Google's Antitrust Victory | Aparna Chennapragada, Richard Socher, Pablo Palafox, Will Bryk, Charlie Wu

25:54I mean, I guess Apple wasn't like what it is today back in 2002, kind of pre-iPhone. It was certainly not like the biggest company in the world, but still like - Pre-Tyler too. Yeah. Tyler too. I mean, three years. 2005. 2005. Wow. Hey, if you want to feel old, born in 2005. Okay, so anyway, Sergey Brin, what does he do? So 2005, Sergey Brin suggests some kind of revenue share. They always call it a revenue share. Just out of the goodness of his heart? What is he thinking? That's crazy. I have to assume there's some competition. He's an honest man. He's seeing it on the horizon. Okay, okay, yeah.

26:29But yeah, I like that they always call it a revenue share. They're not paying to be the default. Sure, sure, sure, sure. They're just helping a brother out, you know? Okay, yeah, yeah. And then 2007, 2009, these are like the real negotiations. They're like, Sergey Brin says like, oh, yeah, we need a revenue share. But then when it comes down to it, he's like, well, you know, let's slow down. Let's push the brakes a little bit. The numbers are getting a little high. And then basically the actual like numbers are not public. They really only show up as a result of this case, like them being. Oh, after the fact.

27:03So we learned this through the case. We didn't know for years. Yeah, so it's not really until 2021. So there was like a full decade where people were like, yeah, Google's probably paying Apple something. Yeah, but hiding a$30 million line item. You can do it if, I believe the disclosure rules and SEC filings are something like, if it's a division of the company that reports the CEO, then you have to break out the financials. This is like YouTube. This is the story of like AWS when we first got the AWS financials. So if it's just something like, you know, it's some deal and it's just one deal, like it's not even a whole division of the company.

27:44It's a deal I did with Steve. Yeah. It's just like other income or something like that. I don't know. Okay. So 2021, it's kind of revealed or estimated at least that payments are around$20 billion a year. And then 2023, this is also a result of the case. Apple is confirmed to be taking 36 % of the revenue from Safari that Google makes. Okay. So it's similar to their App Store revenue, a little bit higher, 36%. Yeah. And that's probably how they got to the number. That's pretty crazy that Google's making$6 billion off of Apple. I never knew they were getting 36 % for the big man. For the big man.

28:22For the big man. That's crazy. Yeah. And then 2025. We know you paid to be here, but I'm going to need a cut too. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So let's go through the full case. The case. So September 2023, this is really the first like actual like trial. It's the bench trial. I don't really know what that is, but August 2024 is, is the actual like initial judgment. So this is Google is in fact violating antitrust. like something needs to be done. We don't know what is to be done. But we're going to do, but then we will eventually decide what the punishment is. Yeah. But they are guilty. They are guilty.

29:02They were found guilty. There's no, you know, results. Like what are they going to do? But yeah, they're guilty. And then it's not till April of 2025. So this is five years after the, you know, it was actually filed. There's the remedies trial. I think that's what it's. Sure. Yeah. So this is like what is actually to be done. Sure. Now, like we know that they're a monopoly. what do we do about it? And then it wasn't until I guess yesterday that it was actually the verdict. So I think we already went through some of the verdict, but it's that the judge denied the DOJ's request for forced investiture of Chrome and Android.

29:41They ordered Google to end exclusive distribution agreements. So that's like, I think we talked about this too with Apple, you can't like just, it can't be exclusive to Apple, the like payments or whatever. Yeah. What does that mean in practice? It can't be exclusive. So they have to pay like Xiaomi or something. Are we talking about other phone manufacturers? Are we talking about other search engines? Like I know that it like, like it's not like if I go into my Safari settings, I can't pick Bing. I can still pick other things. It's just the default that they're paying for. Yeah. We'll have to dig into that.

30:19Jordy, do you want to look that up or something? Ask Gemini. Okay, cool. It's kind of like legalese. And then there's mandating Google to share search index and user, basically sharing data with competitors. I don't understand the exclusive. So Google pays Mozilla. Yeah. Mozilla basically wouldn't survive without Google, apparently. It's like a very significant amount of their revenue, which is funny because Google obviously competes with Chrome. And then they do this with device manufacturers like Samsung that just continue to make Chrome and Google Search pre-installed. Sure, sure. Okay, and then what's the last one?

31:02Search index, sharing of the search index and user interaction data with rivals. So what is that, Bing? Yeah, so I guess this means, these are all basically direct quotes from the actual file. But I assume it means that they have to just share some of the actual index data from whatever page rank is. They have to put it out publicly. So we've got to hammer the chief product officer of Microsoft today about Bing and what this means. Because, yeah, I mean, there's got to be a way to make money off this if you're Microsoft. This is the way to do it. Okay, anyway, anything else from the history? Okay, so just to be clear, they prevent exclusive contracts.

31:44So Google is barred from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts that give its search engine, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini app a monopoly position on a device. Basically, they can't go to a smartphone manufacturer and say you just can't host any other. Sure, sure. In the chat, Pericleet says, Google's only going to share their search data with other top three companies, it's still remaining a monopoly. Interesting, and people enjoy the VHS. So thank you for tuning in. Also, so these rules also apply to Gen AI stuff? Yeah. All this also applies to Gemini, if they want to do the same, if they want to lease it to Apple or whatever.

32:22All the same rules apply about exclusive - If you've been enjoying the whiteboard segments, we are thinking about getting a smart whiteboard where we can put up a FigJam from Figma, of course, we're sponsored by Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Figma.com. Let's run through Ben Thompson's take. So he kicks it off with Google's remedy decision. Alphabet Inc. will be required to share online search data with rivals while avoiding harsher penalties, including the forced sale. We know this. Google's statement was short and sweet.

32:54Earlier today, U.S. court overseeing the DOJ's lawsuit over how we distribute search issued a decision on next steps. Google closes, says, as always, we're continuing to focus on what matters, building innovative products that people choose to love, choose and love. That's a good line. That's a statement of a company that lost some battles but won the war, in my estimation, says Ben Thompson in Stratechery, which you should go subscribe to. There are some cursory objections to Judge Metta's decision, but by and large, that statement exudes relief, and rightfully so. So the company that is truly breathing, the company is truly breathing easier today, however, is Apple.

33:33Apple's actually breathing easier because they're getting that sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet 20, 36 % off the top. 99 % margin, 20 billion a year. The first set of remedies were the ones that Google proposed and has already implemented, namely ending the exclusive agreements that were the foundation of Judge Mehta's original finding of liability. So let's see. I want to know what these actual remedies are. Here we go. Again, this is literally illegal behavior. What? We should just highlight again. So Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Search, Chrome, Assistant, and Gemini.

34:14Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that conditions the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution, preloading, or placement of Google Search Chrome. This is the bundling thing. So a lot of the antitrust cases hinge on bundling. You say, oh, you can't have the Play Store on your Android phone unless you're defaulting to search. Or you have to have Chrome pre-installed if you want access to search. Like all of that stuff is seen as anti-content. And so Ben says, again, this is literally illegal behavior. So ending it was the bare minimum. Antitrust precedent, however, dictates that Judge Meta go further.

34:53Again, from the opinion, this is from Meta. Yeah. Oh, this is good too. So they cannot enter or maintain an agreement that prohibits any partner, either Apple or Samsung, from simultaneously distributing any other search engine, browser, or Gen.AI product. So Google can't go to someone and say, hey, in order to have search as your default or Google search or whatever deal we're doing or whatever we're paying you, you can't have Anthropic pre-installed or you can't have Mozilla pre-installed. You can choose Yeah, can't be in the contract. And that is illegal behavior. And so ending it is the bare minimum, says Ben Thompson.

35:41Antitrust precedent, however, dictates that Judge Mehta go further. Again, from the opinion, the question now is what to do about Google's violations. Precedent requires fashioning antitrust remedies that effectively pry open to competition a market that has been closed by a monopolist's illegal restraints. Denying the fruits of the violation is a valid objective, and so too is ensuring that anti-competitive behavior will not recur in the same or related ways. The court has broad discretion to impose remedies to accomplish those aims. Judge Mehta laid out four fruits of the violation. The court found that the agreements had four main anti-competitive effects.

36:22They, one, foreclosed a substantial portion of the relevant markets, thus impairing rivals' opportunities to compete. Two, denied rivals access to user queries or scale needed to effectively compete. Three, reduced the incentive to invest or innovate in search. And four, enabled Google to increase text ad prices without any meaningful competitive restraint, thereby allowing Google to earn monopoly profits to secure the next iteration of exclusive deals through higher revenue share payments. These effects did not persist independently. Together, they enabled Google to widen the moats and pull up drawbridges to ward off competition.

36:56Great analogy. Judge Meta attempts to address number two necessary scale by forcing Google to share various types of data, including Google search index, but not the actual data from the web pages and the index or the output of Google's page rank algorithm. Competitors, which explicitly include Gen AI providers, will get a one-time snapshot, not an ongoing one, and only need to pay Google's marginal costs for providing the information. User click and query data showing what results users clicked on. Competitors will get this data at least twice, but the final number will be determined by the technical committee.

37:31The court will set up and oversee. Do you fully understand? Yeah, that's a very, very odd change and remedy. I guess it lets people catch up to where things are. It feels like the remedy is like there has been this unfair advantage for Google for years. We're letting everyone catch up and then we're creating like a fair race, but we're restarting the race and then everyone can go out and do whatever they want. But we're not permanently making Google share everything, but we're making a one-time catch up of like data, I guess. Is that what's going on? I don't know. Tossing some scraps of data. That's what it seems like.

38:09So we'll continue with Ben Thompson. In addition, Google needs to make its web search results available via syndication at ordinary commercial terms for five years, capped at 40 % of an alternative search engine's annual queries. These are all worthwhile remedies. The problem, however, is that that's it, the Google patronage network. So there is a lot here. And he does talk about Bing. I'm going to work through the remaining three fruits backwards. First or fourth, Judge Meta decided that Google sharing user click data for ads was both a request too broad, and also the court didn't know what data needed to be disclosed.

38:48So that one was discarded. The third fruit, meanwhile, is getting a lot of attention because Judge Meta said that it basically no longer existed. Generative AI products are now a competitor to search and are getting plenty of funding. This is what we talked about earlier. Very interesting to see that there is a lot of competition there. In early 2023, when the new Bing with Generative AI Search, OpenAI, Sam Altman told Ben Thompson in a strategic interview, view. I think it's fabulous for both of us. I think there's so much upside for both of us here. We're going to discover what these new models can do.

39:20But if we're sitting on a lethargic search monopoly and had to think about a world where this was going to be a real challenge to the way that monetization of this works and new ad units and maybe even temporary downward pressure, I would not feel great about that. Do you know what that lethargic search monopoly does feel great about? Being able to keep the fruits of its anti-competitive actions because OpenAI exists. It's crazy. Anyway, that leaves one point in the Apple connection. Judge Meta admits that a ban on Google Payments for search placement would have an impact on the market. The rationale for a payment plan, for a payment ban is straightforward.

39:56It would pry open the market to competition. And we talked about this a little bit earlier. And yet Judge Meta declined because of the harm ending payments would cause to recipients of those payments, leading to a list of downstream effects. quotes from the opinion, lost competition and innovation from small developers in the browser market, fewer products and less product innovation from Apple. Apparently, they don't have enough money. Otherwise, that is a funny conclusion. Higher mobile phone prices and less innovative phone features. Judge Metta further argued that the ultimate outcome would harm consumer welfare, and that was that.

40:31The entire section was, in fact, a total endorsement of the Google approach Ben described in Friendly Google and Enemy Remedies. Yeah, this is great. The cleverness from Ben, the cleverness of Google's strategy was their focus on making friends instead of enemies, thus motivating Apple in particular to not even try. Tech company, particularly advertising-based ones, famously generate huge amounts of consumer surplus. Yes, Google makes a lot of money showing you ads, but even at a$300 billion plus run rate, the company is surely generating far more value for consumers than it is capturing. That is, in itself, some degree of defense for the company.

41:07I should note, much as Standard Oil brought light to every level of society, what is notable about these contractual agreements, though, is how Google has been generating surplus for everyone else in the tech industry. Maybe this is a good thing. It's certainly good for Mozilla, which gets around 80 % of its revenue from its Google deal. It has been good for device makers commoditized by Android who have an opportunity for scraps of profit. It has certainly been profitable for Apple, which has seen its high margin services revenue skyrocket thanks in part to the$20 billion per year of pure profit it gets from Google without needing to make any level of commensurate investment.

41:43So what Ben actually recommended. And one more line here from an old, from Judge Meta. He says, the revenue share payments shape the market for general search services in Google's favor. They provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything. They effectively make the ecosystem resistant to change. And their net effect is to basically freeze the ecosystem in place. Apple's like, why would, like, we could compete in search, but why would we if we can get$20 billion a year? And the device manufacturers, they say, like, I mean, technically they could create a new search engine or new intelligence, but we could just get a revenue share from Google.

42:21I feel like there was a dust-up back in the Steve Jobs era over Siri and whether Siri counted as a search engine and where the Siri project would go. Because at a certain point, search had become so well-defined in terms of the technology that you need to actually build a search engine that Apple could do it. Similar to training a foundation model now. It's something that if you have the money and you have the talent, you can just do it. and there are a number of companies that have done it. The problem is the distribution. Like there are other search engines out there, DuckDuckGo, but the problem is actually getting the aggregation of everyone actually showing up and getting the flywheel and making it a default.

43:06And Apple has the ability to make something a default, but you're basically paying them off to not go and build their own search engine. And yeah, there's this tension. Um, anyway, uh, Ben Thompson recommended that Jatru Meta do the following, uh, back when he was writing about this case earlier. Ben said, this is why ultimately I am comfortable with the implications of my framework and why I think the answer to the remedy question is an injunction against Google making any sort of payments or revenue share for search. If you're a monopoly, you don't get to extend your advantage with contracts, period.

43:46Now do most favored nation clauses. More broadly, we tend to think of monopolies as being mean. The problem with aggregators is that they have the temptation to be too nice. It has been very profitable to be Google's friend. I think consumers and Google are better off if the company has a few more enemies. So basically, don't pay Apple at all. What will happen? Apple becomes an enemy. Apple partners up with a different search engine, builds their own, creates more competition. Maybe ad prices on Google go down. Maybe there's more consumer surplus. I think that's kind of what Ben's initial take was.

44:27But Judge Meta disagreed. Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because if you take away, you make it so that Google can't pay for search placements. and Mozilla dies and then browsers become less competitive. Yeah, yeah, that is the flip side of the coin, which is very interesting. Usually you would assume that it's the opposite. You would assume that they're maintaining this monopoly, but in fact they're kind of, at least they're maintaining their search monopoly, but then they're propping up an oligopoly in browsing because they're like, oh, it's okay, because the browsers are just a window into the actual highly profitable search results.

45:01So Judge Meta disagreed because Google's strategy sharing its monopoly profits was deemed too important to undo. Note the paradox. Judge Mehta is implicitly admitting that as long as Google is able to pay for search placement, they will in fact continue to dominate search placement. After all, continued Google dominance is a prerequisite to Google money continuing to flow, thus avoiding the downstream effects Judge Mehta is concerned about. So he did allow for the fact that not banning payments might be a mistake. So he says, so for now Google will be permitted to pay distributors for default placement.

45:36There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work. Still, judges must be open to clarifying and reconsidering their decrees in light of changing or unchanging market realities. The court is thus prepared to revisit a payment ban or a lesser remedy if competition is not substantially restored through the remedies the court does impose. Anyway, let's move on. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

46:14This is Vanta country. This is Vanta country. Annie says, B. Nestle, hire a French CEO. Act surprised that the Frenchman is having taboo, debaucherous relations on the job. Their president literally married his child. Oh, you haven't heard about this? So this was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and we didn't get to it. And then it was also in the Wall Street Journal today. Pull it up. Pull up the journal. And we've got to pull it up. So Nestle has fired their CEO following a probe of a romantic relationship with a subordinate. You can't even marry your childhood teacher in this country? No, you can.

46:49You can't have a romantic relationship with a subordinate if you are running Nestle. So Laurent Frichet, I don't know how to pronounce the X in that name, But Laurent is out after just a year at the top job of the food giant, which is trying to sell a number of underperforming businesses. They dismiss the CEO with immediate effect following an investigation into an undisclosed romantic relationship with a direct subordinate that breached the group's code of conduct. The Swiss maker of Nescafe coffee, Purina Petfood, said Monday that his board had ordered the probe overseen by Chairman Paul Bulk and lead independent director Pablo Isla with support of an independent outside counsel.

47:31This was a necessary decision, they said. Nestle's values and governance are strong foundations of our company, and I thank Laurent for his years of service at Nestle. They didn't identify the employee in the relationship. But it's a dramatic shift in the top echelons of Nestle in little more than a year. This CEO, Laurent, had replaced CEO Mark Schneider in a bid to revive growth as the company grappled with sluggish sales. He was the first outsider to run Nestle since 1922. He was dismissed because he wasn't seen by his board of directors as a cultural fit. the new guy, Laurent, who just got fired, who had previously run businesses at Nestle in Europe and Latin America, took the helm of the company in September of 2024.

48:19So less than a year, exactly a year. In July, they were reviewing some underperforming brands. But let's see, where is it? the company has been. So basically, he gets fired. And then today, he's in the news again. Where is it? It's here, I think. Not again. He's in again with a detail. So an anonymous tip led to the fall of Nestle's CEO. Nestle's chief executive, Laurent Frischet. His downfall started with an anonymous tip to an internal hotline called Speak Up. Laurent was having an intimate relationship. This tip initially came through like last year or something. So it had been bubbling up.

49:06Yeah. So he was having an intimate relationship with a marketing executive who reported to him. The tipster reported. The couple initially denied any relationship. It took two investigations, more hotline reports, and a letter to the Nestle chairman before the food company acted. He didn't respond to requests for comment. Shocking. Gabe sent an unhinged message in the chat. He says, who cares about this nonsense? The divorce rate is like 50%. Makes your brand more personable if your CEO is cheating on his wife. The real question that we need to dig into is how is Nestle going to come back from this?

49:42They got to get Gwyneth Paltrow or something to do some viral video. Yeah. There's a playbook now. So the executive's downfall throws Nestle into disarray after the company abruptly ousted its previous chief for underperformance. Mark says it's low-roan. L 'Aurone. L 'Aurone. It's not Laurent. L 'Aurone. Oh, L 'Aurone. L 'Aurone. Thank you. L 'Aurone. Wait, how do you pronounce for Shay? Is that, is that, am I close on that? I don't know. He was Ness quickly, he was Ness quickly escorted out of the office. That's really good. Absolute great chatter. So L 'Aurone is 63 years old and was in Nestle since 1986.

50:2886. He refocused the company on core brand. 86? 86. A 40-year run. Almost. 40-year run. 20 years. He was 24 when he joined the company. 20 years before Tyler was born. Yes. Put everything in the context of that. I mean, it's important. Wow. So you're telling me that America was founded 220 years before Tyler was born. Wow. Wow. Wow. So the French CEO slashed costs to reinvest in more promising products, such as cold coffee, and shored up Nestle's executive team at the company's headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva in Vevey, Switzerland. I guess I'm probably mispronouncing that too. His Swiss successor, Philippe Navratil, faces the task of arresting a years-long slide in the company's shares and restoring calm after scandals, snafus, and executive departures.

51:24Anyway, there's more. Well, speaking of corporate controversy, the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer are accused of paying star Kawhi Leonard$28 million for a no-show job as a way to circumvent the NBA salary cap, according to a report by Pablo Torrey. Yes. Torrey laid out the alleged scandal on his program, Pablo Torrey finds out. earlier today. The show, which features plenty of direct quotes from legal documents, made the argument that Leonard was paid$28 million through a company owned by Balmer to essentially do nothing. Balmer is accused of using this agreement as a way to pay Leonard more than his contract, which, if true, is a violation of NBA rules.

52:10The entire situation revolves - I thought there was no tax on tips. I thought you could just tip a player if you really liked them. And wouldn't that not count in the salary cap? Should have just been tipping. I feel like he should have just been tipping. And tip 28 mil to your favorite player on the team. Why not? No, that - Why are there - The entire situation revolves around a now bankrupt company called Aspiration, which is a tree planting service funded by Balmer. So I think tree planting feels like a little bit disingenuous. This was a - I think it was a fintech company that had sort of an eco angle to it.

52:45It would plant a tree every time you like saved a dollar on the app or something like that. Every time you spend money. Something like that. And so, yeah, Ballmer had invested a lot of money in this company. And, yeah, they were effectively paying him as a spokesperson.

53:05But in the contract with Kawhi's, one of Kawhi's entities, stated that Leonard could decline to proceed with any action desired by the company. so uh he could they could say like hey you want to do this and he could say yeah not no thanks and uh he would his contract was still you know valid he wasn't wasn't violating anything it is it is an odd choice i feel like if you're balmer and you're a multi-billion i mean he's one of the richest people in the world right and your goal is to get someone who you're effectively doing business with on the court, he's a basketball player. Your goal is to get him an extra$28 million.

53:50Isn't there a better way to do that? Like, isn't there, isn't there a way to like set up some fund that's, you know, you cut him in on and then you're actually like doing something economically valuable, like - Go invest, get into founders fund, growth fund. I mean, that's one option, but honestly, it's like, couldn't you just make some calls and get him more Super Bowl ads and get him more like ad deals. Like just, just make some calls and get, and get some like legitimate business. Like it doesn't seem like that crazy of a number to try and pull together. Um, like somewhat like much more legitimately, you know, like there are probably advertisers out there who would say, Oh yeah, like we'll, we'll pay him a couple million dollars to be like our, you know, the face of our brand.

54:3720, 28 million is a lot though for a company that it only raised a couple hundred million dollars? No, what I'm saying is that, like, I mean, the question to me is, like... Does he not have to solve power at Microsoft to say, hey, we're rolling out a new version of Excel and you're going to be the face of the campaign? The new Clippy is going to be Kawhi. Awesome. A little Kawhi hanging out. I love it. Hanging out, helping you in this spreadsheet. There's got to be some other way to help. Well, the way is to actually make him an ambassador for the company. Yeah. I don't think there's anything illegal about somebody, you know, a basketball player getting a major endorsement deal outside of their team.

55:15But I think that the thing that ticks it off is, you know, really big number. And then not doing any, not doing, they weren't able to find any content that Kawhi was in related to Aspiration. So signing this big sort of like. If you sign a deal with a company to promote them, you have to run ads for them. You have to tell the audience about Graphite. Code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. We will always tell you. They're not paying us to get around the podcast or salary cap. No way. Yeah, I mean, I read this and I was feeling so grateful that we don't have any salary caps in business.

55:55Yes, yes, 100%. We wouldn't have been able to retain Tyler. I also don't know that I feel that this story is finished. It feels like it's viral and there's some allegations, but I will be reserving my judgment until I hear Steve Ballmer. Yeah, the Clippers already responded. They said, neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to aspiration. Any contrary assertion is provably false. Yeah, it's like an anonymous inside source from Pablo Torre founds out. I mean, I do think if you care about basketball and you care about... this if you're another team are you not like deeply frustrated if it's true it might not be true He might have been like, yeah, I had a deal.

56:49We signed the deal. It was$28 million. They were not very good at planting trees. And so they didn't pay me anything. And I didn't do any promotion for them. So yes, there's technically a contract. Or there could not be a contract. It's also just crazy. It could be this anonymous source just saying whatever. I mean, this is not an anonymous source. It's an inside source. Inside source. But he's like a capital J journo. Pablo Torre? Yeah. Oh, OK. I don't know. I don't know about that. He seems to be like. athletic or something doing pretty legit uh journalism okay but the funny thing is so leonard anonymous leonard joined the clippers on a three-year 104 million dollar deal in 2019 re-upped in 2021 for 176 million and then re-upped again in 2024 for a three-year 149 million dollar extension and so the 28 million dollars is like almost like a rounding error and in all of this i mean it's a big number but at the same time like would he not have joined the clippers yeah Would he have gone somewhere else if he hadn't gotten this?

57:48Yeah, I don't know. Maybe the nature of the salary cap is there is more cap space at another team. NBA fans in the chat, does this piss you off, or is this fair game for Kawhi Leonard to be the faceless face of aspiration? Yeah. Aspiration isn't even around anymore. They're Chapter 11. There are plenty of sports with no salary caps, right, where they can just spend as much as possible. Isn't F1 kind of like that? Maybe Kawhi just hates trees and wanted to put this company in the dirt. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, we have massive news from one of our sponsors, Shane Copeland, over at Polymarket.

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59:16So congrats to everyone over there. And if you're tracking any news, head over to Polymarket to check it out. We, of course, have Polymarket powering our ticker down there. Anyway, I want your review of the new Aston Martin Vanquish, particularly this one. This is your favorite colorway, right? Green over tan? Yes. So it's green over tan. And it's finished in historic California Sage over 21-inch liquid silver wheels. It features a 5.2-liter V12 twin turbo with 835 horsepower and 1 ,001 newton meters of torque. I absolutely love the Vanquish. Yes. I think I want to pick one up when they're half off in two years.

59:57You think there'll be a depreciation? I think this is like a half a million dollar car right now. It feels like it's going to be a quarter million dollar car in a couple years. Why do you think Aston Martins depreciate so much faster than Ferraris? Is it just the limited run nature? What's driving it? One big issue over the last few years has been the internal electronics. Oh, yeah. Extremely dated. So until the last two years, they were extremely dated. Isn't that true for Ferrari? Is Ferrari known for amazing CarPlay integrations? I mean, not to the same degree. I mean, if you buy a 2021 Aston Martin, it feels like sitting in a car from like 15 years ago.

1:00:41And people just don't like that, right? Like I've looked at them and I'm like, if I'm driving this around LA. Can you just rip all that out and get one of those aftermarket things with like 12-inch subwoofers in the back? It's kind of janky. I think you'd put it on spinners and take it to the Pimp My Ride shop with Exhibit and throw a TV in the front. I don't know. Or you can pull off the, you know what the cops do where they put the full laptop next to them? Have you seen that? Where you pull up next to a police officer and they have the full laptop. And you're like, wait, you're pulling somebody over for using their phone.

1:01:14And you're on your laptop. You're watching TBPN. A little hypocritical, don't you think? Oh, well. But, yes, why do you think they'll tell you? Did they just make too many of them or something? Lawrence Stroll is out to win in the category. He's taking it very seriously. They've upped their manufacturer's guarantees now. They've made it a much easier decision. We'll see how these do. I still think they lack the scale of the Colt following that, obviously, Porsche has. But I think in this case, I like this colorway. I think green on tan, the meta, it's timeless, but I think the meta is fading. And brown on brown.

1:02:04Brown on brown. Yeah, you saw a brown on brown Porsche at the gym yesterday. And I tried to buy it. And I jumped out of the car to go shake the person down. Tried it. Made a bid. You made a bid? Well, I just said, would you sell me your car? You said that? Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize that's why you went up. The woman said no. That's hilarious. But brown on brown. The most bullish catalyst for this vanquish going asymptotic and going into the stratosphere in terms of price, Aston Martin is, of course, partnered with Public.com. That's right. And so all the Public.com fans, the investors who take it seriously because they have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions, all the Public.com fans will buy Aston Martins now.

1:02:45And Public is a sponsor of the U.S. Open and some tennis players. They sent us some balls. Is Aston Martin paying public to, oh, that's a good sound. Smell it. I don't think you're supposed to. You're definitely supposed to smell it. That's rule number one of opening a ball of tennis and tennis balls. You're going to kill me, John? Anyways, these are fantastic. This is really cool. We got to get it. I mean, we almost have room for court here. Now, are those actually tennis balls, or could those be used for some of the less popular sports, the padel and the pickleball? Oh, I think it would be wrong to use these for anything but tennis.

1:03:21Does Padale or Pickle have like this different ball? Pickleball does. Pickleball has its own ball. What does Padale use? I don't know. Anyway, thank you to the public. No, Padale have higher pressure thicker felt, slightly larger size. Okay, interesting. Well. Standard tennis balls are, Padale is smaller, I guess. Yes, well, Klarna is going public. And Eli says, friendly IPO. That's a good one. He says, interest in this IPO, but$35 seems like a lot to pay all at once. Would it be possible to split this up into four interest-free payments? Of course, there it is. Well, I mean, this is what that company, this is what Basic Capital is doing.

1:04:12They're basically bringing leverage to the people. Yeah. For your 401k. Yeah, pay later. It's very interesting. Yeah, I mean, we talked to Max Levchin at Affirm. We've talked to Sebastian at Klarna. And Affirm's doing very well. So that probably bodes well for Klarna going out. At the same time, it's oddly competitive. It's kind of shocking to me that there's such a duopoly here and one company hasn't run away with it. Like Shopify has really compounded and compounded and compounded and really defeated a lot of the other e-commerce platforms. But in terms of the payment processors, it's been much more oligopolistic.

1:04:50Maybe it's just because the dynamic of the buyer wants to bid the two against each other. So like the Stripe ad yen dynamic kind of comes to Klarna and Affirm. But both really big companies. We'll get to see the financials and dig into Klarna as they go out. Klarna's total revenue in 2024 was$2.8 billion. I'm going to jump in right now. The firm's 2024 revenue was$2.3 billion. Wow, they're really Klarna's. That's crazy. Klarna made a very narrow profit in 2024. $21 million. Let's give it up for that. I'll have to see it. So yeah, they've been cutting. But I mean, credit to Klarna for getting to the scale while competing against Max Levchin.

1:05:36It is crazy. That is like a nightmare competitor. There's also something very, very odd about the... Klarna and Adyen are both European companies, correct? and they both compete with like Stripe and Affirm, these like sort of PayPal mafia-esque Silicon Valley firms that have been doing it the very Silicon Valley way. Like there's this odd dynamic that's in both companies. Yeah, so one of the things cutting into Klarna's profitability is their just like credit losses. They lost half a billion dollars last year, which is more than they spent on sales and marketing. Interesting. and is that just because people sign up for Klarna they do the buy now pay later and they just bail like they buy a burrito and they say so yeah does that make it sense to collections i imagine it does but eventually it doesn't get well i think part of their value wasn't there part of their value prop is that it's not tied to your okay it's just like completely optional like it has to hurt your credit score right i imagine like i i i mean maybe it goes into some sort of database but uh the idea that you could just go around and use buy now pay later willy-nilly and never pay your later part does not seem sustainable.

1:06:49Anyway, if you're looking to slice up a bunch of financial data, do it on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data and analyst that works for you, used by Princeton, BCG, and Zapier. Klarna, get on Julius before you go public. For sure. Thank us later. For sure. Let's go to this tier list by Mert Helios.dev. He's been on the show. Good friend. He says a city tier list that will trigger everyone but is true. S tier is Moscow and Tokyo. A tier is NYC. B tier is Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, and Austin.

1:07:34C tier is Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, Chicago, and Rome. D tier is Los Angeles. Come on, Mert. You're doing us dirty here. Of course, I am triggered. I think that LA is definitely a D tier city. I love living in Los Angeles County, but the city itself is mid. Yeah. We should do our own tier list. Can you wipe that down, Tyler? Yeah, start working on a tier list. just just draw up the the the s a b c d f and uh and we'll fill in them we'll throw them out um uh this is so funny because one of the first replies sf not even on the list is accurate and sf is on the list in b tier uh reading comprehension not quite there sam but good job i like the but i austin above places like paris and berlin it's a good mog and he did a really good job like no this is the perfect post it is like you'll get people that agree and people that disagree and it's perfectly controversial yep um uh anyways i i got a text from a financial technology expert that says most bnpl providers don't report to bureaus because the bureau systems haven't been able to use the data intelligently they've tried to fix but they're a cluster f uh so that's interesting clarna is like hey we got a lot of i mean the thing that clarna can obviously do is say like if somebody buys a burrito and doesn't pay for it yeah they can just like not work with that yeah so when you try and hit it the second time you don't get a chance yeah and say most consumers would be like i want to keep having options options yeah probably pay it back yeah um well Well, there was a timeline that was in turmoil, a little battle between the Scroat Goat and Nikita Beer.

1:09:28Very interesting. Nikita's having a hilarious time on X. I feel like - He found an absolute roll. I'm so happy that he took - It's really the best. It's just the best narrative arc for him. It's basically a poster in residence. Yeah. But then gets to mold the platform. Totally. I mean, I think I've been having a good time. I haven't noticed any really negative changes. It seems like there's some intractable problems. Dude, it's great. Did you notice the changes they made on video? Like they totally updated the UI on video. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With the buttons down at the bottom.

1:10:01Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's do the tier list now. I got this account that was actually adding followers now for getting in this war. And this is Nikita's advice. Remember, he said, if you're a tiny account on Twitter, the best thing you can do is go and pick a fight with the biggest account you can find. And that's exactly what this guy's doing. It's so good. So, yeah, ScroatGoat says, like, I have eight followers and they're all bots. And the algorithm's keeping my reach from being like, you know, like I'm not getting enough reach. The only way to get reach is via comments. Nine followers is a byproduct of no reach.

1:10:43and Nikita says, maybe the Scroat Goat is not the best name for your account. He said, nah, man. If anything, it's an all-timer. People should follow it just for the name. And it worked. The Scroat Goat said, the truth always wins. And Nikita Beer got 600 likes. And I checked the account and had a couple hundred followers. So we might be looking at a future Hall of Fame poster. Okay, Tyler, let's do the tier list. I want to go first and then you can do your tier list. Maybe we can just do a little line down the center. Can you do a line down the center? Like after the city tier list, like a little bit farther, a little bit farther so that we can put mine.

1:11:24Okay. So yeah, that's fine. So I'll start with F tier. I'll agree with Mert. I'll put London in F tier just like Mert did. And Mert also has Toronto and Brussels. He has it in D tier. I'll leave Toronto and Brussels in F tier as well. So for me, I think we're good. So put Toronto and Brussels in F tier. Then for LA. Have you been to Toronto and Brussels? Yeah, terrible. Then Los Angeles, he put it in D tier. I'll actually go S tier. I love LA. It's fantastic. I'll put LA there. Then in C tier, he has Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, and Rome. I would, as a little controversial, I would put those in F tier.

1:12:11So I'd put Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul. So Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, and Rome all in F tier. Then in B tier, he put San Francisco and Austin. I'd put those in S tier. So put those up there. And then he put dubai in b tier uh this is gonna be a little controversial but i would put dubai in f tier yeah uh he also put hong kong in b tier sensing a pattern i think that's f tier let's put hong kong down there and then also uh istanboul i'd put that in f tier uh and then new york city he put in a tier i'd put it in s tier uh and then also i'd also add uh phoenix in s tier and uh Philadelphia. Just put Philly.

1:13:02And then San Diego. I mean, have you been to San Diego? Absolutely put an S tier. And then Dallas. Let's put Dallas in S tier. And you got Chicago. Oh, you missed Chicago. Chicago's obviously S tier. Okay, cool. Yeah, we're good. And then Moscow and Tokyo. He had them in S tier. Let's go D tier. Let's go D tier. D tier. No, no, no, no. Tyler, what are you doing? What are you doing? D tier Moscow and Tokyo. We'll give them a bone. And so this is kind of like how I think of the city's tier list. It's your view of the world, probably. This is kind of my worldview right now. And so, yeah, I mean, you can see some patterns.

1:13:39You're probably, the next time your passport expires, you probably won't even renew it, right? What do I need a passport for? Why would I ever leave? I have a long list of S tier cities. I could be in Philly. I could be in Philly right now. Why would I go to Tokyo? Why would I go to London? London. Paris. Rome. And I could be in Baltimore, London of Pennsylvania. Wait, the London of the East. Baltimore, Maryland. Uh, yeah. Anyway. Uh, what about you, Jordy? Do you want to, do you want to take a crack at it? I don't think I, I don't think I can. I don't think my, my only controversial, I mean, I don't know.

1:14:20Oh, we got, we got some questions in the chat. How are we feeling about Charlotte, North Carolina? S tier for sure. I think it's S tier. Yeah, Charlie is probably S tier. It's part of the, isn't it part of the research triangle? It's one of the greatest places to, New Orleans. How did we miss NOLA? NOLA in the S tier. New Orleans is definitely S tier. Oh, Mark says it's not S tier. Maybe we got to move it down to A tier. I don't know, NOLA. It's not that good. The lonely A tier city. Yeah, NOLA. Okay, anyway. Oh, good stuff. Yeah, and then. Yeah, but you can admit that LA is S tier in that it's sunny hundreds of days a year.

1:15:05And it's absolutely stunning. But functionally, it's a terrible city. Here's a tough one. Where would you put Pyongyang? People love Pyongyang. I love PIF. I love PIF. The Pyongyang Investment Fund. Yep. Highly authoritarian. Some people are into that these days. limited food I don't think you put Pyongyang in S tier but I think it's definitely within the in the top do you remember when uh when 4chan tried to send Justin Bieber to Pyongyang do you see this oh this is amazing this is like one of the greatest like the internet does something funny so Justin Bieber put up a poll on online saying I will pick my next tour date I'm going on a world tour I'll let the fans vote and if the fans vote for a particular city I'll go to that city.

1:15:52And so of course the fans voted for North Korea. You got to go to North Korea. And it was like a classic lesson in like, do not let the internet decide anything. You could pick any, you could, yeah, you could pick any city, suggest any city. And he was like, I'll go where the fans want me to go. Where do I have the most fans? Of course the fans were like, go to North Korea. I need to be like, I'm not going to North Korea. Uh, anyway, thank you for doing the city tier list. Now let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte serverless. We puffin'. And full text search built from first principles and object storage.

1:16:26Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. If you're seeing - You want to be like Cursor. You want to be like Notion. You want to be like linear. Can we pull that up again? Look at this website. This is honestly the biggest reason why I was excited to partner with them. Was you have to go to their website. It's so beautifully designed. And it's so, the layout is awesome. We officially puffin'. We're puffin', baby. And you should, too. Yeah, go check out Turbo Puffer. Anyway, let's move on to another Nikita post. Yep. Nikita says... Nikita apparently gets a lot of DMs from people that gets their accounts suspended for spam.

1:17:06They say, I wasn't spamming. I was just commenting the same thing on every post, regardless of the context. uh elizabeth holmes says dear nikita rumors swirl that my account's been hijacked for a crypto rug pull not true it hasn't please don't suspend me unless i start chilling a coin for then it's surely compromised thank you for your attention to this matter this is you gotta know we gotta know i mean there's she's mixing a lot of stuff in here so my theory is that it's the husband i don't think that i think it's hard to get access to a phone and post from prison we We should have Martin Screlly on again to discuss the theories behind what's going on here.

1:17:44Could she get a printed out, could she get 100 posts a day delivered to her that are just basically letters? You can get fan mail, letters. And then she could write back letters one by one. What are the timestamps on here? Two hours ago, 8.45 a.m. It feels like it's too quick of a turnaround. At the same time, there have been reports of mob bosses, gang members in prison who get access to cell phones. They get smuggled in. I mean, all sorts of stuff gets smuggled into prisons. They're not the most secure places. They're designed to keep people in, not necessarily keep everything out. So they bribe someone.

1:18:20They get something in. And there was a case where, I believe in L.A., there was a gang member who was calling hits on people from prison, like organizing crimes from inside the clink. So not very good. And yes, SBF did do the pod from prison. I'm not sure how they did that. It might have been over the prison phone. No, but he got in trouble at the prison for doing that. Yeah, but I don't actually know the rules. Like, are you allowed to do pods in prison over the cell phone? Like, can you record that? It feels like building. I know that after you go to prison, you can't sell your life rights. You can't make a bunch of money off of selling the rights to your movie or your book.

1:18:57Like, I think it just doesn't work like that. I actually don't know enough about it. We should dig in much more and do a whole deep dive. Tyler, did you have something else you want to share on Peter or Elizabeth Holmes? I was just going to bring up the SPF thing. Because, I mean, he had a laptop. He had a full laptop? But was he posting too? Is he still posting? I don't know. If he was, the novelty kind of wore off for sure. Either way, Elizabeth Holmes got to clean up her SEO results. She's got to get her brand mentioned in ChatGPT. No, she doesn't. But serious businesses do, and serious businesses need to use Profound.

1:19:30You need to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. More important than ever in the age of agentic commerce. What's coming is a lot of consumers buying a lot of things through ChatGPT, through LLMs. You need to know how you're showing up, and Profound helps you do that. This is crazy. Morning Brew has a highlight from The Athletic. stream east the world's largest illegal sports streaming platform shut down in a sting they had 80 unauthorized domains 136 million average monthly visits and 1.6 billion total visits in the last year the digital equivalent of catching black whoever writes for morning brew fantastic fantastic um so uh stream east was uh the bane of uh dana white's ufc i'm sure yeah so a lot of A lot of the pay-per-views were streamed over here.

1:20:29And I would assume that this platform alone accounted for a billion-plus of lost revenue for the UFC. It's been operating for years. Anybody from anywhere in the world could just tune in and watch a pay-per-view. And I think that this was like a game of whack-a-mole. They had all these different domains they'd be buying. Every time they spin up a new domain, They have one getting shut down and people are just like, you know. I wonder if they're, this is oddly timed. Because if you think about it, like what's coming in the next couple weeks that would be illegally streamed? That's not going to be publicly streamed that everyone's going to want to watch.

1:21:13It's obviously the Antichrist lectures in San Francisco, Peter Thiel's hosting. Yeah. So they shut that down. They shut down this because people are going to go there with a phone and live stream it. but you know everything's off the record right what do you think tyler would you be tuning in on streamies breaking the rules yeah so like i i personally have a i have a couple guys there who are going i have a plug you know oh yeah my personal streaming yeah but yeah oh so they're gonna like facetime you and you can just watch well just be sitting in their pocket okay

1:21:42yeah um i was trying to think of like uh like why am i not familiar with this why am i this is the first time I'm hearing about stream east it's because like well I don't watch sports at all and I uh and I don't and I can't think of anything that I would want to watch that's behind I've never bought a pay-per-view in my life I did the first literally the first reload off of Rob and David yep I free off of you for sure nice dude nice for sure and and other than that I mean are there other other was their entire business just like UFC piracy like what else is all sports because there's people that don't have cable oh so you want to be basketball football yes so like i i also don't really watch sports but at at school in college streamiest is like i mean everyone knows streamiest like that's like basically the default rather than i mean some people have like the cable equivalent or something yeah but yeah every ufc every uh football game yeah um and they were monetizing like crazy right because they have 136 million visits imagine how much sports betting signups.

1:22:46Can you pull a list of all your friends who are using streaming so we can contact the authorities and make sure that they... Let's include them in the sting. Yeah, let's get... They owe Dana White money and we're going to collect. Okay? Or Uncle Dana. I have a funny story. I had a buddy in college who was very much into watching football, did not have cable. And he... And I go over to his Harvard dorm room and he pulls up a website and he's like, I can watch sports on here. I can watch my Raiders, even though they're not even like – the Raiders game is so local to – I guess they were in Oakland at the time that even if you paid, you'd have to be on the highest tier of NFL Sunday ticket to get access to a cross-country game.

1:23:31Like if you were at school in Boston, you could get like Nessun, the local regional sports network, New England sports network, and you could see the Patriots games. and then the local news channel or the local sports channel would show you like the local games like you probably see like the i don't know the new york what is it the giants like they'd play and like they'd be local so they'd be played but you couldn't just go see the raiders unless you paid the highest tier is really expensive no one wanted to pay and so he gets on his laptop he pulls up this website and he's like i can watch the raiders on this website do you know what website it was justin.tv no way yeah and and the it was the funniest thing because he he explains it to me he's like yeah anyone can go on justin.tv this is pre-twitch they're saying we should we should citizens arrest tyler's friends for for using streamies yeah yeah can you guys no show tomorrow can you invite them tell them we're hiring like tons of interns and they pay really high and like they gotta get out here just it's a one weekend we'll arrest we'll do citizens arrest on the screen in support of dana white but so so my buddy pulls up justin tv and is like yeah apparently uh mark mark in the chat says lebron uses stream east i guess he was was was he like i feel like i remember this was he like oh i've seen this well a lot of people do this oh f1 was big on stream east yeah that makes sense uh a lot of people uh do it just because it's a hassle to figure out how to do the pay how to pay says i would never watch stream east because then i I wouldn't see the local ads.

1:24:57That's an affront to the advertising industry. Thank you. Thank you, Trey. Thank you, Trey. Thank you for supporting big television advertising. So my buddy is watching Justin TV. Justin TV had all sorts of crazy, because anyone could spin up a stream, so people would do all sorts of crazy stuff. The gaming thing was the first intersection of like, oh, wow, this is legal and growing, and it's a niche that no one else is catering to. Like G4 TV existed, which was a TV channel just for video games, and it was like scripted content and talk shows and interview shows. They had a whole bunch of stuff, but there wasn't that much video game content.

1:25:31So they eventually pivoted into Twitch and figured out that that was the right thing. But before they pivoted, Justin TV was playing whack-a-mole with all the scammers, all the illegal streams, and it was like a huge hassle. And of course, you get adult content and all sorts of stuff. And it's an interesting challenge for a platform like that that's trying to bootstrap itself and get a lot of content and users because that's some of the most in-demand content is like an NFL game. Look at the visits on this. Stream East had 136 million average visits. They're like, we got to knock out these illegal streams, but at the same time.

1:26:05Isn't that more than all of F1 combined or something like that? Yeah, I think they get - Wasn't F1 at like 100 million or something like that? No, they get like a few million live viewers in the US. And then an incremental 100 million on Stream East. uh and so yeah they should be selling those ads hey if you're putting your logo on a f1 car it's going to be seen on stream east so you got to pay up uh anyway wait this should we should we pull up this video this hot mic moment yes but i want to i want to close out so i so my buddy is like justin tv is explaining to me and he's like he describes it to me as like there's just a guy named justin and he has a website where you can watch this stuff and didn't have this conception And it kind of was that way, but really it's like there was a team behind it and Emmett Shear was there and a bunch of other folks.

1:26:51It probably wasn't Justin and Emmett. No, at that point they probably had 10 or 20 people. But there was this moment in like 2007, 2008 where like people didn't realize that websites were companies that had organizations and stocks and like could become like massive like Facebook. Like in 2005 when people were first introduced to Facebook, they were like, oh, it's like some kid at Harvard like put up a website. Justin was so early. Yeah. Well, if you're trying to build the next great streaming platform, do it legally and do it using Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

1:27:23Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Start building on Linear. Let's pull up the hot mic moment on CTV. First, Truth Zone, is this real or is this dubbed and faked? This says this was picked up by Bloomberg. This seems crazy. I would like to know if this is real, But let's play it and then we'll decide if it's real. Yep. Bloomberg. Confirmed. Okay. So this is Xi Jinping talking about... Wait, we can't see the subtitles.

1:28:01Okay. Start over. Yeah. What are the subtitles? No, they're here. Okay. What's he saying? These days, 70 years old. Earlier people rarely lived, but these days, 70 years, you're still a child. You're still a child. That's amazing. Putin speaks inaudible. How are they picking this up on this microphone? This is so rough. With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted and people can live younger and younger and even achieve immortality. Immortality. Wow. Predictions are this century, there's a chance of living to 150 years old. That is crazy. She is, he's like, I'm just getting started, actually.

1:28:49I'm down. Extremely bullish for a new limit, Jacob Kimmel. True, true. Extremely bullish. Speaking of old people, guess who the oldest billionaire in America is? His names, or guess how old he is. the oldest billionaire in america 94 you're 10 years short 104 in september he founded the insurer mercury general in 1961 his name is george joseph we got to get a founders episode on this guy if there isn't already one that is an incredible run 61 that's that's what 50 years before Tyler was born. The chat's calling it BT before Tyler. BT. BT. The journal has a fun article deep diving all the biggest billionaires in America.

1:29:44He also has non-traditional background. He actually got his bachelor's degree at Harvard. The youngest to oldest, anonymized mostly. The Koch and Koch Jr. are under 30. They're billionaires. Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift are under 40. While 86 % of the billionaires are men, more than 150 out of the 1 ,000 that the Wall Street Journal collected are women, including Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. Mark Zuckerberg's in his 40s. Has a huge circle here on this graphic. Musk, Page, Bryn, these guys are all topping the charts. Elon Musk is at$423 billion. The next richest person, Jeff Bezos, is worth$283 billion.

1:30:32Of course,$423 billion. There's only 300 million Americans. So that's enough to make every American a millionaire if he just gave his money away. That's how it works. But it's way better for him to keep it because he gets to do all the cool stuff with it. Yeah. Sick. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and President Trump are among more than 360 billionaires who started with some inherited wealth. Just a bit. Jensen Wong's on here. Steve Ballmer's on here. He's almost 70. The Waltons are on here, and they're in their 70s. Milken's on here. He's almost 80. What a run to go to jail, come out, still hold on to a billion.

1:31:13Not bad. Larry Ellison's in his 80s. Geffen's on here. George Lucas is on here. It's a murderer's row. You love it. Rockefeller. There's still a Rockefeller? Who's alive? Who's Rockefeller? So did you cover this? Collectively, these people, you were joking, but these people are worth$5.7 trillion. That's enough wealth to buy a Corvette Stingray convertible for every 65-plus U.S. driver. Wait, did you actually do this, Matt? No, they're doing this, Matt. The Journal did this? Yeah. That's hilarious. So that's$4.7 trillion, a four-year Harvard tuition, room and board for 1 million students, plus$10 ,000 annual stipend, only 388 billion.

1:31:51How much are they worth in total? $5.7 trillion. I am deaf. Congratulations. All the stock in McDonald's, Delta Airlines, Ford, and Lululemon. There we go. And every residential property in Chicago,$245 billion with$8 billion to spare. That was not that impressive. This is a weird stat from the journal. So they collected, what, 1 ,135 billionaires. So I got to put their stats in the true zone, because if you tried to buy a Corvette Stingray for every 65-plus U.S. driver, the price is going to go way, way, way up. It's going to be so scarce. You're going to hit real scarcity real quick. You might be able to lease a Model 3 for everyone.

1:32:41But is this not like an incredibly, like you could get a Corvette for every American 65 plus, a four-year degree for 1 million students. You could buy McDonald's, Delta, Ford, and Lululemon and some property in Chicago. And that's the journal saying, look how much they have to spare. Can you imagine how long it would take to calculate all the sales tax for all those Corvette Stingray purchases? I don't even want to think about it. I'd rather spend five minutes. I'd rather spend five minutes with Numeral. Sales tax and autopilots spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax and plies. In fact, it's the only way you could actually execute that deal to buy 300 million Corvette Stingrays.

1:33:20But this is a funny stat. So billionaires are everywhere. So they track 1 ,000 billionaires, right? In the U.S., they own more than 3 ,000 homes. That's only three per person? I feel like that's not that many. Like if you're a billionaire and a house is like 10, 20 million. These must be residential properties, but still that seems extremely low. 300 homes. Yeah, it seems like the data was not, like, widely available. I feel like they must have, like, oh, that's only what they could, like, pull together. But there's a lot more homes. A lot of these billionaires are not. It's not going, like, 20 homes just in Palo Alto.

1:33:53A lot of these, only a third of them inherited wealth, meaning that the other 700 or so are not beating the American dream allegations. This is the real headline here. 700 billionaires in America are not beating the American dream allegation. They were born. They didn't inherit anything. And they created billions of dollars of wealth. They're not beating the allegations. They're not beating the allegations. They are living the American dream. They're living the American dream. They can't deny it. Started without inherited wealth. With nothing. And now they own. Built empire. Now they own not one, not two, but three homes on average.

1:34:28What's funny is I feel like I heard this story about like Bill Gates owns like a thousand homes or something like that. Or like all the land or whatever. I know. I know. Ken Griffith, he owns 50 homes. You don't even have to be a beaner to be just collecting homes on the fly, just browsing. I feel like I see a guy on Instagram every other day, buy a fourplex, buy seven homes, rent them out, make a billion dollars. I'm assuming this is like residential, so it's not like units. It's like what they actually, yeah. Like one real estate developer billionaire would own more than 300 homes, you think?

1:34:57Isn't BlackRock counted? Doesn't BlackRock own like a bajillion homes or something like that? Isn't that the conspiracy theory? They own 105 % of all the homes in America. But that's just because they're counting the tents at Burning Man in Black Rock City as individual homes. If you take those out, I mean, you can't count a Black Rock tent as a Black Rock-owned home because it's not really a permanent home. It doesn't make any sense. I don't get it. Also, underrated alpha. if you're trying to be the only billionaire in a state, you got to go to Wyoming and Alaska because there's no billionaires with primary businesses in Wyoming and Alaska.

1:35:38Primary businesses? Primary businesses. So just move your business there. Yeah. I mean, Alaska, it's just sitting there waiting. It is crazy that Wyoming, I feel like they're super crypto-friendly. You'd think there'd be somebody who went and built some massive thing there, but it hasn't happened, at least not yet. Jack on X said, Costco should get into web services. Kirkland Cloud would clean up. It really would. I would be repping Kirkland Cloud. We would build on Kirkland Cloud. This is interesting. Sheil highlights German discount grocer Lidl. Lidl? L-I-D-L. Okay. Little. Sure. Lidl. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:36:14Built their own cloud infrastructure because of German data laws and now has a$2 billion revenue business selling it to other. No way. A la AWS. It actually worked. If you're a retailer, get into cloud. Neo Cloud. Get into cloud. Costco should do Neo Cloud. buy GPUs, buy the bulk. Buy the rack. Do you get this meme, the Dr. Strange tweet, or how I learned to love the RT just after the Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic? There's this meme of this woman looking at this screen, and this is the... No, I missed the original meme. Tyler, you were born not too long ago. Do you understand this meme?

1:36:55When it's the woman looking at the screen? Yeah. It's from some Netflix documentary or Apple TV. Yeah, I never watched the show. Me either. Yeah? I think it's just like a boomer meme. It's like, oh, the old woman doesn't understand the internet meme. Wow, okay. We are boomers because we don't understand the boomer meme. Yeah, it's kind of a meta-boomer take. I don't know. It's a boomerang. Anyway. It's always like her looking at the screen is like, oh, what do they mean by this? I'm curious to know what the actual show is because the original photo of that meme, it looked cinematic. It looked interesting.

1:37:33And, of course, I have to watch 100 % of the movies around here since Jordy isn't lifting his weight. Anyway, do you see this interaction between Daniel Tenriro and Rune? Do you think this is real? So Daniel says, hedge fund guys are so much more fun to spend time with than tech guys. rigorous, irreverent, and don't have their heads up their own butts. And Rune says, bro tweeted this five minutes after we got done hanging out. And do you think it's real? Do you think this actually happened? He's trolling Rune, or do you think this is just completely random? And Rune's just like taking the opportunity.

1:38:08I think Rune is in SF, and I think Daniel's in New York. Rune's been on a little trip. He was in L.A. briefly. I didn't get a chance to meet up with him, but I do want to hang out with him soon. Hedge fund guys are serious guys. Serious? That's what he's saying. He's saying irreverent. That's the opposite of serious. No, they're serious about making money. More serious than venture capital. This is the, what, Jeremy Giffon take that investors are more interesting than founders. The fox and the hedgehog thing, right? Is that a public take? Yeah, it was at the founders event with David Center. Which, I don't know if that was ever streamed or released.

1:38:43So maybe it's not. But you're leaked. Sorry, bro. I mean, yeah. Founders that are, the average founder that is incredibly locked in knows a lot about their business and their market, not a lot about other things. And it's more difficult to be a generational investor, you know, only knowing about it. It's super narrow. It's like the fox and the hedgehog, right? That's the analogy. The fox knows a little bit about a lot of different things. The hedgehog knows one big thing. That's like the mind, what's it called? Like the mindset, the, what was it called? Like the, I don't know, framework, the mental model.

1:39:19The mental model that people talk about. He's got sort of spiky intelligence. The hedgehog? That completely blows up the metaphor because the metaphor is that the hedgehog only knows one thing. It, in fact, does not have spiky intelligence. Oh, I guess it does. You know, you're right. Spiky intelligence because it's actually better now. That's fantastic. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we need to expand on the fox and the hedgehog metaphor for sure. Anyway, Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake-offs. Number one ranking in G2.

1:39:52You want some spiky intelligence? Spike that intelligence right into your customer service organization. It's the best place to spike the intelligence. Spike the football after you bring AI-enabled service to your organization. Vittorio says, incredible white pill. Scientists just mapped how aging rewires our genes. They found universal switches that control decline. basically aging is a coordinated epigenetic drift of which we now have the atlas we will solve aging in our life maybe maybe putin and xi jinping were they said okay just yeah just yeah yeah they probably follow vittorio and they were and like right before that clip started they were like oh did you see what vittorio posted and they're like yeah we're gonna live to 150 yeah vittorio is like the best and that's where i got my news from yeah just a couple 72 year I like to think that they both, both Putin and Xi Jinping have a non on X through VPNs.

1:40:52They just scroll the timeline like the rest of us. I can see it. It's possible. It is funny if you assume that, that organ trend, you know, if they assume that organ transplants are the solution to immortality, why are they assuming like one 50 is the cap? Yeah. Is it by that point you're so such a mix of different parts. It's not really you anymore. you're a ship of Theseus. Yeah. Yeah. It's the ship of Theseus. You have no original parts anymore, so you're entirely new. I mean, that's the classic question. If you swap out everything but your brain, it feels like it's still you. Isn't there crazy stories around heart transplants changing?

1:41:28Your soul? Yeah, your personality. Really? No way. I had no idea. I haven't seen that. What do you think, Tyler? Well, I mean, you're already a ship of Theseus because your cells die. Oh, true. But I think it's more likely that Xi Jinping and Putin have been watching Dwarkesh and saw the Jacob Kim Lopes. That's probably true. That's probably true. Yeah. So I mean, I wouldn't be surprised since Dwarkesh is like the foremost interview scholar on China right now. I'm being serious. Yeah. No, 100 percent. Like, yeah, that makes sense. And apparently podcasts are booming there. Did you see that post about how like like China seems to be going through some sort of like boom of translated American podcast content that's doing very well there?

1:42:08So stay tuned. I'm on Gemini. The idea that a heart transplant can change a person's personality is fascinating and controversial. The medical community broadly says that personality, these sort of psychological changes that happen after heart surgery are due to trauma and side effects from the medication. But there's more speculative ideas around how potentially memories are stored in places other than the brain. And what happens, there's people that report personality changes that mirror the donors. The original person's heart gets transferred into the new host, and then the new host starts being and acting more like the original donor, which is crazy.

1:42:55That is actually crazy. So anybody in the chat, if you've had a heart transplant. Maybe we should get our hearts swapped. like face off which is a movie you haven't seen i know uh but in the movie face off nicholas cage and john travolta take their faces off and swap faces because of some convoluted thing where one of them is a criminal and one of them's a uh one of them's a hardened criminal who has some information about where like a bomb will go off or something like that and then the and then the the special agent needs to go undercover as the criminal. And so they swap faces. And then, of course, the actors just play each other.

1:43:35And then they go on a... I don't know what our... If we did a heart swap, it would just be... It would just be more golden retriever mode activation. I don't know how much it would do. Do you want to kick off this article about OpenAI? I would rather tell you the full plot of Face Off, actually. Okay. Tell it to me. I'll be listening. Okay, perfect. So FBI special agent Sean Archer survives an assassination attempt by caster Troy, a terrorist for hire, but the bullet kills his son, Michael. Archer then engages in an extended vendetta against Troy. It culminates six years later in his team ambushing Troy, who is with his younger brother and accomplice, Polux.

1:44:19On a remote desert airstrip, Troy goads Archer by saying he knows of a bomb that is located somewhere in Los Angeles and is set to explode in a few days. I was correct about the bomb. Before Archer can learn more, Troy is knocked unconscious and falls into a coma. I need to figure out how to pronounce that. The guy in custody affirms that the bomb is real but refuses to reveal its location. in secret Archer reluctantly undergoes a highly experimental face transplant procedure by Dr. Malcolm Walsh to take on Caster Troy's face voice and appearance Archer as Troy is taken to the same high security prison where Paloo is being held in order to obtain information on the bomb's location Troy I got some visuals for you John oh you got it yeah this is okay Troy unexpectedly awakens from his coma and discovers that his face is missing he calls his gang and they force Dr.

1:45:14Walsh to transplant Archer's face onto him. Meanwhile, Archer successfully learns the bomb's location from Paloo before being informed that he has a visitor. Anticipating a reunion with his colleague and return to his normal life, Archer instead finds Troy wearing his face. Upon revealing he has murdered everyone else who knows about the face transplant, Troy gleefully informs Archer that he looks forward to running his FBI career and ravishing his wife. That's a great film. it's a classic 90s is it 90s when did this come out 1997 thriller you gotta watch it it's the best uh i'll add it to my list you should you should for for when the singularity hits uh do we have the singularity tracker up and running yet or is it working tyler what do we got how many days until uh right now it's at uh 344 can you 344 days 344 days until what what do we say until AGI?

1:46:11Till AGI. Till Singularity? Yeah, I see. You need a light on that. Hold it up. We can't really see it. Yeah, you need a light. You need a light on that. But we got a ticker. We got an analog date tracker. We will be tracking the amount of days until the Singularity. Sam Altman said that the Singularity is just a few thousand days away. Wasn't that what he said? How did Sam Sam Altman exactly described the few thousand days. He said, super intelligence is a few thousand days away. Super intelligent AI. So that's ASI. So AGI is here, essentially. Let's see, thousand days. So super intelligence is a few thousand days away.

1:47:01According to Sam Altman, Tyler Cosgrove has a much shorter timeline, apparently just 300 days. we're booting up for ASI in 300 days we gotta do better on the lighting here we're getting some crazy reflections in that thing maybe we need to take off the front take off the glass so we can just see it fully but anyway realistically how many days do you think should go on there Tyler? timeline to ASI it's super intelligent Sam Altman puts it a few thousand days I count a few as three. A few is three. A couple is two. What's a few is three? What do you think a few means? Do you think a few could be four?

1:47:47How many is a few? I would maybe put more at a handful. More than two, but less than a significant amount. A couple often implies two. A few usually starts at three or more, which can extend to small indeterminate quality that is not many. The exact number depends heavily on the context and what is being discussed. So could a few be six? Max is saying it feels pretty gentle. Yeah, it is a gentle singularity for sure. I was going to say 3 ,000 days, which is 10 years, right? 3 ,365? Yeah, I've updated my... Oh, wow. Ultra bearish. Short everything. I don't think it's... How many years is that? 99999 divided by 365.

1:48:33That is 273 years away. You've got to be more optimistic than that, Tyler. Do we do the Oli G? Somebody asked Oli G how many days until the singularity? 999999999999999. Realistically, I'm at 6 ,000 days. I'm on Kurzweil timelines. Kurzweil timelines put us at maybe even more, honestly. maybe 7 ,000 days. You put it in GTA terms, like is that GTA 7 or 8? GTA 7 probably. So I'm on 2045 ASI, Kurzweil timelines. I remain unchanged by any developments essentially. So 2045 ASI arrives, it's the singularity. And so I'm around 7 ,000 days. Sam Allman said a few thousand, is seven a few? I don't know, we'll decide.

1:49:25But Tyler, feel free to update that to whatever you think is the correct estimate for when ASI arrives. Jordy, you've gone from not AGI-pilled to extremely AGI-pilled, back to top signal, maxer, extremely AGI-not-pilled. How are you feeling about the progress towards superintelligence? I think we're a few thousand days away. I think there's only, it feels like there's this very small number of people that have any real sense of the truth. And they're all extremely conflicted. They all have no incentive to tell you that it's, they have an incentive to be, like try to be a little realistic about it.

1:50:10But they have no incentive to say, you know, we're 10 years away or it just all feels. But you specifically don't have foundation, model, lab, bags. You have Adio.com or Adio bags, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Obviously, Adio has their own timelines. But what are your timelines? My, I don't even know if it's the right. Are you over under my estimate of 7 ,000 days until super intelligence and a singularity? me and ray kurzweil riding together are you earlier this is self-reinforcing full-on super intelligent smarter than everyone can do any job can do anything and make itself smarter yes and it's just like it's a thing that just runs you know one shots anything full full self reinforcing who knows maybe it maybe it goes to war maybe it just leaves you know but it is it is Definitely more than a decade out.

1:51:14Yep. So over 3 ,000 days for sure. That's the low end of Sam Altman's prediction. Yeah. I just still find it hard to believe entirely. So maybe never. Maybe infinite days. You could be in the 9999999 days camp. I could be in the 999999999999999999999999999. If it happens, so this is the update to take actually from some of the AI-pilled people. They will say it either happens very soon or it doesn't happen at all, which is kind of a funny way to frame it. But if you put it in those terms, if it happens, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, what are you feeling? I just feel like it'll end up being, I think we're going to continue to get more and more advanced capabilities but I don't, I just believe that even the, even the smartest people in the room, like clearly we're getting machines that are just more intelligent and capable in many ways than humans.

1:52:20But you can take, you can take an, I just sort of disagree with like the ramp that will come from that, right? Because if you took, if you took, you know, of a thousand of the smartest people in the world and put them in a room and you say like, solve world hunger or like get us to Mars. It's like, they're not gonna do it. And it doesn't work. It's not gonna happen in a year. Like if you take a really smart group of people like with SpaceX and you say, get to Mars say like, great, well, we're gonna work on this for decades. Right. And so I just, I disagree with, or I don't believe in this, I don't believe in the fast takeoff.

1:52:59I believe that like machines will continue to get smarter and smarter and more capable and more valuable to humanity. But I don't believe in a fast takeoff. It is somewhat of an abstraction of that philosophical question of like, can God create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Like, can a human create something that's smarter than a human in every way? Like, how would that work? There is sort of like a fundamental philosophical Yeah, and also raw intelligence is rarely the bottleneck for progress. That's a very good point. Yeah. I don't know. I still am rooting for the Terminator outcome, where superintelligence comes around 2045, we go to war, and the indomitable human spirit wins out, and we kill all the robots, and we win.

1:53:51I think that would be the most exciting outcome. That would be fun. Because it would be so unifying to humanity to have a common enemy, the clanker. Humanity needs a true common enemy. Exactly. There's so much infighting. I don't want to manifest like an alien race that wants to destroy us, but it'd be so good for the world. We could stop. Fantastic. We could ignore all politics and just focus on survival. Imagine the dream team, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, all your boys working together to shoot the clankers. It'd be great. It'd be amazing. And the funny thing is that the Doomers will come to you and they'll say, A uniform that just says human race.

1:54:29Haven't you seen the Terminator? That's what's going to happen if we create AI. We're going to get the Terminator outcome. Well, I've seen Terminator. I know you haven't, but I've seen Terminator. What happens in Terminator? Who wins at the end of Terminator? The humans. The humans win at the end of Terminator. That's the conclusion of the movie. They fight and the humans win. And so if we get the Terminator outcome, that means we win. That means we win. And that's going to be a lot of fun. So tool up. Get the guns. Get ready to fight the clankers. We're going to war. But not for the next two decades.

1:55:02It's going to be two decades of enterprise sass. It's going to be two decades of shareholder value. Cruel. And it's going to be two years of delightful rest on an eighth sleep. Get a pod five. Five-year warranty. 30-night risk-free trial. Free returns. Free shipping. fantastic sleeps await at 8sleep.com and i got a 90 so please you're on a roll thank you congratulations john i am on a roll and i love who else is on a roll microsoft microsoft has been on a roll and we have the chief product officer of microsoft joining us final boss of product people this is the true gatekeeper to our plan to bring back Clippy.

1:55:54So we will welcome the CPO. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's happening? I think we can hear you. How are you doing? Yes. Fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. So just so you know, I said there's many bosses, but Clippy is the ultimate boss. Yes. Clippy is the ultimate boss. Has Clippy actually been thrown around as an idea? It feels like more and more you know so i get companies like the huge companies are starting to have a little bit more fun every once in a while it is a bit of a wild uh i've seen some like throwback microsoft merch that's gotten out is there any serious discussion in internally to think about reviving clippy i feel like it would be so much fun dude i i'm with you i feel like um unironically clippy was just like early right totally totally the original conversation early and write.

1:56:49Interface, interface. Anyway, would you mind introducing yourself and give us a little bit of an overview of like what your day-to-day actually looks like? It's such a huge organization. There's so much to do, but I'd love to have a little bit more context on what you oversee and what your role actually looks like. Yeah, let me give you the autonomy. I've been at Microsoft for two years. I'm the chief product officer for AI at work. So focused on kind of like, how do you make work great again with AI? And before that, I was at Robinhood. And before that, I was at Google for many years. But I think the steel thread through all of this for me has been like the way I think about this, bringing near future science fiction and putting it in product and making sure that billions of people have it.

1:57:37So I did that with Google search. And then I founded this area called Google Lens with, you know, the camera turns into a search engine. And of course, Robin Hood for first-time investors. And at Microsoft, my focus has been, and our team's focus has been, we have hundreds of millions of professionals. We've got to make work not just about doing more, but about being better. So on a co-pilot work, what are the agents that you get for work today? You get a badge and a PC. Should you get a team of agents? How are you thinking about the trade-off of put a chat box obviously microsoft has fantastic access exclusive access to gpt5 the you know frontier level capabilities um there but there's a trade-off from the product perspective put the chat box next to it which is almost just one level away from just having two tabs open next to each other and having gpt5 in chat.com over here versus do the hard work of have the product teams go and dig into how do we add AI functionality into every sub tool?

1:58:45If you're in Excel, how do you create smarter functions within the cells as opposed to just a sidebar, which has kind of been the status quo for a lot of AI at work projects broadly? Totally. And I think this is the, I mean, the answer is yes, and right. In some sense, like, look, every shift that I've been through three of these, I worked at Akamai like 20 years ago, and the internet was like a a thing was going to be a thing. And then, you know, obviously mobile and cloud and Google and now at Microsoft with AI. The first wave of all of these things is just add AI, right? Like put chat next to it, bring some intelligence to it.

1:59:24And it's no different from, you know, the first wave of mobile apps were like desktop form factor, like shrunk into the mobile screen form factor or the first websites actually were like scanned brochures, which are PDFs. back in the day, folks. And I think now I feel like one of the, that's why you see across the industry saying, oh, let's add AI to it. But I think the yes and comes from two things. One is you want to make sure that when there's a natural way, because of the natural language interface, you're actually asking AI to do a lot more higher order things, right? Instead of this fine-grained manipulation of like, oh, let's go through 200 menus and remember the magic incantation.

2:00:09Like you want to kind of say, hey, do it for me, right? So there's a bunch of things where chat is the right answer. But then there are other things where if you're an Excel bro, like you want to be in your IDE, right? And get the assistance right where you are. So meeting you where you are. So if you saw last two weeks ago, we talked about and we announced the equals co-pilot. But that's like the hello world of like what we're thinking of and say, how do we actually right now in teams or in your meeting? How do you have assistance along with the chatbot? Yeah, from a from a product perspective, there's something very interesting going on where, I mean, Microsoft kind of coined the term or the definition of like being a platform where the companies that built on top of Windows created more value than Microsoft captured.

2:01:01And it was like the classic example of a technology platform driving like incredible value. There's something potentially, at least that we've been tracking, where we've talked to what, three or four different companies that are building AI add-ons to Excel. Or trying to rebuild it entirely. Or trying to rebuild it. But a lot of times it's actually integrated into Excel. And there's one frame where, okay, those companies are going to get steamrolled by Excel and the team there. There's the other frame, which is... We said it, not you. Well, that's a risk that I'm sure every investor in those companies is discussing.

2:01:38But then there's another frame where Excel becomes a platform, like Windows became a platform. And there is a robust ecosystem of apps and services on top. Some of those that are complementary to Copilot functionality. Some of those that are competitive. So I guess the question is, is Excel becoming a platform? and do you see, like, how do you message around the openness of the Excel platform? Are you trying to take learnings from the openness of the Microsoft ecosystem and bring that into the developer communications on top of Excel? Or is there a different strategy at play? Yeah, and I think, you know, look, super sharp point.

2:02:18And I think in the fullness of time, Office as a whole has always been a platform, right? If you look at like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, actually Outlook plugins, Teams has a very healthy like bot ecosystem. So the platform play is always being kind of at the center of it. And the question, though, is keeping the user in mind, are there things that are much more intuitive and native to be part of the product? And are there things that are kind of like, let's say you're doing something very specific for accounting. It is absolutely the right thing for that to be a plug-in and add-in versus doing something horizontal that should really be a feature of the product.

2:02:56So that's the way we're thinking about it. Have you thought at all about how AI can supercharge the way people use LinkedIn? I imagine that there's a lot of – that might be a completely separate world from what you're doing. But it does seem like something that in the future people have been out there for so long. I need a personal CRM. I need some sort of thing on top of my LinkedIn connections to remind me. And you get those like on every social app, you get the reminder, hey, it's somebody's birthday. You should write them a note. But with AI, you can imagine so much more power there to say, I'm trying to sell this particular thing.

2:03:36I'm hiring for this particular thing. And having GPT-5 go and crawl all the profiles, put together something for you. Have you thought about anything that's happening over in the LinkedIn world or is that just kind of out of your purview? You know, Ryan and I talk all the time and he's actually like much more front and center on the office world now. So I think the thing that's interesting there is that a lot of these ideas were just like unfundable or bad ideas before because they didn't have enough tokens. So my favorite thing to say is like take all these like ideas people thought were like really bad.

2:04:08So for example, I'd have a whole bunch of people pitch back in Google, the whole alerting, oh, wouldn't it be great if you could kind of ongoing do event discovery? I'm into this favorite, my favorite band is this obscure thing, and wouldn't it be great if I knew something about Bandai? Oh, I think we have some technical difficulties. It's actually, oh. Sorry. I think we're having some technical difficulties here. Can you hear us okay? I can hear you. It's fine. Okay, sorry. We're back. I think you're cutting out. Let's move on to. I didn't say anything controversial. No, no, it's not that. I think it's the backbone internet infrastructure in this country that's controversial.

2:05:01What about. I guess my biggest thing that I'd be curious to get your insight on is how many businesses in the Microsoft ecosystem have just totally opted out of AI that are not responding to upsells, that are just not interested? Maybe they have employees that are kind of using various AI tools themselves. But I have to imagine it's like a very, very large percentage of companies within. Off-contract, I think it's in fact, we've had like more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 using some form of like, you know, co-pilot AI products. We have like 100 million customers that have just we've just crossed 100 million across commercial and consumer on co-pilot usage.

2:05:51The thing that's actually interesting that I see is maybe a variant of what you're asking, which is, you know, like there's one extreme. There's a set of folks who are just leaning much. The posture is much more proactive, I would say, and kind of like in the game, get in the arena, building stuff. It's not just about, oh, like there's an off the shelf thing. This is a chatbot that I'll buy and see who uses it in my company. So that set of firms, in fact, we've started calling them frontier firms. These guys are out there starting to invest, both build and buy, and partner. And we are starting to see, oh, those folks actually get a lot more out of AI.

2:06:33So for example, one example for me is these guys are using the reasoning models. So if you step back and think where we are in AI, the first version of AI, it's just be more about like next token prediction and like chatbot right yeah um but the next really real big unlock came in january and february around that time and the reasoning models came online yeah that's when we saw a very clear shift there's certain companies that just jumped in and said oh all these things that we couldn't do six months ago or one year ago let's try them now including microsoft by the way yeah has that been affecting gross margins we saw in the wall street Journal yesterday that Notion obviously sells a few competitors to Microsoft products, saw gross margins drop from 90 % to something like 80%.

2:07:20I was talking to Ivan. He said it actually wasn't even that bad, but there was some sort of an impact. Obviously, you can upsell against that, but how is the economic trade-off? How are you thinking about that with selling? Obviously, people want frontier-level intelligence, but it might change the economic equation. Are you seeing anything that indicates that going forward, the fundamental gravity of the economic equation might be different? I mean, look, I think it's going to be proportional in the sense that, like, I was joking with someone saying, like, you know, using GPT-5 thinking, like, in your product is like taking a flying car to a grocery store, right?

2:07:58Or O3 Pro or whatever. Like, so in some sense, you do have to be, it's no longer about, like, just being a wrapper around the model. Sure. Yes, the model is eating the product, right? Absolutely. So that's, I think, one thing. Both these statements, seemingly contradictory, are true, and we're seeing that. On one hand, the model is eating the product. What do I mean by that? Like, you know, internally, even us, we spent a bunch of time trying to solve what I call the six-finger problem, right? Like, remember two years ago when DALI 3 came out, and like, to humans, it would be like six fingers and five, like 18 toes or what have you.

2:08:32And there's a whole bunch of startups that say, oh, we'll solve that, right? and a whole bunch of product teams inside Microsoft, too, saying, oh, we'll just figure out how to solve the six-finger problem. Metaphorically speaking, six months later, the model of GPT-40 came out, and there's no longer a six-finger problem. Yeah, I mean, hallucinations seem to be at an all-time long. The models are getting way more remarkable. There's been a lot of reports of consumers developing friend-like relationships with various LLMs. Do you have, is there any evidence that employees at companies are developing real relationships with AI in the way that some people on Reddit have developed relationships with models like 4.0?

2:09:17Yeah, I mean, I think we've made product choices that kind of squarely put AI and Microsoft as tools, right? Yeah. And even these tools, they can be agentic tools, meaning they can be working for you in background. You have a natural language interface to it. But this is not an accidental thing. We have to make intentional choices. In fact, I call it a term called neural software, meaning that it's not software as usual. In fact, Steve Sinopsky and I had a spat on Twitter about it. Because for me, the way I think about this is, look, yes, it is software. As engineers, we all know that. It's like stochastic models, and it's like, you know, you peel a few layers of false software.

2:10:03But it is probabilistic, and there are three things that are really important going on here. And we, like, as builders, I feel like we've got to pay attention to it. Number one is the natural language interface, right? It just has this human-like anthropomorphic interface. So when 4.0 gets replaced by 5, you're not like, oh, my cheese or this menu item moved. Like who fired my, you know, like chef, right? So I think that is a point, whether it works or in personal life. But I think the second thing that we are underestimating, and we certainly see that inside is the way we are building products and releasing them is changing.

2:10:43Like previously we'd say, oh, yeah, like 2.1 to 2.2, right? The software is updated, release notes and change logs. But now it's just like you have to kind of slow roll out. You have to kind of do evals and benchmarks on how the interaction works, not just the accuracy of things. And then the third thing I'm seeing, at least like, and this one's a hard one to kind of like crack. We're still trying to figure out what that means is the composition of the team. like in the past it would be like oh you had engineers you know your desk your test your product your UX it's all a blur right it's all mush and like you have a bunch of generalists and you have the model whisperers right and then you have go to market like that's the new triangle that we're seeing well it's a fun puzzle to solve thank you for hopping on the stream this was great we will talk to you soon have a great rest of your day and just let everybody know internally that we're We're riding with the XL bros and Clippy.

2:11:44We're riding with Clippy. For sure. Thank you. We would love to help relaunch Clippy given the opportunity. No name. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. Have a great rest of your day. In the meantime, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Nick, did you see this post by Nick Dobos? Open AI cackling right now today. So OpenAI acquired Statsig. We talked about this yesterday.

2:12:15But he's sharing a photo of Anthropic and telemetry services for data usage. Cloud code connects from users' machines to the Statsig service to log operational metrics as latency, reliability, and usage patterns. And so is what he's saying, like, they're going to rug Anthropic by buying their telemetry, like their logging service? Like, is this a monopolistic, like, market? Can Anthropic not just use another company or product? I don't, this doesn't quite, like, sit with me as, like, oh, yeah, it's, like, they totally owned Anthropic. It's, like, yeah, they bought a company that Anthropic uses.

2:12:55Like, Anthropic will probably keep using that. Maybe they'll replatform. I don't know. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Yeah, I mean, I do wonder, curious if Statsig is going to remain an independent brand or just be rolled under OpenAI. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch of companies that use Statsig. I'm just looking at the website. Yeah. EA, Microsoft, Atlassian, Bloomberg, Riot. Effective Altruists use it? You said EA's use it?

2:13:28Tyler, do you think this is do you think that What do the EAs use of Statsig for tracking shrimp welfare? Frankly, I don't know what Statsig really does so I have no it seems like, yeah, Anthropoc can just Why don't you know what it does? It's no more complicated than Palantir It's equivalent Oh, we got Arfa Rock dropping massive alpha on Mistral Mistral is closing$14 billion, blew past the initial target of$9 billion. I assume that's market cap. The rumors about Apple's acquisition were fake. That seems right. That always seemed fake. I mean, in what world was France going to let their national AI champion be?

2:14:10Wait, wait, wait, wait. Is this real? This hello, hello? Breaking Apple and Google have reached a deal to have Gemini power a new Siri platform, as per Bloomberg. Let's pull that up because that's literally my prediction today. Did I just not read Bloomberg? Well, this was rumored for a while. Yeah, so. Is it actually happening? Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We got. Either I'm going to look extremely dumb or extremely smart. Let's read this. Okay, so this. Okay, Apple plans AI-powered search tool for Siri to rival OpenAI perplexity. Apple is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence web-powered search tool next year, stepping up competition.

2:14:45I'm going to put this in the chat, or should I put it in the tab? The company is working on a new system, World Knowledge Answers, that will be integrated into the Siri Voice Assistant, according to people with knowledge of the matter. And who are they? So it's Google. Okay. Apple is aiming to release the service described by some executives as an answer engine. The news breaking right now is crazy. So American Eagle just beat earnings up another 20 % after hours. Also, moment of silence for Figma. They missed earnings. Very sad to see that. but never bet against our boy Dylan Field. And the whole team.

2:15:23Yeah, everyone is ripping. American Eagle. Wait, I wonder if they actually beat earnings because of that Sidney Sweeney thing. Like, we were talking about the value that she brought to that brand and it probably was like$100 million in market cap. She should have gotten like a$50 million payday. Like, it really did change the trajectory of the business. Yeah. Sidney Sweeney XAI deal incoming. Regal is a goaded poster in the chat. Bob is on a tear. Thank you for having you do, Regal. This is badass. American Eagle's still down 30 % in the last 12 months, 20 % year-to-date. So Sweeney really was the turnaround.

2:16:01Sydney bought them ticket. Hopefully she got some shares. She basically did. The underlying technology enabling the new Siri could come in part from Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Apple's longtime partner in internet search. The company's reached a formal agreement this week for Apple to help evaluate and test a Google-developed AI model to help power the voice assistant. So very interesting. I would imagine Apple has to pay Google for this version of just an answer engine because the answer engine is not going to be directly monetized. But Google has to be working on agentic commerce, agentic ads in the LLM results.

2:16:38It seems so obvious. I feel like this is going to flip at some point. But I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Apple's new search experience will include an interface that makes use of text photos. So how is Google going to feel about this giving them... Why? What's wrong with this? They're building something that is... They're building an AI-powered web search tool for Siri. Yeah, they're building software because they're a software company and they're selling it to the hardware company or they're partnering with the hardware company. So you think Apple's saying, you're going to keep paying us$20 billion and we're going to compete with you?

2:17:11How are they competing? no this is them not this is them saying we're not getting into foundation models we're not going to do our own our own i know but we're going to use gemini oh they're saying okay i missed the part no so uh today siri can answer basic questions yeah we got it we got it instead of the companies reached apple and alphabet reached a formal agreement for apple to evaluate and test a google developed a ai model to help power the voices system yes so um so what like what like Like this is, I mean, it's a formal agreement to evaluate and test it. So like we're still like years away from anything happening here.

2:17:49Like the next iPhone event is like next week. And like they're not going to roll out a Google partnership. I'd imagine they don't roll out a Google partnership. This feels like something that they're going to be working in over time. I don't know. Maybe they will. But either way. So Apple is rebuilding Siri around three core components. A planner, the search systems for the web and devices, and a summarizer. The planner interprets voice or text input and decides how to respond. The search system scans the web or user data, and the summarizer pulls it all together into an answer. And Apple has recently leaning toward a custom-built Google Gemini model for the summarizer.

2:18:25It would run on Apple's own private cloud computing servers. And that's going to be important. Search giant already delivered the technology to Apple, and both companies are now collaborating on fine-tuning and testing it. Yep. It does say that Apple considered acquiring perplexity to enhance the search features in Siri. But again, perplexity is the big loser. Yeah, but perplexity sits on top of other foundation models. So it doesn't fully solve Apple's problem all the way to the root of the stack, in my opinion. So somewhat makes sense that they would. the secret sauce that perplexity builds is something that Apple's capable of instantiating.

2:19:12Yeah, what you got there? So I'm reading the article. It says Google was not initially the front runner for the Siri project. Anthropic had been in the lead for the deal. But then their price was too high. Interesting. Anthropic demanded a high price for using its technology, more than$1.5 billion a year. And Google was open to more favorable financial terms. So the end result is that we should expect that Apple pays Google less than$1.5 billion per year to vend Gemini models into Siri, essentially. And I feel like as soon as Gemini has ads in the results or monetized commerce in the results...

2:19:56And Apple can take a cut of that. Apple should want to take a cut of that. And so it feels like this economic flow is going to reverse at some point. I don't know. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe inference remains really expensive and the monetization never really pencils out or something. But this feels like something that would flow the other direction at some point. They're a gatekeeper. They're going to take the cut. Yeah, I mean, OpenAI is now in the league of actually, like, they're very much in the MAG7 league in terms of competing. I mean, in a world where Apple device users are just pushed into using new effectively, this is a Google product, right, that will be still powered by Google Search and theoretically built into the existing Google Ads engine.

2:20:53I would not bet against OpenAI in any way, but certainly this is some real competition, more so than just a net new Gemini app that people are... I guess the question is, what is the value of this particular knowledge engine? right isn't that what isn't that how they're characterizing it like the the what's it called they world knowledge answers so to me this is starting with something that's just like hey what are some things i can do for fun when in new york and it's like you should world knowledge answers is that related to world liberty financial or world coin the orb scanner Potentially both.

2:21:39Potentially both. A k-retsu. Put them all together. No, world knowledge answers, that feels like something that has cost. Not the most high value searches. Yes, not highly monetizable. Yeah. And so maybe there's some bifurcation where the user activity, when they want world knowledge answers, that is a cost center. And when you want to do agentic commerce and shopping, that's monetizable. But apps want both. companies want both types of searches because I would assume, I would assume, I would assume that what, like the world knowledge answer, what headphones should I buy? That's a question that I would want the new Siri to answer and then I would want it to buy it, buy them for me.

2:22:23Why not? More data. Hello in the chat says more data for Google. Let's give it up for Google. They are just data world champions. It is, it is wild people. Yeah, this is, uh, this is not many people's bingo cards early, earlier. Of course, it was probably on Mark Gurman's. Everyone's ripping. The MAG-7 remains undefeated. Anyway, speaking of MAG-7, let's go to Lulu Miservi's breakdown of the Tesla master plans. She's highlighting V2 and V4, and she calls it founder writing versus committee writing. And if you look, and we touched on this yesterday, If you look at the way the first two master plans were written, it really does feel like Elon just tapped it out on the phone almost.

2:23:12Like a couple bullet points here and there. There's one chart in there. Then when master plan V3 comes out, it's this 40-page PDF with a bunch of charts. Maybe he was involved, but the latest version does feel very dry. And Christian Kyle had a very good reply. lie, he just replied with the M dash because of course the Tesla master plan V4 had 14 M dashes in it. It's a lot of M dashes at a time when the M dash is highly controversial. I was, I was thinking about the M dash. I don't know how to create an M dash. Like I don't have the button on my keyboard. I have a minus sign and I have an underscore.

2:23:53All you have to do is hit the dash button twice and minus minus and then space. and it turns into an M-dash. Minus minus space and it turns it into an M-dash. I never learned how to use that. Really? You can also do shift options. You were too poor and then you were too rich. I was too poor and then I was too rich to use the M-dash. I'm not kidding. I've never, like, you can look at any of my writing and any of the scripts I've written or blog posts. Like, I just have never used the M-dash. I don't know why. I was pretty devastated by Chad Chabut just stealing it. You were a big M-dash guy before?

2:24:21It's just, it's very functional. I'm just all about the comma. Like, why do you ever need an M-dash when you can just use a comma? You know, like, so in the Tesla thing, how we develop and use autonomy. It's more than M dash. It's a statement. Why? Just use a comma. I don't know. I don't understand. Tyler, do you understand why the M dash is valuable at all? We should just destroy it. We should just get rid of it. I don't think it makes any sense. Yeah. I mean, there's some like stylistic value. What is the stylistic value? Just looks nice or something? Looks maxing. You're writing. Or farming the M dash.

2:24:55I just don't like it. It doesn't have spaces around it. Like, the comma is just so much cleaner. Use a comma. Use a period. Use a space. It just, like, did Shakespeare write M dashes? Let's figure that out. I think so. Who was the first person to really dominate the M dash? I see it in, I see it all over the place now. I see it in the, I mean, it's in, is it in the journal usually? I don't know. I don't see a lot of it in the journal. No. Okay. If it's not in the journal. If it's not in the journal, it should get out of the training data. Some of the most well-known users of the M-dash. I asked Gemini because I just feel like the attribute is biased.

2:25:31James Joyce. Oh, okay. Emily Dickinson.

2:25:39Vladimir Nobukov. Nobukov. Master of style. Nobukov used the M-dash to create a specific kind of voice and pacing. No. Shakespeare did not use the M-dash. Does the Bible use... J.K. Rowling has been a notable user of the M-dash. Maybe she is an AI that traveled back in time. To bring Harry Potter forward? To bring the chosen one. Does the M-dash occur in the Bible? No. The Bible, at least in its early printings and manuscripts, did not use M-dashes. Ancient texts, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, were originally written without punctuation at all. M-dash is not in the Bible. This is hilarious.

2:26:21So ChatGPG says, no, M-dash. The Bible at least did not use M-dashes. The Greek New Testament were originally written without punctuation at all, M-dash. Just continuous script. Breaks, pauses, and emphasis were conveyed by spacing, rhythm, or oral tradition. Modern editions, some 19th and 20th century English Bibles, especially in America, started using dashes to mark sudden breaks or interruptions in thought. But this is a modern editorial choice, not a part of the original text or the earliest print traditions. So the M-Dash is relatively recent punctuation invention. I think we've got to return.

2:26:58We've got to get rid of the M-Dash. Destroy the M-Dash. I'm sick of hearing it. Take it out of your writing. Instead, get on Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com. Alex Conrad went viral yesterday. he shared a screenshot from Bloomberg Erwan the Colt Los Angeles grocery chain is opening its first New York City tonic bar inside a private West Village Paddle Club he said none of these words appear in the Bible oh there we go, related to the Bible this is the Erwan thing in New York that Emily Sundberg broke very excited did you see that Josh Kushner was at the US Open and he's so he's so recognizable they didn't need to give him a little chyron a little lower third they had to explain who adam silver was the man that needs no introduction who is who is adam silver again he's like a sports guy adam i don't know if you're serious he's the commissioner of the nba what's the nba that's the guy that said uh nba get ready to learn chinese the nba is the National Basketball Association.

2:28:09So what is, is that a sport? What is basketball? Basketball. Basketball is a dynamic team sport where two teams of five players try to score points by shooting a ball through an opponent's hoop. Okay. So, so, so the guy on the left, apparently he, I guess he runs a company where people, they have teams where they have five players each and they try and throw a ball through a hoop. Okay. So there's Adam Silver, the basketball guy. Then there's Josh Kushner. Everyone knows Josh Kushner. Then there's Bob Iger. Who is Bob Iger? Who is Bob Iger? Okay. Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney. What is Disney? What is Disney?

2:28:56Disney is a global American mass media and entertainment conglomerate known for its family-friendly content and services, including theme parks. What is a theme park?

2:29:14A theme park is an amusement park. Oh, it's an amusement park, but it has a unifying setting or idea. Yeah. So it has somewhat of a theme to it. Yeah. Okay. It's a theme park. The amusement park. Okay. Got it. Theme park. Okay. So anyway, I think we cracked it. So obviously everyone knows Josh Kushner, Thrive Capital, but Adam Silver. It's good to know about these guys too. I guess he made his money with some game where you throw basketball through the hoop. Made his money in balls. Bob Iger, he's a media guy, I guess. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm glad that they put their names there because otherwise I'd be lost.

2:29:52I'd be lost. Anyway, Robin Hood, former guest on the show, Vlad Tenev said investing for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world. Will Brown quote posts it, gets 1.3K likes. Says Roblox CEO David Buzuki has said that gaming for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world. Podcast hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hayes say that podcasting for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world. You know what I would hope replaces labor in a post-AI world. Pull-ups and push-ups. Wandering. Just going from wander to wander. Just finding your happy place. Finding your happy place. Booking wanders with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.

2:30:37It's a vacation home, but better. But better. And in just 6 ,000 days, you'll be able to just spend all of your time wandering around. Hopefully, hopefully. Last post before we go into our next guest. They are in the Restream waiting room. They're about to come into the TV panel to go. Get that gong ready. Would you buy Ilya Sootskiver merch? Alps has printed Ilya's head on a hat and also on a mouse. Went mega viral with 2.6K likes. People are excited. I mean, the mouse looks clean. Ilya, Tyler, you've said that Ilya is like the best aura farmer of all time, something like that? He's a goaded aura farmer, yeah.

2:31:22But I feel like in terms of his aura farming strategy. Explain that like I'm 100 years old. Yeah, I would argue that his aura farming strategy is do nothing win. I think that is an example of aura farming. It's kind of like a nonchalance, you know? Yeah. He has a certain je ne sais quoi. He has a, yeah. Don't nonchalant for nonchalant with Elliot. That's my advice. You don't nonchalant. Don't do it. Don't do it. He will not. He just posts up like this. He will out nonchalant you for sure. For sure. You'll get roasted. Don't even try it. Also, don't go fundraise for fundraise with our next guest.

2:32:05Ilya Orifarm. We've got Richard from U.com. Oh, he did? No. Oh, I thought that was news. Anyway, we've got our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room coming into the TBP and Ultradome. Welcome. We've got Richard from U.com. How are you doing? Very well. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. It's a wonderful day. We're having a great time. What's new in your world? Give us the news. Any big numbers? Yeah. We just raised$100 million at$1.5 million. Boom. When did you start the company again? In 2020. Overnight success. Nothing like a five-year overnight success. Love it. Give us an update.

2:32:44You were on the show, was it, I'm forgetting, was it maybe three months ago at this point? Yeah, main thing since then is we kept growing more and more aggressively. We have over a billion API calls a month now. There are not many other startups. In fact, I can't think of any other startup at that scale now. And these API calls give search results for both people directly, but also for LMs. The way we search is going to change. So you have this whole Google thing that's unfolding now. But that's kind of the last, you know, sort of past of searching. Now, people are going to search more and more through the LMs and LMs can search hundreds of times and then summarize all that content for you, right?

2:33:31So it's a whole new world. And we're building composable infrastructure layers for companies and startups, massive consumer companies, like Dr. Go, and also enterprise companies like Harvey and Windsurf. The NIH is a customer of W.com, Telegraph, like lots of different organizations, both for the APIs, but then also we built end-to-end solutions because not every company is ready to just like take in an API and may have an epic AI transformation. So we're doing both of those together. Yeah. When did you realize that it made sense to combine those efforts? I'm sure early on companies, like maybe that, you know, actually building out these, this infrastructure for companies was not something that you were selling.

2:34:14and then you realize like, hey, in order to actually unlock the value of our product, we need to kind of like hand deliver some of these features? That's right, yeah. For the last couple of years, we were the most accurate answer engine in the world. But normal consumers, they care more about marketing and fun ads and stuff like that and designs. But companies kept coming to us and be like, we did a benchmark. You are the most accurate. We need that. There are hedge funds, the NIH, like journalists that really care about accuracy. And so they were like, we want the technology, but we don't necessarily want it on you.com.

2:34:49We want it inside our own products and our own websites and our own apps and so on. And so at some point, there's so much market pull there for the technology that we said, let's build out a proper sales team. Let's really go to market with those APIs in an enterprise context. Give us your reaction to the Google News today. They beat the charges almost. I mean, they were found guilty, but then the remediation was pretty minor. They won the war. you're obviously an expert in this category. Walk us through how you process the news. Yeah. I mean, I think overall it goes in the right direction in terms of giving some more access to certain companies for the index and some of their data.

2:35:29At the same time, you know, we're a startup still. And by the time this gets really implemented, you know, they're probably going to try to appeal it and so on it's got to take another we were really struggling to understand what giving the search index one time and then on ongoing basis means it's only like some percentage of the data base yeah they're giving you data based on some percentage of your query yeah can you explain like what exactly is available can i just go get this data can you.com go get this data can anyone get this data like what does it actually take is this just like microsoft bing and the other like duck duck go like the big competitors are they named like how does this actually work yeah so no one fully knows yet right there's like recommendations from judge uh and then like so there's like a ton of meta within eh not yeah um but uh insider dealing but like my hunch is uh the one the most extreme scenario here would be like they have a full-on API the way u.com right now sells it, right?

2:36:35Which could be good for some people. My hunch is they're going to try to drag your feet as much as possible on that for as long as possible because that is very much core IP for them. And then they're also going to realize that the index, the way it used to be built, was for people to decide which of 10 blue links to click on. Our index now is looking very different. It can go deeper. It can crawl more. It has these decomposable components. and it actually gives you much more content per link back rather than just a short snippet the way like the Google search results would. And so by the time this all comes out and this might become available maybe as an API, it'll probably be somewhat outdated for the use cases LMs need.

2:37:19Do we need an API here? I feel like if I have an AI agent that has a browser, the browser can go to Google and search for me and then scrape the results, like is not the front end the API? Like does Google have like a blocker on this? Like can OpenAI not just Google things? Like their employees can Google things, I imagine. But can they not like resell that to me in their chat app? Like what's the dynamic there? Yeah, it's a really interesting world actually. There are not many real web indices out there and you have a lot of startups, including some of our competitors who essentially just do what you described through so-called SERP APIs and proxy networks where you have your phone, you have your smart TV, and you install some app.

2:38:10And that app then has some SDK installed somewhere where if you're not using your phone or your TV, it becomes an IP address. Oh, interesting. It then pretends to be a user, goes to people, scrapes the content from a search query in that, sends it back to centralized IP, and then folks sell search results, but they're really Google results. Like literally biggest competitors in the consumer space are just really fast at scraping Google results and then connecting it to an LM and doing all of that. It's hilarious. Now, the problem with that is that, A, if you're a bigger company like OpenAI or Facebook Meta, like they wouldn't want to send all of their data and all their queries to Google, right?

2:38:50They're literally trying to compete with them. So that's not an ideal setting. Two, it doesn't really scale. because Google can and does shut down these proxy networks all the time and they try to block it and have CAPTCHAs and all of that. And then three, as you go through someone's random phone and maybe they did click on something, now it's really slow and there's slow response times. And so where we actually have benchmarks that we can back up, we can go on u.com and find them, we are super fast and we're more accurate than Google serve APIs and that is really unique in the market. What about this news?

2:39:26It just broke that Apple will be potentially partnering with Google to have Siri powered by some sort of version of Gemini. Was that on your bingo card? Was that expected? Does that seem like a reasonable kind of end state of the market dynamic? I was talking about this earlier. It feels very, something that feels like it'd be on your forecast, given that you guys are helping a lot of companies build these sort of like knowledge. Yeah, like if you're in like business 101 going to Silicon Valley, you would say that like the ability to search and get great results is valuable. Therefore, Apple would be paying Google for search results.

2:40:12But in fact, the money flows the other direction because Google's making$60 billion a year or whatever off of Safari search results. And so how do you see the relationship and the economic flow changing there? I think the news report was that Anthropic wanted$1.5 billion and Apple said that's too much. We're going with Google and Google will be getting less than$1.5 billion maybe from Apple for the rights to use the LLMs. But what's your take on all that? Yeah. So a couple of different angles here. So one, it's surprising that Apple cannot do it themselves still. Like it's kind of crazy and surprising.

2:40:51They're like, you know, trillions of dollars worth and somehow are not able to execute on this themselves. The second thing, and they have great privacy at Apple, but then they partner with companies that have a different stance on privacy. So there's interesting complexities there. The second thing is that indeed, one of the biggest changes also of the ruling today was that Apple will continue to be allowed to take the 20 billion to not build their own search index. right um so that's that's a really interesting part of the ruling too google is allowed to still pay apple 20 billion dollars a year to stay the default um so that is a really important piece of this whole situation because defaults are very strong i don't know where i read this but like 80 of all iphone users never change a single setting maybe not your viewers but many normal iphone users they don't change any setting ever so if you're the default you'll be on there forever I wonder how, I mean, I imagine.

2:41:52No settings app for me. I don't need to adjust the volume. I'll never adjust the brightness of my screen. Not a single setting. No, I imagine that it's like deeper in the settings, of course. That is hilarious. Anyway, do you have anything else? We have a couple other people on the restrooms. Very happy to hear about your progress. Yeah, congratulations. This is awesome. Thank you. My favorite new pun, unicorn. Yeah, there we go. There we go. Unicorn. Unicorn. Fantastic. Well, yeah, tremendous. thanks for joining yeah we'll talk to you soon have a great rest of your day our next guest is already in the restream waiting room we got pablo from happy robot and i think we got some more news let me put my pack in here so i can get ready let's bring in pablo pablo how you doing welcome to the show

2:42:43how are things you hear us are the robots happy are they sad are they going to turn into terminators what's the plan can you hear us can you hear us uh you live we're gonna work on this like oh that's me back to you uh but thanks so much for hopping on give us the update give us the news what's latest we just raised our cheers b 44 mil

2:43:0944 great number great number take us through the story of the company what unlocked this fundraising around? What are the biggest drivers of growth for the business? To set the scene a little bit for the audience, we're building the AI workforce for an entire industry for supply chain. There's a lot of work that is very repetitive and manual in that industry. I take my hat off to all of those folks who are running those operations every day so that you guys can have that very cool ramp, DBPN hat on your doorstep every time you order on Amazon or any other platform, right? So we are powering those operations so that we take away the work out of work.

2:43:49We're trying to lift off the mundane and repetitive tasks from those folks running operations in supply chain and logistics so that they can focus on the more strategic and higher value tasks. We started over a year and a half ago, raised our series A last summer, announced December last year, raised a 15 mil from Anderson Horowitz. Now we announced our B with Base 10 and follow on from other folks like YC and XS &C. Very excited to be here, yes? Is it fair to characterize this as like AI ERP? Like how much of this is like, you know, some sort of like point solution within the supply chain and operation stack versus like system of record?

2:44:33Really building that system of record, that layer of interaction, we call it. So we define it as a layer of interaction, layer of connectivity, if you will, that sits on top of the actual data that already exists today. You can have a transportation management system, a warehouse management system, an ERP. You're talking about the shippers and distributors. Today we serve multiple verticals within supply chain. Shippers is one. Freight brokers is another one. Ocean carriers is another one, right? But right on, right? Like this is exactly what we're doing. We're building that layer of interaction so that users don't have to go and look for that little detail on the TMS.

2:45:08Where the hell is my load, right? Where's my truck today? Oh, let me just look it up on this messy UI from the 80s. Instead, they just go and chat with their data. And not only that, an AI also is exposed to the customers, to the vendors that are calling in every day. We're automating over a million phone calls every week with our customers. We serve eight of the top 10. A million phone calls. A lot of emails as well. Ultimately, our customers come to us. Customers like DHL or Uber Freight come to us to automate what their team doesn't want to do. Yeah. What's the split? Yeah, so have you guys had a more, working with Uber Freight, DHL, are you taking more enterprise focus?

2:45:52Because I know there's a long tail of players in logistics and supply chain broadly. But are you focusing there or going up market? Fully focused on enterprise. We're very lucky to have been able to cater to these enterprises from very early on. I think AI has unlocked that capability in startups. Maybe 10 years ago, it was harder to tap into the enterprises. Today, they just understand that they don't have the AI capabilities themselves. So they're just looking at it at whoever is tempted or willing to go into that space. We were early on in the space of supply chain and logistics, and we've kind of defined that category for AI agents in this space.

2:46:35So they really don't have anyone else to go to. They just come to us as a trusted partner. And that's really what our customers are looking for. They're looking for an AI partner, really. You're based in San Francisco? Yeah. Fantastic. Because there's this big German company that's been in this space forever, and I can't wait to just fully put them out of business and just make America dominant in enterprise resource planning. Let's make it happen. Jordi, anything else? What were you doing before this, out of curiosity? I was doing my PhD in actually Germany. I was in Munich. I was in Munich. All three founders are.

2:47:16One of my co-founders is my brother, who I've known for a while. And the other one is my best buddy from college, from Spain. We studied in Madrid. But yeah, no, the company is based out of SF. We have offices in Madrid as well, opening up in Chicago and office now because of all the freight and logistics that happens. Maybe you've got to take the fight to Germany. You got to invade Germany. Go right next to the big boys. The big boys. I love it. A couple brothers armed with$44 million, ready to do some international business. I love it. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. Congrats on all the progress.

2:47:51Congratulations. I'm sure you'll be back on soon, given the past couple of raises. I'm sure you'll be. I'm excited. Let's do it. Let's bow for that. Appreciate it, guys. We will talk to you soon. Have a good one. Great chat. Bye. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room already. We'll bring in Will from EXA with another massive fundraising round. You can do the honors on this one, Jordy. Let's bring Will in from the Restream waiting room into the TVP in Ultradone. Welcome to the stream, Will. How you doing? How's your day? Hello. How you doing? What you got? Where are you sitting right now?

2:48:22It looks like you're on a train. I'm in a phone booth within our office. Okay. Okay, cool. We need some of these. It looked like it was some type of tractor or something. This is the physical instantiation of the great lock-in of September to December. Yes, yes. You get locked in. Fantastic. You've clearly been locked in. What's the news? Yeah, big day today. We just announced our Series B. $85. I'm smart. Sorry, couldn't hear you. Couldn't hear you. Couldn't hear you. Oh, yeah. Peter Fenton. That's exciting. what's it like with him yeah I mean he's a legend he uh he's super experienced he's taken seven companies to IPO he really he just honestly his vision for Exa was just like matched or exceeded ours and so that was really exciting to work with a VC who just like saw what we saw and saw how big this company could get yeah yeah so he's joined the board had you worked with him before or is this new no no I met him like a month ago month and a half ago nice fast friends and partner So yeah, take us through the story of the business.

2:49:33I mean, only a couple years old, well on your way to an overnight success. I think if we check in with you in a decade, it will be pretty clear that you're an overnight success. But take us through the history of the company, where you are now, kind of what's been the key growth driver. Yeah, so we actually started 2021, so summer 2021. This is way before ChashBT. And the idea was like, you know, at the time, GB3 had recently come out. and it was like this magical thing that could understand like a whole paragraph of text and then at the same time there was google which felt like it hadn't changed in a decade so the idea was what if we could build a search engine that was as smart as gp3 something like fully understand understood the web and fully understand your query and get you like way better results than google and that's how we started uh so not necessarily a search engine for ai's it was more like a search engine for nerds because we were building it for ourselves uh and then when chat with t came out a couple years later uh it turned out that like the search engine we were building for ourselves for nerds is actually perfect for AIs because AIs and nerds are very similar.

2:50:26But yeah, I mean, basically we had to go build a search engine from scratch for years, which is really hard. So we bought a million-dollar GPU cluster after YC. We trained a ton of different models, tried a ton of different transform architectures until we had a new type of search engine. So the GPUs are trained to actually... So you're not doing crawling on GPUs, right? That's like traditional CPU workloads, right? That's right. And that's probably done like clouds. CPU batch processing and then we train models on our interviews. Okay. And, uh, and what, yeah, what, there's been a ton of news today in the search engine world with the Google news.

2:51:01Like, well, what, what's been your interpretation of it? Oh yeah. I mean, there's so much like what's crazy, like AI is very exciting, but then search for AI is like now the most exciting, uh, I think everyone's realizing that, uh, like sure. Like we want smarter and smarter LLMs, but really we want more knowledgeable LLMs. Like we want to connect our LLMs to like the best data in the world. And search is basically the most important tool to connect your LM to. And so, yeah, I mean, it's pretty exciting. There's Google News, like, for example, like, yeah, I mean, they're sharing their data. One thing about the search space is everything is very counterintuitive.

2:51:34So, for example, like, if everyone now has access to Google's data, people are less incentivized to build new search engines, which is interesting. So there's all sorts of counterintuitive, like, things in the search space. Yeah, so what, so, yeah, how does that shape, like, your strategy? because it feels like right now Google's not only like the, they have the search monopoly. They were kind of like, you know, found guilty of that. The remedies are not exactly putting them on the back foot. The stock's up 8 % today. And it feels like they're partnering even, they're going even deeper with Apple, potentially.

2:52:06The Bloomberg reporting that just came out is that there are rumors that Apple will be partnering with Gemini to test out if Siri can be powered by Gemini, which is obviously built on top of the Google crawler and Google search index. And so is the future for you look like a really long tail of, you know, tons of businesses that need to use some sort, some form of like best in class search and they can't go to Google for a particular reason, like an API level because Google doesn't want to sell that as a product and you're there to sell that? Yeah, that's exactly right. Like a big difference between us and Google is that Google is not trying to be search infrastructure.

2:52:46they're trying to be a platform like they want people to go to Google yeah and but we are uniquely trying to be search infrastructure so we want a long tail of companies like every company to be able to have the highest quality search inside their applications yeah and so that makes us very unique like when we said we were a search engine for AI is like a couple years ago in no one really got what that means but I think that world has really played out where now we have you know thousands of companies using Exa powering all sorts of applications whether internal or external with high quality search.

2:53:14And like you said, like Google doesn't like, is not doing that. Like they're not going to have an API because there's a lot of searches that are valuable in the context of specific applications that are actually not even that valuable to Google, right? Like, yes. Like when you're trying to retrieve information that you can then take action on, that's not necessarily something that Google is like, you know, able to run a bunch of great ads against. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's right. And the business model determines what you're saying is business model determines like how the search feels or how the algorithm works.

2:53:43And so, for example, like Google is really bad at recruiting. Like you can't use Google to find like, give me all the engineers in San Francisco who have like a PhD in machine learning and get a list of those things. Like why isn't Google good at that? Well, it doesn't make them more ad revenue. Whereas we're very good at that because all sorts of customers, AI applications want that high quality knowledge. And so like the end user you're selling to like really determines the search algorithm, which also makes us quite unique. Yeah. What is the value of actually training a model? I feel like there's enough of a business.

2:54:12I don't know if now's the best time for this, for that particular business, but, but like just being the best web scraper index, you have all the, every single webpage perfectly indexed in a database that people can query that feels like a valuable product in and of itself. Um, and then someone else brings their foundation model to bear on top of your search index. And you're a partner to the big labs that train the big models. Why are you training your own model? Yeah, I mean, well, the easy part is actually gathering all the data. I mean, it's hard that you need like crazy scale infrastructure, but it's an engineering problem.

2:54:47Once you gather all the trillions of pages, the hard part is how do you filter those trillion pages to the right 10 or 100 pages in real time? And that's where all the secret sauce is. And so we train embedding models because we see that as the way to get the highest quality search. How do you get the perfect search over the world's information you need to train all these like crazy neural uh models which is in contrast to the old world which is like google for example mostly uses a keyword based method obviously they use a mix of things but like we we're very bitter lesson pilled at exa and so we believe if you have the right uh you know a training data set and like a feedback signal you can get an extremely good search engine for the thing you're training for yeah when you say you're bitter lesson pilled i feel like that's rough because like who's more bitter less than Google.

2:55:33Like they have the most data, the most compute, deep mind, all this other stuff. Like what is the, walk me through like the counter positioning against like Google's like business here. The whole like Google will do it is like a complete trite over, I don't believe in it. I'm bullish on you, you know. But like there is something weird about what you just said in that I would expect Google to be able to move off of keyword pretty quickly, at least from a technology perspective. Yeah, well, there are two things. So one, it actually is kind of hard for a giant ship to switch to a different algorithm.

2:56:04That's fair. That works really well. It's very reliable. And there are a lot of benefits to the keywords we're talking about. And so it's hard. You know, you have a lot of people at the organization who are in there for decades who have a certain thing. You have all sorts of like advertisements that are connected to the keywords, actually. But I think the more important thing is that it comes back to the way the revenue model. So they are serving humans with ads. And by the way, Google is fantastic at that. Google has built an amazing consumer search engine for humans to make money from ads and optimize for what humans click on.

2:56:36But that's not what AI applications want. So a critical point of Exa is that we are optimizing for a different thing than Google. Google is optimizing for humans and clicks and ads. We are optimizing for AIs and AI applications and all these complex searches that this new AI world makes. And so that explains, even if we both have a ton of compute, we'll build very different search algorithms. Yeah, it does seem like with the AI search overviews, those have at least anecdotally been hallucinating like crazy. So they definitely have some gaps to bridge between some phenomenal stuff going on in Gemini and some frontier level reasoning models.

2:57:10And then some very reliable Google search results. And then the AI search overviews, still they haven't fully solved the hallucination problem and some grounding in truth there. Obviously a problem they're working on. Do you guys compete with U.com? We just had Richard on. Is that or is it not a lot of overlap? If I see him, it's on site. Well, because it's funny if you both announced fundraisers today. I don't know if that was random. Yeah, I mean, they mentioned that they do search, and they also do AI agents. So we are definitely in a similar space. I would say the space is very hot. Everyone's realizing the market is massive.

2:57:50And so I welcome other players there. I think we've been doing this for many years. You welcome them, but you encourage them to take the full Memorial Labor Day weekend off. You said, yeah, you guys should be. It's a hot space. It's going to be a long road. Just take the full three-day vacation. We grind. OK, sorry, last question for me. You bought a GPU cluster. That can mean a million different things. What does that mean? Do you own the land? Do you own the data center? Do you own the cards? Do you own a space within Azure? Like there's so many different, are you partnered with a NeoCloud? Like what can you tell me about what it means to actually own or manage a GPU cluster?

2:58:28What are the best practices? Like what actually works? You're now dealing with depreciation. There's so much going on. Love to just learn more about like owning and managing a GPU cluster as a startup, not as some hyperscaler. Yeah, sure. So in terms of like getting GPUs, like there are a couple options. Like you could spin up on-demand clusters, which is more expensive. But if your workloads are like very like spiky then that makes sense but for us we're doing constant research so we want something that we're like constantly using gets like you know 80 utilization uh when you start to have that kind of utilization then you want to get like either reserved or your own cluster and you know do the math and like uh you know it often makes sense to buy your own cluster if you're crazy enough to like set it up if you have you know if you have the expertise to set it up and and uh you could customize in all your all different ways um and so yeah we kind of went that route also it's just freaking badass and like we know we're gonna get bigger and we want to have experience like building clusters.

2:59:17I would say like we're not. So you have servers like in your office like the cluster exists physically or okay. It's like George Hots literally has like server racks in his comma AI spot in San Diego and it's like the craziest thing you've ever seen. Then Nat Friedman when he was doing NFDG, he spun up the Andromeda cluster and that was more like in partnership with someone else which made a lot more sense because like why do you have to learn how power or routes necessarily. Like that's not necessarily the differentiator. Yeah, so we don't, well, we're not big enough yet. Our previous one wasn't big enough where we had to buy the land or buy the data center.

2:59:50We have a part of the data center. But as we expand, at some point, we'll have our own data center. I see land on your horizon, Will. Yeah. I think you've got to vertically integrate. You've got to buy an oil and gas tract. You've got to buy the natural gas resources in the ground. Buy the sand that you can turn into silicon. Fab your own chips. Design your own chips. You've got to be vertically integrated. It's the only way to win. From sand to search. Exactly. From sand to search. That's a great line. Print it. Put it on a t-shirt. I've seen enough. Give them$10 billion. Give them$10 billion.

3:00:22Thank you so much for hopping on. Jordy, you got anything else? No, it was great. Awesome progress. Congratulations. Thanks for breaking it down for us. We will talk to you soon. Congrats to the whole team. Have a great one. Thanks, guys. Bye. Our next guest, Charlie from Orchard Robotics, is in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring in Charlie from Orchard.ar. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Orchard, Orchard.ar. A Teal Fellow Cornell dropout. Wow. Oh, Lyle Flush. How are you doing, Charlie? Charlie, it's great to have you in the Ultradome. Great to be on the Temple of Technology, the capital of capital.

3:00:55Welcome. There we go. There we go. What else can we do? Can we play a soundboard for you? Can we ring this gong for you? Do you have anything for us? It would be an honor to us. Give us something. Yeah. So today we announced our$22 million Series A, led by Quiet Capital and Shine. Let's go. So excited to finally have us out there. We've been growing the team a bunch. We've been scaling up our technology into a bunch of new farms. It's really been an exciting time these last couple of months. Thank you for making cool looking robots. We got to pull this. We'll have a team. Yes, yes. Pull up the landing page.

3:01:29I want to look through this. Also, thank you for making a company with a name that directly translates to what you do. Orchard.ai. It's a farming company. It's fantastic. And I love your background, by the way. How did you get into this? So did you just like do a market map and figure out there's opportunity in farming or did you have some background? How did you like that? My grandparents were actually apple farmers and my parents did agriculture before they immigrated to the U.S. I grew up in Virginia, gone to robotics early on, built my first robot when I was like seven years old, trained my first ML model in middle school.

3:02:02Ended up going to school to study CS and mechanical engineering. And this was kind of during the COVID use. And a lot of people don't know this, but Cornell is actually the number one agriculture school in the nation. And we have acres of apple. Look at this robot, John. Yeah, it's a beautiful robot. You made a beautiful robot. Yeah, thank you. Our amazing team made that. But it's been a pretty long journey the past three years to get to this point, actually. And, you know, the first iteration of this was actually this huge six-foot-tall autonomous rover that I built in my dorm room. And then we realized, wait a minute, you know, you don't really need a rover.

3:02:31You can just have a camera because you have tractors that go through the farms all day already. But really, it was talking to, I think, you know, when I first started the company, I talked to like 100 different farmers, just drove around upstate New York, talked to everyone I could and basically learned that, you know, here in the U.S., even on the largest commercial farms, like these farmers are relying on very, very small amounts of data to make every decision. So, you know, say an apple farmer is going to send their 10 best workers out to the fields for an entire week to count and size fruit on trees.

3:02:59And maybe, you know, 400 man hours, they get to 500 trees. Seems like a lot until you realize there's 5 million trees in the farm. And that sample size is what they use to make every decision across their entire company, which is kind of insane to think about. But we're helping them get data. So are you starting with counting, which sounds simple? We can do a lot of things. We started with counting. Now we can count and size, measure color, measure grade, detect disease, measure growth rate, do inventories of plants. Basically tell a farmer everything they want to know that can be gleaned from visual information out in the fields, which is pretty much all of the important information that they've been lacking for these last couple of decades.

3:03:39Get nerd out with me for a second on the hardware. I see a bunch of different lenses and cameras on here. I imagine that you're driving right by a tree. There's going to be apples that are obscured by leaves. You need high definition, some 4K, 8K, some zoomed in, some zoomed out. Like what's the optic stack that gets you enough resolution or data to actually determine, you know, is this an Apple or is this Apple healthy? Like walk me through that decision. Yeah. We have four lenses on each of our cameras and they're basically two stereo pairs. We use stereo vision. They're RGB cameras. They're pretty much off the shelf cameras.

3:04:19Camera technology is really good in the last couple of years. The real magic is in the machine learning models that we run on the edge. So we have some state-of-the-art multi-object detection tracking models that we run on every camera. We have NVIDIA Jetson Orens inside every single one of them that run these models on the edge. And we can basically do things like, you know, of the 100 images we take every single second, we can tell, you know, even through occlusion, through, you know, things like leaves, blocking fruit or fruit that are, you know, as small as five millimeters we can actually size.

3:04:47You actually hit the nail on the head. We have a really wide angle lens and a really narrow angle lens. And that lets us do things like zoom in to see very, very small things, but also things like a 12 foot tall tree from three or four feet away. Being a farmer and just refreshing your dashboard and seeing that you have a bountiful harvest must hit extremely hard. How do you sell robots? I imagine if this is replacing the need to send hundreds of people or a bunch of people into the field to physically count fruit, it can pay itself back fairly quickly. But what's the business model? Yeah, so we actually charge a per acre per year subscription fee.

3:05:28So it's similar to SAS pricing where it scales on the number of acres they use it on. Since the hardware is so relatively inexpensive, we actually don't even charge for the hardware. It's boxed in with the subscription fee. So it's really easy and not capital intensive for a farmer to try on a couple hundred acres and scale into thousands or tens of thousands of acres. Are those LED lights on the sides of the robot? They are. Yeah, they're LED strobe lights. So even at night we can operate. Oh, and you only strobe them when you're taking a picture with the cameras to save energy? Yep. Makes a ton of sense.

3:06:00All of the cameras are powered. So we actually can power them off of any 12-volt power source. So we have farmers that actually plug them into the 12-volt sockets, like the car jacks on your car. We have people who use external batteries. You can wire it into the car battery of any tractor or ATV. It's really versatile. What's the refresh rate on the flashing on the strobes? Are you doing like one per second or something? It's more, it depends, but it's more than 15 times a second. 15 times a second, you're flashing LED lights. Is this going to make squirrels go insane? Hopefully the squirrels aren't awake at night.

3:06:40Yeah, go to sleep, squirrels. We're farming out here. We're farming, get out of here. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's a pest control. We talked to the laser weeder guy, and maybe there's a pest control angle. where maybe you can also place some heavy metal, tell you to pick a different category. Oh, yeah. Actually, it's a good point that you brought up because we started this company back in March of 2022. And it was actually, I think it was around the time that the whole American dynamism thing - Yeah, they were like, please make weapons. Please. Make weapons, I'll give you 100 million. Put a gun on it.

3:07:14I remember actually when I met my first VC ever, they were like, oh, you should pivot into crypto. Like that was the first year. Because this is March of 2022. It was before everything came tumbling down. And we were like, I don't really want to crypto. I think this is my life's work. I'm going to do this for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And I think over the last year or so, there's been kind of this rise in robotics and American dynamism and manufacturing, all these industry things. And suddenly agriculture and ag tech is sexy now. And it's been when we went out to raise this last round, it was, I'd say, a bit I don't say easy, nothing's ever easy, but you know, it was, it was a lot better than, you know, when we were raising our first two rounds, you could have gone into beans.

3:07:58Do you remember beans? Hey, you know, I, I've actually heard that a coffee beans are a pretty big market. I'm talking about the crypto project beans. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it was popular on Twitter for like, you know, right around that time, right about when you would have been print, uh, uh, uh, pivoting from agriculture themed robotics into agriculture themed crypto. It was a very popular crypto app where you would put your, the whole thing was like staking coins, but the metaphor was like, you stake your beans and your beans harvest and they yield and stuff. And then there were tons of people that all of a sudden they put in like a thousand dollars and then they like, the harvest came and they were worth like a million dollars on paper.

3:08:41But then the thing got hacked and so they lost all their money. It was a wild. I'm glad you tripled down. Seems like you did something much more value creative. And it feels like I have to imagine this is like already helping solve labor shortages with farms. And the same thing that, you know, when people sell in AI to the enterprise are saying we're freeing up people's time to do higher leverage work. And like counting, doing this stuff, you know, you're just sort of like getting the state of things by understanding like crop yields and things like that. And then I imagine this is freeing up labor to like actually take action to increase yields and fight off pests and things like that that actually impact the bottom line.

3:09:29Yeah, you know, the big thing is, you know, not only is it freeing up labor from, you know, having to go out and do this counting and sampling work, but perhaps the more important thing that's actually being done in the immediate ROI a lot of our farmers can see is actually a reduction in labor costs and crop inputs. Because right now, this is a bit of a simplification, but what happens across a lot of these farms is that a farmer who's managing millions of trees and thousands of acres might go out and say, hey, this is like one 50-acre plot of land. I'm going to do the exact same thing to every one of the 50 ,000 trees in this 50-acre plot of land.

3:10:00When in reality, half the trees might only need half the amount of pests, their pruning, or fertilizers, whatever it is they might be applying or doing to those trees. So it's very one size fits all. And, you know, we can tell these farmers things like, hey, wait a minute. In this half of this block, it only needs, you know, half the amount of pruning. You only need to send half the amount of workers into that half. And suddenly you're saving 25 % of labor costs in that block. So, you know, that's probably one of the first big things that a lot of our customers notice when they use our technology is just this, you know, ability to see where you need more of something and where you need less of something else.

3:10:33And you can see pretty immediate labor and cost savings just from that alone. But, you know, in the long run, we have this, I guess, this conception of what we call like an AI farmer, which is that if we can see, you know, tens or hundreds or, you know, like billions of trees across their entire life cycles, across multiple seasons, we can start trading large embedding models and all of this data that can basically farm or know how to farm better than any human ever could because it has so much experience. And, you know, from there, it's like, what can we do with that? Right. We get down to the tree level and like prescribe, you know, individual recommendations to what every single plant in a farm needs.

3:11:08And that's super exciting. I mean, I think that's ultimately where, you know, a lot of this technology is going to go over the next couple of years. It's amazing. I'm incredibly bullish on you and Orchard. Extremely bullish for Erwan, too. Very exciting. Thank you so much for hopping on. Congrats, Charlie. It's great to get the story and I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We're excited. Amazing. thank you guys and send me send me send me your address too uh yeah i'll send you an orchard hat yeah in exchange yeah we're gonna need a robot to count and make sure nobody's overdosing on caffeine in this that's that's a problem we have uh great talking happy to see you guys to your day um what a legend his product's called fruit scope and we got a 360 scopes 360 no scopes A Call of Duty movie is officially in the works.

3:11:57This could be the second movie that Geordi sees in his entire life after Borat. Borat will be the first one. Thank you. Would you see the Call of Duty movie? Paramount also has the rights to expand Call of Duty into a universe of multiple films and TV shows. I wouldn't just watch it. I would study it. Sit down and listen. I would sit down and listen to the Call of Duty movie. The Call of Duty movie seems like a no-brainer. seems awesome um dodford a great youtube creator uh says the sensible thing to do would be adapting black ops or modern warfare instead i fear they'll do a minecraft movie-esque comedy with trick shots and noob tubes uh what do you think do you think they're gonna go slapstick comedy lighter pg-13 jokey for kids or do you think they will actually try to make it like black hawk down gritty serious like you know uh brain rot or i think i don't think they're gonna go comedy i think they're gonna go uh oh jordy saw mountain head daniel's crafting me that's true i did and i so this will be the third movie i felt like i needed to give a review yeah i'll watch yeah and uh well we'll have to give a review of the call of duty movie obviously everyone will demand it and listen uh well very excited well we gotta have to get over onto sub stack we gotta hop on with philadelphia you.

3:13:20That's right. No, but we actually are going to do a live over on Substack. Yeah, you can go watch us on Substack. You might already be watching on Substack. We're going to be live with Emily Sundberg. Love you. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a great evening. Goodbye. Cheers.