about it in the style that you're talking about it with the same tone.

3:12:45Yeah. When I think about the Mr. Beast copycats, I think like there's distinctly a lack of perspective and a lack of view. It is just like, okay, yes. Like if Mr. Beast does this and you clone it and rotate that piece, like you have a slight iteration, that's enough to get the views, but it wasn't actually something that was like inspired or trying to push. I think you can navigate how to get views right now. Like you can navigate how to get attention on the internet. If you study it, if you study it enough, you know, you can navigate it, but it doesn't mean people who remember you what's the state of the thumbnail industry the thumbnail sub industry well on that note i feel like there's this emergence of the creator with short form video being so powerful for discovery there's an emergence of a content creator that might have 200 000 followers and no viable business or even path to a viable business because they have like a bit that they run that's really funny and so they can get attention in a certain audience but then like the pathway to monetizing it you see this with like certain kind of accounts on instagram where it's like your pathway to monetizing is like online casino advertising exactly uh and so that's kind of like that's kind of like ubi for people that are funny online it's just like you can that is a hilarious take that's unbelievable uh and i i totally agree with you but that and i actually somewhat appreciate it because there's this guy there's a guy who actually sponsored by steak and he's hilarious there's a guy who is so funny i just want him to uh it's like get a better sponsor agent something uh well i don't care what sponsor he has really i'm not i'm not i don't that's i don't buy products based on like some guy that i see for 10 seconds uh but i do yeah this like sort of ubi for people that are funny online right now is like gambling and it's dark but at the same time there's a dark side to it but it is what's the light side to it just that people are making money well the light side is that is that on a personal level i get enjoyment out of it and i'm like he's providing it it's effectively i mean the same thing happened with sports uh sports podcasting there's like a massive bubble in sports casting the the the white pill is that like there's a lot of people that have jobs important podcasting and that's a pretty fun job the chinese micro dramas right like chinese micro drama is like real short actually on the drive over here saw ads for real short, like big billboards for real short.

3:15:06If you're unfamiliar, it's like if soap operas were on TikTok, you know, to swipeable feed. Well, yeah, the crazy thing is that those have been so successful, and it's, to me, very much the same idea as Katzenberg's short form play. No, it's not the same idea. Dude, that was when we went into, I'll never forget walking into the Quibi pitch meeting where they invited a bunch of creators to come pitch shows. When we walked into their office, It's like the play there was like spend a ton of money on content. Like they were like, we have a Spielberg movie and an Aaron Sorkin movie. It's like$100 ,000 a minute for some shows.

3:15:41Yeah, but they were like, what is it on real short? It's higher than TikTok, right? I don't want to totally discount what you said. You're right, Jordy. Like what they said in the meeting, I remember, I'll never forget it. They were like, I was like, when does someone watch this? And they said when someone is waiting for the bathroom, like in line for the bathroom. they'll they'll they'll flip it on and watch like seven a seven minute increment of a show and i remember being like but people watch people look at instagram during that time like how are you going to pull me into so yeah i guess i guess i guess it's hyper it's hyper it's hyper competitive uh for that time but i think there's something to be said for uh slow content that's made in a slow format which is like with production i've been thinking about like fast and slow content we make fast content from a production standpoint from a production standpoint like there's people that make content john's content on tech historically was slow content yeah it's been two three weeks making a video right you put it out you get a bunch of views we're the opposite very fast we're making uh three hours of content a day with like three hours of prep a day um and i think like taking the taking a a form factor like short form video and then putting a different type of content through it, which is this more cinematic, highly produced content.

3:17:01It works in the form of like real short. Yeah, but they're spending a lot less. But also, they're formulating in a way where they're earning your attention every 60 to 90 seconds. There's a hook every 60 to 90 seconds to get you to keep watching. You guys know how the economics works? No. Okay, so how it works is like if you download real short or drama box, basically they're spending like typically$200 ,000 for a 90 minute show. Right. And it's, that's cut into like a hundred slices. And how, what's happening is you, when you download real short, you're getting like tokens. So it's kind of like Roblox money, like Robux, right?

3:17:39So you're getting these tokens and you have to buy more. And the first 11 swipes are free. You go past the 11th, you got to make a payment. You got to spend tokens to keep watching. Every swipe you're spending tokens. Interesting. And, you know, we interviewed a director on our show who's directed 20 of these. And he is acutely aware of the fact that, like, some of his content has been viewed by 30 million people. And when you're making micropayments, again, at that scale. Making 30 to 40 bucks if someone finishes your movie. And it can be upwards of 30 to 40 dollars if someone finishes the movie.

3:18:11Huge. And the max budget is 200 ,000 to make these. Wow. Now, the content itself is like, you know, it's not. It's soap opera. It's soap opera content. It's not, you know, it's all speaks to like the most aggressive, you know, just versions of what people want on the Internet. But the silver lining, the reason I brought this up, the silver lining is that people in Hollywood are working. People who are directors, writers, cinematographers, this is where they're working. I mean, it's by no means a perfect model in terms of like compensating actors and people working, but they are working. Yeah. There are opportunities.

3:18:46So I can unlock coins right now. on real show. If you want to read some of the titles on real show. I'll read a bunch. American Sniper, the last round. Okay, I was actually going to ask, is it all romantic-y or romance? I think it's mostly romance. American Sniper, the last round, that does seem like something I would watch. Okay. I'm down for that. Step aside, I'm the King of Capital. That also seems directly targeted. John gets one shot. Did you prep this for me? It might have a geotag on it. It seems like it does. Maybe, John, you get into acting in these. Yeah, some of these are a little scantily clad maybe this Christmas the billionaire married a homeless girl that's kind of interesting didn't China just ban that format they did?

3:19:28that's right China banned there's a very popular type format for a show basically the Hallmark movie very successful guy marries or falls in love with like a very normal, a normal woman. Um, and apparently China is like, has a top down mandate to like not do this kind of content because it's creating unrealistic expectations. Oh, I'll be, I will definitely just be randomly plucked from obscurity by a billionaire. And, and it's like, well, like statistically that's not going to happen. So maybe like marry your high school crush and have kids and build a family, uh, instead of just waiting around for a billionaire to come pluck you out of obscurity because you've seen so many of those stories, which is like a fascinating problem to have.

3:20:19Yeah, amazing that stories are that popular that it's gotten to that point. Oh, totally, totally. Yeah, I do wonder, I mean, we've had so many discussions about the downstream effects of TikTok-ification or YouTube-ification or whatever, Mr. Beastification. I wonder if we're going to be having that discussion in a year or two because it feels like people are just learning what Real Short even is. Yeah, for sure. It's early, it's early stage. Obviously, the business is working now. what happens to a generation raised on it? Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know. The last thing I'll say just to close the loop on like what I think big metas that have changed on YouTube.

3:20:52Another one is length of content and serialization. Meaning like creators are approaching YouTube as if they're making a show like a series that you can binge. Cleo Abrams is a great example. Like Huge If True is a show. It has a format to it. It has an intro card. That could, similar to Mark Rober, be pulled onto Netflix I was an explainer show that explains cool science formats. And from the era even when I was watching you as a YouTuber, we all weren't looking. We knew we were making content that fit a format that should have been repeatable if we were at our best. We weren't making a show.

3:21:28And now people are making a show. And a YouTube channel is a TV show, largely because it's watched on connected TVs. Even our show, over 50 % of our watch time comes from a connected TV. and our average view duration is 48 minutes on TVs. But you look at like Mark Robert. Thank you, guys. Hit the gong. Hit the gong. Hit the gong for that, for the obscure YouTube metric that only the real ones recognize. Hit the gong. Whoa. See, that's how you hit the gong. That's a great hit. That was the hit of the day. Hit of the day. Yeah, but like Michelle Carre, Challenge Accepted, if you guys are unfamiliar with that, it's a show about taking on big challenges.

3:22:06She hung out outside of a military airplane, recreated Tom Cruise's stunt. But that's one of many episodes that follow the same format that are 30 plus minutes in length. So help me square that with what I regard as YouTube's sort of organ rejection to overly serialized content. I'll give you an example. Johnny Harris, we're all fans here. Bunch of really great, it is a show, there's a bunch of great content. But then when he goes and does, you know, I'm doing a three-part series, it seems like YouTube's like, we don't want your three-part series. We don't want your four-part series. And it feels like part two is the death knell of a YouTube title.

3:22:45And you should never put part three, part four. Oh, yeah, I don't. And they say, hey, we have playlists for you. I don't believe it. My suggestion is not doing, you know, part one, part two, part three. Although a creator named Preston Goes did an amazing series about building a mini truck for Abandoned Railroad. And it worked. And it worked. It's great. But you agree with me that it does feel like it's counter. I agree with you that you should not put part two in the title. It speaks to a packaging problem, obviously. Yeah, yeah. It's a title thumbnail problem. On Netflix, the show has title art.

3:23:15Yes. Right? And that's what gets me into it. Yeah. That's where I get the recommendation from. And then once you get in, I don't really care what the artwork is for every individual episode. It's like it would almost be better if you're doing like a four-part series, four 40-minute episodes or something. Just drop a four-hour YouTube video. I saw somebody watch a 10-hour video just on Star Wars Episode I. You've seen that one, right? I think you'll see the UI changes come to YouTube. So it'll be a UI thing eventually. I think so. I think it'll start to feel. Like super chapters almost. Yeah, exactly.

3:23:43But it needs to live in one place because it feels like just if the algorithm even has a bad day and it serves you part three before it serves you part two and you're on part two, you're going to be like, what am I doing? I'm not clicking. I know this can seem minor, but they're either testing it or it's rolled out where you can now upload 4K thumbnails to YouTube. And I think just higher resolution thumbnails. I think a lot of that is because now people are sitting and they're watching on their TVs. And like, if it looks like crap, when you click on it, they are ushering this move across the platform to be ready for consumers to be sitting on their sofas and choosing what to watch.

3:24:20I'd imagine someone listening would be like, but didn't you just say that like anyone could upload to YouTube and anything could happen? This feels like a high lift to make like a show, right? And it is. but these creators have all been on the platform for a decade so the suggestion for me is that like this is happening if you watch like hot ones is a tv show right um so i think you've seen it it's it's happened over a decade but it is like if you are exploring what is the now of youtube that is the now yeah like it is people are making premium shows that are watched on tv um and then the question is does netflix come in and repackage and license those episodes yeah or open the doors to a creator program, which I do think is a very, very realistic path.

3:25:00It's not going to be anyone can upload, but it's probably going to happen. So what's the state of the thumbnail artist today? Is it all AI? Are there people that have graduated from YouTube thumbnail artists and now they're doing Netflix thumbnails? Because I imagine thumbnails are important on Netflix too, right? Oh, they're insanely important. I mean, if all of us logged into Netflix right now, we might have different versions of the same thumbnail. No, I mean, I said it last time I was on the show. It's like they're the gatekeepers to viewership. But I think thumbnail artists are more like strategists now than pure designers, right?

3:25:38Because it's more of thinking through the strategy of what will pique someone's curiosity enough to click. I don't think we need to be like hyper, hyper designed all the time. But there's some really great artists out there. There's actually, I mean, when I think about this, there's a thumbnail that comes to mind, which is... Stuck in your brain. Yeah, it's stuck in my brain. It's a really good thumbnail from a basketball YouTuber named Jesser. Oh, I know Jesser. And he went to go tour the new LeBron Nike facility. And it's like kind of a similar thumbnail to Mr. Beast, where he's like hanging out of a helicopter, and you can see this like gold LeBron statue.

3:26:16Oh, wow, yeah, that's iconic. Yeah, it's like a classic. Even at two pixels, I can see it. And it has 6.3 million views. But I mean, I watch some of Jesser's videos. I like his like guess the NBA player videos. Those are awesome. But I looked at that and caught my eye and I clicked it. But what was amazing is that it pays off in the first second. You watch it and you're like, oh yeah, there's a gold LeBron statue. And this is a brand new Nike facility I'm in. So AI could create that thumbnail for someone else. But unless you actually did it. Yeah, you got to do this. But unless you're a Jesser and you pay it off upon hover.

3:26:45Because it's also like things autoplay on YouTube. It's not. The hover is a very big deal. It's underrated. It's why that now you can't clickbait someone because a thumbnail is proven over a hover before you even click. It's like, did this really happen? What does the video look like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the fact that he's standing there, that's a strategic move of being like, if I'm going to make this thumbnail and design it like this, it can't be so hyperbolic. It has to be pretty real. You've got to set the expectation with the thumbnail and then match it. The bird watching doc listers the thumbnail looks like a movie.

3:27:19It's like very lo-fi, but there's text on it that reads very much like a movie that was shown at Sundance or something. And then you click on it and you're like, I had no idea this was going to be so incredible. There's a very distinct smell in here. It's not a bad smell. It's a good smell, but it's a very distinct smell. People say that it smells like rubber. Rubber. I would say if anybody in this room has ever been to India, it smells like India. Like when you get off the plane at India, this is kind of what it smells like. Let's go. You know there's someone in the technology world that just got fired for saying that exact thing.

3:27:51No, really? This is a whole drama. Who? Yeah, the CTO of Klein was talking about a hackathon, and it was a lot of men in the room, and it went all back and forth, and it turned into a dust-up on both sides. Oh, that's a different thing. I'm talking about like a childhood nostalgia for me of landing in India. Yeah, that should I? Go ahead, George. As much as I would love to continue this conversation, the good news is we are. Yes, we are. We're podcast. It's true, yeah. I'm not sure when it's going to release, but we should wrap up. Slow content. Slow content. Slow content. Slow content. Fast and slow.

3:28:25But thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having us. We can close it out. I love the show. And we'll be back tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in today. We'll be in properly dressed for the season. We will. We will. Finally. Finally. Finally. So thank you for tuning in with us today. Goodbye. We love you. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. See you.