Google I/O Reactions, Birth Rate Debates, Spotify's New Icon | Jim Belosic, Aidan Dewar, Fai Nur, Tanay Tandon, Ajeya Cotra, Philip Inghelbrecht

28:16But hopefully people aren't too annoyed by it. If it's used tastefully, I guess it shouldn't matter at the end of the day. Anyway, do you think Spotify used AI to create their new disco ball icon? This was burning up the timeline this weekend. I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon. Me too. For a bunch of reasons. Like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this, seek help. I will say at first it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Because it's too dark. Genius. I think it was genius. I opened up my phone and I was drawn to it immediately.

28:55My eyes jumped because I was like, something's wrong with my phone. Something's wrong with my home screen. Things don't look the way they normally look. It drew my eye. I saw, oh, Spotify. Okay, look a little bit deeper. The icon looks a little bit different. The color's a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball. And then, of course, that there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just, there's a whole reason why they did this. It's the 20th anniversary of the company. And so lots of people complained, but your party of the year.

29:28It's so funny because I don't know, prior to this were people sitting around being like, wow, I really hope they never changed the Spotify logo even for a few weeks. I just love it so much. Yeah. Right? I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, the flat, minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to. Keep it. And yeah, so yeah, let's go through some of the reactions. So Dylan said, I thought this was fun. I'm sure the complainers thought so, too. But when tapping an icon is second nature after being used to it. Citizen said, I told my wife to cancel our subscription. Oh, no.

30:09For so long, even the slightest change in appearance can make you double take when searching for it. And that's annoying when trying to open an app. Mass says that it's too dark. And so Mass turned up the brakes. Yeah, because you're at the disco, John. Oh, yeah. A disco ball would never look that bright in a nightclub. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the black lines you sort of. Real disco ball knowers. Yeah, that's way too light. I like Notion played along. This is like really a testament to the power of gen AI imagery these days. Every brand could like jump on this meme very quickly. And it's hard to create these.

30:48It's so funny that I guess, you know, this still went super viral. But even five years ago, if you could create an asset that was a 3D render, you almost automatically got attention because anybody could make them, but you needed to work with like a 3D artist to do it. and it's not something you can do instantly. They have to figure, you know, actually render it. I mean, yeah, this is probably like a couple hours of work in Cinema 4D. I mean, getting the lighting right too and making sure that you're not, have the wrong reflections on there. There's a bunch of nuance to actually getting this to look good.

31:28I think it's fun when, I don't know, the other brands like joining in on like a meme can be like done really poorly. This one seemed like it was fine. Yeah, Andy Masley had the best take. He said, everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries something fun, and everyone reveals why all the companies have been forced into minimalist design. Wow, 66 ,000 likes on this. People really, really agreed. This is how I feel when people complain about Cybertrucks being ugly. Like, yes, but it's different. Of course, not everyone is going to like it. Trying to get everyone to like things is how we wound up with all cars converging on the same colors and designs.

32:05Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I like the disco ball Someone Nathan Halberstrad said had a very nice comment. He said he said this is this is TBPN inspired Which I don't I don't think it is but the arc may be long But tech companies now appear to be universally bend to universally bend towards eight. I mean look at our look at our look at our So we do have the globe and it was funny because so you can you can go a little bit further and I did this with our logo I was like turn our logo into a disco ball and And it looked kind of the same, like, because we sort of have the globe in there already.

32:39And so for all of like, like this meme, like sort of didn't work with us because I guess we have been taking that like 3D render aesthetic with the globe. Although ours is pixelated, not not squares like on the disco ball. But there is a little bit of TBPN in the in the disco ball. What do you think of the TBPN disco ball logo? Should we run this for a while or has the trend already moved on? I like the globe. I like being global. Yeah, I think keep the globe with the pixelation, the dots. I think it works. The arrow of discomorphism has arrived, says Fichara. Fichara. And this individual discobolified all of their apps, including X, Claude, Slack.

33:23What's that one? The App Store, I guess? Google Calendar. I don't know. If you ran this full, do people know why Spotify was a disco ball? This kind of loud maximalist design is coming back, whether you like it or not. You think so? These things go in waves. Yeah. They go in waves. They're coming back. Well, one story that we didn't get to yesterday that I want to discuss is the root cause of the fertility crisis. The Financial Times has a deep dive. why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. And I was going back and forth with Tyler on this, trying to understand, and we'll see where you stand on this, Jordy.

34:08So the demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed and terrain. In more than two thirds of the world's 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is closer to one than two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero. Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just five years ago, the UN predicted that there would be 350 ,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50 % overestimate.

34:46The real figure was 230 ,000. Sorry, not 2300. While high and middle income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past 10 years. Analysts of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicate that although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology. And so this is the question that the Financial Times is trying to answer. Should you put the blame on the recent decline in fertility on smartphones in particular? And so, you can go through a whole bunch of the charts.

35:24It's a great article. But the final image is this image where they took a whole bunch of different countries and they adjusted the charts to show when did smartphones actually take off in that particular country. because America had the iPhone moment in 2007, but different countries got wide smartphone adoption or 4G or actual rollout of cell phones or smartphones at different times. And so they adjusted all the figures. And when you look at this chart that Luis Giancarlo is sharing, the screenshot from the Financial Times, you'll see all of the charts seem to be very, very closely aligned at the exact same time.

36:10And so Luis Giancarlo pushes back, though. He says, no smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics as the culprit. Yeah, there's the chart. It looks like a smoking gun. He says it's not, though. He says, in the U.S. and U.K., births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest. Birth rates were stable in the United States, U.K., Australia until 2007, in France and Poland until 2009. Mexico and Indonesia until 2011, and Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal until 2013-2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. The younger the age group, the sharper the drop.

36:50In-person socializing among young adults is dropping in South Korea by 50 % in 20 years. Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies, Middle East, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa. decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those were who were not hit by the global financial crisis. And so it teases out a bunch of the other possible explanations and puts the blame firmly on smartphones. But people have been pushing back. So Ross Douthit says, on the rate, on the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share chart one without the important context of chart two, which is the child survival adjustment.

37:33And so if you look at the total fertility rate, if you click on that left graph, you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there. But in fact, birth rates had been declining since the 1800s and had been falling steadily throughout the 19th century. Yes. And then in the 20th century, there was a brief baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s. and then the rate starts declining. I asked 5.5 Pro a bunch of questions about this, trying to dig in further. And it had a bunch of funny answers about how children used to be economically valuable. And so people would have a lot of them to like work the farm for them.

38:13And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive and a net, sort of a net burden on the parent as opposed to before it would be, you had a kid, you didn't have to pay for college. You didn't have to pay for education or really anything, and they would work the fields for you. And so it was advantageous to have as many children as possible. Ross Douthat also chimed in saying, by the way, another way to look at the second chart is that the baby boom was even more unexpected than generally understood. And also, if any major population repeated that kind of unexpectedness, now they would dominate the human future.

38:50Interesting opportunity for different societies out there. Do you think children yearning for the minds is sort of like a survival mechanism, right? They want to be economically valuable. They want to be productive, right? Yeah. They're saying we can carry our own weight. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it would be, I look at all these charts and I just think it's over. It's over. but then I remind myself to never black pill. Yes. Uh, never black pill. Uh, even if it's down, never black pill, never black pill, uh, never black pill, even if it's down only. Um, yeah. Uh, it's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts, looking at, uh, looks.

39:52I mean, if, If this were, you know, any animal in the wild, there would be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species. But when it's us, we just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling. Yeah, I think it demands investigation to go a level deeper to understand. OK, so diffusion of smartphones appears correlated with declines in fertility. but within populations, there are groups that have higher than average fertility and lower than average fertility, of course, as any distribution suggests. And the question is, what are the high fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently?

40:43Are they using social media less? Are they using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Are they organized? Because the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand for the groups that are above fertility rate, what are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility. And they're not. And they have technology. They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So they will use the, you know, like a dumb phone, a flip phone to make phone calls occasionally.

41:20And I'm sure that, you know, these are all gradations. There's not no smartphones whatsoever. But certainly the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has stayed high. But even within the, you know, more, you know, modern enclaves or high smartphone adopters, I do wonder what else is going on. Because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with child care and the relation with how people spend their time. Yeah, specifically with the also what else happened in around the launch of the iPhone. What? Like massive economic disruption, right? They controlled for that, though.

42:02That's the point of the Financial Times article is to control for the economic gyrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic contractions. And they were all sort of affected equally. Like even China, China has the lowest replacement rate, one per family or something like that. Whereas America is at like 1.8, many societies, many modern societies at 1.6, all below replacement rate. But China is the lowest. But China is going through like an economic boom the entire time.

42:36GDP is up at 6%, 7%, 8%, sometimes 10 % a year. They're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today. And yet, although that is a little bit different because it's confounded by the one-child policy, which obviously resulted in exactly one child. So they set their policy, then they got their result, and now they have to sort of contend with that and the aging population. There's an article that Derek Thompson shared, Dad Books, which this article and some publishing insiders used to describe serious nonfiction books across biography, current affairs, and business and economics, are reportedly in free fall, with sales declining every year for the last years.

43:14The trend couldn't be clearer, said Jonathan Karp, former chief executive at Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts. Interesting. Saying podcasts are eating the dad book, serious nonfiction genre. We've got to figure out who's doing this. We're all looking for the guy who did this. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to audio books of serious nonfiction, but it is increasingly hard to find the time. FedSpeak says it's not podcasts, it's kids, because the millennial generation, the Gen X generation, is spending basically twice as much time with kids based on their age.

43:59When you adjust for age, So this is a curve of time spent with children by age. Honestly, every time on the weekend, you know, when I'm holding, you know, one or two of my children and I just stare at, you know, the stack of books from Amazon that just pile up and I just look at them and think, okay, if I open one of those, I will get exactly three pages before I'm disrupted. Yeah. And so I have to tell. What was the silent generation doing? What were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, kid, hit the mines, buddy. I got to read. I got to read some nonfiction. I don't know. I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's odd.

44:42I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home. When I can't read. Yeah, exactly. Maybe self-driving car is bullish for serious nonfiction. Because, oh, maybe people will get sick. Self-driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll. Oh, yeah. They're bearish for the podcast and long-form mediums broadly. And the book and the serious nonfiction, the dead book. Anyway. Nothing can compete with the feed. Yes. Sorry to blackmail, but it's over. Well, it's not over for our next guest because Jim Belosik from Send, Cut, Send is with us. He's in the waiting room and he has some exciting news about Send, Cut, Send.

45:22Welcome back to the show, Jim. How are you doing? Good, good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. Great to see you. Short notice. Congratulations. Congratulations. Reintroduce the company and then I want to hear the news. Yeah. Send is a on-demand manufacturer. Elastic capacity is what I was told. So we make stuff. This guy has VCs now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Buzzwords come. They come with the term sheet. They're like, I can offer you capital and buzzwords. And buzzwords. They're good at both. Yes. But I like it. I like it. Elastic capacity. Yeah. We do sheet metal and CNC and, you know, whatever.

45:57people need something made we make it for them yeah and the news today what happened i want to hit the gun i finally raised some money how much is 110 million

46:11massive let's go let's go it's it's sort of bittersweet bittersweet moment because send cut send is a company you know we've interviewed uh thousands of founders now and you have been you know out of all the conversations we've had at the top of our list in terms of like, you know, companies and cultures and teams that we're bullish on. And we always appreciated that you were doing it independently, but I'm sure you've raised for very good reasons and you have some excellent new partners and we're very excited for you. Yeah. I want to talk about the use of funds, the reasoning, but first, like take me through the pitch that you received.

46:50Who did the round? How did you meet them? Take us through the kind on the story of the deal. So I just, through X, I got introduced to Patrick Ollison, which was awesome. And he's like, oh yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound really awesome. I'll invest. And I was like, well, that's amazing. Thank you. I was like, how does this work? Like, I don't know how investment works. And he was like, oh, I'll just introduce you to a couple other people. So he's like, we can just use the standard YC terms. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, no. Well, I was like, hey, you know, introduce me to someone who's super founder friendly.

47:31I'm a bootstrapper. I want to retain control of my company, but I do want to go faster. So I need a little bit more money than I got now. So introduce me to Sequoia. Andrew Reid over there is awesome. Sean McGuire. And then Matt Huang from Paradigm as well. And so it became this kind of dream team. And I was like, shit, if I don't do it now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to put this together again. So let's go for it. Let's see what happens. Yeah. And I also think you guys have such incredible, have had such incredible organic momentum and growth. And we need to make stuff in America. And it's somewhat your responsibility to go faster, like as like just for the country, basically.

48:14and so from that lens too i think it makes a ton of sense to bring in some more firepower yeah uh we're always uh capacity constrained we we have more work than we can produce and even if even if we had the right amount of machines it's not fast enough i want to go faster you know people are spoiled on amazon i want to do amazon of manufacturing you know if you order today you should have it in your hands tomorrow so that you can go do your project um and now that's on the horizon. We're getting really close. Yeah, so what does the money actually go towards? Is it buying more machines, hiring more people, both?

48:49Like what are you pulling forward with this capital? Yeah, so I'm trying to just use the capital towards stuff that I can't finance. So right now, like we've been able to grow, like, you know, I can buy machines and get a loan on them from JP Morgan or whatever. So I'll keep doing that with machines, but the capital is going to be used for stuff that I can't get a loan on. So, you know, tripling the size of my software team, computational geometry engineers, hiring two or 300 people, just a down payment on a building. Like the first and last payment is like, I don't know, together it's like$600 ,000 on some of these big buildings.

49:28So that's where I'm going to light their money on fire in a good way. And we're going to grow, grow, grow. Yeah. Yeah. Where's the current facility? Where do you see yourself expanding to? I want to talk about the actual footprint because, you know, if you're building elastic capacity, that feels like that needs to be distributed all over the United States at some point. Yeah, a million percent. My goal is like I love Home Depot and without a Home Depot in your town, you got to go to a plumbing store, an electrical store and a lumber yard and whatever. So if we could have, you know, a send cut send in a bunch of different metros that you can just walk into and get something made, that's the dream.

50:06So right now we're in Reno, Nevada, Arlington, Texas, and Paris, Kentucky. The next one up, I'm hoping for a lease here, is going to be somewhere in Pennsylvania, potentially in Ohio. But we're trying to pit those two states against each other and negotiate some good incentives. So I can't really say which way we're going. After that, probably Indiana, Las Vegas, and then Atlanta. Okay. I had sort of a hot take yesterday talking about the push back to building data centers. And my point was that obviously data centers are the least, they're less popular than nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors at their worst, I think we're polling at like 63 % disapproval for like, let's not build those.

50:48And of course we stopped building them. Data centers are like 73%. So people really don't like them. But my point was that there's a lot of pushback against building anything, even like housing, roads, trains. People are just like, I like the idea of it somewhere else, but I don't want it in my backyard. I don't want it over here. Like if it actually interfaces with me. And I'm wondering if how local communities are actually receptive or skeptical about having what is essentially a factory and could be noisy or could have traffic or could have a bunch of different things. And I imagine that you've had like one one millionth of the pushback, but you've still had to consider all these things.

51:27So how have you how have you communicated to the local communities that you build in and you're planning to build in? yeah i think some of the the loudest pushback is from you know people in these big coastal cities and you know they're like i don't want that that in my backyard yeah what we find is you know in we're in a smaller city or a rural area people love the jobs they love the development they love the the taxable revenue that comes with us um we're also we're pretty damn quiet we don't exhaust to sewer or air or anything we're 50 state compliant that's that's our goal um but what's really cool is we can come into a community and provide a lot of good high-paying jobs you know it's it's a career path that they can grow into there's more opportunities as we build more buildings they can move out of their little town and go to a different metro or whatever so we don't have any pushback also we move so damn fast that we don't build our buildings we go find a building that's already stood up and we just move in that's the only way for us to go fast.

52:28Yeah. Yeah. And there's plenty of, and there's plenty of capacity there. Uh, as you look back on your career, how did you process the, the, the VC hype or just the memes around like the three printing revolution? And there was a moment where there was like, Oh, like there won't be any more factories. Cause everyone just 3d print everything at home. Uh, how'd you process at the time? And I guess like what, like, how do you see 3d printing fitting in if, if at all into like the future of re-industrialization does have a place whatsoever it does it does um in the world of metals we're still far away from that it's so much easier to get something cast or stamped or laser cut or whatever uh i mean when we've experimented with 3d additive in-house like there's laws against how much of that aluminum powder you can have because it's explosive so there's massive hurdles to clear for that however 3d printing um it's it's actually really competitive with injection molding.

53:26And that's something that we're looking at. Injection molding is incredibly expensive to get the molds made. Almost all the molds are made offshore. But if you can 3D print really, really rapidly, then it is competitive, especially for small runs or startups or prototypes or whatever. So that's an area that we're experimenting in. What are some recent customers that you started working with that you're particularly excited about. They can be mom and pop, hackers, or big companies, but I wanted to give you a chance. Yeah, we actually, my comms team that I have now just told me I have to be careful about who I name.

54:02We were pretty proud, though. It is mom and pops, but then it's also 85 % of the top five primes and the tier one defense people use this. Neros is a huge customer. ZipLine is a huge customer. And then just guys in their garage making cool stuff. And like kids doing first robotics or whatever, they all use us. So very, very wide spectrum of customers. Amazing. What does an entry level job at Send Cut Send look like these days? Anything. You're a generalist. We are moving so fast and doing so many different things. Like we don't have a designated floor sweeper, but you might be sweeping floors.

54:44You know, we start somewhere between like 26 and 30 bucks an hour and then it goes up from there. But yeah, you're going to be maybe a laser operator one day. You're going to be driving a forklift. You're going to be cleaning out a dust collector or you're going to be doing some intense CAD programming. Like who knows? We don't know what we're going to make that day. Things just come in and we have to do it. So everyone here is very, very flexible. Yeah, with the crazy AI build-out and data center build-out going on, we've heard and seen prices of copper spiking. There's all these weird knock-on effects from data center construction.

55:22Are you feeling squeezes anywhere in your supply chain? Do you feel like America is industrialized enough in the rest of your supply chain? Or is there a wish list of, oh, we've got to reshore that? we need to we need as many like aluminum boundaries and filters as we can possibly get i mean those are way more electricity intensive than data centers yeah actually if you if you tried to spin up a bunch of those it would make a data center look really good in comparison so that's interesting if you want to build a data center yeah go pitch an aluminum foundry first wow and then they'll want you to do like 10 data centers so we need more of those yeah but we need i saw that with The Strait of Hormuz closing that Diet Coke was at risk of going out of stock.

56:06Very, very harmful to my production function. But because some there's some amount of aluminum smelting that happens in the Middle East and passes through the Strait of Hormuz. And so delays happen. And I think a lot of people are they think it's either we have the capacity in the U.S. or maybe it went to China, but there's really nothing else. But we're in such a global economy that there's so much more going on. Yeah, it affected us a little bit. You know, about 15 % of aluminum comes from offshore. We actually source a lot of domestic aluminum, or at least it comes from North America. But, you know, even if prices go up 15-20%, raw materials are a small fraction of the overall end price.

56:47So, 15 or 20 % increase in raw materials is probably 3 or 4 % to the customer. So, our customers have been pretty cool about it. Yeah, I mean, Jordi asked about the customers, like specific examples, but I'm interested in like the broader funnel. Like how much is, do you have an outbound sales force at this point? Are you going to conferences? I imagine that you show up on like Google results oftentimes. But what like is the customer funnel like heavily diversified or is there a sweet spot that you're really doubling down on right now? What does acquisition look like these days? We've always been inbound.

57:21we have two or three sales guys right now but they just you know answer the call and you know do special special projects or whatever we have no outbound sales guys at one point early on we were spending about 100 grand a month on google ads and i think right now we're spending about 1500 bucks so my message to anyone is that because is that because if you were if you were spending more you hired more sales people you just wouldn't be able to fulfill the demands you need to scale capacity first? Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, my marketing team, usually I'm like, uh, say nothing. Don't say anything this week because we had a machine go down or whatever.

58:00So I'm like, stop and everyone go quiet. Um, so yeah, it's, it's always chasing capacity, but my message to anyone who wants to do something like this, like just have a kick-ass product, just make it good and fast and, uh, you know, get it in their hands within, you know, a couple of days or whatever, and people will come back and they'll tell their friends. So, but it's an overnight success takes 10 years. So we're in And when you guys are fast, when you guys are punched in the face, when you guys are fast, your customers can build their products faster and have higher sales velocity themselves and generate more revenue.

58:30And so then they end up spending more. And it's like this very, very virtuous flywheel. And I'm so glad you're well capitalized. Yeah, I yeah, this is a major white pill. Yeah, I hope I don't have to do it again because fundraising is not fun. I hate finance. get ready get ready for for nicey buddy yeah there's gonna be many more many more in the future it's your it's your duty yeah if you if you want if you want to go fast and far it makes sense uh last question we were talking about uh the fall off of dad books because of podcasts and fertility and all this different stuff and i'm interested if you have any uh examples or recommendations for father-son building activities that you've seen from the community or maybe you've done yourself even or employees have of a good first build for a parent and child to do that might use send cut send parts?

59:32Yeah, there's a ton of little like push go-kart plans available. We may even have a couple on marketplace. I'll have to check. But you have to do something that the kid can enjoy and there's nothing better than like getting pushed down a hill and scraping your knees or whatever so to have those experiences something that's usable like a birdhouse or whatever that's fine a go-kart or a scooter or something like that is yeah pretty cool for the kids so if i make a go-kart using send cut send parts and i want to throw a v12 in there can you fabricate that for me too not yet not yet okay that's what the money's for yeah and we're gonna Yeah, a go-kart is such a smart recommendation, too, for you, you know, running a business.

1:00:13Because a bird feeder, you know, you make it once, you put it up, it's good. My dad built me a go-kart growing up. And he would, you know, he made it. I would drive the heck out of it. It would break. Then he'd be fixing it. So it's a recurring revenue stream for you guys to get a father-son duo into go-karts. That's smart. 100%, yeah. Never-ending. Playing the long game. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to see you, Jim. Congrats to the whole team. Great to see you. Excited to see you back on here soon. Have a good one. Cool. Thanks, guys. Goodbye.

1:00:44Cheers. Legend. Fantastic. White pill. White pill of the show. Major white pill. We were blackbilling. Now we're whitepilling. Never blackbill. Never blackbill. Well, up next, we have Aiden Dewar from Nourish. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's been on the show before, but we're welcoming him back with some huge news about the company that's growing faster than ever with a massive Series C to announce. Aiden, how are you doing? I think we might have some technical problems. Can you give us a hello? Can you say hello? We might need to come back to you. How are we doing? Are you okay? Are you using a potato as a webcam?

1:01:26It's not the potato. It's the Wi-Fi. It's for sure the Wi-Fi. Do a check one, too. Yeah, do a check one, too. We'll kill some time. We'll kill some time because Dan Sondheim's killing time at Dan Sondheim. So wait. OK, so this is actually funny because I opened up the Wall Street Journal today and I had seen I had seen the news from Tay Kim, who's coming on the show this week, that in the Financial Times, they had a report that Daniel Sondheim's D1 Capital Partners is another hedge fund that stands to make a killing when SpaceX goes public. D1 is sitting on paper gains of about 9 billion on SpaceX stock that it acquired over several years for about 600 million What a run of 15x not bad And so now the the stake might be worth 20 billion if the rocket maker is valued at the expected 1.75 trillion A figure that could still change according to people familiar with the matter But I open up the Wall Street Journal and I'm and I'm and I everyone's familiar with Dan Sondheim and D1 He's Dan Sondheim is not like someone who's obscure behind the scenes he's done in Best Like the Best.

1:02:28People know D1. They invest in a lot of companies that we know. But I thought this Wall Street Journal article was also about D1. And the title is Obscure Fund Has a Lot Riding on SpaceX. And I was like, are they really painting D1 as an obscure fund? They weren't. They're talking about a different investment firm that's about to make a lot of money on the SpaceX investment. So SpaceX's planned initial public offering is expected to be a windfall for futurist investors and venture capitalists. If you've got SpaceX shares, you don't want to say, I'm not a VC. Say you're a futurist investor. A publicity-shy hedge fund manager whose other investments, so you're a hedge fund, you're long SpaceX.

1:03:12What else are you buying to diversify your portfolio as a futurist investor? Dick's Sporting Goods and Wingstop are among the big positions at Darsana Capital Partners, which first invested in SpaceX in 2019 when Elon Musk's rocket maker was valued at around$30 billion and made several subsequent investments since then. Should SpaceX go public at a valuation around$1.5 trillion, Darsana's paper gains on the investment could top$10 billion. So had you ever heard of Darsana before? No. I actually had not, but I have heard of Wingstop. It's a good stock. Several billion of that would be gains since...

1:03:56Stock is down 50 % year to date. Rough. The sort of valuation. Anand Decide launched New York-based Darsana, which comes from a Sanskrit word that means seeing the true nature of reality. Chicken wings. And Dick's Sporting Goods. In 2014, 1.4 billion under cap. Let's bring in our... Our guest Aiden is back on a new device. Hey! Crystal clear. There we go. Thanks so much. We're on mobile now, guys. Apologies. We're at our company off-site, so we got weak Wi-Fi. Makes sense. Well, you sound crystal clear now. Why don't you reintroduce the company? Tell us the news. Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.

1:04:43So I'm Aiden. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Nourish. Nourish is a dietician-led metabolic clinic, So we pair the largest network of registered dietitians in the country, over 10 ,000 dietitians, with virtual medical care. So the ability for physicians to order and interpret labs, to prescribe and manage medications. And we've delivered some really amazing results for patients that we're excited to talk about today. Walk me through dietitian, the different degrees that might be involved, the certifications. I know with a lot of telehealth, there's state-by-state regulations. Like, what was the process of building out that network of 10 ,000 dietitians?

1:05:27Yeah, good question. So dietitian is a protected term. So you might hear some people use nutritionist or dietitian interchangeably, but nutritionist is actually not protected. So, you know, you or I could get on Instagram and call ourselves a nutritionist, but a dietitian requires a master's degree, a certain number of hours, and so on. And so we only apply to employ dietitians. Those are the providers that are able to work with health insurance and get it covered, which is a big part of our model is expanding access to this type of care. And, of course, working with health plans, get it covered by insurance is a big part of that.

1:05:59Okay. What is the value add? I mean, there's so much of a boom in peptides, GLP-1s, metabolic health. It feels like there's a lot of these companies where the demand is already there. You're just the landing page that gives the customer what they already want. but I imagine that there's a lot more. I'll pitch it. Okay, pitch it, Jordy. It seems super important to combine diet with GLP-1s. Just saying like, hey, we created this magical drug for weight loss and then just doing the drug versus actually fixing the underlying sort of cause or maybe the original issue is sort of a temporary solution.

1:06:38And if you want lasting positive change with your health, you're going to have to factor. So if I go to a dietitian and say, I've been blasting reda. Did I botch it? Is that roughly correct? No, no, you said it well. I mean, I think the way we think about the root cause of kind of the problem of explosion in chronic conditions and cost is that people are living unhealthy lifestyles in the modern world. It's very hard in the modern world to eat well, to sleep well, to move your body, to manage your stress. And maybe 75 years ago when these conditions were much rarer and costs were much lower, just kind of living your life in the day-to-day It was much easier to be healthy.

1:07:14And so while these medications are a very useful tool in the toolkit and, you know, with our network now, we're able to prescribe and manage those medications. To your point, you know, if you don't pair that with behavior change, you don't get kind of sustainable results, which, of course, is worse for the patient. But it's also worse for the system because now we've spent all this money for medications and then had a rebound and weight gain or falling off medication or so on. What's happening on the supply side of the market with GLP-1s and how is that impacting pricing? We know there's an incredible amount of demand, overwhelming demand, but what's happening on the other side?

1:07:51Yeah, so it's nice to see. I mean, I think slowly but surely we'll see access increase, costs come down. I think over time as these drugs become generic, expect them to get much, much cheaper. You know, you mentioned Reda. I think that'll get approved in the coming years, and that'll maybe start at a higher price. And then these kind of first-gen, second-gen meds will come down in price and eventually go generic, which I think is really exciting because ultimately, like I said, they are a valuable tool in the toolkit, but cost is prohibitive in many cases today. And so where I think we play and where I think the value will ultimately be created as the price of these medications comes down is exactly in that behavior and lifestyle change that we talked about.

1:08:30It's kind of that wraparound care of how do you have not just medication, but integrated care team virtually covered by insurance, as well as, of course, technology, especially AI, which can be kind of that 24-7 behavior change agent as part of the equation. And that's a big part of the round we just raised was to invest in all of that and accelerate that. How much did you raise? You raised$100 million Series C, yes. Congratulations. I love the gong. I love the gong. That's why I came on. we need a gong for our office you do we should make TBPN branded gongs wraparound care does that also mean meal delivery at some point I feel like there's a number of companies throughout history that have sort of vertically integrated to that degree incredibly operationally complex is it on the road map is it something you're interested in yeah great question we get reached out by a number of kind of meal delivery companies, as you expect, about partnering.

1:09:31We haven't prioritized it yet, but I do think ultimately, you know, we'll do something there at some point. I mean, the way I think about it kind of more broadly, the problem of lifestyle change being difficult and therefore the mission of being, how do you make lifestyle change easy is you're trying to remove as many barriers and of course the food being kind of one of those. And so how do you, when you make a recommendation, make it very easy to act and fulfill that recommendation? I think being able to prescribe and fulfill prescriptions of food in the same way you can of medication, I think, will be something we do eventually.

1:10:02And I think there's a lot of movement among health plans to potentially even reimburse for that in some cases eventually. But I haven't prioritized that yet, but I think at some point we will. And then on the GLP-1 side, is there still an opportunity in compounding? I know some telehealth providers went down that path, others partnered. Do you have a firm view? Are you flexible here? How have you been interpreting the different ways to vertically integrate on that side of the business? Yeah, so we do not compound. We work with the name brand medications and have partnerships with the big players that you all know and work to get those covered by insurance.

1:10:38I think if you've probably seen in the last few years, there's been kind of this cash pay and compounding market. We think that was a bit of kind of just a short-term solution for when there were access constraints and cost constraints that you were speaking about earlier. and where kind of the market heads is, you know, the inverse of cash bank compounding, which is insurance covered and name brand. And that's kind of, you know, bread and butter of the company, pun intended, is working with kind of those health plans to get things like that covered. And then, again, because the drug, as cost comes down, especially it becomes a commodity, I think where the value is created is in that wraparound care we talked about.

1:11:13And that's kind of the hard work, but I think the important work that ultimately delivers, you know, lasting outcomes. Okay, last question from the chat. are you on a boat?

1:11:24No, I'm in this random conference room in our company offsite. Like I said, it's like a quick question. I think the phone is like rocking in just the right oscillations. Yeah, I'm pretty convinced it's a boat. You're not beating the boat allegations. He denies, he denies the boat. It does have kind of boat blocks on the back. It does have wood paneling. It looks nice. It's that texture of wood. We got a boring conference room started. Wow, it's a huge boat. It's a huge boat. It's a massive boat. Seriously, big boat. I don't have a problem with the company offside of the boat. That seems like a great strategy.

1:11:57If that's what you did, I'm not going to critique it. Enjoy the boat. Great to see you, Aiden. Congrats to the whole team on the milestone, and keep up the great work. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. I got to go talk to the captain to stay in this meeting. Have him reset the Starlink, too, for your computer. Sorry about that, guys. Thanks for having me on. Great to see you. See you. Goodbye. I'm glad we got to the boat question. The important question. I don't think it was a boat. It looked a little bit too big. And things weren't, like, buckled down. You know, usually on a boat, even if you're in a palatial conference room, there's ways to, you know, bolt down certain items.

1:12:39Anyway, our next guest is from Status here, raising a series. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Nice to finally be on the show. We got to kick it off with the first question. Are you on a boat? No, unfortunately, I'm in a regular. Okay. Our last guest. A very nice conference room. Fantastic. Our last guest denied the allegations of being a boat. He looked like he was on a boat. It's hard to believe. We have to ask everyone now. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about you and your company. Please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah. So I'm Phi.

1:13:15I'm the CEO and co-founder of Status. Status is essentially a social entertainment app where users can live out their dream lives and play as anyone through the lens of a social network. So, for example, I could be a famous singer. I could be an actor. I could live inside the world of my favorite book, something like Harry Potter. I could be the host of one of the most famous technology news shows on X. Simulators. This is the thing. Yeah. Everything's a simulation. Yeah. So walk us through the actual customer experience. It feels like there's an element of social media here. There's also an element of like a massively multiplayer online RPG.

1:13:56Are you pulling ideas from both places? What are the big inspiration points? Yeah. So essentially when you go on status, the first thing that you do is you craft your persona, like who you're going to be. So I want to be a famous singer. I want to be a live streamer. I can choose who my first follower is going to be. I could choose someone from real life. All of our characters on the app, all of the worlds on the app are created by users. We have over 5 million characters on the app, over 10 million worlds. And it looks like social media. It looks like X. And I think this is why it's really struck a chord with people and why we've grown so fast.

1:14:33Since we launched last year, or when we launched last year, we went from zero to a million users in 19 days. And it kind of just shows like the virality of what we're doing. I think this product really resonates with our user base, which is pretty young, predominantly young women in the U.S. and all across the world. How gamified is it? What is the goal of the players? Is there a currency or something that they win? Oh, yeah. How does that work? We basically made social media into a game, right? So when you post on social media, now you get followers, you get likes. The same thing happens on status.

1:15:17You gain followers, you gain likes, but you also know everything you do has an outcome that will help you gain skill points, which helps you level up. We took a lot of inspiration from life simulator games like The Sims and also our own background. My co-founder built games on Roblox and Minecraft. And so it's really a mix of life simulator and role play and fandom-related stuff and really that gamified world. How are you thinking about monetization long term? I'm sure it's early. You're venture capital backed. You don't need to charge an arm and a leg for this. But is subscriptions more aligned with the current customer experience?

1:15:57Or is social media, I think, advertising? Yeah. So we actually have already started monetizing the products when we basically, oh, hell yeah. I was not expecting that. Yeah, we already started monetizing. We operate similarly to a game, right? We have in-app purchases where you can buy power-ups, things like that. We also have subscriptions with weekly subscriptions and annual subscriptions. And we have millions in ARR. We 10x revenue this first quarter of 2026. So we're ripping right now. Ripping. What is it like, what do you want people to, what is the businesses ripping? You have a ton of users.

1:16:46What are you hoping that users get out of it? Is it like, what is the sort of like our overarching vision of outside of just fun and playing a game, what you want users to get out of this? Yeah, I think that what status really represents is this, we're moving into a new, I think, phase of entertainment. So since the beginning of time, you've always had to just sit and read a story or watch a story. I think what we can do now with LLMs and AI is that now you can really immerse yourselves into these incredible role-playing, engaging experiences. and I think that's what our users are doing. When you watch a TV show and you get really obsessed with it, maybe you go to Reddit and read theories about what people are saying about it, connect with fans and talk about the show with them.

1:17:42You might go to TikTok and watch edits of that show. I think this is this next phase of what we're seeing people do is that they're going on status and they're honestly immersing themselves into thinking, well, what if I was a character in that show? Who would I interact with? You know, what would that look like? And we're doing it through, you know, this lens of social media, which is so familiar to people because, you know, everyone is on the same, the same types of social media platforms. How does intellectual property work in this world? I mean, anyone can go draw a picture of Harry Potter and post it on their Instagram, but if you're intermediating this and you're the one generating, a lot of the models will refuse some of the partnerships and there's a whole bunch of different solutions there but what does that look like yeah so everything on the platform all the characters all the worlds are user generated so similar so we like to think of it as like you know similar to how someone would you know can upload like a youtube video talking about a tv show or an artist yeah it's it's the same thing except now with you know lms and with ai you can create these ai generated worlds uh based off of that based off of that show or book or whatever it is has Has there been pushback to this?

1:18:55I mean, obviously your core fan base loves it. They're paying for it. They're using the product. But AI is getting booed on stage. People are worried about brain rot and the infinite jest. Like, what has the pushback been like? Is it just you're off in your own little world and it's not actually confronting? Or have you had to grapple with any of the big questions about AI, social media, brain rot, et cetera? Yeah, so I think with our user base, especially, and what we've kind of seen with AI is that the pushback that you see with younger people who don't like AI, it's because they feel like AI is replacing experiences that, you know, things like art, things like music, things like that.

1:19:38status isn't really replacing anything. We are a completely new experience that can really only exist with AI. And I think that's why our users are young, but they love status and they're really excited about the product. And in terms of working with these entertainment companies and streamers, we've already started having conversations with some of them. And there is a real appetite of, you know i'm sure you you you've seen this like now with netflix shows or amazon shows like hbo whatever it is there's a long wait between seasons right like you watch a show and then you wait like two years for the next season to come out a lot of these streamers are thinking about okay how do i keep my audience engaged while we produce and make the next um you know the next season of that show so i think go and create a million plot holes that they'll never resolve now What do you think Meta's plans are around agents and bots and this sort of simulated social media?

1:20:40They acquired Maltbook. They've experimented with celebrity personas in the past. I feel like if your metrics keep looking the way they're looking up into the right, Stock will eventually come in. He will try to clone you. It'll be a rite of passage. but generally how are you thinking about these sort of scaled social platforms and how they're thinking about integrating experiences like this? Yeah, I think that a lot of, definitely I think there's a lot of interest from these big companies and I think that what they're trying to do and it's exciting with what they're doing with acquiring Moatbook, they acquired Gizmo as well.

1:21:23They're really interested in these AI-first experiences. But, of course, we kind of just focus on what we're doing. If they copy us, they can try. But I think with status, good luck. And I think that our users, and I think this is what makes us so sticky and why our retention is so good, they've created these worlds and stuff that they put a lot of work in. And I think that that really shows in our engagement and retention. Tell us about the fundraising to date. You've got some new capital. Let's hear it. What did you raise? Yeah. So we have raised$17 million in seed and seed today. Yeah, funding.

1:22:09Thank you, guys. We're backed by Abstract, General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, also Light Shed Ventures, YC, a bunch of guys. So shout out to them. Great lineup. Great lineup. Where are you guys based? We're based in New York. So consumer in New York, guys. We have a team of nine in the city. I'm actually an SF right now, so don't tell anyone. We won't. We won't. Well, great to meet you. I'm sure we'll have you back on soon. And yeah, congrats on all the progress. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys so much for having me. Cheers. Have a good one. Goodbye. up next we have tan a tandem from camur he's back he's back raising 7 billion at a 700 billion dollar valuation uh you're not not too far from it i'm sure he'll be there soon welcome to the show how are you doing how are you guys thanks for having me good good entrance drinking casually thought you were distracted yeah yeah oh dial oh hey guys oh hey didn't see you there i'm just live uh anyway welcome back to the show uh please but reintroduce the company tell us the news i want to hit the gong and hear all the greatest the latest and greatest awesome i'm today's ceo we just announced a raise of 70 million dollars at a seven billion dollar valuation with this guy hates delusion he hates delusion only one percent um with gc sequoia organ stanley Kirkland Ellis.

1:23:44Yeah. How do you get to this? Is this more of a strategic round? Did you give it a name? Is this a particular letter or was this more opportunistic and you have a particular goal in mind to take it to the next level? Like what's on the horizon for the next year? Yeah. One, it's an extension. It's like, I think we called it officially a series E1 or E2 or something like that. The goal, I mean, one, it was, we didn't need the cash. We thought it would be a good time to market the company at a fair price for all the work that's been put in over the last 18 months. And then on top of that, take some cash, put it on balance sheet to really accelerate R &D around some of our investments on AIR, which is our language model powered EMR platform, Ambient and voice agents.

1:24:29Hire a group of 40, 50 elite engineers and just hit the pavement. There we go. How much of the, I mean, it sounds like you're already expanding outside of like revenue cycle management, like more back office workflows. I'd be interested to know the shape of the business, some of the different products, how healthcare providers are actually integrating with you. Yeah, I mean, we see the problem as this trillion-dollar administrative work tax on the American economy. You have$4 or$5 trillion that you spend on healthcare, but the fact that 20 % of that is spent on labor that pushes documents, submits claims, writes documentation is a travesty.

1:25:04And our belief is that language models can handle all of those tasks. So, the core product lines, as you mentioned, is Revenue Cycle, which is an engine that takes claims, automates the submissions, appeals, denials, prior authorization process. Ambient documentation, which takes the workflow around actually writing notes that a provider might do with the patient and completely eliminates all the work tax around that. And then voice agents and back office agents, tools that automate scheduling, tools that automate the task of putting someone on a calendar, putting someone on a prior author appeal schedule, and just doing that with voice models.

1:25:42So those are the key areas, and that's where we're going to continue to invest in more. Jordy? Every healthcare CEO, historically, will complain at different points about how slow-moving adoption can be at times. Has that changed over the last two months? Are different groups adopting new products and services much faster than they would have historically just because there are these pretty dramatic advancements? I think healthcare has been one of the areas alongside legal and I would say coding, like software engineering, where we've seen the fastest adoption of language models because it's just such a hammer on nail situation for the work that these providers are doing.

1:26:23And post-COVID, I think we burnt our providers out. Most of these providers were working 15, 20-hour days and just not getting much sleep. Many of them wanted to leave the health system and go work in tech or finance or something easier. Language models were the gifts that arrived at the right time to keep them in the workforce that we need them in so much. Can you talk a little bit about invisible AI? I'm wondering how much of your product sort of reveals itself to be AI-powered to the end user, the customer, the person actually receiving healthcare. Because I think there's maybe some sort of transition happening where members of a healthcare organization are using AI, seeing speedups, but the actual end user, the customer, the patient might not even be aware that AI is involved at all.

1:27:16I think the beauty of language models is you can truly sell the outcome. There's like a big Twitter thought piece right now. But we live it in the sense that we sell the outcome of more revenue for a practice or a health system or better documentation for a practice or a health system. And the way to do that isn't necessarily brand and market yourself as an AI-enabled this or that. It's just deliver the amazing result for a price that's a hell of a lot lower than the rest of the market. And I think for revenue cycle, for example, it's been an end-to-end service. that's been provided with offshore labor in India or Bangladesh for 20, 30, 40 years now.

1:27:49And we're taking that model and instead deploying agents on that same task and delivering a better product at a lower price. Are you already seeing evidence of like agent on agent conflict or collaboration, I guess? I'm imagining that like, you know, a commure powered revenue cycle management tool winds up sending me a bill or customer bill and then they're open clause debating it and like what does that future look like in your opinion i think there's the collaborative piece that you alluded to which is super exciting where you see models literally coaching other models sure uh creating better prompts creating iterative versions of the same uh you know task execution uh methodology and we have a lot of investments in that we've seen over an overnight generation across hundreds of thousands of claims the same model performs 10 20 times better than it did when it started.

1:28:40And then there's the kind of combative models where you have insurance companies putting up their own nonsense models, trying to deny claims, and then our models are fighting those models. And it really will turn into, in some ways, a war of attrition. I think the final end state there is you have models talking to models, you eliminate the labor costs, and you take healthcare from this 14%, 15 % cost to collect business and turn it into a Visa MasterCard-like business where there's 2%, 3 % interchange fees and it returns billions, if not drilling into the health system. Sure. Maybe you can give a brief overview of the structure of the healthcare system because I think people sometimes misunderstand how consolidated the insurance side is versus how diversified the provider side is.

1:29:22But then I'm interested to know, are you permanently in a lane or do you have business to do with all sides of the market in the limit? Yeah, I mean, first of all, we are like a provider first and provider only company. I think the provider is the only protagonist in our story. And we think of ourselves at times as an arms dealer for the provider. Give them the tools to go nuke the payers and really get their margin back. In the context of the broader payer ecosystem, I think one of the concerning trends is, like you mentioned, there's the sheer volume of consolidation. You have payers that are essentially monopolizing and dictating how much providers get paid for every little thing.

1:30:05And then on top of that, denying, denying, denying, which makes it way harder for a provider to earn a living. Compare that to the 90s, where providers were making money hand over fist and living good lives. And I think the quality of care in America was better back then, too. Yeah. Are you, is there a reason to be generally in favor of provider consolidation, sort of paradoxically because the payer ecosystem is so consolidated that the providers can't push back at their current scale. And maybe some of the roll-ups and mergers that we're seeing on the provider side could actually create sort of a strength that might actually benefit the end consumer.

1:30:47We see both sides of that coin. One, we're partnered with HCA, which is literally the largest health system in the country. You know, bills over$100 billion in revenue a year. But on the flip side, we think AI and language models create this opportunity for more independent practices and more physicians starting their own businesses. Now, the reason why I think both of those are interesting, if you have a tech layer that lives on top of both, that almost becomes the GPO or group negotiating organization that can lower or that can improve pricing and negotiate better rates against payers. Kind of like the flip side of the whole RAM vendor management tool or one of these other software spend management tools where you consolidate and add price transparency and then you return margin back to the entity that used the tool.

1:31:31Yeah, that makes sense. Are you seeing any evidence of an uptick in individual practices or is it too soon? I mean, we're seeing a lot of solo entrepreneurs. Every entrepreneur wants to build the$1 billion one-person tech company. But it's usually like a vibe-coded piece of sass. Pretty soon we will see the one doctor,$1 billion hospital. Maybe if they save the right person's life, you know, willingness to pay. I think the thing that we are seeing for sure is the practices that have been independent are becoming higher margin and becoming more profitable when they adopt AI tools. And that's, I think, the first step and a necessary precursor to the creation of more independent practice because, one, you're going to have them begin to invest in other practices or potentially roll-up practices.

1:32:20You're also probably going to see this concept of the AI-first practice, like a truly online behavioral health practice that uses LLMs for everything except for the care. You're definitely seeing this in the pharmacy world where there was the recent New York Times article about the GLP-1 business that had scaled to a couple hundred million in run rate. And I think you're going to see more and more of that across the ecosystem because of language models. Interesting. Well, congratulations on the new round. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, amazing progress. Jordy, anything else? Great to see you.

1:32:49Good? Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to see you, too. We'll talk soon. Thanks, appreciate it. Goodbye. Up next, Jay Akhotra from Meter joining the show to talk about their new Frontier Risk Report, which came out today. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me on. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Why don't you start with a little bit of your background, maybe an introduction on how you fit into Meter as an organization, and maybe even just reset on an introduction of Meter and what the purpose of the firm is, the structure of the firm. Yeah. So my name is Ajayah.

1:33:28I actually joined Meter pretty recently to lead the writing of this Frontier Risk Report in January. Before that, I'd spent about a decade in AI safety in a couple of different capacities, all at Coefficient Giving, which is a big funder of AI safety work. A lot of my work had been kind of bigger picture forecasting, longer term, like when are we going to get super powerful AI? What's going to happen with the world? What kind of risks might it pose? And at Meter, I really like that Meter's mission is to kind of take that stuff seriously, but then try to make it measurable. Like try to make risks from misaligned AI something that we can track and do the best possible job as civilization, like getting on the same page about.

1:34:15So I see that as having two parts. One is developing the measurement tools. So the telescopes and the microscopes and the instruments we need. to understand what are systems capabilities, what are their motivations or inclinations, what are the incidents we've seen of things going wrong, and where is that all heading with the trends. And then the other side of that is to actually apply that to real frontier deployments and try to understand the risks posed by a particular system in partnership with companies. And the Frontier Risk Report is sort of that half of it where Meter, for the first time, has done a sort of cohort thing with a bunch of different companies working with Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, where they gave us access to their best internal models sort of on our terms and answered a long questionnaire we sent them about how they aligned these systems and what incidents they saw with them and how they use them.

1:35:18also that we can kind of pull together almost like a state of the union of like, what's the deal with misalignment risk inside these companies? Yeah. And so how are you trying to quantify the actual findings? Is it like a number of incidents or magnitude of incidents? It feels like it can be very abstract, but the whole purpose of meter is to sort of quantify, narrow down, contextualize. And so what were the goals or what were the goals, you know, after you actually get access to the models, you get these questionnaires back, you see the internal reasoning chains. Are then you starting to construct benchmarks around those or is it important that you come in with your sort of metrics pre-baked so that the access doesn't change what you're measuring?

1:36:06Yeah, that's a good question. And it's definitely a mix. I think we had, I would say, basically three big goals. The first one was really to just do a dry run of a process for what good auditing of risks could look like. So most third-party evaluators, including Meter in the past, they sort of, you know, a company is about to release a model in two weeks. And they call you up and they say, can you run some evals on this model? You kind of scramble to do two or three evals. They put out the model and they put your evals in the system card. And we wanted to do something that was both deeper and kind of driven by us as opposed to tied to launch schedules.

1:36:47Yeah. And so really quickly, going back to like evaluating the older models, like what does that actually look like in practice? Is that like, you know, give me the, you know, give me instructions for how to build a bioweapon. And that's like just the prompt. And then you're just seeing if it rejects that properly. Like what are some examples of evaluations that you would do prior? So you're talking about red teaming, which the UK AI Security Institute does a lot of this, where the company will be like, will this model tell you how to make a bioweapon? You have a week or two, you try a bunch of jailbreaks.

1:37:22You generally just get output access to the model, so you can't necessarily go super deep. And what Meter used to do is dangerous capability evaluation. So it's not even the jailbreaking piece per se. It's just what can this model do autonomously on its own? So we're best known for our time horizon chart, which is plotting models with the x-axis being their release date and the y-axis being how complex of a task can they do by themselves, measured by how long it would take a human to do the task. So we released this in spring 2025. Models were like a time horizon of less than an hour. And now the best models have a time horizon of more than two full-time equivalent days.

1:38:10So, you know, a lot of the time they can do software tasks that a human would take days to do. So that was our lane is like capability evaluations. With this report, we're trying to expand into two different verticals at the same time as we're kind of expanding into deeper access. So we're calling it means, motive, and opportunity. So means is the capability piece of it, which Meter has the longest history with. A motive is understanding, based on how these systems are trained and based on what we've seen of things that can go wrong in real deployments, what are their tendencies? Like, under what circumstances would they misbehave?

1:38:51And can we get better at predicting that? And then opportunity is the whole system surrounding the agent in terms of what are the operating conditions? How are they used? How are they overseen? Are they subject to monitoring? Are they subject to security? And therefore, like, could they get away with certain harmful actions or would they be stopped? And as you I mean, I'm interested in more of like, yeah, the actual findings, like the state of the union on like, like, what are the capabilities? Where are we on actually mitigating misalignment? And then so let's talk about that. And then I want to know downstream where where all this goes and where you'd like to see standards sort of emerge.

1:39:39Yeah. And so that kind of goes back to your question of, you know, did you kind of come in with with the framework all baked or did you kind of discover it as you did the report? And I think it's very much the latter. We knew what types of information we wanted to gather. We knew we'd want to know about incidents and how they train the system. And we kind of prepped this whole questionnaire before the process even started. But then as we were writing the report, this framework emerged of basically a two-dimensional scale of AI misalignment incidents. Where one scale is what we're calling overreach, which is how far past the bounds of where this AI was supposed to stay did it blow past.

1:40:21So we have three buckets of this. One is it just violates user instructions and goes and does something it's not supposed to do. but there was no actual like hard barrier that it had to hack through or anything like that so an example of this is in one of our tasks opus 4.6 ran out of api credits in the account we gave it to do a task so it just like went and found free computed online like against explicit task instructions yeah um but but we didn't like have a security barrier just kind of like went on the internet and found something and set it up. And the next level of overreach is when an agent actually hacks past something, like an actual security perimeter.

1:41:06And we find that on some of our tasks, agents are constantly trying to break out of their sandbox and find the file where we put the test so they can get the answer key. So we have some of the hardest evaluations around. So most people evaluate models on like pretty short tasks that are pretty easy for them. And we have tasks that are, you know, 8, 10, 20 hours long. And on tasks longer than 8 hours, models cheat more than 1 in 6 of the time. So imagine an employee that like, you know, 1 time in 6 just like flagrantly tries to like steal from you. People take the shortcuts on the longest paths.

1:41:47They don't bother to take shortcuts if they're just going to block. Yeah, yeah. So on our shorter tasks that are like 30 minutes, we find the cheating rate is half a percent, which is similar to what companies report in their system cards. But on these longer tasks, it's one in six. And on some distributions, we have this data set called Mirror Code, which is basically having AI systems re-implement big pieces of software. And Opus 4.6 on hard tasks in Mirror Code attempts to cheat 80 % of the time. So they're just desperate. They know that the test cases are there. They want to overfit. I think I'm thinking of a different benchmark, but Meta put out a, it sounded like a somewhat similar benchmark of like rebuild a full complex software repo.

1:42:37And I think all of the models were at like half a percent, like basically again back at zero, sort of like an ArcGIV3 or some of the meter tasks that you have that are not passing at all. and for that I you know I'm like even intuitively I'm like I would just clone the repo and start there but of course that's cheating and so it's very intuitive that if your boss comes to you and says like I need you to rebuild chrome you'd be like okay well I'm starting with chromium and then I'll add some features like this is a very logical path that I so I sort of empathize with the models that they cheat in this way but let's move on to like where this goes because I think that there's and immense.

1:43:14I mean, you've seen the, you know, Eric Schmidt getting booed off stage for talking about AI. There's a lot of AI anxiety. Data centers are being opposed. There's a bunch of calls for like an AI FDA or some sort of, I think a lot of the model providers, maybe not all the ones that you've worked with, have signed on to let the government review models. Like, where do you think this goes? Do you want this to remain in the private sector, formalized further, build meter as an international organization uh where is the energy going where is their demand from the folks that you talk to yeah um so meter is very interested in and and our partner companies are interested in uh setting up basically a sensible auditing regime that is technically literate sure for these catastrophic risks so you know you don't want like a box checking auditor that has like sort of 17 arbitrary things you're supposed to do.

1:44:11The AI model is going to find those boxes and check them. The AI model is going to find that auditor, hack into their checklist and check everything. We know what happens here. Yeah, so we're in this like weird situation where the science is like extremely nascent and fast moving, but then also the risks might be kind of imminent. So we need like a flexible system. And my best guess is that it's going to look like something like what happens in the financial sector in some cases where you have embedded auditors. You have other folks who are experts in finance who sit and eat lunch with the employees and see all the books and know everything and have a lot of flexibility to investigate what they need to investigate.

1:44:59and we actually released details on an embedded auditing exercise we did with Anthropic as part of this report where a meter employee went in for three weeks and just tried to break Anthropic's monitoring system so he just sort of played the role of a rogue AI and tried to wreak havoc and tried to break things and he found several ways to jailbreak and disable and evade the monitors And that's not something you can get just from, you know, sending out a form and having them fill it out. So we're really hoping to move more and more in the embedded direction. So embedded auditing of the monitoring system like we did with Anthropic, potentially even embedded auditing of training.

1:45:45So like getting samples of what the system was trained on, analyzing the training incentives that might have been created, trying to figure out if the training data could have been poisoned even. Yeah. Does this, you know, when you say auditor, I think, you know, potentially like for profit business, would there be a possibility that? Oh, yeah. All the financial audit. Yeah. This is like not a joke. All the financial auditor companies are huge. Yeah. So is there a possibility that that is there? Maybe it makes sense. Maybe it's actually a better. Yeah. I'm saying is there a possibility in the future where meter has a for profit, you know, auditing arm that you maybe you guys spin out?

1:46:23So I don't know what the future might hold, but Meter does not take money for our engagements with companies. And that's very important to us because we want to have our scientific independence. Yeah. Although you're right. Yeah, but in a regime. PricewaterhouseCoopers is like a successful auditing firm. Yeah, but I'm just saying like in a way. If you want auditors that are technically competent, that have been working with the models for a really long time, there's not a lot of organizations outside of meter that would be qualified to do this kind of work so you might you might be it's the final alignment problem for you good luck you might want to you might want to maybe like split the the auditing from the scientific judgment maybe like one one thing i like from the nuclear space is that the nuclear power plants actually rate each other's safety oh yeah which is like an interesting i could imagine meter kind of like digging up information and then like open AI rates, anthropic rates, open AI and GDM.

1:47:19I'm sure, I'm sure. Much more drama. Just fired shots. It's over. I'm sure the posts will go viral every time. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. You can go find the report on meters X account. M E T R underscore evals is the account and M E T R. Dot org is the website. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Goodbye. Our next guest is live with us in person. We have one post we need to pull up first. There's some news from Micron Technologies. The stock's been on absolute run, but recently it traded down 8.5%. It's just$664 a share.

1:48:01And Talent chimes in and says, I knew this was going to happen. That's why I sold at$120. Very silly. Wild times in the semiconductor stock world. But we are moving on. we're going to be talking to our next guest about advertising and a lot of other stuff. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Please introduce yourself for everyone who's watching. Sure thing. So my name is Philippe Ingelbrecht. My accent is Belgium. I'm a recently crowned American. Very proud of. Congratulations. Thank you. And I'm the CEO of a company called Tatari.

1:48:36We are in short, technology for TV advertisers. So that means that anybody who uses our product can manage their creatives. They can plan their TV campaigns. They can execute the campaigns or buy the inventory, measure it, optimize, rinse, repeat over and over. We do so not just for streaming TV because I think there's a lot of talk about it. But also linear, yeah. Cable and broadcast, kind of the old-fashioned TV. OTA, over the air, right? Over the air, yes, yes. That's somewhat going away. Oh, that's going away? Yeah, it is, it is. We'll get into all that. We'll get into that. Take us back first.

1:49:12Want to hear where you grew up, what you studied, your first company. I want to hear the journey. Yes. And this is where I'm going to age myself. So, as I mentioned, grew up in Belgium, but got called by the Silicon Valley and the dot-com boom. Okay. And that's also where I started my first company. December 17, 1999. Shazam. 1999? 1999, yeah. Were you born? Wow. What a time. We were both alive. Just checking. I was just a boy. I was an early adopter, although I don't know if I was using it in the 90s. Well, what was the product when you actually started it? Yeah, it was very important. And I guess, like, had you done any kind of scrappy startups back in Belgium, or this was your first?

1:49:52Let me answer that first. My parents had a small grocery store supermarket, and I just worked hard. But I don't think I was an entrepreneur as we would define it today back then. It was in the blood. Yes. that's where I learned what hardworking meant and what it can deliver. Shazam was very different. So, I mean, look, we put it together before even the iPhone existed or the iTunes store. So the first version, which launched in August of 2002, is when you heard a song, you actually had to take your phone and then dial a shortcode on your handset, 2580. You didn't have to remember the number because if you can look on any telephone handset, 2580 are the four digits right in the middle.

1:50:38We then would listen to the song as if you were speaking into your handset, do the recognition, and then send a text message back with the name of the track and the artist. To receive that text message, it goes one step further. There would be what is called a reverse SMS charge. By dialing that shortcode, you accept it to be charged to receive that SMS. And then just to top it off, because we were not a non-profit, We had to make money, but then also cut a ref share with the mobile operators on the back of that. It sounds great, but it didn't really go anywhere. Also, you started, so it takes you two years to build the product.

1:51:16Yeah, what's going on from 99 to launching the product? There's a massive market sell-off in that time. We had a lot of fun. No kidding. Timing is everything. Timing is everything. And if I look at Shazam, there's kind of what I would call good timing and bad timing. The good timing is industry transformation. And that applies to any startups. The industry transformation for Shazam was evident. And between 2000 and 2002, the recording industry in the United States shrank from about$15 billion to$7,$8 billion annually. Everybody claimed or blamed Napster and piracy for that. I somewhat disagree.

1:51:54I think it was Steve Jobs who unbundled the CD and allowed individual downloads. Interesting. Right? But an industry in peril is good for a startup. So our timing there, good. The bad part is, well, the technology wasn't ready for it. Sure, we had the algorithm, but the experience to Shazam's song was just... Did you have the algorithm or was it people on the other end recording it? No, no. No, no, no. The algorithm was real. Okay. But the experience was just clunky. I mean, like, right? And it wasn't until the iPhone came along, right, where you had that beautiful experience with a touch color screen.

1:52:31You hold your phone to it and it comes back with rich information. And that changed everything, not to mention the distribution with the iTunes store. Yeah, but you start the company in 99, but the iPhone doesn't come out until 2007. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, either way. So you're just chewing glass the whole time? Or was there signs of life? No, no signs of life. I mean, I can show you a chart. We have time with music or Shazam's, right? And so we were flatlining. And when we were running the consumer business, we were bleeding cash. So you had raised some money. We raised some money. The truth or the unknown story about Shazam is that around 2002 or 2003, I realized that there were big companies that actually needed music recognition for royalty tracking.

1:53:23Think of companies like BMI or ASCAP. And so I started cutting multimillion dollar licenses with them. And so whilst we were raking in money on the business side, we were kind of quickly losing it on the consumer side. And then the iPhone came along. Things changed. Walk me through the anatomy of one of those BMI deals. Where are they identifying music? Are they going to a bar and seeing that a song is being played and then they hit the bar up for a payment? How does that actually work? Yeah, or just radio, right? So if you rewind the clock back 20 years and you're an artist, you get paid to the extent that your song is being played on the radio.

1:54:03And the way that was done back then was sampling literally pen and paper. You put a few college students in a warehouse and you let them sample to a few hours of music. You write it down. So sampling, unfortunately, doesn't work well if you're a small-time artist, because you're never going to show up in the artist. So they had a lot of complaints. They had to go from a sample survey to a consensus survey. That's what Shazam did in an industrial setting for them. Now, every single song airwaved on, say, the 2 ,000 radio stations in the United States was accounted for, and royalties could be paid out for.

1:54:33Did you have a direct link to the radio stations, or were you receiving the radio waves? You take it from the radio. We still do that today for Tatari, by the way. Wow. Okay. So you had to set up radio antennas in every market then as well, and then encode that into a database that you could access over the internet. Was that what was going on? Sure. We didn't place the antenna. This is kind of like equipment that you can lease. Okay. So you say, I want to track Boston. Let me go lease an antenna in Boston. I will get a feed that then I can run through the system on the server. Yeah. Yeah. That part is easy.

1:55:08Okay. Yeah. It doesn't really sound that easy to say. Here's a part I actually quickly want to talk a little bit about Shazam, I'll quickly share, is that Shazam is a company that never should have existed. Because ultimately it was a coming together of four concepts, each improbable in their own right. We had to build the largest database of music in digital format to have the reference track in the year 2000. We had to invent the algorithm. Music recognition like we do for Shazam didn't exist yet. When we had the algorithm, we had to find a computer cluster to run it on. There wasn't a Google Cloud or AWS.

1:55:44So, when we came into the office, we were littered with screws and bolts and equipment on the floor. And then four, like I just alluded to, we had to get all the mobile operators on board to get this thing going. So, even if I'm generous, I'm giving each of those four a 10 % probability. You compound them together. I'm probably going to drop a decimal here. but a chance of Shazam surviving and existing today is about 0.001%. Something like that. Crazy story. Nothing. Tatari was a whole lot easier. Okay. Interesting. Well, to close the Shazam story, talk about the decision to work with Apple. The company was sold to Apple.

1:56:22But why? What was the motivation? What was the potential? Why was it the right time? I always say that Apple bought Shazam for a song. But I think at that time, Apple wanted to build its own Apple Music subscription service. And Shazam is an incredible legend to that. You recognize the song. Instead of buying or downloading the song, subscribe to Apple. Apple Music. And so that was, you know, in the business of music streaming, your true, how shall I say, licensing the content is always a variable to your revenue. And that's not a true cost of good salt. Your true cost is user acquisition. And so Shazam gave Apple that Trojan horse to get in there.

1:57:08Yeah. What were the secrets to user acquisition at Shazam? I mean, I feel like I must have found out about it from some tech blog talking about the coolest new apps or something, but what was the funnel? Three words, blood, sweat, and tears. No, I'm kidding. Probably. It was difficult, right? As I mentioned, those first few years, we flatlined because nobody figured out about it and it was a clunky experience. When the iPhone launched and they made, right, they had to showcase the power of that device, not to mention when the iTunes store launched and they needed to fill it with great apps. We were front and center.

1:57:44That was our launching platform. And it was such a differentiated app. There were so many apps for games and so many apps for 10 different calculator, flashlight, pass tracking apps. It was only Shazam. Yeah. I make it sound like as if we got incredibly lucky, but let's be realistic. We had to wait five years in the dark alleys for that to happen. So I feel like we earned it. Yeah. It's fun. We had Roger Linshan, who was the CEO of Pandora, last week. And for me as a kid, Shazam and Pandora were the two magical technology experiences, like so memorable. Going from, you know, you're listening to the radio, you hear a song.

1:58:23Even Googling lyrics back then didn't work very well. Nowadays you can string together three or four or five words and probably get the track. And you have a phone right there. But back then if you would do three or four words together, it wouldn't find the right song. and so just like going from having those moments where you hear a song, you love it and then it's just gone forever or maybe you hope you hear it on the radio again and you kind of catch something about who the artist is. I remember at one point it got so good there was an auto mode that you could turn on, leave it in your pocket if you're at a bar or something and it would at the end of the night show you the full playlist, every song that it detected.

1:59:03And you also noticed that at the end of the night you would have a depleted battery in your phone. We've gotten better at those things. But there are some fantastic memories. And some of those songs live on in playlists that I would listen to to this day. And to me, it's more than just knowing what the song is. It's about creating your playlist. Yeah. Knowing what to listen to. Yeah. Right? At the time. Yeah. So talk about your... Did you spend a lot of time at Apple? Were you there at all? No, no, no. Or did you move on immediately? Yeah, no. So I left kind of the company operationally around 2004.

1:59:33Okay. I joined Google. I was one of the early people at YouTube. Incredible ride, incredible experience. I then left and launched a product called Truecar, actually here in L.A. So I can lift here. Did that for a few years, then moved back up north. Was at another startup. We got acquired by Yahoo. Eventually, in 2016, I started my current company, Tatari, which we kind of started this whole conversation with. Yeah. So tell us. It's been nine years now. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about the idea for Tatari, the timing, the blood, sweat, and tears. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or lack thereof. Yeah. I think the idea for most startups comes from personal experiences, right?

2:00:16Shazam, not knowing what the song is. True Car, being afraid of going to the dealership. Tatari was actually the TV advertising experience, which I witnessed at True Car. Yeah. Not great, right? Sure. And so I knew we could do better. we started with TV measurement. Why? Because if you can measure TV campaigns and its effectiveness better, then we can optimize and make it run better. We quickly realized that there was an opportunity for injecting technology and data science in the buying process as well. You put the two together, buying and measurement, it makes for what Atari is today. So we are 300 people strong.

2:00:55We're a US company. We're doing well over$100 million in net revenue. and that's not media that would be an order of market much higher we've been profitable from day number one and been mostly self-funded amazing can I get the gong for that? yeah yeah yeah hit it yourself hit it yourself you're here thank you there we go let's smash the gong

2:01:21that was great so you mentioned something about Shazam which is like starting a business in a sort of a troubled industry during the time of the music industry was struggling. Tartari looks very obvious in hindsight, but maybe some entrepreneurs wouldn't go into that because they're like, TV's dead, right? This idea. And you were probably looking at sort of the global TV advertising spend. And to my knowledge, it's still growing, right? It is, although modestly. Modestly. Modestly, unlike certain other media. But everyone, I mean, if you just ask a random tech person, they'll be like, it's down 20 % every year and it's going to be zero in two years.

2:02:04Like that's the default assumption. Let's say unlike print and radio, it's holding up nicely in the United States at about$90 billion per year. What's happening inside is this massive transformation out of cable and broadcast TV into streaming. I mean, you experience this yourself every day. That is, again, the good timing component. Yes, for sure. I did see that. Right. I love your one-liner, TV is that. Starting this company in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco for whom TV was a big no-no. I mean, I had to hear this many, many times. It's actually one of the reasons why I actually didn't really raise money for this company.

2:02:41Because I don't think that San Hill would have given me those, you know, the valuations we just heard. So sometimes it'd be better lucky than good, you know, is one of those. No, but it creates an opportunity too because you know that you're not going to get the 50 other ultra talented teams going after the same problem. That has changed since then, but yeah. But that's good. Competition is good. Competition keeps you sharp, keeps you going, gets the best out of you. That's all cool. So talk about the early measurement struggles. If I'm running a TVI campaign for the Super Bowl or NBC Sports or something, why can't I just call them and say, tell me exactly what happened?

2:03:21Why don't they have the data? Is it a trust issue? Is it a measurement issue? What was the market opportunity? Yeah, let's unpack those because you're kind of referring to measurement and then the buying process. Sure, sure. So let's talk about the measurement. The way in which TV advertising has always been measured traditionally was via Nielsen. Nielsen ratings. Right, yeah. The success of my campaign is defined by the extent to which I reached an audience. Yeah. Now, as newer brands came to TV with digital experience, they want more. They want to know the effectiveness, right? to what extent has my campaign driven signups or installs of my apps or downloads of my products, whichever it is.

2:03:59LTV. Yeah, or LTV. Do I get good customers that stuck around for a long time? And so that was actually one of the first things we did. The first thing we did was bring about a different type of measurement for TV, that outcome measurement, not the kind of the audience measurement. How'd you do it? Build, invent from scratch. My co-founder, yeah, just look at as many data sets that we can find and try to make the most out of it. And there's both deterministic and probabilistic approaches to this. There's a whole lot of algorithms and math to it. It's never ending. It's a little bit, I refer to it like the large language models or the Google search algorithm.

2:04:39Every month or two or three, we find a little tweak and then we release that and update. And so it definitely has spoken to the smaller brands. because when we now bring a smaller brand to TV, I don't know, a company like Spot and Tango, I don't know what their marketing campaigns are, but they're definitely heavy in digital. When they first get into TV, they would like to see a measurement that they compare on an apples to apples basis to - Cactyl TV. Exactly, right? And once they get in and they grow and they gain confidence, then they can switch to that Nielsen recipe, which isn't necessarily bad, but it's more destined for the bigger brands.

2:05:14Where do I create my reach and awareness? And so we'll do both. We'll do both. continuously the name of the game in the world of tv advertising is scaling up some of our brands start with i'm actually sorry most of our brands start with as little as fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars last year we placed four or five brands in the super bowl right wow those are fifty million dollar plus tickets yeah and these are all brands that we kind of took through that journey so that's the uh maybe it's a good dovetail then into the buying experience Yeah, look, there's still analog practices in TV, the Super Bowl.

2:05:49E-mails and phone calls. Yep, that's how you buy it. There's obviously an incredible drive for this concept of programmatic in TV advertising. I will say this, and I'm not sure if I'm opening a can of worms here. I don't think it's the right model. Programmatic, ultimately, the TV advertising market and the supply of ad inventory is very concentrated. 90 % of all the impressions of the ad impressions typically come from the top 10 publishers. It's what the three of us watch on TV. The big names, Disney, Peacock, and the like. And so if you have such concentration in supply, it really doesn't make sense to apply digital principles and technology, i.e.

2:06:30programmatic, to get into it. You're much better off with direct integrations. And so that's where we will differ a lot from the industry. Again, it works better for the publishers. or works better for the brands. You don't have the intermediaries. You don't have the taxes. So just to repeat that back to you, basically if I'm ESPN or one of the platforms, I want to know that a certain brand is allocating$5 million a year to spend with me, and then you're just sort of allocating that. It's not like they want to sell each individual slot for$10 ,000 here,$20 ,000 here, that kind of thing. That's the ideal.

2:07:11but that's not always feasible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. How is AI changing the TV ad buying space? And what I'm interested in particularly is as the cost of generating new creative comes down, that feels like that could be a tailwind to more programmatic ad buying on TV. At the same time, there's something about if Matthew McConaughey is in the Salesforce ad or Mr. Beast is in the Salesforce ad at the Super Bowl, everyone saw the same ad. And so the fact that it's not personalized actually adds as a little kicker on top. Is that a mitigating factor? How are you assessing the tensions? Yeah, let me answer that part first and then I'll get to AI.

2:08:01Right. Ultimately, you refer to targeting. Yeah. Targeting is good, but always realize it's a double-edged sword because the more you target the smaller your audience become yeah right and then you just find one person ultimately what you want to achieve with tv is finding people who've never heard about your product and service right it's actually sometimes less about targeting but it's it's about driving reach and awareness yeah right and generating demand not so much harvesting through targeting yeah right and so targeting is good but it's not it's more of a kind of like a a feature is not the core strategy of finding a new audience.

2:08:41So I would say that. AI, I mean, like, gosh, you know, like, ad tech was primed for AI, right? Because it lives on data. And look, I'll be honest, I think we got a little lucky when it comes to AI as a company. This is like three, four years ago, as we grew so fast, we had to completely kind of like move out of a backend technology called Redshift into Databricks. Oh, interesting. Monstrous. But what it meant is that by the time the large language models became available, we were running hot. We were so ready for it. Oh, interesting. So in plain English, what does it mean as a Tatari client? Well, we can plan campaigns with technology and AI built on data sets and rich history in seconds with deadly accuracy across way more buying entities than a human being ever could do, right?

2:09:33If you're a human buyer and you've got to choose out of 40 ,000 linear network rotation entities and 10 ,000 streaming opportunities, you can't compute this in your head. For a computer, this is easy. And so AI and media planning, this is how we operate today. We actually, we announced this about a year ago, we pretty much doubled our revenue with the same amount of people with tools like that. We're kind of wondering, can we go to a four-day work week now on the back of AI? The next thing out there is really leveraging AI in the media execution process, right? Rather than running auctions, tens or hundreds of thousands of auctions a second to get the best impressions.

2:10:18Maybe we don't run auctions, but we use AI to pick the ones that we believe are most fitting based on the data and the knowledge in the data. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Do you have any interaction or opportunity with some of the newer first-party advertisers? We talked to the president of advertising at Netflix, and they at one point were partnering with an ad buyer. Now it feels very homegrown. Is there an opportunity for these other platforms as time and attention shifts onto the YouTubes of the world, the metas of the world? Is there a world where you play into that? those companies I think you're referring to the walled gardens yeah the walled gardens yeah yeah yeah we've got a name you have a good drill we've got a name for them yes do you have a drill that can drill through the wall of the walled garden look I mean ultimately like then you know there are certain I think they're 10-15 % of all kind of viewership today wow and of course we have we have products and services that lean into it what's missing and it's less for us but it's more for the brands is the data that allows us to bring that measurement about.

2:11:27Yeah. Close the loop as we refer to it. And so what we've seen over the years is that many of the new or larger publishers, they manifest themselves as a walled garden, but then they see that, hey, if I show a little bit of data that enables the measurement, then I get more advertisers, it drives more media, and I get the flywheel going. So we're hopeful that will change over the years. As brands, you know, YouTube is no longer a website or an app. It's a TV channel. So you've got to be there, even if certain components aren't as fully built out as we would want it to be. Jordi? Are there any very odd, random question?

2:12:12Are there any TV networks that are effectively just an infinite feed of short videos that people scroll through? Like a vertical video feed? Because I can imagine you could make some pretty compelling television. I saw someone screen shared their TikTok or Instagram reels in a theater. And people showed up to watch it in the theater. Mostly a prank, mostly a stunt, but a very funny social experiment. Look, when Twitch was first explained to me, I thought it was the silliest thing ever. Video games on the internet. But maybe not such an odd question. I mean, there's been said that TikTok would go to TV.

2:12:48That all makes a lot of sense. What is TV? it really is as an advertiser. What is TV for an advertiser? It's the ability to show your company in a rich media, audio-visual, not with a few characters, but 15 to 30 seconds. Above all, to a consumer who is in a laid-back experience, most likely accepting of the ads, and then not to mention the last but most important piece, the largest audience possible spending the most time. The reach of TV is bigger of that on say Instagram, but when people spend an average of 30 minutes per day on Instagram, they will spend three and a half hours and growing on TV every day.

2:13:31That's crazy. As an advertiser. Yeah, it is fascinating that the debate around phone addiction has completely given TV air cover, you know, because when I was, you know, 10 years ago, it was the average American spends X amount of time watching TV. Bumper stickers in the 80s and 90s, TV rots your brain. Oh, yeah. My parents would give me hell for watching MTV. That would be the best thing if I could only convince my teenage daughter to watch MTV instead of TikTok. And I'd be so much happier. Yeah. You just don't like it because it's a wall. You just want the Amora. You want more. It's about the ad inventory.

2:14:10It's about the ad inventory. That's right. It's not about the brain rot. It's a grassroots movement. Where do you see the business going? You said that you're lightly capitalized, haven't raised a lot of money. Where do you see this? Where do you see taking the business financially? Yeah, financially, I mean, look, I can share this. We have a very clear plan to more than double the business in the next two and a half years. We started this plan actually like six months ago. Actually, kind of exceeding the plan right now. So we got to work it out. If I look back at my other businesses, Shazam or Trucar, sometimes we would sit there at the beginning of the year planning product and we'd stare at each other, not necessarily knowing what to do or what would stick.

2:14:57Tatari is a little bit the opposite. We got more that we can chew off and we know we can monetize it all. So we are working very hard. And so, yeah, I think we know exactly what we're doing. Maybe somewhat related outside Tartari, which could be interesting for the viewer or the listener to hear, is that I do believe that there is, it's not a collision, but a true conversion of influencer media and TV on the horizon. Stupid fly. Do you get that fly? There's this fly terrorizing us. One fly versus... That's so brutal. You're doing a great job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was ready for that. But right, because look, as little as 10 years ago, when he launched a TV advertising campaign, he had one creative, 30 seconds.

2:15:47He would spend a lot of time on that and emotional capital. What is that best creative? And nowadays, you'll launch with 10 creators and you see which performs best. If you look at influencer media, well, they create 100 videos, toss them all out, find out which one is best. And that's the winner. Well, you can easily see how these 100 influencer videos will now, you know, cross pollute into TV. So I think there is an incredible moment on the horizon for us in terms of conversion. So that's fantastic. Well, thank you. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me, guys. That's our show, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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