In-Car Surveillance, Goblin-Mode, Jon Gray from Blackstone Joins | Colleen Aubrey, Anthony Liguori, Colin Zima, Alex Epstein, Shira Lazar, Anshul Gupta, Apurva Shrivastava, Bubble Boi

27:29It's not making the decisions, but it's a tool that's making us much more efficient. So I would say to us on the compute side, it still feels like it's very early days in the implementation. but we can see particularly in rules-based businesses, you know, transaction processing, legal, what is a billable hour going to be? This feels like the path of travel in a big way, but I think it's taking more time than most of us would hope. Yeah. How have you been processing the idea that certain moats might be eroded? There might be more competition in certain sectors of the economy going forward. Is the moat section of every investment memo getting longer these days?

28:12How are you investigating that? I would say the uncertainty section of every one of these memos is getting longer because investing is hard. And what you did historically was look at the 10 or 20 year history of a business and industry, and it just may not apply. Right. And we've seen this in the past, right? The yellow pages, which I may be dating myself with you guys, but you used to get a plumber opening up your yellow pages, find them. When the Internet came along, they disappeared. Taxicab business, which still exists, but obviously when Uber and Lyft showed up, it changed the world in a really profound way.

28:53Now the issue is in 50 different verticals, there are going to be impacts. And how do I think about it? autonomous vehicles, which reduce the accident rate by 95 % on serious accidents, like, won't that happen? And what does that mean for collision repair? What does that mean for auto insurance? So I would say the areas of greatest risk today are obviously in sort of the white collar world. It's the software, it's professional services, information services. And there you're spending a lot of time trying to understand what the world may look like. And as a result, what you're beginning to see both in the public markets and the private markets, I describe it almost like the Red Sea parting, where obviously there are companies viewed as AI winners, could be LLMs, application software, could be the digital energy infrastructure.

29:44That's easy. Then there are companies in the physical world that are pretty unaffected. We took a company, Medline Public, at the end of last year, it's in medical supplies. Manufacturers distribute them, no impact basically from this. And that's easy to underwrite. And I think what you're going to see, I think you'll see a recovery, for instance, in an area like real estate that's been very much out of favor the last four years because of higher rates and a bit of overbuilding. That's going to come back because people are going to say, oh, that warehouse that's going to exist, that hotel is going to exist.

30:16I think sports, obviously. And so I think there's definitely a tendency from investors now to look at this physical, unaffected AI world, certainly the AI benefiting world. And then this other area is fascinating because some of these companies could end up being very attractively priced and they may need to change their business model, but they have real incumbency. So we have a business that does revenue management for hospitals, helps them with their billing, basically. What do you charge for certain procedures? Now, they need to incorporate AI into the business. But if they do that, they should be a winner because they have the trust of their customers.

30:57And that's super valuable. So I would just say the risk levels on investing have gone up. But I also, at the same time, the opportunities have gone up as well, the upside. how's your recall on your thinking around the dot-com era there was very similar fears around uh how the internet internet would disrupt different businesses we had rick caruso sitting here yesterday and we were asking him about this and he's like i never i never thought read i never thought my my category of retail would go under even though at the time everyone was projecting that like hey why would somebody go to the store to get something if they could get it shipped directly to their house.

31:36And so, yeah, I'm curious if you've reflected back on that era when you started your career and kind of tried to understand where you had good intuition, where you were maybe off. I think it's a great analogy. And Rick is a very good man. It's funny, if you look at retail, I think that does resonate with what we're talking about in software. So if you go back 25 years ago, you know, just as the bubbles bursting, as Amazon's starting to become a marketplace for everything, you could have said retail will be an apocalypse. And by the way, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us did not make it. On the other hand, Walmart, I think it's up sevenfold.

32:23Costco's up like 25 fold. TJ Maxx is up 40 times and has$180 billion market cap. That's crazy. And for those companies that won, they either had something that was infrastructure like groceries or had a great value proposition, really understood their customers. They found a way to navigate it. And I think that is the kind of way to think about what's coming to so many businesses, which is if they just sit and operate the way they have, they have enormous vulnerability. If they do something and have a market position that's protected, you know, they can end up doing much better. In terms of my own accuracy, I think I probably at times may have been too negative on some of the retail if I look back at it.

33:15And some of it obviously ended up thriving and doing quite well. And so you try to have a little bit of mental flexibility. Yeah, well, it's good to have a mental model of like, am I looking at a Sears management team or a Costco management team? Yeah, and it makes all the difference in the world. I've been the chairman of Hilton now for almost 20 years. And when Airbnb came out, which is an amazing business model they built, a bunch of people were saying it's the end of Hilton. The stock has been a rocket ship. Chris Nesetta, the CEO, has done an amazing job. It had a differentiated business model.

33:53It offered something fundamentally different. And so both of those companies ended up thriving and doing great. So I do think that is the hardest part today because the technology is moving so quickly and is so capable. It's making it harder. What I would say as investors is anything in this AI uncertainty world will see these multiples come down. because people are until there's a sense that there's terra firma, that, hey, this business model is going to survive or may end up thriving. But right now, I think people are taking a step back. And I do think there'll be some baby thrown out with the bathwater.

34:33They'll end up being some software companies that you could buy at very reasonable prices. But this is the sort of stuff. The other thing I would just point out for us, because of the risks that exist, One of the easiest ways is to be in the picks and shovels. So invest in that electricity, invest in those data centers, because you don't know who's going to win of the incumbents, who's going to win of the new model companies. But you do know they're all going to need AI factories. They're all going to need power. And that, for us, has been really the biggest strategic pivot we've made. And we think it's going to pay huge dividends for our investors.

35:07Well, we appreciate you taking the time to hop on the show today. We've kept you already five minutes long. We would love to have you back and go way deeper. This was a fantastic conversation. Let's do it again soon. Have a great rest of your week. Great to have you, John. We'll talk to you soon. It was an honor to be with you guys. You have a great show. Take care. Thank you. You're the man. Up next, we have Colleen Aubrey from Amazon Web Services. You know it as AWS. She's the SVP of Applied AI Solutions here with us in the waiting room. We'll bring Colleen in to the TBP and Ultradome in just a minute.

35:40Not yet. Last question I wanted to ask. didn't get a chance was the barbell strategy. I wanted to hear his take on this idea that you have Josh Kushner buying the giants, the most legacy thing possible, and then the AI labs, and then you have Ellison owning Bugs Bunny and a bunch of data centers. And it's this weird new normal of you buy the oldest possible thing that is resistant to any sort of disruption, and then the exact opposite. But we are joined by Colleen Aubrey from AWS in the waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TBPN UltraDome, if we can. Let's give it a try. Hello. Welcome to the show.

36:23Good morning. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what's going on today with AWS. Sure. So Colleen Aubrey, I've been at Amazon for over 20 years now and joined AWS two years ago. And I've been on this journey of looking at how can we bring to life some of the operational expertise that we've developed at Amazon into Argentic products and put them in the hands of AWS customers. And today it was really sort of great to announce two new products, Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Talent. We announced Amazon Connect Health a couple of weeks ago.

37:03And this really expands the family of Connect products that we have, adding to Amazon Connect customer, which is a nine-year-old product that we've been developing. So can you help me understand? I think most people will be familiar with AI chatbots, and many people will be familiar with AI agents and coding agents that they fire off a prompt. And maybe it goes for five, six, eight hours sometimes and then comes back with a fantastic response. But when you're deploying an advanced model, a frontier model, an agent into an enterprise system that's deployed on AWS, what are your clients looking for?

37:43How are they thinking about integrating an agent into a platform? Is it that they're vending the agentic workflow to their customers in turn? Can you walk me through some of the examples of how enterprises are actually deploying agents in practice when most people are probably familiar with the more point solution they type the prompt themselves? Yeah, well, let me first start by saying that I think we're early in that journey. Yeah. And certainly in my conversations with customers, a lot of what I hear is people looking to automate processes. Sure. And so, and for me, what that triggers is that the mental model is looking at how work gets done today and then putting AI to work to do that same process.

38:30And personally, my point of view is that that misses the bigger opportunity. I think the bigger opportunity is much more transformative. And we can't assume that how we work today is the sort of gold standard for how we might work when we have this new capability in our hands. which is to be able to develop fairly complex agentic teammates that can work alongside people in the business. So we're really going after this mission of how do you develop an agentic teammate which is in the business with people and is actually transforming how work gets done. And do that in a way which is intuitive and natural so that transformation doesn't come with heavyweight change management.

39:16And so we really have gone back to the drawing board and trying to think about how will work happen in a number of different areas, in decision making, within supply and demand planning, in healthcare, in recruiting, and in customer journeys. Sure, sure. I feel like AWS's strong suit has always been understanding complex systems, being able to deploy a ton of resources, but then also being able to monitor, understand everything from cost to performance. How is that changing in the age of AI agents? I imagine if I have a bunch of digital workers doing stuff, I want a water cooler where I can tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, how's it going?

39:56I want analytics on how different work processes, even if they are fully automated, are continuing and progressing. What does the analytics stack look like in the future? Yeah, I think it's a good question. And certainly in the agentic teammates that we're building, there's a good amount of thought that we put into the observability, the trustworthiness, like an AI's, an agentic teammate's ability to explain why they've taken some action, why they've come to some conclusion, the reasoning that they've gone through. And an example of that is in Amazon Connect Health. In this case, we're working on behalf of providers, preparing sort of summarization of a patient's history before they meet with a patient.

40:45And in that case, every reference, every conclusion is traceable into labs, into previous visits, into medication. so that the physician in this case versus a builder and SDE has the opportunity to be able to observe the work, to be able to reason over the work, to be able to also course correct as necessary. And so for me, I'm really much more thinking about how I make an agentic teammate trustworthy and part of the team and that that observability comes to life in different ways. Of course, under the covers, we have to solve for price performance. We have to solve for latency. we have to solve for managing the efficiency of deploying many agents under the cover to be actually be able to deliver the experience.

41:29And that's something, some of the hard work that we're doing on behalf of the customers. Yeah, I feel like it's potentially underappreciated. And maybe this is a side, an outgrowth of the fact that the first AI models that most people interacted with were sort of low powered chat bots that did hallucinate. But the hallucination problem has, at least to my experience, basically gone away. And it feels like the next challenge is actually educating people on the reliability, the traceability that you mentioned. And, of course, I'd be interested to hear a few different. There's a whole bunch of different projects that you can embark on to build confidence around the traceability and reliability.

42:13I did have one last question, though. Since you've been with Amazon for 20 years, I'd love to know, how has the company changed? How has it stayed the same? You know, I think certainly for me, this sort of passion for inventing on behalf of customers has remained pretty consistent through the time that I've been at the company. And so really going deep to understand a customer problem, but then also pulling back and asking ourselves, is there a better way? Can we invent a way of solving this problem which is meaningfully better than what exists today? And do we have a unique point of view about how we would do that?

42:57And that's really what we're trying to do with this Connect family of products is really, you know, ask ourselves honestly, what is the unique capability, the unique operational experience that we have that we can bring to life? And I think that has remained consistent. Otherwise, Guys, you know, Amazon's always evolving, always changing. And, you know, our businesses go through inception. They go through scale. They go through reinvention. And now is a great time for all Amazon teams to be thinking about reinvention and how do they deliver their products and services to customers now that we have this new AI capability in our hands.

43:29And it's exciting to see the energy around that. And I feel sort of like sort of just freshness in the organization as we go through this next phase. That's great. Well, thank you for coming on the show. and congrats on the progress. We'll kick it over to Anthony next. Thank you very much for having me. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Anthony, who is a VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS as well to continue our segment on AWS and detail a little bit of the OpenAI integration and new stateful runtime for agentic systems. And so we have Anthony in the TBP at Ultronome.

44:06Anthony, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for taking the time to join. There's been a lot of discussion back and forth, and I think it would be helpful to start with just like a one-on-101 of what is a stateful runtime? How are you thinking about agentic systems? I think everyone knows LLMs are next token predictors. Maybe they're stochastic parrots, but how are you thinking about the capabilities that come from this? Yeah, and then how does that tie into the announcements today around some of the new models being available?

44:39That's great. Yeah, the best way I would describe it is that we've seen kind of an evolution of how folks interact with these AI models over the last few years. It started out exactly, as you mentioned, with just token prediction. The early completions API from OpenAI was exactly this. You give it a string, it gives you some more strings. These APIs have advanced over the years to where that string starts to get parsed and you get tool calls. Or you get reasoning or you get other kind of capabilities. What we're seeing now with agentic development is that folks are taking those tool calls, executing tools, performing things like compaction or extracting memory.

45:17This is a super powerful mechanism. This is really the thing that has caused at least my career to dramatically change in terms of productivity and what can be accomplished now. I think the next phase for AI, I truly believe, is taking a lot of what we've learned in the coding space where most of what's happening is happening locally on a person's laptop or maybe their development machine and making that be deeply integrated within the cloud where like real enterprise applications live and getting all those same benefits. And so what we announced with Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI is a new API that really has three parts.

46:00So the first part allows you to create what we call a runtime. And you can think of the runtime as the definition of the agent. This contains skills, which tell the model how to do new tasks. This includes tools like MCP servers that you want to configure or other built-in tools, and a memory policy. So you can tell it how to maintain short-term memory or long-term memory or whatever new memory mechanisms might come over the time. And then the next part, and this part is really the special bit, is the environment. Today, when most people are using tools like Codex, they're running them on their laptop and the agent effectively lives on your laptop.

46:40That's good and bad. It means you can do all the things that that person can do, but it also means that agent doesn't have its own identity. You can't create agent-specific policies. A lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to strike the balance of enabling these agents to work, but also making sure that you can set the right guardrails on them. Environments in Bedrock Managed Agents really solves this. It allows you to give a dedicated compute environment for that agent. It allows you to create specific policies around governance. And most critically, it gives that agent a unique identity within AWS.

47:13So as a security team or an administrator, you can create policies around what that agent can do. We think these things are absolutely critical to enable agents to be used in real-world enterprise applications. And then finally, there's the inference API, the thing that you actually talk to the agent through. And that API is very familiar to existing APIs like the Responses API from OpenAI. And so a lot of existing applications can just work once you've created this agent. Can you reflect a little bit as a distinguished engineer on... Wait, wait. Yeah, sorry. Before we move on. if I'm an AWS customer today, what should I do to experience what you just described?

47:59Because it was a lot of corporate lingo, which I love. I'm an enthusiast. But what would be your recommendation of the, given this new set of capabilities, what should I try doing to start? what kind of value might be unlocked in the organization in maybe a more straightforward way. Today, Bedrock Managed Agents is in limited preview, and that will expand over the next coming weeks. And so you probably have to wait a couple weeks. But in order to actually use this, it's really as simple as making two API calls. So you can go into your AWS account and make an API call to create a runtime. And then once you have that runtime, you decide what type of compute you want to associate with the agent, and then you make another API to create that environment.

48:50Once you've done those two API calls, that's it. You now have an endpoint that you can take an existing tool. It can be codex, it can be a web chat-based system, or you can just use the OpenAI SDK and integrate it deeply within your application. But it's really that simple. It's just a couple of additional API calls, and then you're off to the races. Interesting. How are you thinking about the the different roles of engineers right now. There's been this trend of managers and CTOs becoming individual contributors at labs. And then simultaneously, there's been individual contributors who are effectively becoming the manager of many agents.

49:28And so we're sort of going both ways. But where is the highest leverage point for someone who is on the distinguished engineer path, like the ultimate individual contributor, but the world is changing? Yeah. I can tell you that in my role, I am coding almost every day. Okay. I took the day off today to come and do this event, but I'm spending almost all of my time coding. I'm having probably the best time of my career. Yeah. What my experience has been with all of these coding tools is that once you make coding fast, once you make the actual art of generating the code quickly, what really matters is your understanding of algorithms and data structures, architecture patterns and things like that.

50:11So I think what you're finding is that a lot of very senior ICs, folks that have a deep understanding of software architecture, are now able to do really amazing things because they understand how to prompt these models in a way to be able to generate new things. Is it less frustrating? Are you having the most fun you've ever had? I've always felt in my career that I was limited by typing. I don't care. I don't mind typing. I don't mind writing. I love writing code. but you can think about a problem and you can think about solutions and then you're like, okay, this is going to take me weeks to actually implement.

50:48That's just something I had always become resigned to is that it's going to take me weeks to solve that problem. Now I think about the solution to that problem, I do some prompting in Codex and I have the solution by the end of the day and that is so incredibly rewarding as an engine. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thanks for breaking it down, Anthony. Absolutely. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have Colin Zima from Omni. He is the co-founder and CEO. Building a semantic layer, powering AI-driven analytics.

51:23Chat is asking, do I blink? Do you not blink? Apparently not, but I was blinking at them once I saw that. Oh, yeah. They've been asking me to drink the Diet Coke with two hands. I was communicating with the chat by blinking. they demand that they drink the Coke with two hands. Oh, yeah. I wasn't going to do that. You stared them down and said no. I saw that. But I oblige every once in a while with the two-handed Diet Coke. If I see somebody who's like, oh, they're not reading the chat, drink the Diet Coke with two hands if you're reading. I'm going to sip a Diet Coke with two hands. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room.

51:59Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. Colin, how are you doing? I'm great. Welcome to the show. I can do a two-handed drink for you. There we go. He's rude in chat. This is great. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us the news. Yeah, Colin Zima, CEO at Omni Analytics. We are building the next great data platform. So a product that can do everything from AI to spreadsheets to dashboards. We're trying to consolidate all of BI into one tool. And we're doing it on top of a semantic layer. So a layer that can explain how everything in the business works so that AI does stuff reliably.

52:32How generalizable is the semantic layer? This has got to be some trade-off because the different businesses have different ontologies. How are you thinking about creating something that's flexible but simultaneously uniform? So, I mean, on the one hand, a semantic layer is actually pretty straightforward. It's just a bunch of text about the business. So, if I'm going to go write a semantic layer for ChatTBT or Claude, right now that is what the skills framework looks like. It's a document that has lists of stuff about the business. And that is completely unique to every single company. On the flip side, we've had semantic layers in data for 50 years at this point.

53:08And it's the specifics of how all the tables in a warehouse fit together. And what we're doing is just bridging those two worlds together. So it is completely specific to every business. Yes, exactly. Like a Snowflake or a Databricks. Yeah, so I imagine that there's still a world for databases in the future. How are you thinking about that? Do migrations get easier or changing schemas get easier in the future? Does this get harder because the data is just so much more? How are you thinking about the evolution of databases and how you'll use them? Yeah, I mean, using sort of public trading as a proxy for this, it seems like the data warehouses have found like a nice middle ground in between the SaaS apocalypse and the pure play AI companies.

53:54Like we need somewhere to hold all of the data. And so I think that databases will probably be here for a long time. I think what has gotten interesting is that picking up your data infrastructure from one tool and moving it to another tool has gotten substantially easier. Like SaaS used to have a good bit more lock-in than it does today. And you still need a database that's holding all the stuff. But the portability of it, I think, is the new question. Yeah. Is there a piece of this pitch that's like cost driven? Because with some of the advanced models, it feels like if I just threw a million dollars, a computer, a problem, I can have it go and parse through every PDF and use an API to turn it into text and turn it into CSVs and write custom Python for it.

54:43just to answer the question of like, what was revenue last month, right? And that feels inefficient. It feels like this is a good solution. But is that the goal or is it something faster, speed, cost, everything? I don't think that we started there, but I think that to your point, like savvy people are sort of coming around to this because on one side, these models are smart enough that you can just sort of throw it at, you know, Google Drive and Slack in your warehouse and you can actually answer every single question. So you can get 80 % of the way there with literally no thought, which on the one hand is a little bit scary building a data company because it's sort of like again, why don't you do this?

55:19I think to your point you probably don't want to reinvent your ARR metric every single time you query. And ultimately if it's a one second answer that you're going to ask every single day a dashboard is probably a pretty decent place to go get that. We don't need to rebuild the dashboard on the fly every single time. So people are starting to come around to realize that this is a cost performance optimization problem. And it turns out that the analytics products that have existed for the last 20 years or 50 years or whatever it is actually do have some sort of good solutions to these things. I think at the same time, trying to fight the idea that you can just bring ChatGPT to the warehouse and get an answer is a naive version of building product now.

56:02Every single person is going to compare your SaaS product to sitting the thing on the warehouse or just setting it up yourself and doing it in Claude. And so figuring out that balance is the goal of every SaaS company now. And cost is a part of it. Okay. Bit of a hot take I want you to respond to. There is a muttering around AI psychosis in the enterprise, like people vibe coding things that don't actually create value yet. And there's a question about what's the useful token spend versus just the explorative, sort of performative token spend. I think there's a lot of real stuff to be done, but there's also some crazy internal tools that are just self-perpetuating.

56:50And it reminds me of people had dashboard psychosis like a decade ago. I worked at a company where somebody was like, oh, we need every dashboard. We got to have every metric. And I'm like, oftentimes you have a question and you just need to go answer that question. You don't need to be checking like what's the website traffic on my website every single minute. Like sometimes that's not useful. Sometimes there's already a dashboard for it. So how do you think about rolling out like dashboards or analytic products that are actually effective? And like what coaching needs to happen versus just like raw consumption?

57:24It really comes down to pragmatism. So the example I love to give is Guitar Center is a customer of ours. They have sent spreadsheets to every single store for the last 30 years that have every single SKU. and like the week over week, day over day sales. That's not a process that needs reinventing. Like they're going to send the spreadsheets to the stores for the next 25 years. You need products that can do that. You're also going to have a dashboard. Like I want to know what our plan is and I want to go compare like our ARR on a weekly basis to where it is relative to plan. You're also going to just have a question that you need answered that you didn't predict in advance and need to go answer questions.

58:01And I think the challenge is that every vendor sort of has this point of view that's like, you know, dashboards are the way, or Tableau was visualizations are the way to do everything. And then I was at Looker, and semantic layers were the way to do everything. And I think what you see is that there's a little bit of truth in all of these things. And quite frankly, right now, it's AI is the way to do everything. And we're into, you know, how many billion tokens can you spend to go answer your question? We probably want a tool that does all of those things and actually makes them fit together. And it's sort of like the, It's not the sexiest pitch.

58:35Every single thing that you are doing is right, and you need a little bit of all of it. But I think that there is space for pragmatism in the world where we can invent things on the fly sometimes, and that is a great way of doing it, and we don't need UI. And we had good UIs, and they do things, and websites are good, and we can go back to them again. So it's both. It's not the sexiest pitch, but it was sexy enough to get the Series C done. How much did you raise? Tell me about the round. 120 million at a 5-1 post valuation. Massive. Massive. Could you give us a quick history of the company? When did you actually start the company?

59:15Yeah. February 22, so four years and a little bit old. We raised about$27 million as we got the company started. Did our B about 12 months ago at a$650 million valuation. So we're building for about a year and a half and we've been selling for two and a half. So business has been pretty good. Fantastic. And what were you doing before this? I was at a company called Looker that got acquired by Google. So I'm a very direct competitor to my previous company. You know what you're doing. Well, congratulations on the progress. I love the chat loves the pink, by the way. I love the pink. It's great. Are you guys like fully just are you going to own pink?

59:58We embrace the pink. We sort of fell into it. I think it's so smart. We were going to a conference that was all blue and gray. Yeah. And one of our marketing leaders was like, hey, wear some pink. People will notice you. Stand out. And then we just turned into a pink company. So we embraced it. Fantastic. I love it. Very smart. Well, congratulations. Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, great to meet you, Colin. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next. Interesting username. I didn't get to ask him about it. Oh, yeah? It's at DrinkZima.

1:00:25It sounds like some type of cool caffeinated beverage. Yeah. That does. Zico coconut water. Get a very cool caffeinated energy. Maybe that's the next thing. He can buy Sobe, bring it back. up next we have Alex Epstein the author of Fossil Future live in the TBP and Ultradome taking us through what's going on in the world, what's going on in the energy markets, what's going on with OPEC great to see you again Alex, thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBP and Ultradome, please get us up to speed, what should we be paying attention to? Look at this black on black you look fantastic with the hair too do you guys remember what we talked about last time?

1:01:07the straight? The straight, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, by the way, interesting fun fact about AI. So I think most of what I said last time was vindicated in terms of the main thing was this straight needs to open and there's no substitute for it. There's all these other little things you can do, but nothing compares. And that's still true. I would add you need to enduringly open the straight. So if you cut a deal with Iran and they have control over it, even if they give you control for a year or whatever, then you've actually made the situation way worse than it was before the war where everyone figured we really have control over the strait.

1:01:45But fun fact, since you're talking about AI tokens. So in preparation for that, in addition to consulting experts and thinking about the issue, I have my own internal AI called Alex AI Pro, which I've invested over a million dollars in. and uh oh yeah it's nuts so to talk about and one of the things i've invested in is i don't get enough compute yeah yeah i don't get enough compute from off the shelf ai so you need you know if you can run your own agents then you can do it so um that query which i think led to very valuable content was 48 kilowatt hours so that's half a tesla yeah wow think about that that's That's three Powerwalls for one query.

1:02:25That's a ton. So, yes. How long was that running for? 10 or 20 minutes. What? That's crazy. And what is it doing? Like pulling data from the internet, pulling it together, writing? It's really God mode. I'll show it to you sometime. Well, actually, so here's an announcement for the first time. A version of that AI is now free to everyone who works in government. So it's gov.alexepstein.ai. No way. Yeah, yeah. So at some point, it's free. If you use too many tokens, we'll have to just charge you cost beyond that. But yeah, I mean, I have a lobbying firm, which is the only pro-freedom lobbying firm, the Energy Freedom Fund, which is a 501c4 that I'm the unpaid president of.

1:03:10And I figure one of the best ways to spend those dollars is to give people a pro-freedom AI. So I'm not going to make any money off those queries, but I'll at least cover our compute cost. So this is a real world example of, I believe that if you know how to intelligently integrate AI, you can make use of a lot of energy. And very profitably. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, of course, because the results that come from good research or good policies and good consulting fees and all sorts of things. But you need to train it so that a lot of the work is just literally breaking down everything I do and my researchers do.

1:03:43I just built one today, which is the policy validator, which is anyone is free to send us policies and we'll lobby for them in proportion to merit, not in proportion of payment. We don't take payment for this kind of thing. But I needed to replicate, hey, I have these two really brilliant researchers and then I'm pretty good and we have some other pretty good people. Like, how do you break that down? And there turns out there's about 25 questions you need to ask to get the credibility of the people. Is this a pro-freedom policy? Is this going to increase energy abundance? Are there better ideas?

1:04:14And if you know how to really do it, you can get and you have human validators at the end of it, it's wild in terms of what you can do. Okay. Let's start with, there was on the straight, there was this interesting piece in The Economist that was arguing that the market was simply not processing or digesting the fact that even if the straight were fully open today, there's still a massive shortage of energy that is effectively delayed and that that would have ripple effects on the economy, inflation, all sorts of things. How have you processed the impacts, the downstream impacts? I think a lot of people see it at the pump when they go and fill up their cars, if they drive gas cars, it's starting to show up in other places.

1:05:01But how are you thinking about just what's at stake, why the straight being open is important from first principles. Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to that argument. It would be just miraculous if it didn't get a lot worse in terms of prices. I mean, you're dealing with a situation we talked about last time. You have a certain amount of spare capacity. So, you know, international agencies released a lot, a reasonable amount. We released, yeah, in terms of their oil reserves. But these are all very temporary measures. It's like 30 days here, 90 days there, 180 days over. There was already a bunch of supply.

1:05:39No one's sitting on 5 ,000 days of oil. And the thing you have to realize is, you know, in America, we are very America-centric. So, you know, we don't even think about Canada, let alone Asia. Okay. And a lot of what's happening with the strait is oil that is intended for Asia and Asian consumption. Now, the Chinese are in an interesting situation because they did build up a bunch of spare oil. Now, there's questions of other things they need, like sulfur and helium that go through the strait. And I've heard interesting claims about that. But we're already seeing in Asia various shortages. And, you know, one analyst that I likened it to, okay, you're starting, like, one part of the Titanic is starting to fill.

1:06:18And not everyone on the Titanic realizes this is happening. But you're cutting off a huge, whether it's 14 % or 20 % or whatever, you're cutting off a huge percent of global oil supply. And that cannot last. And even if you solved everything today, it takes a while to bring it back to bring it back. Of course. And right now we're in ceasefire mode. Yep. Which is not creating enduring. Yeah. That doesn't enduringly open it up. Yeah. I heard, I think it was Rahm Emanuel was saying that the Gulf states do not want Iran to have a veto over the strait. Even if the strait is opened, now the conversation has shifted to what does it take that America is potentially responsible or is being held responsible for removing that veto right?

1:07:10Is that your perception as well? Yeah, that's my perspective is it needs to be enduring. So in advance of this, there was the idea that, hey, if America ever goes into Iran, obviously we're going to keep the strait open. Obviously, we're going to prioritize that. That unfortunately did not happen to the extent that it did. I mean, you know, there are different people in the administration, but overall, I mean, we have to just be objective. I'll praise them where they deserve praise, but like they were not prepared for this in terms of whatever the final decisions were. I think within a week of our last interview, not because of our last interview, but just talking to people in the administration, they all became very clear that Hormuz is non-dispensable.

1:07:46Before that, there had been people saying, oh, we have Venezuela. We have all this. It's just all nonsense. Yep. So they understand this. We talked about that with Venezuela. it's like 1%. Yeah, you might get to 1%. You might get to 1 % and we're talking about 20%. Yeah, we're talking about years. Are there 30 Venezuelans? No. In years. There's no one to do business with. Yeah, yeah. So it's like they understand the importance, but it's still in this mode where Iran now is known to have, like Iran has proven that they can control the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the U.S. cannot obviously counteract.

1:08:19So if we cut a deal with them where they, again, where they can use the same power to stop us anytime they want, then it's not open. Open is a little bit ambiguous. It can be open momentarily, but it's open on their terms. So basically you need, without giving any strategy, because I don't know the exact strategy, it needs to open on our terms. That's the only way you have a victory. Let's shift to OPEC. Can you give me a primer on OPEC? It's the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Yeah, yeah. And now it's OPEC Plus. OPEC Plus. So, yeah, take me through the history and the impacts and importance.

1:09:00Let's talk about cartels. I think the easiest way to understand this. It's important to understand cartels, and I think people have a uniformly negative view of cartels, which is plausible but a little bit exaggerated. So you take the— People that aren't a part of cartels tend to not like— Yeah, exactly. Well, so you think about the – if we look at the early oil industry where Rockefeller is criticized as a monopolist and we created this thing, the Sherman Antitrust Act and other things to prosecute so-called monopolists. And I'm totally against these laws for any number of reasons. I don't think – the government should not be able to create monopolies that it enforces by force saying, hey, there's one producer.

1:09:40Nobody can compete. But nor should it be able to say, hey, you're really successful in this market. You're too good. I've decided that you're too good. And one of the things that people will counter with is, well, what if... Economic deadweight loss. What do you mean? Just the idea that if you actually do control 100 % of a resource, you can charge dramatically above market rates, which reduce demand and wind up having less human flourishing because you have less energy produced, in fact. Yeah, so what happens in practice is, if you look at what happened with Rockefeller, So Rockefeller, his focus was refining.

1:10:19You look at the early people in the oil industry, the different producers. What would happen is oil prices are decent. Then you get a flood of new oil on the market and people just get wasted. They get ruined. And so what does that do? That disincentivizes people from investing over time because the volatility is so high. So what Rockefeller was basically able to do is he said, OK, I'm going to buy you up. You're exposing yourself to way too much risk. I'm going to buy you up. I can run everything much more efficiently. And so in the long term, we can have something that is A, profitable, and B, has much lower prices on average than the very volatile situation.

1:10:54And in fact, he dramatically lowered prices. So the interesting thing, so you can think of Rockefeller, they call it, it's in a sense a cartel, but it's a free market cartel, which I think should be able to exist. You can call it - Yeah. And I believe that's in the Sherman Antitrust Act in some ways. Like you have to prove consumer harm. And this is why it's hard to go after animals. There's later versions. I mean, it's very vague. It's like no comp, you can't do restraint of trade, which what the hell does that mean? And then later they have these different things. And I have a lot of reasons for being against it, but it's notable that the volatility is a real, a really, really big thing in oil markets historically.

1:11:32And that's why people, whether or not you think free market cartels should exist as I do, you have to understand why these things exist. Why any cartels, OPEC is not a free market cartel, But why these exist is because the volatility is just so, so high and oil is so, so valuable. So people want steady oil, but and they want people to be comfortable being in the oil business instead of just getting wrecked all the time and getting thrown out. So we had this era of Rockefeller and then that was broken up. And then we have in the United States had something called the Texas Railroad Commission, which basically cartelized America was the dominant producer.

1:12:09And so they did these things that basically rationed how much everyone could produce. So the term that's often used is swing producer. The U.S. was the swing producer, which meant that they could basically control the supply in the world. So if there were, you know, and in particular, if there was, you know, a cut in demand for some reason, they could cut supply. And if there was a huge increase in demand, they could increase supply. So that happens until the Mideast starts to boom. And then the Mideast starts to become the swing producer with the rise of Saudi Arabia and others having very low cost oil.

1:12:45And so then you have the era of OPEC. But then you have fracking. And so for a little while, the U.S. becomes the swing producer in the sense of we have unrestrained production. We add a lot of oil to the market. And what happens? At a certain point, prices crash. There's overinvestment. U.S. consumers benefit hugely from fracking. But a lot of these companies just get wrecked. And then they start doing what they'd call fiscal discipline, which functions as a restraint on supply, even though they're not doing any kind of cartel activity. They're basically saying, hey, we're not going to produce if prices go below this.

1:13:18We're not going to keep increasing our production, et cetera, et cetera. So the reason if you take OPEC right now and OPEC Plus, they have a lot of reasons, even though there's a lot of unethical stuff. And I don't think the government should own the oil. And I think they stole the oil. But if you just understand how they're thinking, they want to sustain a certain level of price. So you have the different swing producers, particularly Saudi Arabia and then UAE, who we're talking about. They want to keep, like, what happens if there's excess supply on the market relative to demand? They will cut, this is the key, they will cut their supply as a swing producer to keep prices high.

1:14:02because if they don't, then prices will go low and that will have a ruinous effect on many people, including U.S. shale, by the way, because we have higher production costs, but including these economies that are dominated by oil. So you take Saudi Arabia, they're so dependent on oil and they have all of these alleged green ambitions that are totally fueled by oil and they have all these welfare schemes that are totally fueled by oil. UAE is a little bit less dependent. So the interesting thing about UAE saying they're going to withdraw is, can they sustain this if there's a supply glut? Right now there's a supply shortage.

1:14:35So it's easy to say we're going to leave OPEC because there's no need from their perspective to cut supply. And then everyone will take all the supply they get. And Saudi Arabia doesn't really care if UAE produces more now. But when there's a supply glut, are they going to stay out of OPEC or is Saudi Arabia going to be able to pressure them back like they've done? Because Saudi Arabia can say, we've got the most oil. We can just flood the market too and ruin you. Is there a history of major suppliers leaving and coming back? I don't know. I mean, there's at least been threats like Saudi Arabia has been able to use a lot of force.

1:15:14Now they've been able to do that in the past, but the argument, so there's an argument that the UAE won't stay out of OPEC because Saudi Arabia can pressure them back in when there's a supply glut. There's also an argument that UAE has become more disentangled from oil now than it used to be because it's diversified its economy. It doesn't have all the welfare obligations of Saudi Arabia, and therefore it can call Saudi Arabia's bluff. Now, people will say both UAE and Saudi Arabia have incredibly low production costs. So it's very cheap for them to bring a barrel up from the ground, but they don't just have the production costs.

1:15:49They have all the governmental costs of actually how they're obligated to spend that oil. Like if Saudi Arabia spends$5 a barrel on oil, say, that doesn't mean at$100 a barrel, they get$95 profit because they have to finance all these schemes that they're involved in. So that's going to be the interesting thing. The other interesting thing is, so if UAE stays out, here's one, if they stay out, they're going to increase production. Let's say on some timetable, this Hormuz thing gets resolved, then it's plausible in the next few years, at some point, you'll have a supply glut because you'll have added a million and a half barrels a day on top of everything else.

1:16:28And you won't have a corresponding increase in demand and you won't have some other decrease in supply. So it's possible that they could, that this could dramatically lower prices, which would be hardest for U.S. shale. Now, long-term, I believe the best estimates I've seen is longer term, we're actually screwed in the other direction. We've had all of these anti-fossil fuel policies that have disincentivized long-term investment in oil. And oil is really hard to sustain. People need to remember oil depletes over time. So you don't just take the same well and keep tapping at the exact same amount.

1:17:02You have to do what's called reserve replacement. And there are many credible arguments that our reserve replacement has been incredibly inadequate in the ESG era. And that takes a few years to show up. But that's actually my biggest fear. Like my biggest fear, I'm afraid of Hormuz keeping prices high, but I'm really afraid of insufficient reserve replacement with high oil demand. Because you're talking like$200. That's drilling new wells. You have to drill so much. You have to replace so much. And the oil supply is so politically driven. There's so much oil in the world that you could harness if everyone had the policy of the United States under Trump and under a friendly Congress.

1:17:41But most of the world has these national oil companies. We've had ESG all over the place. It's been hard to finance things. I mean, as recently as 2021, think about this, The International Energy Agency said there should be no new oil and gas development financed. So we could be really screwed in terms of higher prices. I mean, geographically, it's coming up on the map there. The UAE is directly affected by Hormuz. Yeah. Every barrel that they make will have to go through the street. Well, they have a pipeline. They do. They have one pipeline. It's about a million and a half barrels. OK, so they can get some out.

1:18:18Yeah, but they're there. Oh, yeah. So if they become a swing producer, they are in fact important, even in a world where the straight is closed. No, it doesn't matter as much right now because they're saying we want the right to expand our production, but none of them can produce nearly as much as they want right now. This is why they're doing it now. They're not doing it in the time of a supply glut. They're doing it in the time of a supply shortage because nobody really cares. It doesn't really affect things for them to say, oh yeah, we have a million and a half spare capacity that we'd like to use and we're planning on using into the future.

1:18:51But right now we can't bring most of that to market. No one can bring anything to market. That's different from a situation which we've had fairly recently where there's tons of supply on the market. Like there's too much. And U.S. producers are saying, hey, we've got$50 a barrel oil. This is really hard to sustain. Imagine then a million and a half new barrels coming on the market. who wins who saw the news this morning and was fist pumping well i i don't think most people understand the consequences of these these things because i think many people think oh it's going to be amazing for the u.s like opec bad u.s good but like opec the the way it's set up it it in a sense favors our shale producers because they have higher they're one of the higher cost set of higher cost producers in the world.

1:19:41So if you have OPEC collectively decided to just massively increase supply and flood the market, they could do real damage. And this has happened already. Yeah. Right. This has happened in previous years. Yeah. Like you were saying, if you're, if you're, uh, uh, in, in shale and you're trying to make money at$50 a barrel, it's like very, you're really hoping what, what's the, what's the sweet spot again. It's like somewhere between 70 and like 90. Yeah. I mean, they, they all, yeah, sweet spot is interesting, right? Cause they'll, they'll take whatever they can get, but yeah, if they get to 70, 80, 90, it's, it's a lot more profitable and basically not much changes about their cost structure when prices go low.

1:20:21So it's almost pure profit. I mean, a little bit, they can squeeze that, what are called the oil field service companies, but you have to think when you're thinking of oil and particularly oil, you're just thinking like every$10, it goes up. That is almost pure profit But for them, and every$10 it goes down, that is almost pure loss of profit or loss in absolute terms. In terms of policy, look, I think we should forcibly reopen the strait. And I don't believe that the U.S. government should be directly trying to favor or disfavor its shale companies. But it's just important for people to understand these dynamics.

1:20:53And also you have to understand the UAE is doing this at an opportunistic time. They're not doing it at a time when there's already a supply gap. Sure, sure. Shifting gears, where do you want to go? I wanted to ask you about beaming sun down into solar panels. Yeah. So they can get 24. In space, you can? Yeah. Put a mirror in space that shines light onto a solar array so that they can get 24-7 power to a data center, potentially. They're going to do it on Earth. The recipient of the light will be on Earth, a solar panel next to a data center, but there will be a mirror. There's a specific orbit that is always in the sun, and the sun will hit the mirror, and the light will bounce down onto this particular solar panel in their solar array, and so they will be able to get power from their solar panels 24-7.

1:21:52There's no weather that interferes with this? Weather might interfere a little bit. Okay. So I have not— Closer to 24-7 than current. I mean, here's the dynamic is the—obviously in space, you have 24-7 solar. Yeah. And it's really hard to do things in space. Yeah. So all credit to people who are willing to invest their own money to try to do this. It's not, there are a number of variables that might make it succeed or not. I mean, the more you're talking about chips that are evolving very quickly on Earth, because we don't have this moon colony yet, right? You're talking about you're replacing chips every year.

1:22:30You're doing these very logistically difficult things in orbit. That tends to disfavor the energy advantage you're going to get from having the stuff in space. If you're doing something that some of these solar things work, if the energy cost is high and you don't need to change a lot about it. if it can run a long time. So my view is, like, my view of solar is always, you need to recognize its strengths and limitations and use it accordingly. My argument continues to be on Earth with the solar that we have right now. Solar is primarily a fuel-saving technology, not a real on-demand power source.

1:23:05And I wrote a long article about this. And it is, if you go to alexepstein.substack.com to check it out. And so, by the way, that means that in some places, solar is a lot more valuable than others. And in particular, it's valuable in places with very high fuel costs, which the United States is not really one of those places because we have really cheap natural gas and could get cheaper natural gas. But like in general, what we don't have, what the holy grail would be is if you got solar and batteries so cheap that you could have self-sufficient solar by sufficiently overbuilding the panels and having multi-day battery storage.

1:23:42So overbuilding the panels means, let's just say round numbers, you know, you have 100 megawatts of demand in a given location. So one tenth of a gigawatt. Well, if you overbuild it by 10, then you have a gigawatt. Well, even when the solar is fairly, the sun is fairly low, you're going to be able to meet your demand. And then you can get, right. And then you can get rid of it and then you can charge the batteries. So you have more to charge the batteries. But then to make that work, because sun is not around at night, people really underestimate this as a problem. Night is a big, it's not as much of a problem for wind, but it's a big problem for sun.

1:24:16Like night is a huge, huge, huge problem. So you need to then, and, you know, think about a winter day like we had during winter storm. And even in Phoenix, you can have storms that disrupt the sun for a week. So you need lots and lots and lots of batteries and you need lots and lots of overbuilding. And the question is, how cheap can you get it? And China's not even nearly there yet, let alone the U.S., but it's not a bad path to pursue. It's not bad to pursue because batteries are valuable anyway. Batteries are valuable, number one, to store reliable power and dispatch it like that. And Elon is in favor of that.

1:24:51I've said on the show before, I'm in favor of that. So it's good to get the cost of solar lower. It's good to get the cost of batteries lower. We have to recognize primarily it's a fuel saving play, not a replacement play. But if we had 24-7, all bets are off. then you get the benefits of solar. That's the mirror. All the time. That's the space mirror. So I hope that as long as they're doing it in a safe way, they should be free to try. And it's interesting. The schemes I've seen in the past haven't worked. And I don't know if they have better energy people than they used to at Meta. So we'll see.

1:25:22We'll see. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. All right, man. Good to see you. Yeah, we had more time. All right, anytime. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Shira Lazar from What's Trending. She's the co-founder and host of What's Trending, and we'll bring her in to the TVPN UltraDome in just a minute. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Good. We're just diving in. I love it. Yes, of course. That is the nature of the show. We dive right in. Why don't we dive right in with an introduction on yourself? How are you introducing yourself these days?

1:25:52What can you tell us about the shape of What's Trending, the platform? Yeah, so I've been in the digital media. Yeah, sorry. I think there's a delay. But I've been in the digital media creator economy space for almost two decades. I'm aging myself. We started Watch Trending actually was a live streaming show in 2011. So we were playing around with this tech and these tools way back. One of the first to live stream in a really high quality way. But, you know, the space in some ways wasn't ready. It was us, the Young Turks at the time. Al Jazeera was doing a live stream. And we had a weekly show.

1:26:33We went daily, actually, with YouTube. No way. Oh, shoot. Am I like? What? Oh, is it? I look like I'm paused right now. But I don't know if that's. We can hear you. We can hear and see you just fine. Okay, I'll continue. Welcome to tech. In the future, I'll stop by your studio. But yeah, then we went daily with YouTube. And then it seemed like live, just the platforms and the audience weren't ready yet. And then we went more into on demand, grew more as a digital media brand and publisher. And that's who we are today. And we cover news views and culture for the social generation. And now, oddly enough, like seeing your success and what you're doing, starting to rethink, like, how do we maybe go back to that?

1:27:14Who knows? Yeah. Timing is so important. I mean, there's been like Jason Calacanis had TBPN effectively back. I don't know the first year that he did it. 2007. Yeah. Like very, very early. Same, same kind of era when you started. But yeah, people need to be ready for it. Yeah. I'm interested to hear about what is changing right now, what you are tracking. I was reading a piece in the journal about sort of a K-shaped dynamic that's emerging with brands only want to partner with. The biggest celebrities, the biggest podcasts, and there's sort of a winner take all market. Are you seeing that? Or is there a way for sort of middle class of creators to emerge these days?

1:27:59Yeah, that's really interesting. I actually think there's two extremes of opportunities. I think that definitely people that have skilled audience and those big names that are the new wave of celebrity are definitely getting the deals as long as there's, I would say, conversions. And they have that fandom audience. They are the new names that a lot of brands want to partner with. And of course, the streaming services or the podcast, like to really have a successful, I would say at scale podcast or platform, you need to have, you know, that audience, that big name. However, that doesn't mean that's the only way to succeed.

1:28:32Right. So we're seeing, as you might know, a lot of smaller creators that have niche audiences, the B2B creators now that are becoming big, the LinkedIn creators, the knowledge creators, and they've hunkered down on a very specific audience and they're seeing high conversions, even though they don't have a skilled audience. And so that creates a lot of success too, where they could have, you know, or be making half a million to a million a year, possibly they're relying on brands. There may be having courses, there may be having, you know, paid events, et cetera. So what I think is really interesting right now is we are at a time that that there could be opportunity for big names, but also not such household names.

1:29:14But again, it's really about understanding your why as a brand and what you're trying to go after. Do you like the term nim cell, niche internet micro celebrity? That's been one that's been bandied about. I've never heard that. I don't know. That sounds like an incel. Yeah, it is a weird knockoff. But I think it does capture something that is real, which is that there might be someone who is incredibly influential in a particular sub-vertical industry. And they might be a household name gets stopped for autographs at that industry's conference, but never at a random Starbucks. Right. And so this is just an interesting.

1:29:53Who is it? It was Colin Samir we were talking with, and they said that something like 80 to 90 % of the next generation, maybe gen alpha, is a super fan of someone that no one in their high school has heard of. So they all have individual relationships with someone that they're a super fan of, but they don't cross over. It's not everyone likes Tom Cruise. It's everyone likes their own individual, unique Tom Cruise or whatever. yeah i was talking about that with someone actually recently because it it creates i think again so much possibility but then it's harder to figure out like if you can just find one name that everyone knows that will have that popularity again like in the past there were how many cable channels or even before cable you know tv channels and cable channels and then um shows that you watch you know we have such a fragmented audience right now and so there could be someone that is so popular and you might have never heard about them.

1:30:50And that's like the beauty of social media and the internet right now. And actually, you know, you were mentioning the middle class. I do think there's something about the middle class that is difficult right now when it comes to the creator economy, because I see people when they're at the 1 % making a ton of money. I mean, not everyone is Mr. Beast, right? And then niche creators are making a lot of money. When you're kind of stuck in that gray area, that's becoming, I would say, more and more of a challenge because you're getting underpriced. But then also, you know, the prices that you want, they're not necessarily being able to hit it because they're keeping that for like more of that macro creator.

1:31:27Yeah, the other challenge is that there's going to be new creators that are growing quickly, that are hungry, that maybe have figured out formats that the algorithms are rewarding more intensely. And if you're in that middle zone and you don't adapt quickly, you can quickly become irrelevant. I used to, I used to talk to YouTube creators that would try to, this was back in 2018, that would try to set pricing based on the number of their, the number of their subscribers, because there was a period where you could basically say like, I have this many subscribers, like you can assume that at least half of them will like click through and watch the video.

1:32:07There was a moment like that. And then it changed pretty rapidly. And I would, I would talk to them and be like, Hey, like, unfortunately, like you can't, you can take your last 10 videos and take the average and like that for some creators that's higher than their subscriber base. But for a lot of creators, it's 20 % of their subscribers. Yeah. A lot lower actually opening the videos. But then, you know, I think pricing is really important to talk about because, you know, I do think there's different types of creators that require different things. Like, you know, now there's a lot of the affiliate creators and I liken that to like a QVC host, right?

1:32:38They're really good at selling through and having that affiliate model. And that's the only way they work. And they're really good at that. I don't think that's for everyone. And just because something works in the creator economy for a group of people doesn't mean it needs to be the end all be all. Do not tell that to Gary Vaynerchuk. If you get him going about TikTok shop, it's over for you. He will yap and yap and yap. He loves it. Not everyone is meant to be a TikTok shop. I agree. I agree with you completely. And then where's, wait, on that note, and I love Gary. where's Gary Vee's TikTok shop?

1:33:09I want to see him and he's like, okay, so TikTok shop is hot. What are you selling? I want to see you selling, which he does these moments where he'll be selling or he'll go live for a week or like, okay, we're doing this again. Why am I on TV? And like, okay, by week two or three, he's like, okay, I have other shit to do. Yeah, no, no, 100%. I mean, he does, he, I think part of his benefit is that he's sampled from the smorgasbord of content creation and can speak to, okay, well, there is a gap here for some people, but it's not all going to be one size fits all. Just like I don't think everyone's going to be doing IRL streaming in the future, even though that's having a moment.

1:33:49And we could see many more creators do IRL streams outside of the kick streamers and the controversial folks and the political folks. You could see that instantiated in a whole bunch of other categories, but it'll just take time to get there. We've been seeing with TBPN, And people have made a version of this show for car dealerships or what's going on in Europe or what's going on in crypto. And there's like all these different twists on this format. And that happens whenever there's a new thing, but it's not going to be perfect for every single vertical. But yeah. Exactly. And that's what they'll jump on it because it's a trend.

1:34:20And there's a difference between the people that jump on to something and then build it as actually like a substantial career. Yeah. So, for instance, like I like to say, like I'm looking at a career. Yeah. Like I'm here in the digital space. It's something I'm very passionate about. And now on my personal brand, I cover creator economy trends, emerging tech, AI, even mental health. We could get into that when it comes to the digital space. But I've been now working in this space for 20 years. I get to look at trends and how they've changed and not just report on them, but I've actually lived through them.

1:34:55So it gives it a different approach, at least for me and an edge when it comes to my coverage. I also think just sidebar, if you're a creator or someone looking to be in the space, like I do believe as long as you get the right representation, agents or managers are important. As long as they don't take advantage, there's a lot of predatory behavior out there because they have other talent. They could see. How much should you share with a manager? Like 90 percent or or where they want? Well, they want more. No, I'm kidding. No, no. Usually agents. And I'm going to say this. Someone said, don't talk about this.

1:35:29I was on a panel at the NAB show last week and someone was like, why are you revealing? And I'm like, these aren't secrets. These are kind of industry standards and we need to talk about things more and not cut people off from information. Like I am not, I do not want to be that person. So yeah, so agents typically take 10%, managers 20%. But again, this day and age, managers, people are just becoming salespeople and they're saying they're managers, which is crazy. Whereas in the past, a manager would actually build your strategy and help you with your career and like your longevity now they just run your email inbox and like that is not a manager but anyway that's just my hot take on on that but uh i think things are you know things are changing what yeah no no no i like it it's a good point and i think it is important for these to for the yeah just the benchmarks or any sort of relative information getting out there is always good uh jordy anything else what's your outlook on clipping it feels like the legacy media It feels like the legacy media just woke up to this.

1:36:33Well, it just started. The first clip, I think, went out like last week. And so that's why everyone's talking about it. The first clip from a legacy media company? No, no, no. We're joking. No, just clipping's been around for years. And it's now like having this big moment. And it's just sort of funny to reflect on this thing that everyone's been aware of for a long time. Yeah. So it's interesting because I think when you Google even clipping, and I was trying to find the platform that does it. There's like two sides of clipping. It's like the, you're clipping up all your clips, obviously, and distributing them at scale across everywhere.

1:37:04And then there's the clipping farms, like where you can pay people to post on their platforms and try to get views. Yeah. Those are kind of two sides to the clipping business. The clip industrial complex. Yeah. And I find that fascinating. Like a lot of the streamers are doing that. Yeah. I show speed. Yeah. Well, for a long time, Joe Rogan would be clipped, but just by people that were watching the show and were like, this was an interesting moment. It was organic. Organic. Yeah, authentic. Farm to table clipping. Now you got the industrialization of clipping. And so thousands of people are being paid to clip a single streamer and it's part of a marketing process.

1:37:43But it seems to be effective for people. So it is becoming a trend and people are paying attention. And that how like, is it clavicular? Clavicular has been a massive beneficiary of the Clip industrial complex. Apparently he has a hundred people working for him. Yeah. But it's interesting because people like analyze his whole strategy and they put like, they seemingly put like 80, 90 % of the, of the, of the success and the growth of his personal brand, whether you believe it should grow or not on the strategy when, when he was a unique figure. And a controversial figure. And if he had been saying there just, yeah, a little bit of sleep, diet, exercise, don't worry about it too much, you're going to be fine.

1:38:26And he had a billion Clippers, no one would know his name. Instead, he's out there with the craziest hot takes possible, the craziest stunts, the craziest getting in jail and stuff, like insane stuff. And so the Clips really amplify that. But there's a seed of virality there already on day one, whether or not the Clippers are paid or not, I think. Yeah, no, that is the thing. So I think it's interesting as a new marketing strategy that it'll be interesting to see if traditional media jumps on board. I don't think they will because they have a hard enough time building out their social strategy right now, let alone doing a whole like, I would say, clipping strategy like that.

1:39:04I think that definitely benefits the individual personal brand, the person that's willing to take the risk. again there's still money that you need to spend on this but if you want to become a social media celebrity one yeah you need to have the basic i would say controversial hot take and then being able to tap into this other stuff but it's something to look out for in terms of the phenomenon of social media right now uh and putting more out there right and how do you do it faster but then some of these i would say i use opus for instance i know the team there uh they're great if If you have long form video and you want to cut it up, but some of these tools, they do need to be better.

1:39:44It's like, you can't just throw it in and spit it out. Yep. Yeah. We tried a number of the tools early on and couldn't get any of them working. We ended up building our own internal software. Which, which helps with the, the cutting of the footage, but does not do the selection for you. The selection is still editorial. That's still human, which is interesting. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of creators are still worried about or anyone about AI taking their job or this or that, which is real, which is why I think that you need to lean into like having a voice and an approach to things where you're not just being told what to do, but you can take a piece of content as an editor and be like, I'm going to make this the best it can be like better than AI right now.

1:40:25I'm personally excited for when I could throw a clip in and it could spit it out for me and be awesome. We are not there yet. It would save me so much time. so as a creator i'm excited for these tools i am not scared clip super intelligence it's gotta happen it's gotta happen well thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show have a great rest of your day you come back on whenever you have i love all the i love all the spice come back on whenever oh i will be back maybe i'll be in studio it's easier and i want this tech i'm just being a freeze frame right now thank you i appreciate it you came through loud and clear.

1:40:58Great to hang. Fantastic. Goodbye. Talk soon. Flashbang out. Our next guest is Anshul Gupta from Actively AI. He's the co-founder. He is the co-founder and president. I think I got it right. Welcome to the show. Last minute switch. Introduce yourself and the company, please. Sorry for bringing it on. How are you doing? Thanks for having me, guys. Good to have you. Good to meet you. Big fans of the show and congrats, obviously, on the thank you thank you yeah or a lot of folks on our team have switched from sports center to you guys so i think that's a there we go i didn't realize we were pulling people from sports and i like that yeah this is the new sport the sport of enterprise revenue workflows tell us about it amazing so yeah quickly amanshul one of the co-founders of actively as you guys mentioned and we build agents for for go-to-market teams and effectively are the only platform that proactively guides revenue teams on what to do next and then actually helps them do it.

1:42:02And it's based off this notion that we built called an agent for every account. So this concept called per account agents. So the idea is as a rep, you're stretched really, really thick on all the possible actions that you could be doing to drive revenue. And so what it actively does is we've created these agents that live with every single one agent that lives with every single account for the life cycle of that account across the funnel from, you know, top of funnel through close, through expansion that are maintaining all of that context as well as guiding you on what you should be doing next and then actually doing the work, which stands in stark contrast to, you know, a lot of the solutions that require a human being to go point and click to kind of decide what they want to do.

1:42:46And our fundamental belief is that there's going to be, and, you know, it's true with their customers, there's going to be a lot more agents than sellers, right? And so how do you build and plan for that world and that reality? Is software sales the beachhead or are you selling to car dealerships or Rolex ADs or HVAC salesmen? Like there's so many different people that would benefit from an agent on every account, but I imagine that you'll be accelerated in certain verticals. Have you narrowed down or are you going broad? So it's a great question. I think for us, ultimately, you know, the ICP is very clear, which is we make revenue teams way more productive.

1:43:23The larger revenue teams you have, the more impact that we can make. To your point, however, the beachhead very much is within software sales. But we're starting to see organic demand from some of these other verticals. Maybe not car dealerships yet. And that's, you know, hopefully a good, maybe a good thing. But, you know, financial services. The watch brand ADs, they could just be like, tell this person they're not. I scraped your Instagram and I noticed that you had a bare wrist when you were going swimming. Do you need a dive watch? Potentially. Talk to me about what it actually takes. Because obviously you're scraping the emails, you're scraping the calendar invites and probably transcriptions, understanding what's going on with the interaction between the company.

1:44:05But are you also looking at like product analytics? I feel like so many times you sell a software product. They're like, great. We did the demo. Cool. We're rolling it out. Yeah, it's going great. and you're like, we see that no one's logged in. We need to intervene. Is that part of what the agent's working on? Yeah, for us, we view the bright line as being very plain and clear, which is full and complete context. And so in order, the way I try to analogize it is, if I had unlimited dollars and I was a CRO, I would put one seller, ideally I would figure out a way to clone my best seller and put one seller on each and every one of these accounts.

1:44:40And so as part of that, if they're doing their job, John, to your question, they would be looking at every single data point, which today sellers don't do because to your point, it's in so many different systems, right? Whether it's product analytics, calls, information that's not in your database. And so our account agents are kind of becoming the sort of continuously updating source of truth across all of those different areas. And so, you know, because we're very enterprise focused, we have to build integrations into a pretty large set of kind of technologies housing this information. Tell us about the round.

1:45:09Last question. Do you track how long it takes to generate one of your customers their first like a dollar of revenue that you can attribute back actively? Like what metrics matter on your side? Yeah, it's a really good question. Yeah, I think I think ultimately we're in the business of helping increase, you know, seller productivity revenue per rep. And so we track, based off our account agents, what are they able to drive and attribute it? Kind of pipeline, conversion rates, downstream revenue expansions. But then also there's some interesting org change dynamics that as a result of having these really powerful agents, we're starting to see, we work with many publicly traded companies that as they're starting to see efficiency gains, they can rethink the levels of maybe middle management that you have, the levels of ratios between AEs to BDRs.

1:46:04Because as you gain more and more efficiencies with these account agents, you don't need as much in those different supporting functions. But I think the other point that I'll make is it's not just about the metrics that you're driving. It is a fully different way of doing go-to-market, which is every single other solution out there only works when the human goes into it and decides I want to do this or I want to do that but like what about when they're asleep or what if they're not thinking about asking that question that is where um and there's a huge disparity in terms of seller uh performance in terms of players in the in the rest and so it's it's kind of this broader transformation that we're trying to trying to drive very exciting tell us about the round yep um go away for the gong wait for the big old$45 million series.

1:46:57Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Great to meet you. Congrats to the team on the milestone. And we'll see you at the sea. Yeah. Have a good one. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have Apoorva from Avoca, the founder and co-CEO, working on AI agents for the service economy, baby. Let's go. A lot of capital being deployed today. It is a boom time. Being announced. It's a boom time. Well, we are very fortunate to have our next guest. We are in the TBP and Ultradone. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. I'm doing well.

1:47:33How are you? Thanks so much for taking the time. Beautiful background. We are doing great, but I don't think we're doing as good as you today. Yeah. Introduce yourself and the company, please. Yeah. So my name is Apoorv. I'm the founder and co-CEO of Avoca. Yeah, we're basically building AI agents for physical service businesses, primarily, for example, home services, where we've seen a lot of traction. And my co-founder is Tyson, and we started this business together in 2022. Cool. 2022, what did you see? Yeah. Were you thinking just like SaaS, and then it just got a lot better with the AI tailwind?

1:48:08Well, it's kind of interesting. So this kind of happened during the time that the models that created ChatGVT had come out. But ChatGPT itself wasn't yet out. Yeah, GPP3 was getting a lot better. Like 3.5 was basically out. DaVinci stuff was starting to work, but it was a little bit rough, but you could see glimpses. Exactly, yeah. So this is the time when DaVinci was out, but then you didn't really have the consumer adoption of ChatGPT yet. And yeah, during that period of time, something interesting about both me and my co-founder is that we both came from backgrounds where... So I grew up in Michigan.

1:48:41Tyson grew up in Pennsylvania. We grew up in backgrounds where our moms owned these service businesses. We used to do this job every day where we'd have to be picking up phone calls, booking customers, figuring out how to properly book them, and all that fun stuff. Essentially, after we did that, when I saw AI was getting really good, I was immediately like, wait, I feel like businesses like that will have so much value and no one's really looking into it. We were like, what does it look like to bring value here? We thought, let's start with the phone call. Okay. Oh, the phone call. Okay, yeah.

1:49:11I want to know more about just the data ingest points because you can imagine ERPs, custom ERPs, CRMs. There's a lot of different touch points, and you could even go into photos and 3D scans of things that are going on in the physical world. But where is the beachhead? Where is the light bulb moment for your customers? Yeah, so it's kind of like multiple phases. I would say for our customers, if you think about it, their customers are basically just like us. Anytime we need a new job for plumbing, new AC, etc., things like that, they're coming through a lot of sources. Phone calls is actually how many businesses get most of their revenue.

1:49:52But then there's also lead aggregators, some people are texting. And so Avoka, our first phase is essentially responding and closing every lead, which is how do we get you any lead that's coming from Angie's, for example, People often think of as a war room because now every single person is fighting for that person. So we can have an AI that will go respond to that lead immediately. We can have an AI that picks up every single phone call and sticks to the script, does what you need, and closes that customer. Then there's kind of like a second phase, which is like how do you figure out your capacity and get new customers?

1:50:24So based off of what kind of availabilities and jobs you have, can you go reach out to the existing base? Who should you target to kind of fill up your board? Yeah. Yeah. Our voice models at a chat GPT moment now. I had a really great experience booking a restaurant reservation at Fogo de Chao, Bain Capital backed. No surprises there. But, but, but, you know, like I have grown up my entire life, like do not talk to the robot, do not reject the clanker, demand the human, press zero a bunch. But it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of magical experiences. How close are we? Have we crossed the touring test?

1:51:06Do you have data on any of this? How is it going on that front? Yeah, absolutely. We have now crossed the point where if you wanted to, for the first 30 seconds to a minute of a conversation, people would not be able to tell that they're talking to an AI because the models have just gotten so good. But still to this day, we are not yet at the But point where we're at with text where you could literally have, you know, minutes long conversations because eventually the AI sounds robotic. It takes like an extra hundred milliseconds to respond, interrupts you when you're speaking, all those kinds of things.

1:51:38So we're not yet at the moment where it's like, oh, everything is going to switch over. But we're at the moment where, in fact, you can have very good conversations. You can pick up the phone within a second and super efficient. Like these average calls actually last about 30 percent faster than calls that humans would take. So it's even more of it. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Tell us about the round. Any of these different, is there, you have roofing, HVAC, plumbing. Is there a category that is more resistant to AI? Like our plumbers, like, nah, I'm good. More than electricians or HVAC? Or is it pretty, like, and what is general sentiment across the board?

1:52:19Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So I think like, you know, the initial thought would be that, oh, people are probably not too excited about adopting AI or whatever AI is evil. But in fact, the nice part about our business is that the AI is not the main character of the job. What the main AI is doing is just making sure everything gets booked, making sure their customers are happy, making sure, you know, you're always getting new customers. But the main characters are actually the plumbers, the technicians, you know, HVAC guys. And so they are actually, I mean, I would split them into multiple buckets, but a lot of them are very hungry and eager to actually adopt AI right now because they already see the overhead of like, oh, shoot, I forgot to follow up with that customer.

1:52:55Or, oh, wow, I can't believe we dropped that customer on their phone call. And so an AI can go in and solve that. They can do their job. They're still running the show. And the AI can help facilitate that. So still seeing actually really good adoption there. Cool. Tell us about the round. You raised a bunch of money. What happened? Yeah. So we actually, this is our first time going public. So we're very happy and honored to be here. We've now raised$125 million. At latest$1 million valuation. Congratulations. First time going public as in coming out of stealth, right? Yeah, I mean, we were all over LinkedIn, but we had never did a single press release.

1:53:30And so, unfortunately... You got the exclusive. Let's go. You're like, let's just wait. Let's just wait till we hit a billion. Very impressive. Very, very good progress. Congratulations. And thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out. Yeah, great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Up next, we have an Anon joining. We have Bubble Boy. I believe Bubble Boy is in the waiting room. Let's bring Bubble Boy in to the TVP on Ultra Dome. We have some important questions. Another one. He's coming. He has been on an absolute terror. There he is. There's Bubble Boy. I like this photo.

1:54:09Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello. hello hello okay so you said yo tbp and put me on the show to talk about semis i will make your listeners rich go make our listeners rich tell us about semis let's start like uh why why do you still have a normal job at this point let's start there yeah so someone actually asked me this recently and i think the uh answer i got was a lot of my ideas come from working on the same problems these engineers are actually trying to solve. So I really don't think I could have actually called Intel or called a lot of these other companies like Santis if I didn't have that experience and know-how and expertise.

1:54:54So I actually think having a job is a bit of alpha, believe it or not. And I think a lot of the engineers who are actually just making a killing this market, I mean, these are just real experts in their field. And we look at the market every day and we just see, you know, big divergences. I don't think the finance bros really understand what advanced packaging is or what yields really mean. They understand it maybe from a financial aspect, but not from a competitive standpoint. uh re rewind to a year ago where did you think we were in the overall ai cycle and where do you think we are today yeah probably the start i i think um at the beginning of the year at the beginning of the year uh every hyperscale basically said that they're gonna to spend 680 billion yeah so i mean we're just at the start i think we have at least three years of capex growth going crazy for my estimates and from there i mean tokens are just looking like the new oil or electricity i think uh at this point i actually can't live my life without a token so yeah i think we're just at the start i think um right now is really when things are going to be going crazy.

1:56:19If you actually look at the data center build out, nothing's actually been completed yet. We're just at the beginning. How do you think everyone having access to LLMs, these incredible research partners, is changing the markets? Do things get priced in faster when everyone is maybe asking the same questions. Absolutely. And that's a good question. I just need to shout out GPT 5.5, my preferred model for stock research. I know for sure that the number one consumer of these tokens is these hedge funds and financial institutions. they are absolutely running through a bunch of research and it allows you to get up to speed quickly um if you really think about it like five years ago if i wanted to make a bet on like chemical epoxy for semis that would have took in six months of my life um and been a bit ridiculous and then and then so so share share your post yesterday which went incredibly viral turned into news you were just you were basically just showing that you could just make up stuff on the timeline and and uh i think you moved i think you moved the market uh but give us give us the backstory yeah what happened um so i was actually just researching these um chemical suppliers and i just realized um you know you could really you could really talk to an llm and get it to say whatever you wanted to say.

1:58:02So I just picked a random company, honestly, in Japan. And I just said, hey, try to really pitch this as an AI bottleneck. Sadly, it's not a bottleneck, right? But I think they're doing well either way. I mean, we're in a good place. You know, data centers will be built out. We don't need to wait for Sumitimo Bakelite to get their epoxy resins at the scale, but I guess that's a harm. People need to definitely do their own research. I've seen a lot of people just piling into things they don't understand. So very interesting place to be in. What's your Intel thesis right now? Great question. I think up to this point, Intel's thesis was really a fab turnaround.

1:58:58It was about 18a and 14a which is coming i think really now i've completely changed my logic it's about advanced packaging advanced packaging to me is the new moore's law you've kind of already seen this with vera rubin um where they can't actually do four dies on one package they actually had to change that last second if you look out to fineman i mean this packages the packaging of the silicon is a huge bottleneck. It already was a bottleneck. In 2025, NVIDIA was 60 % of TSMC's advanced packaging. So everyone else was out there to fend for themselves. So any kind of advanced packaging that comes to market, that allows people to scale, compute way more than I think just shrinking a node.

1:59:52I mean, shrinking a node is great, but the way NVIDIA's timeline, and I think all the hyperscalers as well, they want more HBM, they want more radical sized dyes, and they all want it in one package. So that's really where things are headed towards. And I think the market's not pricing that in. I think this is a real sea change to the semi-industry. This really is just happening over the past year or so. What's the story with the dog? oh well this is just kind of like how i look on the day-to-day basis when i'm sitting at my desk tipping on a diet well pepsi in this case but i just like to you know spread joy yeah no i think this is kind of like how you look when intel beats on earnings and goes up 30 percent in a day and you've been proven right after a year of being told you were wrong.

2:00:48Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Any non-financial advice predictions for this tech earnings cycle? What are you expecting tomorrow? Well, I think we have Sandus reporting soon. I think that's kind of been telegraphed that Sandus can just increase the price of Flash until the customers cry. So I think, yeah, they will be fine. I think the other story is people think there's a CPU shortage. I think that this is going to be, we're going to get a yes or no definitely in this earnings season. And people actually just price up CPUs 25, 30%. And will people take it? When you post a picture of your, a screenshot of your returns on X, do you ever get worried that it's a sign that you should at least go to cash somewhat?

2:01:45Or does it just fight? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I've never thought of going to cash. I actually took some money out last year for taxes and it was the biggest mistake of my life because that money, who knows how much it would be by now. I see this as we have a three-year run at least and now it's time to really pull the trigger. If anything, I'm trying to borrow money at this point to go bigger. and that's why they call him bubble boy that's why they call him bubble used to pray for a bubble like this yeah i i definitely did yeah and it's come to fruition so what can people what can people expect from you you say that having a job is alpha uh i'm sure you're getting people are trying to pitch you on new job opportunities uh but what what can people expect from you this year besides making a lot of calls all the time and to date often being quite accurate?

2:02:44I think I'll give a hint. You'll see me in the Flash business somewhere, somehow, maybe at a pretty established Flash company in the supply chain. So I think Flash is one of these technologies that I think scales a lot higher than the market expects. And I always have this joke. I say like if you want to like change the world, you can cure cancer or you can come up with new kinds of memory. So I can't work on the first one. So I'm going to look at the number two for now. And would this be an early stage company? You get exposure. Yeah. Potentially or it could be really partnering with a very, very large company.

2:03:27Cool. So there's some advantages to both. Well, good luck wherever the future takes you. and this was fun i i've i've deeply i've deeply enjoyed your your posting uh and uh and yeah you're clearly having a lot of fun and it's fun to watch great to meet you thank you guys both and uh big fan of the show so thanks for having me on thanks for it's been an honor we'll talk to you Cheers, Bubble Boy. We'll talk to you. Have a good one. Bye. We should close with an example of why memory is so expensive. Star Wars meets Pawn Stars. Have you seen this video? Have you watched this, Jordy? I did see this.

2:04:13People are going crazy. I saw the first second. I haven't watched the full thing, but I think it's probably. It's pretty incredible. I have items to pawn. All right. Let's see what you got.

2:04:27Okay, so these are lightsabers. Correct. So where'd you get them? Estate sale. Estate sale. It's so funny that you can clock it by the audio or the video. It's very weird. I've been a collector for many years. It is a great passion of mine. Each lightsaber has a story. A history. There is a certain thrill. I guess the character is CGI to begin with. so it's hard to clock but even he's probably fully AI video or maybe it's edited together I don't know but yeah you're 100 % right it's the audio that's off that's rough man how much are you looking to get for him 100 ,000 credits look I'll give you 50 bucks for him you fool it's interesting that the like Like why that's popular is because it's this mashup between two intellectual pieces of property and they're not being compensated for that.

2:05:31And so there's like this thing that can only exist in the piracy world, basically. Like if someone, if you had recreated this without leveraging Star Wars IP or Pawn Stars IP, doesn't go viral, right? and so the the business case for ai video is still a little bit more narrow and i think it will be tucked in the tool section i was i was uh yeah looking a lot at like the the aflac project that he sold to netflix and some of the background replacements some of the vfx stuff like it feels like the way even though this is like this oh it's like one-shotting entertainment uh it feels like the next moment of like AI in Hollywood is very much like tool driven, you know, leveraging things like, you know, green screen removal and object replacement, VFX workflows, and just sort of speeding up remote, like rote tasks.

2:06:31But people will continue to have fun with these mashups. And I'm sure we'll see many more of them on the timeline. Anyway. The other news, Mike Isaac and his team over at the New York Times are in the courtroom live blogging. They went. They're blogging. They're blogging. There's some crazy moments already. There's some crazy, crazy moments already. The judge is doing bits. We'll try to put some of them together. The judge is doing bits. Apparently, Elon's lawyer's microphone turned off four times in the course of his opening statement. Or maybe the screen turned off at one point. I saw some different reporting on that.

2:07:10Apparently on the fifth, issues fifth or so time the judge says what can i tell you we are funded by the federal government so that's why she's running she's running bits uh but uh highly recommend going over and yeah mike isaac has some fantastic coverage posts are still rolling in yeah uh it's a lot to go through because it's it's it's hours and hours and hours of content but we'll try to pull out some of the highlights and go through it on tomorrow's show. The other thing you should listen to is Patrick O'Shaughnessy had Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest macro traders of all time on invest like the best.

2:07:49It's an hour and 11 minutes and you should go listen to it. So go take a listen. It already has 5 ,000 likes, 1.7 million views, not nearly enough downloads. So go add it to your podcast player right now. And enjoy that for the rest of the day. Enjoy the rest of your day. And we'll see you tomorrow, 11 a.m. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Can't wait to see you tomorrow. Have the best afternoon of your life. We love you. Goodbye. Flashbang. Going flashbang. Out. Goodbye.