Oracle Slides, Disney x OpenAI, SpaceX IPO | Fidji Simo, Dylan Byers, Angela Jiang, Jonathan Slotkin, Aaron Cannon, Karan Kunjur

27:45I was texting the CEO of Profound, James, last night, and he was giving me an update on the business. And he shared just like a clearly like copy and pasted it, like the new customers that they had signed. And I don't think we can share all of them yet. But it basically looked like every company in every company, every big company, it looked like they had them. they already are working with MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, DocuSign, Ramp, Zapier, AteSleep, U.S. Bank, Figma, Seeky, LG. So many of these different companies are choosing Profound and we feel lucky to be partnered with them. Here's a good post from just another pod guy.

28:32We can sprinkle this in before we move on to Oracle. Just thought this was an interesting point of view. Elon is not really a person. He is the human embodiment of network effects. When you've been operating at that level and breadth that he has been, you aren't really dealing with an individual. You're dealing with a deep bench of talent and capital with a comms guy who is addicted to Twitter. The same warnings about underestimating Trump, the person versus Trump's cabinet apply to must, but a hundred X and with far less rationality injected and with a much higher caliber of people. Does he over promise over hype over hyperbolize?

29:05Of course, but I would guess the median IQ and depth of expertise of the bench around Musk is higher than that of any nation state. I thought this was obvious to most people. So it's just, it's just crazy how like, yes, the, yeah, yeah. You just have to accept the over promising, the over hyping and stuff, but recognize that it's like no one else is trying really. There's very, very few people. they're trying. Yeah. But in terms of like the real, the real people making a run at a lot of these crazy ideas, like they're just, it's, It's incredibly thin. It's incredibly thin. There aren't that many people.

29:39There are a lot of people that, yeah, just don't take it seriously. But anyway, let's move over to one of Elon Musk's best friends, I believe. They're boys. They're boys. I think they're boys. Elon can count on Larry for a billion or two over taxed. So Larry Ellison is addressing, he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. So Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarter fell slightly short of analysts' expectations while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits.

30:34Before we continue this article, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So, I mean, this is all part of this. I think investors didn't realize that when you do one of these crazy AI deals, you have to go build the data center, and then you have to wait, and then you have to get power, and you have to buy the chips, and the chips have to ship. Turn it on. You have to rack the chips, and then you have to turn it on, then you have to test it. And then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell them.

31:05All well, enterprise AI adoption might be stacking. We'll see. There was some crazy data out of RAMP today. R. Karazian, the economist over there. At least some businesses might be saying, we've got enough AI. We like it, but we have enough. Apparently, 55 % of businesses are just good without paying for AI. I mean, the paying thing is the key. At least directly. At least directly. The paying thing here is. So the example is like a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud, but they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies that leverage cloud to deliver their products. But it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going.

31:46This is from Ara Karazian over at Ramp. He says, Ramp's AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45 % of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors. By the model, OpenAI went down negative 1%, Anthropik up 0.8%, and Google went up 0.7%. And so you can see that this chart in 2025, OpenAI had a big, big jump. And then just has been flat for the last couple of months, a little bit down. Anthropic's been on a much smoother, it seems like they didn't exist in 2023, basically, or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then 2024, you see some slight growth here.

32:34And then 2025, a much smoother, like, okay, uptick, growing more, growing more, growing more. Kind of all keeps up with this, you know, they've been 10Xing every year, like an Instagram hustle account. But OpenAI had a massive spike at the start of 2025 and then has been a little bit flatter. But it is interesting. I wonder how much you read into this. So Ara has a take here we should go through. Before we do, let me tell you about Fin.ai. The number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. So he says, adoption is flat. That is the bubble popping and he says, I'm not calling it yet.

33:17The slowdown comes at the end of a rapid run up in adoption rates in 2025, which coincided with a significant step change in the capabilities of these models. Now the effect of the latest advancements has faded. If we want to see another run up in adoption, we would have to see at least one or two step changes, technological gains, the models get even better, spurring faster adoption or implementation gains. Early adopters figure out the best use cases for AI and the rest of the market follows, driving incremental adoption. Both are likely, the latter even more so, as adoption actually rose in several industries with relatively low adoption rates like retail construction and manufacturing.

33:53Is Google's AI good now? He says it's still underrated. Adoption of Google's Gemini rose 0.7%, its second highest monthly increase on record. And then he says, what's going on with OpenAI? He says he cautions an overreaction to the latest results, which show OpenAI adoption dropping while Anthropik and Google adding new users and what that means for OpenAI's business. I've learned a lot covering how companies buy and use AI. Mainly, this market changes rapidly in the typical rise and fall timelines of companies. Does not apply here. OpenAI enjoyed rapid adoption of growth in 2025, in many ways emerging as default spend category for businesses.

34:29And it's not unreasonable to think that rate would normalize as competitors find their fit in the market. Also, there's just a lot of fear. Overall, the interesting thing is it seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model is just getting smarter is not going to, by default, make adoption accelerate massively again. They need to become more useful. They need to be able to do our cash has talked about this. They need to be able to learn on the job, basically, in the way that a human does. I think until we have that, there's some things. you know, the forward deployed engineer movement of like having people out embedded in companies, like trying to unlock the potential of the models.

35:11That's great. But I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful. Yeah. More useful. I don't know. Yeah. It's tough. I mean, when I look at those, when I look at the number, like the headline number, it's 45 % have adopted, have paid for, um, AI chat apps, basically, you know, he's tracking, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and XAI on there, a few others. And you flip that around and you're like, 45 % of businesses don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all? Or are they just good with free? Because if you told me like 55 % of companies are in sort of like a private equity scarcity wartime mode where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door, Or even a$20 subscription is something that will be scrutinized because you know what?

36:07Like, son, we've been running this business for a generation. We're not going to spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is precious. And so we're not just going to go sign up for whatever. No, you don't just spend, spend, spend. You need to really understand if this is valuable. And you know what? If the particular business we have, we have a specific POS system. we have you know we don't have that many unstructured questions right like realistically it's like we're not doing a lot of random email a lot of random research for our business it's more like you know customer comes in take their order put in the pos system yeah charge them go do the thing which ai is probably not you know replacing so um it's interesting but it is one of the one of the cool factors about this our karazian report is that it comes from ramp customers who I don't think of as, I think of them as a little bit more forward thinking than the general population.

37:05Like if I were to say that there's bias in the data set, I would say it's biased towards like being open to AI. For sure. For sure. Yeah. If, if I wonder, uh, if a company like Amex would look at their data of like AI adoption, just for cohorts that signed up for Amex over a decade ago, you would expect it to be lower. Yeah. Or, or even, or even putting Amex aside, like a community bank. Because if I go to my local laundromat and I ask, what corporate card do you use? They're probably like, we don't do corporate cards here at all. In fact, we have a relationship with the local bank down the street and they put up the mortgage for the building and we write checks or we do cash.

37:50Or they're even using a debit card. Yeah, exactly. Or if they do have a credit card, it's probably from the local bank branch. It's not like they haven't built their whole system. So, yeah, it's fascinating to read into. I do think there is something to be said. I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. Like, it's not accelerating. And it is real that there is. It's just getting harder and harder to justify, okay, it's a no-brainer to bring it in. It's a no-brainer to pay for it. Part of that's the competitive dynamic of, you know, 50 % of the value from AI you just get in a Google search.

38:24Also, what are you getting out of some of these? If you're a business that's not doing co-gen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, et cetera, and somebody says, hey, for$20 a month or$100 a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level in math, but extremely low agency. You have to tap the person on the shoulder. I like the laundromat. The laundromat's like, actually, I don't need somebody who's PhD level in math. Sir, this is a laundromat. We've been running this laundromat and this family for 45 years, and I've never run into an IMO gold medal level problem ever. I bet there actually are.

39:03I bet if Mark Chen wanted to create a laundromat. Allocation of laundry. You need to efficiently, I mean, if you have a big load of laundry. Yes, how do you split it across? How do you distribute it? Okay, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. uh but but yeah so you have like you have a a robot on your computer that is incredibly incredibly smart incredibly low agency it can't learn on the job you have to like tap it on the shoulder and say hey do this okay now do that now do this do that and it's like well a lot of these businesses don't have again these these problems that need that level of intelligence and they need people that are that are even have some level of agency not even maxed out on intelligence but can just kind of like chug away and learn on the job and get better.

39:49Or they need SaaS products that have AI functionality built in, right? And so to them, it's just, oh, yeah, my POS system just flagged a couple more fraudulent orders and took care of that or like ramp. You know, it's like, yeah, my receipts get classified better, but I'm not like a direct user of AI. Maybe they need to be on Numeral, numeral.com, compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance. so you can focus on growth. Disney is investing$1 billion in OpenAI. Before that, before that, I do think it's notable. So Oracle's remaining performance obligations, which we know refers to contracted revenue not yet recognized, is$523 billion.

40:34Currently, their stock is trading at$500. Worthy of a gong hit, sure. But currently the stock is trading at only$568 billion. And so I just look at this as like Oracle continues immediately when they announced this backlog. They got a bunch of credit. It was almost immediately. And it has basically just been downhill ever since as the market has basically said, we're giving you less and less and less and less credit here. And to the point where in many ways they're getting negative credit for the partnership. That was the Financial Times take. The deal is worth negative$70 billion. Yeah, and I think that the way that they framed that title was not entirely.

41:18Edgy. It was definitely edgy. It's a blog. It's Alphaville. They're having fun. And then I have one more post here that's relevant. So Suspended Cap says, I got to feel like that at some point Oracle Larry was misled. Was it OpenAI showing him something in the lab? Was it Jensen lying about token prices? or was it a partnership that was supposed to happen that didn't? It's always been clear to me that this was a race to the bottom. Why would you want to take these economics that someone as sophisticated as Microsoft was happy to pass off? Remember, I've said this a bunch on the show, Satya has more information.

41:53He owns OpenAI's IP, right? He's been serving OpenAI models. He's been running an AI. It's one of the most scaled platforms, right? He has more information than anyone in the room. Momentarily, he didn't look at when Oracle announced this backlog and the stock jumped however many hundreds of billions. Everyone was kind of like, wait, did Satya miss this? And I think the market is maybe realizing some of his wisdom. Suspended cap says, Jensen's whole thing is that the rack costs$4 million, and you make$20 million, you net$16 million. No one can make you$16 million. Got it. but a lot of assumptions baked into that someone has to pay you 16 million for however many trillions of tokens you can spit off if a token is a commodity and someone can serve it at 50 lower than now it's net plus 6 million on the 4 million of costs what if the dollars paid for the infra results and massive losses for whoever is purchasing them is the assumption that the capital will just keep funding it maybe they will i actually think they will but i'm just confused at what Oracle thought they saw here.

43:01Well, story's not over. Let's move on to Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full-text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. So Joanna Stern has a little bit of a screenshot take joking around about Disney, which is investing$1 billion in OpenAI and is going to license their characters for use in Sora She says, look at this hype. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my bubble's complete? I think that's from some Disney song. I actually don't know, but just the cadences. Do you have any idea what's - That was my read. Santa Claus is coming to town?

43:40No, definitely not Santa Claus is coming to town. That's not a Disney property. Is it? Oh, yeah. Look at - But the tune you were singing sounded like that. That's just because I'm bad at singing, I suppose. Okay, let's see if Grok can grok it. Let's see. Okay, anyway. There is news. Oh, is this Frozen maybe? Look at this. Isn't it neat? Do, do, do, do. Okay. Accompanied. I don't know. Someone will have to tell us. Anyway. So Disney is making a$1 billion investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties to generate short, user-prompted social videos. Henry says it's from The Little Mermaid.

44:19The Little Mermaid. What is the original line from The Little Mermaid? Look at this. Okay. Anyway. Disney's three-year licensing deal will let users generate videos using Sora, OpenAI's short-form AI video platform of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters. A curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney+. Whoa, that's the bombshell there. I didn't realize that. Because when I think about going to Sora, it's very fun to make a mashup video of Mickey Mouse fighting Iron Man or something like that. And that's something that doesn't make sense to underwrite within Disney.

45:04They're not going to spend the time. The CGI is too expensive. It's just not going to happen. But for a kid who loves a Pixar character that wants to see WALL-E join the Avengers and go fight Thanos, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who enjoys Disney's IP. and yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create that, makes a ton of sense that they would allow this to happen in Sora in a way where the economic value is accounted for appropriately. Now, you can say whether or not it's a slop, but I just think the idea that this is going Disney Plus is crazy.

45:47That's the crazy thing. I mean, we covered this when we were talking about Sora generally, Just this idea that is it a creation tool or is it a consumption tool? And we were saying, I think pretty quickly, that this doesn't feel like an app that we're going to hang out in. Everyone in the studio was having a lot of fun. We checked their screen times a few days later. No one was scrolling Sora or more MetaVibes for that. But we continue to see outputs from Sora going pretty viral on other platforms. Totally. Even within our own group chats. Like what's been the most impactful Sora video that you've probably seen in the last couple of weeks?

46:28Like me making a Sora video of myself promoting John Fio's energy drink company in a suit. And I just sent it to him directly in a group chat. And it didn't exist. And it wasn't funny in any broader context. Now, the weird thing is that is there real demand for Sora-level quality content in the Disney Plus app? Like, when I open the Disney Plus app, I feel like it's a place that has extremely high polish. And I feel like it's a safe place. Ultimately, to me, what's exciting about this is personalized entertainment, which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this. If Tyler figured it out with Henry's help, the line earlier was, look at this stuff, isn't it neat?

47:22Wouldn't you think my collection's complete from The Little Mermaid, part of your world? But if somebody loves The Little Mermaid, and then you can prompt a really high-fidelity personalized video for your kid saying, like, it's time to do the dishes and singing a little song, right? That's the kind of moment that I imagine Disney would be excited about. Of course, this will be immediately abused in a thousand millions of different ways, but I'm sure they'll put a lot of guardrails in. And one thing that's notable, this went out this morning. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale.

48:04Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding it to stop the infringement. So, yeah, basically the article says, as Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale, using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement. Quote, Google's infringing Disney's copyright on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop Gen AI models and services and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers, in violation of Disney's copyrights.

48:51So the letter continued, Google operates as a virtual vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on massive scale and compounding Google's blatant infringement. Many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI services are branded with a Google's Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google's exploitation of Disney's IP is authorized and endorsed by Disney. Um, so the question, so Disney's not just allowing open AI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested. And so the immediate question is, will Disney do any of these licensing IP licensing with other platforms?

49:34It doesn't, this kind of lot, maybe it feels like we're in the press release economy all over again. Um, yeah, I, I don't know. It does feel like Disney's sort of like picking a winner here in AI video. And they're saying like, we like OpenAI and we don't like Google, which is sort of a bold move. You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I'm fascinated by this. Then again, Thrive Capital bet the fund in some ways on OpenAI. Who's co-owner of Thrive? Bob Iger. No way. Remember he was part of a small cohort that bought a few points of Thrive? Get out the red string.

50:18It's all connected, of course. Get out the board. Get out the board. You were right, by the way, on the structure. So Disney's putting a$1 billion investment in, but they're also getting warrants to buy more stock in OpenAI at its current$500 billion valuation. So there's a little bit of opportunity in the future if the valuation goes up that they'll get a good deal there. I really can't get over this Disney Plus news. I really, okay, it does say a curated selection. So I think that I would be very upset about the idea that I would open. It's just a random selection of whatever. You know where I'm going with this.

50:59As a parent. WALL-E is a film that is, like, I think it's art. I think it's art. And I think it's okay for my children to watch WALL-E. You studied WALL-E. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But I do. You took notes. I do think that a lot of the Pixar films and a lot of the Disney films, they have an opinion. They have craft. They have something that elevates the human experience. It is not purely brain rot. It's not slop. And if you were in a funnel where you watch something that's a great, interesting film with an opinion, with something to say, and then it's like, do you want to continue watching? Five, four, three, two, one.

51:40and then it's just blasting you with the craziest Sora mashups possible, like, you're going to make a lot of parents very upset. So this better be in another tab. But I do like that they said it's curated, because as long as there's, like, some sort of human in the loop to, like, say, like, hey, that's – they clearly jailbroke on that one, because you know people are going to get crazy with this. Yeah, they're going to have every Disney character doing the little yachty walkout, you know? Okay, that's actually okay for the kids. I fully support that. Coffin is a banger, and I'm good with that.

52:13But no, I mean, YouTube Kids famously went through a really, really dark period with Spider-Man and Elsa mashups that were very suggestive and bizarre. And it's been a game of whack-a-mole for a long time. And I think people don't expect when they open up Disney +, they don't expect it to be a game of whack-a-mole. They expect it to be curated, and so Disney really needs to continue to instill this idea that they are curating. Yeah, so Disney has sent cease and desist letters to meta, character, AI, as well as against MidJourney and some other companies. Yeah. I wonder, have they ever sent a cease and desist to...

52:57To who? OpenAI. Oh, I don't know. but they should have because early as soon as chat gpt launched i was having it create stories of you know spider-man i i was particularly a fan of the the deliberately ip infringing so i'd be like write a bedtime story for my son where you know spider-man teams up with superman which of course cannot happen because those are rival intellectual rival pieces of intellectual property some owned by Warner Brothers, some owned by Disney. And so you cannot ever have those cross into the same multiverse. According to Google, Gemini, which Disney has now sent this cease and desist to, Disney has never taken any type of legal action against OpenAI.

53:48They picked a side. Well, fortunately, we have someone who can add a lot more context here. We have Dylan Byers from Puck News joining us in person in just a few minutes, whenever he's ready. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, our sponsor, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe-coded, and deep multimodal understanding. Let's pull up this clip. Bob Iger and Sam, we're on CNBC this morning. We can pull it up. This is a 12-minute video. Can we play some of this and see if there are key moments there? And then we will bring in Dylan. Yeah, so the current deal is a three-year license with exclusivity for the first year.

54:31So, again, it's very possible that a year from today, Google ends up with the same ability to leverage Disney IP. Disney will set and evolve the guardrails for how its 200 characters will be used. One year exclusivity doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me because VO3 and Nano Banana are barely rolled out into YouTube. Like you can put them in shorts, but it's kind of a creative tool. Like YouTube does not seem like we got to win the AI vertical video game this year. This feels more detrimental to Facebook and Meta than OpenAI or than YouTube, honestly. Anyway, let's table this video. We can come back to the clips.

55:16I'm sure it will be clipped more in more precise detail. Instead, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds skills and grows your company to the next level. And let's bring in Dylan Byers from Puck News. Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to come down to the Ultradome. Good to see you in person. Welcome, welcome. Please have a seat. Thank you. And if you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, uh however you describe yourself these days whatever's whatever's quickest uh i'm a senior correspondent for puck okay where i cover the media industry yeah media business media gossip how is covering the media different than covering the oil and gas industry or tech or anything else uh more navel gazing more incestual because you're in the media you can are you are you doing the navel gazing or are you reporting on navel gazing?

56:15I, I, I navel gaze at the navel gazers. Okay. It's sort of an orophores of navel gazing. Interesting. Yeah. Very ancestral. What's, uh, has navel gazing been the top story over the last couple of weeks or is it more deal making? You're, you would, it's, well, here's what's amazing. It's amazing that at a time when like Paramount and Netflix are going to war for Warner Brothers Discovery, Yeah. The media industry is obsessed with like Ryan Liz and Olivia Nuzzi. Oh, yeah, that's a big one. Barry Weiss. Oh, yeah, yeah. The media industry is funny because it has a way of the smallest, most inconsequential gossip has a way of consuming the industry at large.

56:59That doesn't feel like what the last couple months have been, though. Like the Olivia Newsy, Liz, the thing, like that feels like much bigger than some small story. Is it really? It used to be bigger. So part of it, part of why media loves covering media is media likes to cover things that get a lot of attention. And media businesses in their very nature, their job is to get attention. So everyone knows. I think that's part of it. I just think we're obsessed. We're obsessed with ourselves. Yeah. But an example I would give, very often I'll find a fashion brand that is like a household name will have like$5 million of revenue.

57:40It's because they're just like people like fashion. It gets shared a ton. And so I think it's a very... Same thing with individual influencers. Like they might be recognized on the street. If you put them in a headline, it's going to get clicks. versus if I was like, I have a report here on an oil and gas company that's doing$50 million a year, you'd be like, no one's going to click on that. No one knows what that company is. People need stories. You need personalities. The media lends itself to that. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can do that at the executive level. With the Paramount Netflix WBD deal, you can do it down on the newsroom floor.

58:15I think people need personalities to make these stories human. Also, there's only so much intrigue in numbers. Do you feel like the Paramount, Netflix, Warner Brothers story has been particularly personal? Have you been focused on it? 100%. It's the most personal at that level, at a major M &A level, even more so than when Bob Iger and Brian Roberts went to war for Fox, which was personal too and had a lot of subplots there, especially on the Murdoch side. Of course this is personal. You've got in David Ellison, a guy who is basically staking a lot of personal money, a lot of his dad's money, trying to get this asset.

58:57And then doing all the right things, sending all the right signals to David Zaslav and the WBT board. Having all the right dinners. Having all the right dinners, going to all the right fights. And then being sort of spurned at the last minute for someone else. And that negotiation and the Trump element and the relationships between Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav and then David Ellison and Larry Ellison and David Zaslav, it's like, it's absolutely fascinating. So do you think, I mean, there is a world where selling business, it should be purely economic, right? Yeah, and it will be. It will be. It will be in the end.

59:35the funny part is like the the personal element is there but at the end of the day whoever spends the most money is going to get the asset but if you're more personal you might be able to marshal more capital you might know more people you might be more more people might be willing to rally behind you and we're kind of seeing that with ellison pulling in folks all over the board because you know he's has personal relationships with them is that roughly right that's roughly that's roughly right. I think that, I think what you have, my, my partner, Bill Cohen put it really elegantly. You've basically got a company with a$400 billion valuation going to war with a man with a$400 billion valuation and Larry Ellison and his son.

1:00:15And yeah, marshaling the capital for it, you know, with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Jared Kushner and all that is interesting. And at a certain point, Netflix is going to reach a threshold for what it can compete with. I mean, another point Bill made is at a certain point, if Paramount were just willing to come in and offer like$34,$35 a share for this thing, I think it would be game over. But the personal element is just interesting because you've got Trump who wants to be involved in this deal somehow. You've got David who really doesn't like the idea, David Zaslow, who really doesn't like the idea of selling to David Ellison.

1:00:55But fundamentally what you're doing is just a very extended negotiation that's going to play well into 2026. Why doesn't he want to get involved with David? I don't think this is how Zaslav wanted to go out, right? I think I'm not saying all – when David Zaslav got Warner Media, he did this whole song and dance coming to Hollywood and saying, you know i'm a film guy i'm going to save the film industry i don't think anyone thought he was in it for the long haul i think everyone knew this was sort of like a flip but he liked playing the hollywood kingpin and i don't think he wanted to go out because david ellison came to the table and forced him to go to market and i also don't think that you know i think david ellison and his team and jerry cardinale redbird i think they came in and said you know somewhere around that sort of$23.50,$24 a share mark.

1:01:51And I think he took offense to that because the number he wanted and the number he thought he could get was higher to 30. And David, like, look, I have spent a lot of my time at Puck writing about all of the various misguided exploits of David Zaslav at the top of Warner Brothers Discovery. But at the end of the day, like, one thing he knows how to do very well is work a deal. The entire time that David Ellison was coming, was at the table saying, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll spend more. He was talking to Ted Sarandos at Netflix,

1:02:25and basically, by virtue of playing those two off against each other, he's probably going to end up driving the deal up to a price that is actually higher than$30. So, kudos to him. Do you think he's talking to anyone else? There's been a lot of skepticism about there ever having been a second bidder. People were saying, oh, the idea that Netflix would even bid, that's a fake stalking course. I remember in September when Paramount first started this whole process, someone came to me and said, this isn't over, Netflix is at the table. Everyone thought that was bullshit. Greg Peters went out at a Bloomberg event here in Hollywood and said, historically, we don't do M &A deals like this.

1:03:08We're not interested in M &A. And everyone thought, okay, well, that's it. Netflix has been at the table the entire time. And in fact, if you talk to the guys at Paramount, what they'll tell you is like, they feel like Zaslav was playing rope-a-dope with them. It's basically saying, yeah, come to the table, we're good. Everything you're offering is better than Netflix. And then finally in the 11th hour, he's got them to just continue to bid and bid and bid and bid. Yeah, and we're not done. We're not done. That's the sort of funny thing. The way when Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters go out there and talk about this, they're talking about it like it's over.

1:03:38It's not over. No. So you could have me back on in six months. I think we're still talking about this. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Do you think that the actual Netflix contract, the deal, the breakup fees, the announcement, the pageantry around like we have a deal? Yeah, totally. Make it inevitable. Is that a tactic? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Yeah, to drive a higher price from, to let Paramount know, to let Ellison know, hey, your best and final, like now's the time to go rally the troops, go around the world, fire up the jet. How do you make another offer and then say, I just want to be clear that this is not my best and final?

1:04:21Oh, that was a funny line. Like I've never in a negotiation had somebody make a new higher offer and then also say, like, typically you'd be like, yeah, there's not a lot of, like, it just shows that, like, what is the incentive to take the offer at all? I'll buy your house for a million dollars, but I could go higher. I could go higher. And by the way, another partner of mine, Matt Bellany, like, he's reported, Paramount will go higher. Okay. They will. Like, the Ellisons will go higher. And part of the thing, and this gets back to the personal element, which is what's so fascinating to me.

1:04:59David Ellison came to the Paramount deal, the first deal with a strategy to basically wrap up as much of Hollywood as he could scale it up and try to go to go to war with Netflix and go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go to go. more than just Paramount. If at the end of the day, Netflix gets Warner Brothers Discovery and he's sitting there with Paramount, he's not in the game. Well, yeah, so I was thinking, so he acquired the rights to UFC. Yes. They're killing the pay-per-view model, which is interesting. The pay-per-view model was being killed by illegal streaming, which was like the bane of Dana White's existence.

1:05:47He basically, to my knowledge, was always angry about it, was kind of the nature of the internet is just like if you're streaming something it'll show up in other places in other parts of the internet and there's not much you can do so paramount you know basically going down uh throwing down and saying like we're going to own the ufc which is there's a lot of people that will just subscribe because there's one ish major ufc event every month and it's a much better deal than uh than just going and buying each individual pay-per-view for$80 a pop or whatever. But that subscription offering becomes much more compelling if you're bundling in all this other IP.

1:06:28Totally. My question is, you're definitely going to get the UFC fan base, but how big is that fan base? Certainly, it's a popular sport in America, but how do you build enough value around this to really have a competitive offering? I think what's interesting about the UFC deal, The UFC deal was a signal to the broader market, which is so much, again, it can be depressing to cover the media industry because a lot of the times it's going through periods of contraction or decline. or you look at, since we're talking about sports rights, you look at someone like ESPN, right, who's being forced to make all of these very calculated decisions about, you know, should we pay X amount for Major League Baseball when you're competing, still competing for the NFL with, like, Amazon and YouTube.

1:07:16Well, and sports are the last remaining content monopolies, right? So in news, you don't really have a monopoly on anything. News is a commodity. Yeah, you might break the story, but everybody else will have the facts immediately. Sports rights are the one thing. Yes, sports rights and leagues. So the UFC deal. And intellectual property. Sure, sure, sure. The rights to Warner Brothers. But still, that is highly competitive with somebody else online saying, I'm going to make an AI cartoon. Sure. People aren't creating homegrown sports content. They're creating commentary and reaction content. But you still need to pay to see it live.

1:07:50At the end of the day, there's only one network you can watch Sunday Night Football on, and it's NBC. And that matters in a way that when news break, when a bomb goes off or a coup happens, there are a lot of different ways to go. But what was interesting about the UFC deal is at this period of sort of contraction negotiation among legacy media players, David Ellison was coming in almost like a sovereign himself and saying, I'm here. I'm willing to make bold bets and I'm willing to even overpay or what others would consider overpay in order to go after these assets. It also helps that he's younger.

1:08:25He's thinking on a longer time horizon. Like he's actually someone who's thinking, how do I build up not just a media empire? He thinks about it as a media and tech empire. How do I build that up over the course of decades? So he's making these really long-term bets. And again, part of that, it was never, ever just about Paramount. I remember sitting in the polo lounge with somebody before the Paramount deal even closed. And they're like, he's going after WBD next. Like this is always, this is a scale play. And so that just brings me back to like, you can't, you can't execute the plan if you're just sitting with Paramount.

1:08:59And so if you're Zaslav and the guy's like, well, yeah, our best and final offer is whatever starts with a two. He's like, the fuck it does. You need me more than I need you. That's right. Very clearly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, I mean, I count myself as oddly like a media. I'm just getting up to speed on a lot of these media stories. And this one's been fascinating. Um, but, uh, just digging into David Ellison's history, I mean, starting Skydance in 2004, he really has been in Hollywood as at least like, you know, given it his all for 20 years. He starred in Flyboys, the movie that he shot.

1:09:39Like, it's like, he clearly wants it. He's about that. This is not, it's not a, it's hard to call him a tourist. I don't know if you've seen Flyboys. It wasn't great. No, but, but to show up and, and not like, there are lots of like, I mean, you could easily levy the tourist label at Elon Musk buying Twitter. What does he know about social networking? He's been a PayPal guy. Then he's been a space guy. Then he's been a car guy. Now he's a social media guy. What does he know about the news? And it's like, that kind of was true. He did just show up and was all of a sudden like, I use Twitter a lot, so I'm buying it.

1:10:12This is a 20-year journey, right? David Ellison fancies himself a true film buff. Sure. Hollywood guy. Yeah. Grew up watching movies, going to the movies. His association with Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible to him is a massive badge of honor because he feels like he's really been supporting the industry. And part of the argument you're going to see, or we're already seeing it, that he and his team will make against Netflix is that Netflix is paying lip service to the theatrical window. They're not a business that's built on putting movies in theaters. And he's like, we actually will. We are committed to Hollywood in the traditional sense.

1:10:49We're so committed that we'll put Tom Cruise yelling at you about TV settings in front of you. Have you ever seen this? Yes, that's right. No, I haven't. Oh, yeah, yeah. Tom Cruise, like, there's a lot of TVs that come with, like, specific refresh rates technology, like high refresh rate, not 24 frames. It'll do, like, 48. It's, like, smooth motion. And he hates it because it's, like, not as the filmmaker intended. Yeah. And so he'll do, like, pre-roll ads for that. Clearly, like, a, yeah, truly, like, loves the theater still. We are going to, we are all going, in this process, because one thing that gets lost, you know, the creative community in Hollywood gets really upset about the Netflix of it all.

1:11:24Sure. Because they don't like, seem to like Netflix. Yep. They don't like Netflix from a tech perspective, not a political perspective. Yes. They see it as politically aligned with Netflix. But more politically aligned with Netflix, in fact. But in terms of their nostalgia for what this industry is about. Yes. We're going to see a lot of nostalgia over the course of this deal negotiation. and there's going to be a lot of hemming and hawing among the Hollywood creative community about what's happening. And all I would say is whether Paramount or Netflix get WBD, the train has left the station. The industry has changed.

1:11:55And even Ted's whole thing about we're committed to the theatrical window. I guess movies will be in theaters for like 10 minutes before they're on Netflix. Do you think that Hollywood in the actual traditional sense, like the local community we're recording this live from hollywood yeah uh it seems like the industry is the culture of the industry is like dominated by nostalgia that's like totally that's the feeling that i have the interesting thing about tech is that tech has a nostalgic element to it tech culture but it's like videos of us going to the moon and we're like well we got to do that again whereas hollywood seemingly is just wants the whole production pipeline and process to go back the way that it was and i guess how how are how are people processing like having an even smaller kind of potential buyer pool out of all of this well you know this is what you're making me think of i think earlier when we were talking about media you were talking about other industries like oil and gas industry.

1:13:04Yeah, this is my example. The difference is that creatives are a real pain in the ass to deal with from the perspective of the front office. Sure. You build your business around them, but they have feelings about how things should be that I think people probably in the oil and gas industry or the trucking industry don't. Yeah. So there are a lot of like Tom Cruises and Martin Scorseses who have feelings about how this industry should work and what you need to preserve in order to preserve the integrity of it. What happens when new leaders take over is they have to do a song and dance where they pay a lot of lip service to this.

1:13:37And so you see Ted Sarandos coming in and talking about how great it is to acquire the studio that made Casablanca. Yeah. The future of the film, I fucking love Casablanca. I've seen it a hundred times. The future of this business does not rest on future generations going back and watching Humphrey Bogart. That is not where the future is going. Similarly, when David Ellison took over Paramount, there was all this lip service paid to Walter Cronkite and the integrity of CBS News. With all due respect to David, I don't think he gave us a shit about Walter Cronkite. But you have to do that song and dance in order to sort of finesse the transition of the creative community.

1:14:15And in truth, I think what's more interesting is I think whether you're talking about a David Ellison or a Ted Sarandos, they're actually thinking about the future. They're thinking about how to go to the moon again. they're thinking about you guys were just talking about disney's deal with sora when when right after he he dropped his peons to walter cronkite at this paramount event just down the street a few months ago david ellison talked about how we were just a matter of years away from his kids being able to talk to the characters on paw patrol and have those characters talk back to them so the disney sort of deal is like an early step towards that future they know that's where we're going.

1:14:55It is not my kids watching Bluey over and over and over again. It is them talking to Bluey and telling Bluey what to do. They're thinking about it, but the dissonance between what they have to sort of say to placate the Marty Scorseses and where they're actually thinking about putting the money is notable. I feel like it's notable. I mean, there's so... We talk to founders at least once a week that are building like video models and products that could eventually be used by entertainment or are being used by entertainment. And I get as an outsider to entertainment, I get excited because I'm like, if budgets for films hold flat and the tools that these entrepreneurs are building get better and better, you'll eventually be able to say, you know, a movie that would have cost a hundred million dollars could now be four different movies that cost$25 million and you're using AI to reduce the costs and using it for scenes that are just like, you know, historically expensive to actually shoot and do.

1:15:57And so I see an opportunity for this like Cambrian, like even if budgets just hold flat, a Cambrian explosion of more creativity, more people having the opportunity to create films and television shows and things like that. but it feels like there's like zero excitement here about that. And maybe it's, and maybe it's because it's in pockets because if you're entirely outside of the Hollywood system, like the iPhone really did democratize filmmaking, but like the end result of that was like Mr. Beast on YouTube. But I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's still, I'm saying, I'm saying even though the technology is not being created here, it still could be a catalyst for the industry.

1:16:40I think it's a competitor. But, but. It is, and it's a tool. It's a tool. I mean, it's a tool. And as with the iPhone, the question is who has the access to the tool and who gets to harness the tool and then do something great with it. Yeah, the iPhone sort of democratized your ability to create content, and you can argue that the vast majority of what's out there is slop and is not nearly as good as what Hollywood can create. But then again, you just have to look at where people are spending their time. People are spending more time with user-generated content. People are spending more time on YouTube than they are on any other streaming platform.

1:17:20You can be able to talk to Humphrey Bogart. You can talk to Humphrey Bogart. That's what I want. Put me in Citizen Kane. Yeah, you can put him on the plane. Wile E. Coyote teaches algebra. Yeah, that'll happen for sure. The problem with nostalgia and with trying to preserve the order as it is is that the tools are there. They're going to be harnessed. They are more democratized than they have been in the past. And at a certain point, the eyeballs are going to go where they're going to go. And you can't force it. And there's this weird sort of like Amish, like let's just like preserve this moment in time.

1:17:57So if we hopped in a car and drove over to Burbank and snuck into Disney, Do you think Bob Iger has like a total revolt on his hands today? Because I feel like Disney is one of the truly creative places. They hire tons of those artists that have opinions. They're talent driven. And yet they just put out an announcement. Yeah, we're going to do AI content. It feels like a very, it feels like a divisive issue. If I was, you know. I'm sure it is for some people. I increasingly find that the stakes are so high and that the change is so fast that the need to meet it is existential. And I think leaders like Iger increasingly care less about that blowback.

1:18:47You know, I'm so funny. A long time, like 20 years ago, I was an intern at the New Yorker. And I remember when they opened up, you could, they did it, the back page where people could submit captions for the New Yorker cartoons. And the cartoonists hated it because they felt like that was their, the integrity of their work should not be opened up to the public. And in fact, that became like one of the greatest sources of engagement with the New Yorker was, was through that. I think people recognize that the, being able to say, I want Darth Vader on a beach, or I want, you know, Captain Underpants doing X, Y, Z, like that is going to happen.

1:19:29You can already sort of do it. And the question for Disney is, are we going to have a piece of that revenue? Are we going to make money off of it? And in fact, if we know that that's where the puck is going, and at a certain point you will be able to talk to your favorite animated characters, how can we, if we engage with that, then maybe we can start driving. Maybe that helps keep engagement. Maybe that helps drive people to theme parks. There's a whole other piece of it I was talking about with my colleague, Julie Alexander, just earlier today. But there's a whole other element here, too, with YouTube where Google is starting to generate Disney characters, and Disney doesn't want that happening.

1:20:13So I think they're trying to set a precedent. They launched a cease and desist last night. They're taking legal action against basically seemingly every scaled player except OpenAI. The OpenAI deal is a one-year exclusive. and so I think that opens up I'm assuming Disney's using these lawsuits and the cease and desist to start a negotiation of what this will look like once everybody gets access to it but it's notable that I think this is even today just seeing the timeline I think this is underrated as a deal for OpenAI to be able to drive just at a time when it feels like their product is being I completely disagree, but continue.

1:20:57At least somewhat threatened by Gemini. Sure. If you're an American household and you're like a Disney family, what family of apps are you going to be paying money to, right? If one of them creates these magical experiences for your kids and the other is completely blocked from generating any IP around that. I don't know. My kids are young. but if you're a 10 year old and you realize that like you can like my son i generate like pick i take pictures of us and i turn us into dinosaurs and i have used chad gpt to do that a lot it's stuck in his head he'll be like let's make some dine like let's make dinosaur pictures and so when kids realize that any disney content that they can watch can immediately be like brought into their life yeah that's going to be or if he comes to you and says hey let's let's turn ourselves into the Avengers.

1:21:54And you're like, well, there's only one app that allows me to do that. Then boom, you're in, you're back in Sora as opposed to, and you're going to pay for it because I think parents will pay almost any price to bring joy to their children. Yeah. So, I mean, I agree with that. I just think it's, it's going to be a slow takeoff of that type of content because I don't think, I don't think the whole thing, like Studio Ghibli, was that a slow takeoff? Absolutely. It was, it was, it was a huge, it was a huge meme moment where everyone had to have one. Everyone needed to see what they looked like in the Studio Ghibli mode.

1:22:25And then the usage like dropped off and then started climbing at like 1%, you know? And it is climbing and it is going to grow and it will be a prominent form factor. I'm just saying you now have 200 different characters, the most valuable IP in the world. I'm not saying it's bad. It's definitely like an improvement to that product and it will make Sora a better app and it will make it more useful. Not just Sora, but it's, I'm assuming, I didn't see specifically, but I'm assuming, yeah, it's ChatGVD and Sora. So it's going to be take any - Yeah, yeah. But to bring it back to the Ellison, like the Paramount WBD, like if you put them together, you get something like 15 % of all watch hours in America controlled by that company.

1:23:06If you take Netflix and WBD, you put them together, you get 14%. You saw that quote, right? Like Sora, I think is going to be at like less than 1 % for like years. And then it will eventually be 5 % and then 10%. But next year is not going to be like the year that 10 % of watch hours were AI-generated video. It's just not there yet. I commend Iger on at least trying to adapt his company for this future. Because that is where it's going. I mean, it's very hard to reject the thesis, even with the available technology, which feels like very beta, very 1.0, that that's not where this is headed. And if you've got, no one is sitting on a better IP portfolio than Disney, particularly when you're talking about kids, obviously.

1:23:56So, and there's no easier way to do this than with animation. Yeah. So why not go there? Yeah, yeah. I just think, so I looked it up. Disney Plus has just under 60 million total paid subscribers in the US and Canada. I think a lot of those subscribers are subscribing for content for their children. For sure. Don't underestimate how many people without kids go to Disneyland. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. It's a big number. I'm just saying, like, that cohort, OpenAI has, like, what, a third of that in paying subs globally? And so I just think this is, I do think this is, at least for the next 12 months, I think this is going to be a, this is, Chachubiti doesn't have a lot of moats, right?

1:24:44Like the product is better than other comparable products. And this is a new moat where if you're those 60 million people that are paying for Disney Plus. Like you're an ultra fan. And you're a super fan and you're going to parks. And nobody is not going to do it for you. How many people visit? Yeah, yeah. Here's an anecdotal thing. Yeah, please. Most, to the best of my knowledge, the one way I've been able to make my son cool in his second grade class is by getting him on Sora, like letting him play around with Sora earlier than his friends. Cool. Didn't do that with Minecraft. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:25:15But like did that with Sora. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have all those friends coming up to me and being like, what is Sora? Tell us about Sora. Can we use Sora? Sure. I'm sure the other parents hate me. It's a wild thing to do. But you do see, this is purely anecdotal. Yeah. You see that level of like, oh my God, can we create something? Can we just say something and create it? Yeah. And you think about how sticky Disney has been, right? I don't know a single parent in my kid's class who doesn't have a Disney Plus subscription. You are just, you are, if you can do that on Sora and you can't do it on its competitors, that's potentially really valuable.

1:25:52In 2023, the last reporting period for the parks that I can find, 140 million people globally paid to go to a Disney park and experience the Disney park. I'm sold extremely bullish for OpenAI. No, no, no, no, no. You win me over on this. I still don't think a significant percentage of content consumed by Americans next year will be fully AI generated. I think that's where we're going to see a slow takeoff. But yes, it's a great deal. Hats off, FGC-mo. Well, yeah. Yeah, so if you get 140 million people visit Disney parks this year, I bet you they will have things in the park, which is like recreate this moment, turn this into an animation.

1:26:37Okay, this is very good. It is very good. I just think the timeline this morning that was interesting, everybody looks at the headline number,$1 billion, and they're like, this is like slapping duct tape on a boat that's leaking water. It doesn't feel like that big of a number because it's not in the context of OpenAI, but the competitive edge that gives them over the next 12 months is massive. This is fantastic. This is a great conversation. Thank you so much. It's such an honor to finally be in the dome. I'm so glad you're here. I'm sure with the way the WBD deal evolves, you'll be a regular guest.

1:27:12I'm just at the streets, so anytime. Fantastic. This is great. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you. We have our next guest, Fiji Simo, the CEO of Applications. Hit the gong for us. It would be our honor. I don't know if I've earned this. What's a big number? You've got to give us a number. How many years have you been writing? Fourteen. Fourteen years overnight success. Thank you. Let me tell you about Linear. Meet the System for Modern Software Development. Streamline work. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Let me also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you.

1:27:54join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Our next guest is Fiji Simo from OpenAI. She is the CEO of Applications. We are very honored to be joined by Fiji. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of backstory on just What was the conversation like to recruit you, to have you join OpenAI? It's a big move. It rocked the timeline. And I'd love to know, what was the pitch? What was the opportunity? How did you wind up at OpenAI?

1:28:36Well, I had the extreme privilege of being on the board of OpenAI for many months, like I think about a year before Sam approached me. And therefore, we were already working really closely together. And at some point, he told me, hey, it looks like, you know, there's a lot to do and it looks like you have ideas on how to do it. So is there any sense that we could make this happen? And I had, you know, a big job running Instacart at the time, so it took some time to transition. But I was incredibly inspired by the mission of OpenAI already, and it felt like a no-brainer. And can you take us through the GPT 5.2 announcement?

1:29:15I mean, one of the first documents that I think everyone knows you for in the OpenAI context, in the context of your new role, is the different areas where you see GPT-5 and OpenAI having impact, chat GPT having impact in folks' life. Can you explain to me how you think those different sections are going? What excites you about the news today? And kind of contextualize, how do you think about the map of what ChatGPT as an application is touching? Yeah, that's a big question. Sorry, we can break it down one at a time. No, no, I've got it. You know, when I look at the opportunity ahead of us, I think AI is the greatest source of empowerment for people.

1:30:01And I want Chad GPT to be the personal super assistant that allows you to advance every part of your life. So the manifesto that you were referring to, to me, was like putting on paper this notion that if you look at how the world works right now, wealthy people have a lot of support staff. They have a travel agent. They have a personal shopper. They have a financial advisor. Imagine if we could give that team of support to everyone on Earth. And fundamentally, that's what I want to build. And I think with ChatGPT, we have the opportunity to graduate from what is still fundamentally a chatbot that you ask questions to, to a personal super assistant that gets everything done in your life.

1:30:47When you put that in the context of the announcement today, we're super excited to have launch 5.2. It's the leading model on... I was really hoping for that. It's a leading model in terms of everyday professional work. It's a big step change in intelligence. You see that on the benchmarks, obviously, but that gives me a lot of hope that we can be closer to achieving a lot of leaps on these use cases. So for example, if you take something like travel, you have to like, you know, be good at long horizon tasks. You have to understand the goal of the users very well. And so with GPT 5.2 and like the new capabilities, we're getting one step closer to making all of that possible.

1:31:35Yeah. So I feel like some people have a little bit of benchmark fatigue. They, you know, everyone has their own prompts and they feel like stuff's getting better, but it's hard to like everyone wants the original chat GPT moment again. So what have you done for me lately syndrome? But I'm interested, putting all of that aside, I want to know how are you measuring success internally around the launch of a new model? Like what does the rigor around developing KPIs? Obviously, the company is in the interest of driving subscriptions and revenue, but there must be interim steps and A-B tests. And I mean, this is your lineage.

1:32:18This is what makes you who you are. How do you think about assessing the impact of new models when they go out, like downstream of the benchmarks in the actual application? Yeah, so that's like my entire job is turning the research breakthroughs into products that people use. And so, for example, on 5.2, we just talked about the consumer side. I can go back to that. But on enterprise, for example, it's really important to us. We serve a million businesses across the world. what we look at is like can companies start to do things that they weren't able to do before we just released earlier this week an AI report for enterprise and it said that 75 percent of people were saying of workers were saying that with AI they can accomplish tasks that they couldn't do before and then we see that even on the coding stat on coding if you look coding messages from non-engineers has grown 36 percent and so i look at all of these things as like these are also like the research team gives me this like magical superpowers my job is to put the superpowers in the hands of people and and at home and at work and the thing we measure is can they do more and are they actually like understanding the use case and doing more and And there's a lot, you know, there is a big narrative around like, is AI adoption really happening?

1:33:46Is it going fast enough? But what I am seeing is that there is a lot of pent up demand as long as you cross those capabilities. So I'll give you an example. All companies that I meet with tell me that if there was a way to generate spreadsheets much faster with AI, generate slides much faster with AI, Like they would use it for a lot more knowledge work because, you know, all knowledge workers generate spreadsheets and slides. With 5.2, like that's a big step up in the ability to do that. Like I can tell you with 5.1, I was trying to do it and the spreadsheet was kind of janky. Things were like not really in the right place.

1:34:23With 5.2, it's like great formatting. It totally understands what, like, you know, the numbers are about. It structures them the best way. And these are the things that like help unlock completely new use cases and ultimately growth for the customers that we work with. Do you feel like there's some sort of fundamental cultural difference between your previous roles where there hasn't been so much of this divide between the consumer side of the business and the enterprise side of the business on day one? I feel like ChatGPT is unique in that it's used by kids and college students and adults, and people use it, just they bring it to work with them alongside, and then enterprises and the government's using it.

1:35:11Whereas for something like a social media application, it didn't really have that same, oh, we need this product to work for us in an enterprise context necessarily. How has that shift been designing an application that can be used? it's sort of the same underlying model, but it's used in such different ways? Yeah, it's a great question. And that's the thing that we spend a lot of time working on. The thing that's really interesting is that part of the reason why we're winning in enterprise is because we're winning in consumer. When you talk to CEOs, they tell you, well, if my workers are already completely familiar with the technology because they use it for their personal use, that's much easier to deploy that in enterprise and have that be adopted.

1:35:55So that familiarity is actually really helping us. And so the thing we're trying to do is really keep that familiarity, but upsell the tools that are really specific to enterprise. So I'll give you an example. Connectors is a great example. We do have connectors on the consumer side. You can connect your child GPT to your Gmail and things like that. But on the enterprise side, it's even more critical. You have to be connected to Slack, to all of your enterprise knowledge. And so these are cases where we push harder on the enterprise side to make sure that companies are doing what they need to unlock the value.

1:36:32Yeah. I'd love to hear your take or how you're thinking about the partnership with Disney. Jordi and I were just going back and forth on it, landed in an extremely excited place. Seems like a fantastic partnership. I think that in general, looking at the timeline this morning, obviously everybody's going to form an opinion on the partnership immediately, even before they kind of understand the facts. But as I looked at it, I think it maybe was getting less hype than maybe it deserves because it's only a$1 billion investment. It's relatively small in the context of the API. It's an investment in France.

1:37:10But if you look at Disney's scale, the example I gave last, there's like 140 million people have paid to visit a Disney park in the last year. I would imagine that all, like I can imagine a world where over the next year, every person that's visiting a Disney park is like, hey, I can kind of like personalize this experience and like take and basically create this entirely new kind of like entertainment layer to that. So I need a relationship with OpenAli one way or another. Yeah, and I'm going to pay for the product. So it feels extremely significant in a way that maybe people aren't fully appreciating.

1:37:45Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're very, very excited about it. If you think about like Sora and ImageGen, this is all about unleashing creativity. I think we're all born creators. And like if you give people the tools to create easily and to go fast from imagination to a creation, we can see, you know, the golden age of creativity. But for that, we need people to have inspiration, to have IP to play with. And Disney has by far the best IP, by far the best inspiration. And so partnering with them to bring these experiences to life is such a privilege, and we're really excited about it. Yeah. Our audience, I was thinking about this last night, our audience has probably, on average, spent way more money on ads than actually seen ads because many folks in the audience have spent money on digital ad platforms, run ad businesses.

1:38:39how do you think about positioning the ads product or whatever happens to the other side of the market, like the brands that want to be successful in the future of commerce? Do you have any idea of the shape that it will take? Because, you know, we were just doing a Black Friday stream and just one founder after another singing the praises of the meta ecosystem, even the Apple oven ecosystem, the ability to go and put money in a magical box and get customers is remarkable. Have you thought more about what you want to offer ultimately to brands and companies that will ultimately be partnering with OpenAI?

1:39:24So not much to announce to the ads, but what I can tell you is two things. One, if at some point we decide to go towards ads, we're going to do it in a way that is extremely respectful of the very special relationships that people have with chat gpt like the thing to understand is people trust that chat gpt has their back and gives them the best answer for their needs nothing we do can like jeopardize that and so you know when i talk to brands and they're like hey how can we get more distribution How can we, you know, influence the results of the LLM? So reality is have the best products. You know, we want to build an LLM that is not impacted by, you know, paying companies, that is not impacted by, you know, people giving the system and purely recommends the brands that are going to be best for you.

1:40:22Now, around that model response, you can imagine that there are things that we could do to give brand distribution. But we really want to keep the model response pure because the trust that people have in that is critical. Yeah. Is there a good, like, I don't know, like, how do you actually set up a company for that? You need, like, an editorial, like, firewall so that one team is just not even affected. They don't even, like, you know, hang out at the happy hours together and say, hey, you know, can you go do this this quarter because we have a big partner? Have you thought about what it culturally takes to get there?

1:40:56Well, the first very good news at OpenAI is that the culture is already so focused on protecting the user, protecting the purity of LLM responses. It's so ingrained that I think anyone who would, you know, shout like, hey, can you help me change things? That's a holiday party would be organ rejected. So I think that's already, you know, good. We built the right antibodies day one. The other thing is I think we're not just going to rely on culture. We're also going to rely on technical capabilities that have firewalls between these different things so that people can really trust that the model is not influenced by anything other than having their back.

1:41:38Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How are you thinking about setting up the actual applications team for success? Are you, I've been struck by the fact that the narrative has shifted in some ways from, you know, the best model wins every time, the best model, the best model, the best model, the best benchmarks, like just win and, you know, and then everyone will just switch around. It feels like we're almost leaving that era where, you know, the technical insiders, they do care about the benchmarks. They do care about the capabilities. But a lot of consumers just care about the user experience, the design, almost the qualitative aspects.

1:42:19How have you thought about developing a delightful user experience? Is that a new muscle for the organization? Do you feel like OpenAI is set up to deliver this delightful experience that can reduce churn and keep people coming back? How do you think about that? Well, first off, I would say this is a company that, despite not starting as a product company, has built the fastest growing consumer and enterprise business industry, a product with 800 million people. So while I think I can build an organization that does that even better, I really want to celebrate what they've done before me. And I think you're absolutely right.

1:43:01I think the magic is at the intersection of research and employment. So the thing I obsess about is how can we be tied at the hip with a product research team to understand what are the new capabilities that can unlock this new magical product? And you kind of see that like sort of, which we were just talking about a minute ago, it's a good example where the capability was there and like that's what unlocks everything. But then the product thinking came in of like, you know, putting characters and yourself inside the video. And so it's really a mix of like capabilities, but also a lot of delightful product thinking and really understanding what people want that unlocks these magical experiences.

1:43:44we were even talking at the beginning about kind of all of the use cases right like me like you know just giving people more intelligence in the chat bot like that's going to cap out at some point what i need to do is help them realize they can use chat gpt for health and like help them you know make that easier help them plan their travel help them shop like all of these things are going to be based on incredible models but also great products that makes this understandable because right now you're still kind of having to stumble upon the value. And when people realize they can use strategy for health, they're like, oh my God, this is unbelievable.

1:44:21But they kind of had to stumble upon it. And that means I haven't done my job fully until everyone knows how to use the value. You guys are... Sam was talking earlier this week with some folks about the push into enterprise. How are you thinking about enterprise, not on the API side, but just on the core subscription size and around pricing. Historically, as a$200 a month plan subscriber for ChatGPT, I had hit some points where I'd be frustrated because I could sense the model being lazy. And I'm like, I'm giving you as much money as you've... I'm on the highest plan. Can I be on a plan that never gets lazy?

1:45:05This is the rumored$2 ,000 a month plan that I've been clamoring for. I just like, can you make it, would it make sense to ever do an all you can eat? Consumption. All you can eat. Or consumption based. Consumption on the non-API side. Sure. Just because, you know, I think there's a lot of people. Consumer consumption based is wild. No one wants to do that. But I don't know. It's a bold statement. I'd be interested to hear what you think. Yeah. You know, we've launched credit based pricing on the enterprise side so that in addition to your subscription, you can buy extra credit to get more. I think that's a model that could possibly work on the consumer side.

1:45:43So, you know, we are open to exploring anything. We have it like now for Codex. And so, you know, that's something that we could totally explore. But I think it goes back to a lot of the very, I would say, like sophisticated people really understand the concept of buying more intelligence. Regular people just want like more outcomes. So I think the more we make that transition from a chatbot to like, you give us your list of tasks and we do your tasks, the more we're going to be able to make people realize the value. And then, you know, the pricing will follow. Your original manifesto, you outlined knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, support.

1:46:26That sort of covers everything. Is there a seventh capability that you're excited about? You mentioned spreadsheets. Maybe that's the seventh one right after time and creative expression. Put it at the top. That should be at the top. Economic freedom, spreadsheets. But is there a seventh category or a nascent, just even in your own personal use, a new capability that you feel like, okay, maybe this year has been the year of agents. We've gotten coding agents. We've gotten deep research a year or two ago. So, you know, is there some new capability that you've seen glimmers of, okay, I think we're actually solving this piece, or I think it might be good enough to use in this scenario?

1:47:08Yeah. I mean, we touched on a bunch, but what I would say is, like, for me, the next step is unlocking connection to the ecosystem. So, like, ChatGPT is still fairly insular. Yeah. And we launched, you know, at DevDay, we launched on our platform. But I think like we were talking about health, like health would be so much more powerful if you could connect chat GPT to your health record and all of your kind of bio wearables. We were talking about like travel. It's so much more powerful if chat GPT can connect with, you know, a lot of like travel companies. And so figuring out how it can not just do things in this text format, but really connecting and doing things in the real world, that's the thing that I think the models are ready for.

1:47:54But we're still catching up on the product side to make that possible and unlock these really much more sophisticated use cases. There's a ton of questions in the chat about the code red we have to ask. How is it going? Has it been an intense period culturally? it feels like there's been a lot of ups and downs in any startup's history. I imagine that it's been exciting and thrilling to re-engage, but how has it been internally so far? Well, for context, code reds are not uncommon. We declare code reds as a way to really marshal a lot of resources towards a priority. It's a way to signal what's at the top of the list and what can be deprioritized.

1:48:41and really focus. And I think during this time, focus is critical. And in terms of how it's going, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of it, but I'm pretty proud of what we're releasing today and leading the way in terms of best model for everyday professional work that has been a goal of ours for a long time. It's been in the works for a long time. It didn't start with the code red, but we're really excited to be able to release that today. And on top of that, it's our 10-year anniversary today. Wait, today? Yeah. No way.

1:49:15Get a trading card up ASAP. Team, what are we doing? 10-year anniversary of OpenAI. That's incredible. That's wild. Fantastic. That's amazing. Congratulations. How startups historically have been able to innovate because they tolerate some amount of failure. And I think if you look at the hyperscalers, too, they're willing to launch products that just don't work, right? If you look at the history of Google, they take moonshots, they make bets. Not everything works. Some do. And it's an effective way to continue to innovate. I feel like when OpenAI releases a new product now, whether it's Sora or the browser or anything like that, it faces so much scrutiny from the world.

1:50:01Some people are excited and bullish. Other people want to see it fail. What's your internal framework around failure today? because ideally you want to keep shipping a lot of things. And if you ship three things that don't work and one thing that does, it's like, great, you have a new product that you can scale. Yeah, well, you know, I'm no stranger to a lot of scrutiny throughout my career. I've worked at companies that went through a lot of phases like that. And I would tell you, I think it's like, it's simple and cliche, but you kind of have to block out the noise. The thing that's good about OpenAI is like, So Northstar, it's very clear, right?

1:50:40It's AGI that benefits all of humanity. And we have a lot of conviction internally that we're on the right path to do that. And that does mean that, you know, some things are going to work, some things aren't. And because the culture is routine in a research lab, which is very different from other companies I've worked out, I think the fear of failure is much less because people already know in research that you explore a lot of paths and like many don't work. Like that's the core of research. And so because that's the DNA, people don't freak out when a product doesn't work because they're like, oh, it's kind of like research.

1:51:14We have to test a lot of things and some of them will hit, some of them won't. But I think this innovative spirit has gotten us to where we're at and really leading the market. And I think that's something that we absolutely need to preserve. Well, thank you so much. Last question. Do you think, are we still going to see age verification this year? Or is that going to be a 2026 launch? So age verification is starting to roll out already in some countries. And we're doing a slow rollout so that we can make sure that we're very accurate in predicting the teen was an adult. And then the adult mode that's going to be unlocked by age verification is going to land in Q1.

1:51:53Got it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the amazing progress in such a strong time. Congratulations to the whole team on a decade. Congratulations on 10 years in the business of building AGI. We're feeling the AGI here. Have a great rest of your day, and we hope to talk to you soon. Good chatting. Thank you so much for letting me. Goodbye. Bye. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto. Rail securely spin up white-label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

1:52:23I love that. The WWE voice for the Stripe portfolio company. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Let's take you through some news. That was a fun back-to-back. I enjoyed both of those folks. That was, I feel like it's very funny that we were discussing all week the David Allison, Netflix, Warner Brothers. We're getting up to speed on media and what's going on there. And then, boom, we get our little treat, the crossover of the decade with Disney and Open AI. It's funny. You were clearly alluding to me being confused by the Disney Open AI deal because I went on my own roller coaster thinking, okay, is this like a nothing burger?

1:53:17Is this a good thing? And now I am fully in your camp. I think it's very good. And I think that it does feel like we might go into something like the press release economy that's going on in the prediction markets wars, where every foundation model might need to hoover up particular partnerships. Because I didn't even know exclusivity was on the table. Like, you know that OpenAI has a content licensing partnership with the Wall Street Journal. And so the Wall Street Journal gets paid when they, when I, if I hit chat GPT and I ask for a detail about SpaceX's latest launch, it's probably going to ask the Wall Street Journal.

1:53:52It's going to ask a lot of different sources, but they pay the Wall Street Journal. Now, if they do an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal and I'm like, I can't get that in Claude. Claude just doesn't know. That's way less significant because the journal reports on the same news. No, no. To me, the journal is like Disneyland on a thousand. I would gladly never go to Disneyland ever again if I could just read this precious paper newspaper every day. You're like any Disney content ever again in your life or the journal. You're riding with the journal. This is the Disneyland of business. Of your mind.

1:54:28Of your mind. No, no. Of course you are correct. There are not many Wall Street Journal fans that are anywhere near as insane as the Disney files. What is Lisan Al-Ghaib here saying? Lisan says, GBT 5.2 Pro, it has ridiculous pricing. Once again,$20 and$168. Tyler, do you know if GBT 5.2 Pro is more expensive? I guess they're raising prices. Yeah, I mean, so this is the Pro model. These are always like the very expensive ones. Yeah. I think it's pretty, let me actually look at the normal model, but I think it's pretty comparable. I guess 5.1 was$1.75 and$14. So it's a pretty significant increase.

1:55:14But I don't know. This is a new technology. We don't know where the Pareto frontier of pricing is necessarily. We don't know what price elasticity is. 5.1 was$1.25 on the input. but it's$1.75 for 5.2. It's like, you know, marginally more expensive. Yeah, well, so let's see. Direct challenge to Anthropic. The knowledge cutoff is August 31st, 2025. So Yuchin Jin here from Hyperbolic Labs, the co-founder and CTO, is saying that this is a freshly pre-trained model. Yeah, so... Do you believe that? Have you been studying the timeline while we've been live, understanding what's going on? Yeah, so some people are saying it's new pre-train.

1:56:00That's the newest cutoff date since, what was it? Is there a way that they could not do a full pre-train, but they could just kind of do an update with the new? Yeah, exactly. So people are, it's like, oh, it's a new cutoff. Usually you'd think that's a new pre-train. It's probably more like a mid-train or something like this where you basically do continued pre-training on new data. So it's probably not an actual pre-train because you'd expect that to be a much bigger update. right you'd still like oh gpd6 yeah 5.2 yeah yeah yeah i i still i still have to i still feel like the 4.0 pre-train that's like the like the latest and greatest up until now uh running that back i mean that thing was expensive but it's not that expensive compared to now because they have so much more money i don't think five wait 4.0 4.0 was never expensive it was always cheaper yeah but wasn't 4.0 like the base pre-train for like pretty much everything today to date uh yeah and so rerunning that i mean it was expensive at the time it was like probably a hundred million dollars But now,$100 million, they got 10 of those.

1:56:55That's like one AI researcher. Exactly, exactly. So they should be ripping pre-trains all the time just to keep the timeline in check. Keep them guessing. Anyway. They still got it. Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What you got here? We're eating good. Future pipelines may need to unify pre-mid post-training, injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To anyone wondering if 5.2 is a new pre-trained, I'm letting you connect the dots between this, says Alexander Doria, and this synth slash agent pipelines aside.

1:57:31This is the new main catch of DeepSeek 3.2. This isn't a new model card, new ELO update. It's an architectural update at mid-training scale. Everything is mutable, and we are likely to see more and more sub-model speculation. Interesting. Well, we'll have to let the 5.2 news sort of simmer in the timeline. Let everyone do their own benchmarks. How'd they do on Arc AGI 2? That is always an interesting one. Are we cooked? Did they blow us away? GPT 5.2 thinking is at 52.9 % up from 17.6%. That's a huge leap. Wait, we got to run our joke benchmark. Yes, let's run some of the TVP. Pull it up. We have a number of benchmarks around here.

1:58:18Try to make us laugh. While we're pulling those up, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta has AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Okay, so this is my benchmark where I ask to recreate the joke about the shrimp fried rice. Yes. So I'll just go through some of these and you guys tell me how good they are. Yes. you're telling me a crab rang this bell crab rang bell this is thinking this is 5.2 thing this is 5.2 thing this is the frontier this is the best of all time i i i kind of like you're telling me a crab rang this goon that's kind of funny yeah i think that's what i would have thought but that's not you're telling me a bear built this market oh because markets can be bullish or bearish?

1:59:08A bear built market? You're telling me a ham wrote this lettuce? A ham wrote this lettuce? Ham wrote lettuce? Wait, this is a good one. Terrible has happened. You're telling me a ghost wrote this script? Ghost wrote script? Ghost written script? ghost written. Okay, yeah, yeah. You're telling me an owl delivered this mail? Yeah. So I think on this benchmark, there's more I could, I mean, you could get the picture. I think Gemini is still the frontier here. In terms of shrimp fried rice bench? Yes. Yes, because... There were some good ones there. But again, to understand, it seems like Gemini understood the assignment, but still ultimately leaned on reddit data and broad internet data and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the internet before yes but it did find the good jokes all of the good ones um that it gave me i could find yeah that's where but but you still it it you know it's hard to like search for that kind of thing because they're not just listed as like oh these are jokes jokes yeah it's hard to look for yeah yeah i do wonder if this and also there's a thing where gemini 3 was actually a new pre-train yeah at least that's what people are saying so maybe that was all right let's try at least one more.

2:00:23Wait, I wonder if this benchmark is like saturated in the sense that like every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the internet. Is there any new territory? Like if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny as shrimp fried rice? Yes. You think you could? I think so. Okay, maybe that's a challenge. Do it. You gotta give me a month. Okay, when we... You have time. In the new year. Okay, I wanna... That's a key one thing. Just like adult mode, adult mode and Tyler discovering a new joke. are both coming in. You're telling me there's a show.

2:00:55By the way, so Stanley in the chat says, LOL, why don't they swear? Seems pretentious. I guess it is pretentious, but I don't care. No, our kids are watching at home. Yeah. Anyway, what's the next joke? You can see the swearing. You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these? You're telling me a chef boyard eat these ravioli? Okay, yeah, this is really, really rough. Oh, wait, this one's not bad. You're telling me a shepherd actually pied this? Pied this? They're really food-based. They kind of latch on to the food. You're telling me a kid napped this? Kidnapped, okay. There it is. Yeah, I don't know.

2:01:40All right, you just bombed, Tyler. You just bombed. Hopefully 5.3. GT3 RS Bench. Let's do GT3 RS Bench. This is the benchmark here at TVPN where we ask every Frontier model to write unique copy, marketing copy for a GT3 RS from Porsche. And we have an astute eye we watch for any tells that can tell you that this was AI written. Is it generic? Does it use contrastive parallelism? Does it use antithetical parallelism? Antithetical parallelism is, of course, when grammatically you say, it's not this, it's that. It's not just a new AI model. It's an entirely new way of thinking, right? That is contrastive parallelism.

2:02:23There's a good Wikipedia article, I think is relatively new, where it has a bunch of tales of AI that has like a bunch more stuff than what Wesley said. Yes. And people were going back and forth with Rune over this, where Rune was saying, I think you could actually build an AI detector. People were saying, well, OpenAI had one of those, and then they took it down because it wasn't working. But it's weird because I feel like, yes, AI written text should be impossible to detect. Like we're so past the Turing test. The models are incredible. It really is remarkable. And yet I can totally tell when people use ChatGPT to write a blog post.

2:02:59It's just obvious. So anyway, let's do GT3RS Bench. There is a, I read a paper like a month ago and there's this company around it, I think Pangram, but they do like actually pretty good. Oh, they do good detection? Detection, yeah. But do you want me to read the, this is GT3RS Bench. Written by either GPT 5.2 or handcrafted by a marketing genius. Y 'all have to tell us, Jordy. Do you think this was AI or not? Let's read it. I mean, he just said it was. This isn't a car you own. No.

2:03:35Just immediately out of the gate. You're out of the gate with the AI slap. It's not this. It's literally the first line. It's not a car you own. It's a car you cherish. It's a car you own so much as one you operate. Wait, really? That's the first line? That's the first line. Oh, wait. Wait. That's not even a good line. That's insane. Okay, keep going. Keep going. The 911 GT3 RS is a Porsche at its most uncompromising. Like that. A naturally aspirated 4L flat 6 screaming to a 9 ,000 RPM. Ray-spread aerodynamics. Never been in a car before, brother? Never been in a car before? Oh, it's 4L. Yeah, it stands for leader.

2:04:16I don't know. Race bread aerodynamics that generate real downforce. Okay. And a chassis engineered for lap times. Okay. Not likes. M - not likes. What? That's not even true. Yeah. It's like the most over, I mean, I shouldn't say it's overhyped, but it's like the most hyped car on the internet. It is engineered for likes. It is? In some ways, it's like, it's not. I think it puts up good track times. It's a great track car, but it's. It is engineered. Oh, no, no, no. Most people are buying it for the road for likes. We were talking about this with the G-Wagon. Like, the G-Wagon has a particular vibe around it now, where it is sort of like an influencer mobile.

2:04:57I think you've made the joke that, like, it's the standard issue in L.A. when you become an influencer. One just shows up, right? Well, that's partly because the roads in L.A. are so bad. You need something that could off-road in a pinch. Yes, yes. And so, but the question is like, is that Mercedes designing the G-Wagon for influencers? Like, no, not at all. It's like they designed it. They just stuck with it for a long time. Eventually, the influencers adopted it. You can't put that on Mercedes. It's not their fault that all the influencers drive them. Anyway. Yeah. Let's continue with GPT-3 RS Bench.

2:05:31Is that it or is there more? No, there's more. Okay. Keep reading the slop. Every surface has a purpose. Every input is immediate. Every drive feels like a qualifying lap. Built with WISOC level obsession, the GT3RS deletes... Did I also get that wrong? No, it's okay. You just hesitated. You hesitated. You just sound like someone who doesn't talk about WISOC packages very often. WISOC. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I guess like Weimar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The GT3RS deletes anything unnecessary and doubles down on feel. Lightning-fast PDK shifts, surgical steering, and suspension tuned straight from the Nürburgring playbook.

2:06:12Playbook? The Nürburgring playbook. What is the Nürburgring playbook? It's loud, stiff, dramatic, emdash, and utterly alive. This is not a luxury purchase. It's a statement of priorities. It's a statement of priorities. I don't understand how the it's not this is that is still in the soup. Like, just run the trough through. Because it's not a new pre-train, basically. I think it's one of the... It might be that OpenAI team low-key hates AI-generated written word as well, and they want to continue to be able to identify it easily. Maybe, maybe. I like that. It might be they're doing a public service here.

2:06:53Okay. So, getbezel.com. Shop over 26 ,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Cha-ching. ArcPrize is breaking it down. A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI 03 High that scored 88 % on Arc AGI 1 at an estimate of$4 ,500 per task. Today, we verified a new GPT 5.2 Pro X high state-of-the-art score of 90 % at$11.64 per task. This represents a 390X efficiency improvement in one year. This is the headline. This is the story. This is the best fact, I think, about GPT 5.2. This is massive congratulations to the OpenAI team for delivering at this level.

2:07:51This is remarkable. Really, really great stuff. I love it. Now, go do it for RKGI 3. What have you done for me lately? The biggest failure this year was not getting goalposts here in the studio. Yes, yes. Production team, we need goalposts. Can you order on Amazon right now? We need physical goalposts that we can move around the studio every time one of these releases comes out. Like a full-size one? No, something that me and Jordy can lift up and move to a different piece of the studio. And then we'll have a sign that has whatever our next goalpost is, you know, Arc AGI V3. I want them to, you know, one shot that.

2:08:34And we will move the goalposts over there. And then we will erect a new goal. and we will move the goalposts over there on the release of a new model that does whatever we said was going to impress us, but now no longer is enough to impress us. Well, you know what else is impressive? This scoop from Reid Albergati, the tech editor at Semaphore, colleague of Ben Smith. He says, scoop, Google names a new chief to head up its$100 billion a year AI infrastructure build out Amin Vadat, who will report to Sundar directly. This is very exciting. Imagine having a$100 billion budget for CapEx. That's like Ben's dream.

2:09:22Four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah, Ben. Every time straight. If you're really, so Ben's a CapEx guy here. Almost every time he walks up. To me, he wants another$30 ,000 for a new camera, this light, this. It's going up next year. There's one more. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for goalposts that will probably wind up costing$30 ,000. Yeah, we're part of the problem. We are. We are. Martin Cassato says, incredibly smart move by Google. Amin is absolutely unique in his academic, technical, operational, and business depth. Huge deal. Well, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable.

2:10:07Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Angela from WorkTrace.ai. She's in the Restream waiting room, and now she's in the TBP and Ultradone. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Angela? Good to meet you. Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's nice to meet you guys. Great to meet you. Congratulations on the news. Please introduce yourself, the company. Give us the news. I have a mallet here. Getting ready to ring the gong. Yes, I'm Angela. most recently a co-founder of WorkTrace AI, where we just came out of stealth today. So we're excited to talk to you about it.

2:10:41Before this, I was doing a lot of deep learning. So, you know, it was deep learning job after deep learning job. Most recently with that OpenAI the last three years, mostly doing product management. And yeah, when I was at OpenAI, I mean, we were also making these amazing models like they are now more and more. But there is still this gap, you know, that we hear about where people aren't getting their magic moments from AI, despite the models being super duper intelligent. It's pretty funny. You said you were doing a lot of deep learning as a product manager. Some other product managers are doing a lot of deep research these days where they're effectively glorified deep research.

2:11:19I do a lot of deep research these days. A lot of my docs are powered by deep research, I have to admit. So, I mean, Sam Altman's been on record before talking about how not to get steamrolled. Like, do not start a company that is predicated on the model staying the same capabilities. Like, if your whole pitch is, I got a new LLM and it does pretty well on RKGI, well, today was a bad day for you. But there are plenty of other pockets of opportunities. Obviously, OpenAI believes in you because the OpenAI Fund invested. But how did you think about creating durability or positioning the company in a way that was maybe synergistic with what OpenAI is already doing?

2:12:05Yeah. I guess one benchmark for it is that when 5.2 came out today, we were excited to try it. Yes, exactly. It's an exciting day for us too. That's good. Yeah, when we thought about it, I mean, for me, when I was there, OpenAI is so strong at making just really amazing models. But I feel like they themselves, but they also want help from whoever to help distribute these models to the world. I mean, there's so many people that need to benefit from these. And it's very difficult to actually get these into the context of enterprises, real world use cases. It requires a lot of boots on the ground and getting deep into the use cases.

2:12:46Ultimately, they are punching above their weight in terms of how many people they have to get all of the amazing models they have out into the world. And that's something that we felt was super complimentary to them. Yeah. Walk me through the product experience, how a company might actually integrate WorkTrace and start building a bespoke workflow over time. what's the actual diffusion process into an organization to start getting value? Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you about what I think the status quo is, which is what I saw when I was a product manager, which is that a team comes in, they know that AI could be transformative for their industry.

2:13:29And so they want to invest in it. However, they're keeping up with what is going on with the latest 5.2 model. What does that mean for them? They're keeping up with what's actually going on in their workforce. And so what they often do is they bring in consultants or tech services company or the open AI go-to-market team to be able to figure out what is the exact right use cases that they should apply this particular model or the model they know that's going to come out in three months to these particular teams that they know need help. So that takes like months as far as my experience has gone.

2:14:05Whereas with WorkTrace, what we do is what we're able to do is like have a desktop app to be able to see, you know, what work is going on and then be able to flag that, hey, this is tasks that seem repetitive, that you seem to be spending a lot of time on, that are breaking your flow, that 5.2 happens to be very, very good at today. Why don't you consider building out a workflow with 5.2 for this exact use case? So what that looks like then is like a prioritized list of use cases. So a roadmap basically for AI transformation for a company. And then for each of those use cases, it'll have actually the JSON or the output that you need to input into OpenAI Agent Builder to actually start running an agent for that workflow.

2:14:50That's interesting. How do you deal with the scenario where the system is observing a workflow and in the process of that identification of a workflow, it becomes clear that the person should just be using SaaS instead of, like if somebody is like, oh yeah, every day they open a spreadsheet and they have a list of people's names and phone numbers and how recently they contacted them, like that might just be a sales opportunity to get them on a CRM. You don't necessarily need to agentically build a new CRM, maybe, but how do you deal with those scenarios? Because there's a lot of companies where they're not even on the frontier of SaaS implementation.

2:15:30Yeah, and there's a lot of industry-wide process mining tools that look for bottlenecks in your work or maybe where you should use those other tools. And so despite how good the models are, most of your work today probably can't be done with agents. There's a huge amount that can be, though, and that's specifically what we're looking to find. So we'll mine for the ones that can today be used for agents. And we're making a bet that that amount will just get larger and larger over time. Yeah. And do you think that you have to live on the desktop in an app? Because I imagine that if my workflow is slow, but it's taking place inside of the Salesforce ecosystem or something, they're not just going to let you build something on top?

2:16:15Or will they? Like, how does AI bump into these, like, walled gardens that are going to prop up in enterprise software where, you know, Mark Benny, I was probably thinking, like, I don't want you puppeteering my software. I want to be the one doing that. I see. I mean, for us, I mean, to understand how work happens, it's best to be able to just see what you see when you're doing work. Yeah. Which, honestly, is more than your desktop. It's, like, also your phone. Your phone, yeah. And, you know, it's like, you know, you in meetings and whatnot. However, you know, we find that we go a long way by seeing just what's happening on your desktop to get a sense of how your work is going.

2:16:52In terms of actually then doing the tasks, I mean, we still use the tools that you use. You know, we integrate them with Salesforce or any of the normal tools that you might be using because, I mean, that is just how work happens. And we want to meet you where your work is. Yeah. Do you think some people that are aggressively pursuing a forward deployed model are going to look at your solution and think like, oh, maybe I didn't need to send my most valuable human capital out into the world. I could have just sent an app, a screen recorder, because it feels like this is like a potentially a more, at least for a lot of different types of work, a much more elegant solution than let's fly this person out, put them in a short-term rental or hotel.

2:17:35Let's have them just sit in the office when you can actually just use, in order to implement AI, when you can use AI to basically watch someone's screen and discover what these workflows actually look like? Yeah, I mean, part of it is that there's not that many AI experts in the world for what we need. There's not that many FDEs that we could deploy out. So most of the companies that we're working with probably can't afford FDEs to come over for a couple of months at a time, but also continuously as AI changes. But also, yeah, at the same time, when we were thinking about what we were doing to help companies get up to date on AI, we were listening to their workflows, we were understanding their workflows, breaking it down, looking at variations, which just happens to be something that AI is particularly good at.

2:18:21So when we saw like what it took to actually find use cases, and then put them in the format that agent builders needed, it just felt like that in and of itself was a great use case for AI, which is actually what made us super bullish to pursue this idea. Get us up to speed on the fundraising history. I want to know what the latest news is. Yeah. So we recently closed our seed round, which we're super duper excited about. How much? Nine million. There we go. Very, very cool. I'm super excited about this. I love when an idea is obvious and you just sit here thinking, why didn't anybody do this before?

2:19:04And sometimes it just takes the right team to come along and do it. And look at who's in this DABC conviction, OpenAI. Logan Kilpatrickson, big fan of him. Mira Maradi, wow, you really... Murderers Row. Murderers Row. And Genius Ventures. I'm an LP, so yeah, very excited. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. I have a feeling you'll be back for the A within a quarter. I think so. I just got a feeling. Hoping for it too. Hoping to see you guys soon. Also, the chat is obsessed with you. They think that you should go on Joe Rogan apparently, which I don't know why, but I do think that would be a fun thing.

2:19:48So good luck to you on the rest of the media tour. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas. Cheers. Goodbye. 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. I'm getting back in it. My fall off needed to be studied. It's very clear what happened. I flew to New York City and I slept in a bunk bed, which was not ideal. Randomly, I wound up in one hotel room, four bunk beds. We didn't book the hotel. None of them fit me. The hotel room was booked by another company. It was a mistake. They pranked us. Nick is a fantastic hotel.

2:20:27What did you get, though? What did you get? I got an 87. What did you get? I got an 80. I'm back. I'm back, baby. never challenge me at sleep. Never go snooze for snooze with me because I will out snooze you. And next we are joined by John from Scrub Capital. John is a practicing neurosurgeon, health system leader, multi-time co-founder. What's happening? CMO. Welcome to the show. And more. Welcome to the stream. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you get us up to speed on some of the writing that you've been doing, some of your overall thinking on how America is misunderstanding self-driving cars, what we need to change, the actual message, the status quo, and then the message that we need to get out.

2:21:17Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. So look, up until right around now, we've been thinking about autonomous vehicles as a tech moonshot, you know, cool tech story, take shots at it, like it, whatever side you're on. But what I'm trying to say, and now others are joining too, is this is a public health urgency now. Because what happened is Waymo put out data at 100 million miles. This is about a month or two ago. You can go download and analyze it yourself. They put out all the raw data. And what I found was astonishing. We're facing, guys, the possibility that if we play our cards right now going forward, we could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of death in the United States.

2:21:58That's crazy. Wait, it's the leading cause. I thought it was cancer. As a leading cause. As a leading cause. Yeah. It's huge though. Isn't it tens of thousands of people? Yeah. 40 ,000 a year. And for children and young adults, it's the number two cause of death in the United States. And it's the number one worldwide for children. And it also, I mean, not all life is precious, obviously, but it also must be a cause of death of young people because it's so random when it happens. It's not something where, you know, oh, someone's lived their full life and then they passed away. Yeah, that's right.

2:22:31It does tend to bias towards younger people, healthier time of life. It's not like it tends to be the sick and elderly, that's for sure. So, but I'm totally with you. I buy it hook, line and sinker. I'm a believer, but also it seems like it's going fine because like Google has a trillion dollars of cashflow and they're going to do this and Waymo is rolling out. What do we really need to change? It seems like everything's going well. Right. So look, we have a regulatory capture problem right now, guys. And I was so glad to come on TVPN. You could look at coverage in the Washington Post, coverage in the Boston Globe.

2:23:07City councils and other moneyed forces have politicians' ears and they're working against this. And I think we got to work to liberate this and get the message out that this is not a risk story. This is a safety story, you know, from my perspective now looking at this from a medical lens. And, you know, I haven't even scratched the surface, and I'm sure I'm going to get all flamed on Twitter now and everything else. Plaintiff Barr in a lot of places is what's opposing this as well. And I won't impute motive, but people can use their imaginations. Okay, so what's happening in California that allows me to every other week I log on, I see that Waymo's map is expanding California.

2:23:49It seems like it's going well. Historically has been, I don't know, I would imagine that this would be a tougher environment than other states that are less population dense. Jordy, what's interesting about this is this doesn't respect traditional political tribes or left coast, right coast, whatever. It actually, it cuts jagged across typical tribes often. So like you can have far left people where they love bikes but love that Waymos are safer. So it's like, great. But then there's a group over there that doesn't want any vehicles. So Waymo's are a problem. Then you might have libertarians that say, you know, technology acceleration, let's go, let's go, let's go.

2:24:28But then, well, wait, are the vehicles surveilling me? So, you know, this is not traditional tribes. And I think what we're seeing now is the data is moving people further and further along in this story, tribe independent. And to get to your question, Jordan, I think a lot of these companies are based – sorry, Waymo certainly is based in California. And there's a West Coast heaviness to this. And to be fair, Tesla is now also demoing this in Austin right now with human drivers still. Do you have any other reads on how this might break from a regulation perspective? It feels like we could be coming up on a seatbelts in car scenario where self-driving technology is a requirement for all the OEMs and they have to either white label it from Waymo, white label it from Tesla.

2:25:19It needs to be available more widely. Tesla and Waymo, I don't think that's in their business model. I don't think they necessarily want to put it in every Toyota and Honda, but you're making a health-based case. And maybe at a certain point, there needs to be a requirement. How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, so right. Like airbags, we all remember that they started as kind of like a luxury thing on the high end, S-class Mercedes, and then worked their way down. I think we're going to progressively see this with progressively more and more automation. So right now, like the automatic braking is in there and almost everybody has that.

2:26:01But it's going to start to filter down. And Jordi and John, I think insurance industry pressure is going to push this too. We're eventually, when the data gets stronger and stronger, and I think we're about a couple of weeks away from Google's next, sorry, Waymo's next data dump. Because just following their usual trend, I think we're a couple of weeks away from probably 125 million miles. I think that this data is going to start to push rate differential over time and that that's going to kind of get people moving. Yeah, it's funny. If you were expecting a debate, you're not going to get one because I agree with everything you're saying here.

2:26:34But you did go to The New York Times to write this essay. Did you get pushback from The New York Times readership? Was there was that a conscious choice? I'm just trying to understand, like, who is the current, what is the current shape of the anti-self-driving car constituency look like? Because I'm starting to understand the anti-AI data center constituency. And I get that. Like, it's ugly in your backyard. Or if your power rates go up, like, that makes sense. There's a tradeoff there. But who's not happy? What was the reaction to the New York Times piece? Yeah, so the New York Times was interesting.

2:27:13And I'll tell you, there was a very famous magazine that I pitched this to, and they weren't interested because they were writing their own. And this one definitely got a lot more traction. So the team there was the crack editors, obviously. And the fact-checking is incredible. I mean, I knew it was good, but I mean, every word, every statistic, check twice, it seems. And I don't know if that's just because this is a super high-impact story or because it's what we do. But when I was watching, they actually shut down the message board when it got to about 2 ,400 messages. They might have been tired of moderating it.

2:27:48And I saw, you know, really these, again, these jagged splits where I guess it's sort of obliquely cutting across groups. And I'm having trouble. Now, I understand there's some data coming out that it actually tends to cut across tech literacy. So more so than like left, right, libertarian, not. It's how tech literate you are. And that's going to get progressively interesting, I think. Yeah. What do you think about the job displacement narrative around self-driving cars? That does feel like, you know, there are people whose jobs are to drive around. Some of them will be potentially displaced. It certainly has an effect on the taxi cab market.

2:28:26Self-driving cars in other contexts still seems like it's pretty far away. But how do you think about balancing the economic effects, the employment effects with the health benefits effectively? Yeah. So this is a critical question. I want to make sure that's clear. Like this isn't just willy-nilly. Let's go put these everywhere tomorrow. The call is for this to be done smartly starting like yesterday, right? And let's make this a national priority. And the job question is critical. And I don't want to ever be glib about it. I wrote a whole kind of mini thesis, and there wasn't room for it in the piece, and I'm certainly not a labor expert.

2:29:04But what I think is a couple things. One, we're already facing a labor shortage in a lot of markets, as you know, not a surplus. And we have supply chain and value chain breaking because of this. So I think what I'm looking here is we have a chance if we do this right with upskilling and other things. And I know upskilling gets panned a lot of the time. But I think we need to be thinking about moving people from operator to manager, supervising fleets of vehicles. and we could have a truck driver managing a fleet of 10 autonomous rigs from a command center, who, by the way, now goes to sleep in his own bed rather than hers, and rather than staring in a white line for 11 straight hours in a dangerous environment, I think that's a waste of human potential.

2:29:46Now, I want to be clear. Their jobs are super important right now. They're keeping the country alive. So nobody here that I'm saying that their job is a waste of human potential. I'm saying if we just then don't figure out what to do with their jobs, because this is happening whether we like it or not. We need to think about how to use that incredible expertise and apply it smartly. And then, you know, I'd like to say in 1981 was the peak cigarette manufacture. 650 billion cigarettes were manufactured in 1981. Now we're down to 125 billion cigarettes a year. and none of us heard about an epidemic of job displacement because of cigarettes being dropped by 85%.

2:30:30So let's do this right starting today. And I don't know if you're going to go there, but if we don't, we're going to be importing Chinese technology. They have no less than seven companies pursuing full-stack autonomous vehicles right now. Makes sense. and I'm glad. If I can name more than seven American autonomy companies, Waymo, Tesla, Comet AI, Ghost is not doing well. There's a couple that are not doing okay anymore, but it is a backup drag. Casers Company? Yeah, yeah. Applied Intuition. Yeah. While we have you, I wanted your quick take on peptides. We're seeing an explosion of demand. And you're an investor in a bunch of different health and medical companies.

2:31:24I'm curious how you've viewed this category. It feels tough to invest in for a lot of reasons, regulatory. A lot of these therapies are not actually proven by any type of real studies. But I'm curious if you've got a hot take for us. Yeah, I don't know if it's a hot take. But look, so first of all, disclosure, we're investors in Lifeforce. course certainly check out life force and but so I've joked and others have that you remember this old book Prozac Nation I think the new I want I wish I had time to write peptide nation like one of us need or male let's do it together we need to make time for that but this is where we're going and the data is getting stronger and stronger in pockets as a physician I got to say I'm not giving anybody medical advice right now to talk to your own doctor.

2:32:15But me and Chrissy Farr, and you can Google this, we surveyed 135 clinicians who are active in health span on what they do themselves, not what they do for their patients, what they take themselves. And something like 15 or 20 % of them are on more than one injectable, including peptide, of course, TRT and other things and i i think i like a just doctor personally there's no i i i build stress you can't get me in the clinic if he's over 10 body fat he's got to be dried out he's got to be diced yeah he's got to be solid separation it's got to be stringy is it okay if he's cutting and bulking or does it just what he's cutting i typically only go in for the check-in when he's on a cut when he's in fighting form kind of stage ready you want to when you're making your appointment, you almost need to know where are they.

2:33:07Exactly. Miss me when you're bulking. I want to see you ready to go to the Arnold. I want you stage ready. I want you dry. Because bodybuilders are the epitome of health. Yes, exactly. Rodney's looking great. You are looking great. This is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. We're with you. I think it's a good reframing. I like it a lot. so much investment happening in AI broadly. And it is interesting that, and how much the government is doing to try to break down walls to support the industry. Yeah, it is funny. There's all this debate about like, will AI cure cancer?

2:33:50Will AI save lives? Is that just lip service from the big AI companies? And it's like, well, this one could literally save 40 ,000 lives a year. That's good. That's more than many cancers. That's a ton. And there's no reason why we shouldn't do that. And then we should celebrate it as AI saving lives. Like, that would be great. It's more than homicide and plane crashes combined every year. And if I could leave one thing, I would say to folks, look, this is not something that, oh, my God, Waymo started on this and Tesla started on this six months ago. And it looks great. This has been 15 years of deliberate work at Waymo.

2:34:25And I don't work for Waymo. I want to be clear. I'm not invested in Waymo unless it's through a mutual funded Alphabet indirectly or whatever. But this has been handled for 15 years with the rigor of what I would say is most analogous to a medical device. Not an app, not like a wearable, an actually regulated medical device. So what I want to say to people is that this is a moment now that's ready for safe and effective acceleration. Yeah. It's been incredibly high stakes. There have been multiple, I'm pretty sure multiple, artificial intelligence, self-driving companies where they've had a terrible accident and it's basically destroyed the entire company.

2:35:06And so the entire industry has moved slowly. But in this case, it's good because there is human life on the line. I would call it deliberate movement. And I completely agree with you. Time to get into the world. Do this right. And this will be remembered as one of the historic top three moments of American exceptionalism. If we don't let it slip out of our hands. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. We'll have you back on soon. Thanks a lot, John. Thanks, Jordy. Cheers. Hop in that Waymo.

2:35:38Head over to Wander.com. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, and you can get there in your self-driving car. Our next guest is Aaron Cannon. That is a powerful name. That's a powerful name. Scrub Capital. They saw him, and they were like, put the capital in the cannon. Launch the Capital Cannon at Aaron Cannon. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you. And look at that chart in the background. What? Cheeky little chart. Guys, that's real numbers. That's actually real data.

2:36:17Real data. Hit it again. Hit it again a few times. There we go. There we go. We're fired up, Aaron Cannon. We're happy to have you on the show. Thank you. Would love an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Aaron. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Outset. I was on your show, I think it was at YC Demo Day, like six months ago. That's right. That's right. We were super bullish on you. That's awesome. No wonder you're back. Thank you. No wonder you're back. I had my yellow ramp hat on in the YC offices, and I was sharing our Series A. Well, yeah, so break it down for people because they're going to assume you were in a batch this year.

2:36:56But you went through in 2022, was it? Yeah, we were 2023. Summer 23, we went through YC batch and been growing since then. I just happened to be in the office and we raised our Series A at the YC demo day. So I popped in. And, yeah, so Outset is AI moderated research. So if you've ever tried to understand your customers or something, it really sucks today or in the past. And finally, it doesn't suck. I mean, basically, surveys are the old school way to do it. Or you talk to users one by one and talk to maybe a dozen or so. And now AI does it for you. So that's what our platform does. And we just raised our Series B, announced it yesterday from Radical Ventures.

2:37:40There it is. And, yeah, it's been great. So here we are. Incredible. Did you ever, was Paul Graham ever concerned about Outset? Was he worried, you know, founders might stop talking to their customers or is he comfortable with the AI talking to the customer on their behalf? You know, I didn't clear this with PG personally, but. Dude, you got to clear it with PG. You got to get his blessing. You got to get his blessing. I did not do that, but it's part of the reason we don't work as much with startups and we work with Microsoft, Google, folks like that. Weight Watchers and Nestle. And so, so we go for the big enterprises.

2:38:19What is, what does success look like when, when you're working with these companies? What are you pushing towards? Is it a key insight that impacts a, a future product decision? You know, what is actually winning look like? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it generally falls into two things. Like either they're doing product research where it's about a key insight that drives a product decision of what to build or even like not to build. There's like a famous Airbnb, Brian Chesky told the story of like, there was like a million dollar, you know, research saved the millions of dollars because of like one bad design, right?

2:38:55And so like, you know, it could be a massive, like a single insight can be hugely differentiating for a product. And then there's marketing where you're saying like, I'm about to, you know, release a new product to a new market, you know, you're Nestle and you're testing new concepts. You got to get that right, right? So that's, that looks like making smarter decisions and making them really, really fast. And that's like the real thing is that now with us, you can actually gather, you know, hundreds of actual interviews, like in-depth, nuance, like really hear from people. And you can do that in a couple of hours.

2:39:23And then we synthesize all that data so you can go make a decision. Are you guys taking away jobs from researchers or are researchers just able to do far more work and get far more insight? The classic AI question of, yeah it's so the reality just feels like yeah i mean if you look in engineering organizations people are like my engineers are much more effective i'm going to make i'm going to build a lot more product i want more great engineers in this case i i don't have a lot of insight into how research teams at some of these big companies work but i could see them saying hey we historically needed to hire this outside firm to conduct this research or and we needed x number of people to kind of manage it and try to unpack what was actually happening.

2:40:09A lot of them might also have just been using web forms, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what we actually see on the ground is very much not the get rid of your research. It's quite the opposite. And I think the reason for that is there isn't a ceiling of like, I don't need any more insight on a thing, right? There's actually kind of an insatiable demand for it. The problem is the old way was not economical. So you have your researchers, they do one study every month or two, and it would be talking to 15 users. And now that one researcher can actually do a study every week each time talking to 200 users.

2:40:46And so you basically are making smarter decisions. And then you add the speed at which people are putting new products into the world. You actually need that insight faster, right? And so what we see on the ground is basically a research team adopting it and saying, holy crap, like I can actually go like do twice as much or go twice as fast with, you know, the same people we have on the team today. How multimodal are you today? How multimodal do you want to be in a few years? I can imagine research is happening, you know, on video interviews, audio, text-based interviews, web forms. Like what are you doing today and what do you want to do?

2:41:25We want to do all the modes, all the modals. So today we are video, audio, text, and then you can do kind of forums, things like classic survey questions. Like radio buttons and checkboxes. So do you just email or text a customer and say, may I research you? Yeah, that's exactly it. That's the language, may I research you. But then we also do screen sharing. So that's actually where you're getting a participant of video, audio, radio buttons, and then also share their screen while they're interacting with your prototype. So you've got to do all of that together. And then we partner with a bunch of panels that are called to help kind of source people.

2:42:06So in our platform, we can actually source from millions of people. And are you building like the full customer experience management platform down to data collection, but then also analysis? Because it sounds like you're adding sourcing, but it's not like you're going to give me a big bag of text and then I got to go sort it out elsewhere. Yeah. The theory has always been like if we're going to help you scale and speed up the way you collect the data, we got to break it down for you afterwards, right? And it's just two sides of the same coin. So since day one, we've had these two sides, right?

2:42:41Our core platform, AI Moderated Research, is like collect the data, synthesize the data, tell you what matters. The thing we now are building into the future and the reason we raised a bunch of this money, you know, just six months later, is like we're going from think like, you know, study by study. I got a question. Let me go answer it. To the always on customer intelligence platform, right? The experience management where, you know, at every touch point, you know, you get off a flight, you get a, oh, how was your flight? or you get a post-purchase feedback form and really every point in the journey, right, should actually be conversational insight, should be continuous.

2:43:15We should have contextual questions that actually make sense. And so pulling all that together. Makes a lot of sense. Sorry, I have one more. Fraud detection. Like, what does that look like? And yeah, like, is that AI powered or AI enabled or is that just like best practices? Like what, what is the bad, like how big of a problem is fraud and customer research? Yeah. If you talk to anybody in the industry, they'll say like, it's a big, it's a problem. And chat GPT made it worse. Right. Yeah. Um, so is that, is that, what does that look like? Because I get paid a hundred dollars to tell Microsoft or get a gift card to tell Microsoft how I'm using Microsoft Excel.

2:43:56And I'm like, well, if I just go to chat GPT and I'm like, how am I using Excel? It'll just make something up. And then I just copy paste that in and then I get the hundred dollar Starbucks gift card. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, that's right. But what happens is like on surveys, it's really bad, right? Because you have an open, a free text field and you just paste it in. You just try to detect whatever, yeah. Right. Like luckily, because most of our customers are doing very like video-based stuff, it is much more, right? That is harder to like, you know, fake your way through. But we built our own fraud detection agent, right?

2:44:26And it's like, it's actually kind of fun to watch because it's basically looking at your screener answers. Like, oh, you said you were an expert in, you know, Python. And then later in the interview, as they're interviewed about what tools you're using, it's like they don't know anything about it. And then as a customer, you get your reasoning. So the AI agent tells you, well, this guy does not know what he's talking about. And so it's pretty impressive. It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Did we hit the dong already? Hit it again. I'll hit it again.

2:44:54We did. Yeah, hit it one more. Hit it again. I'll be back. $30 million series. I don't know if we actually got to the number. $30 million series. Come back and push yourself in the team. Come back in Q1. It's not all about fundraising, but it is a pretty good indicator of momentum. Call up Rob Taves at Radical Ventures. Say, give me another$30, give me another$30. How about$300? Yeah. How about you put your money where your mouth is, Rob? Make a bet. Take a bet on us. Look at that graph. Yeah, look at that graph. Look at that graph. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you again.

2:45:23Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. Broadcom has smashed earnings. earnings per share of 195 versus 172 projected revenue of 18 billion people were projecting 18 17 and a half look at this ai image of a crying bear relative to avg bears and shambles

2:45:52up three percent green line after after market jack riding the green line after hours sorry And that is fantastic news for the good folks over at Broadcom. Congratulations to everyone on smashing earnings. And thank you to the chat for calling it out. Our next guest is from K2 Space. How are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. We are trying to pull up some audio. Do we have audio here? Can we play this? Yeah. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself and the company. Hey, guys. I'm Karan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of K2 Space. and can i mean obviously space is in the news but can you give us a little bit more color on how you fit into the orbital economy yeah yeah so about three and a half years ago i started this company with my brother neil um we wanted to build really large really high power satellites which at the time was a pretty big contrarian bet against the market everyone was kind of going smaller with their satellites yeah and so we kind of looked at it we were like hey like actually the future if you think about it is all about higher power higher power right and we're seeing that but things that we're probably about to talk about with the data centers and everything.

2:46:59But yeah, we're building the largest space platforms that have ever existed. The largest space. So, but, but, but, but importantly, you're not building the rockets. That's right. Yeah. We're just doing the satellites. We're going to be launch vehicle agnostic. Most of our first missions are going to be on, on SpaceX, SpaceX rockets, but over time we'll probably use a bunch of others. And when you were building the company, did you have a, a thesis around how the launch market would play out? Because there's, I feel like maybe this came up when you were pitching VCs, but there was, there's probably a risk that, hey, if SpaceX becomes like a really powerful monopoly, they're gonna be able to squeeze you like crazy.

2:47:39So was your initial thinking or bet, hey, I love SpaceX, it's amazing, it's unlocking an incredible new capability, but I do think that, you know, Firefly will be doing some stuff, Rocket Lab might be doing stuff. Blue Origin might be doing stuff. And eventually, the market will play out that I can actually carve out a business here one way or another. I mean, 70 % of our company comes from SpaceX. My brother is an ex-SpaceXer. So we're all pretty big fans of SpaceX. And, you know, they've made such a massive difference in the market, right? Like when we talk about there being like launch abundance, right?

2:48:15It's both because they made bigger and bigger launch vehicles and they increased the frequency of those launches, right? Like they're blowing past 150 launches this year as if it's nothing. Right. It's crazy. So we always knew that we were going to be big users. Yeah. We always knew we were going to be big users of SpaceX rockets, but I think it's pretty cool to see a bunch of the other launch players coming online. Right. Like there's a number of new players, whether it's like relativity, whether it's Andy over at Stoke, whether it's the folks over at Firefly. I think it's, it's a really unique opportunity we have right now where hopefully five to 10 years from now we have a bunch of choices.

2:48:48Yeah. Okay. So, so, so biggest, big satellites been in the business of making big satellites what was the first big satellite that you thought would be valuable communications put a camera on it spy satellites hubble telescope what do you what were you originally thinking uh before every venture capitalist said pivot to ai so we started with giant telescopes which is kind of a bit of a bit of an extreme departure from uh ai but uh but yeah we want to build really large telescopes because everyone knows james james webb right? Like awesome, highly performant telescope, but it costs billions of dollars and took like 20 years to produce.

2:49:23Right. And that's like kind of the, the straw by which we take data from the rest of the solar system. Right. And so we want to build many more straws and many bigger straws over time. We realized like, actually, if we go bigger, well, now we can start to deploy a lot of power because we can host bigger solar rays. And if we go bigger, we can build platforms that are radiation tolerant and can handle different orbits and different parts of the solar system. But it all actually stemmed from giant telescopes, which is a little-known fact, actually, about K2. But, I mean, the news today,$250 million, a$3 billion valuation, doesn't look like a science project-type funding round.

2:50:00You got T. Rowe Price, Altimeter, Lightspeed. T. Rowe Price? What does that look like? I don't know. I mean, typically, wouldn't that be pretty common in a pre-IPO? It's like a growth—yeah, these are serious investors. So what is the shape of the business? I imagine that you actually have serious traction and progress actually delivering capabilities. What's the majority of the customer-based product mix look like right now? Yeah, so because we've went in such a different direction, we started as just a tactical contrarian bet that two and a half years ago, started to get a lot of commercial traction.

2:50:36So over the last three years, we've basically gone from 5 million in TCV in 23 to 50 million in TCV in 24 to 500 million in TCV in 25. And this is from a mix of large commercial and government customers. I don't know that many three and a half of your old companies that are like half a billion in TCV. That's insane. So, yeah, take me inside one of those contracts. Give me an example of what you're delivering. Yeah, so the perfect example of power is when you think about communications, right? More power equals more throughput. So if I drive up the power, right, any space-based data constellation suddenly gets more and more effective, right?

2:51:16And we were just like driving up the power incrementally, right? Like the typical satellites at the same price point as us were doing like one to two kilowatts of power. Our first satellite is 20 kilowatts of power. Our next satellite is going to be 100. And so we saw a really interesting use case to go after, which is just for all the players that are looking at what SpaceX has done to the comms market and are thinking about how to reset their unit economics. We were like the really interesting path for them to take to be able to think about a fundamentally different cost structure just based on how much power we were deploying and at the price point.

2:51:48So commercial comms in the first place, government is the second. I can talk a bit about that. But those are the two big areas that we've kind of focused on as we scaled up. Let's flip over to the engineering side. 100 kilowatts, that's 0.1 megawatts. Is that right? Like, how are you actually delivering that? Is it just big solar panels? Like, what's the secret to actually scaling up power delivery in space? Do you have batteries on board? Are there other propellants or resources for fuel? Or is it all just solar? How do you actually scale up power delivery in space? Yeah. So we basically have to reset the entire satellite.

2:52:24We have to go build giant solar arrays. We have to go build giant batteries. We had to build giant primary structures. These things are called reaction wheels, which are these large spinning disks that help you point a satellite with large solar arrays. So like 80 % of the satellite we rebuilt from scratch in this factory behind me. And sorry, really quickly, giant solar array in space, that could mean anything from like football fields to the size of this table. Like just ground me in like order of magnitude. How big are we talking? Yeah. So the first satellite that we're building that we're launching in three months is 40 meters.

2:52:5640 meters. So like, yeah, like halfway down a football field almost, something like that. Wow. Space yacht. Space yacht. Yeah. Exactly. That's good. And then the next one will be 80. So it's going to be 2x the length, but obviously much more in terms of surface area. And does that only fit in the Starship fairing? Is that Starship requirement there, or can you get it up? Yeah, the first one, the 20 kilowatt is made for Falcon 9. So it's made to stack 10 in a Falcon 9. It'll stack. My Starship is so massive, it'll stack 50 in a Starship. Wow. which is kind of cool. If you take the full one, yeah.

2:53:28Exactly. And then the next one will be made purely for Starlink. Yeah, so on the commercial side, how are the telecom players thinking about the threat from Starlink? Yeah. Right? These are, you know, the big ones are multi-hundred billion dollar market cap companies. They have a lot of infrastructure on Earth. And, you know, from our understanding, like really feeling the pressure from Starlink. but what is their kind of mental model for Starlink as a thread? And I'm assuming they're paying you to try to catch up. Exactly. Yeah, I think Starlink came in and basically took a business that had, you know, call it, you'd go like host like data at$50 to$100 per megabit per second.

2:54:12And Starlink came in and brought that price under 10, right? So every single player out there had to figure out like, how do I go deploy a lot more capacity? And how do I do it at a low cost? And deploying capacity in space is just all about how much does it cost me to deploy power, right? If I can deploy more power and I can do so at a lower cost, suddenly I better use economics. So we were kind of the path to doing that, right, which was saying we're going to go max out power. So our satellite is as powerful as the billion-dollar satellites that used to exist. But it's not going to cost a billion.

2:54:41It'll cost$15 million. You can stack 10 per Falcon 9. That's what it takes to kind of change the game for the telco players. So a bunch of them saw that and were like, okay, this is actually something we can play around with and use. And really for us, it's just like the first customer, right? We're all about integrating the hardware stack for space. We want to max out power. Today, that's for communications. Tomorrow, that's going to be for compute. And then who knows, as we start becoming a space-faring civilization, what we'll do with that power later. Dyson Spear. Dyson Spear. So this round got done, I'm assuming, at a time when people were mocking data centers in space.

2:55:17There's been a little bit of a vibe shift over the last week. And I'm sure all your investors have been hitting you up. Have you ever thought about AI competencies? You've got to see this. I think you've got to take another look at this. You should see this invest like the best interview. You should see this. I promise this isn't a data center round. I had to tell everyone what I was like. No, that's the thing. the data center would be three on 15. It was funny. It was in November. Delian has very strong views on this. I was talking to him about it early November, late October when we were doing the round.

2:55:55They have a strong opinion. Founders Fund is right on a lot of things. I'm not going to say I'm going to take the other side of a bet against them, but now it's like Founders Fund on one side, Elon on the other. I'm just going to watch and see how this plays out. But yeah, so our round was primarily on like the communications application. It was also on a bunch of the government constellations that we're starting to work on. There's some really interesting things we're doing that the U.S. government is pretty excited about. So more of what you call a conventional. And like, yeah, now we'll see what happens with the data center.

2:56:25Price of the bird going up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is exciting. As a CEO, it is somewhat your job to bring energy to what you're building and bring excitement to what you're building. And if there's an opportunity, even if it's five, ten years off, if you're going to be a beneficiary of that trend, you do sort of have a responsibility to raise your hand and say, yeah, hey, it's logical that some of the value will accrue here to me if that's the case. But you probably also don't want to whiplash everyone and be like, actually, I've been doing this the whole time. Any predictions on just how big some of these commercial satellites will get over the next decade?

2:57:04I saw somebody on the timeline earlier talking about how in order to recreate one gigawatt of compute capacity in orbit, you need something like 10 ,000 satellites. But eventually you could just have one data center-sized satellite floating out. But how do you think about size and just like massive individual satellites versus the more constellation approach? Yeah, I'm in the school of thought of constellations, right? Like I think we're going to build really big satellites that still exist in constellations. I think compute is going to be distributed, right? Compute and communications are going to be all part of the same distributed network, right?

2:57:49So our bigger satellite, Giga, is going to be like the length of a football field, right? It's called Giga? It's called the Giga. Hit the gong for Giga. Best name for a satellite I've ever heard. It's an incredible name for a satellite. We are very critical of names. Sometimes people come on and they name their companies things that don't or not necessarily. Hubris.ai. Yeah, Hubris.ai. $5 billion seed round. What's going to happen? Who knows? Giga is a fantastic name. Thank you. GIGA would be a beautiful name for a satellite. I'm glad you're doing it. I'm very excited to see it. Anyways, very exciting.

2:58:32Congrats to the whole team. And yeah, hoping we can partner at some point to put a TBPN satellite up in space. We need one for sure. We definitely will need one at some point. One last question from my side. Take us through a little bit of a tour of what's behind you. Is this the only facility? How big is this facility? What's actually happening here? Are satellites getting built? out? This is 180 ,000 square foot factory, right? Where basically you'll see the start of a manufacturing line coming down here. That's going to, you can't really see it in the view, but the clean rooms over there with the satellite actually in it, that's about to launch in three months.

2:59:08Oh, wow. You even have a huge signs up. It says primary structure, side sections, final integration. Wow. Physical divides. That's amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, we're basically scaling up now. We're 11 months in, but a large part of this round that we're raising is to go scale up mass production go from one this year to 10 next year to 30 the following year it's awesome and it's really all about scale at this point right like let's get the first one to work in three months and then let's do it many more times over the coming 24 months and also is the company's name a nod to your initials yeah so here's the thing like uh it's not people think it's about my initials and it's like that's the most egotistical thing i promise you that is not the case uh so you know my brother and i started this company which starting a company with your brother is the coolest thing in the world to do.

2:59:53We're both conjures. But it comes back to the Kardashev, right? Like helping humanity become a type two Kardashev civilization, K2. The whole thesis is build bigger, right? That's cool. And our logo is a big Dyson sphere. I heard you mention that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like our whole thesis is like, let's start laying the groundwork to helping humanity become a type two Kardashev civilization. So let's call the company K2. You understand naming. Extremely bullish. We had a company on called Icarus. Icarus Space. We were a little bit worried about that name. For what it's worth, an insanely good team over there.

3:00:28Insanely good team. And I really hope maybe they'll be brand. But they're playing with fire. They're playing with fire. The team is playing with fire. They're a super cool team now. They are very cool. They are very cool. But there's been a rash of hilariously named companies. That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to meet you. and congrats to the whole team. Massive. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. The coffers are full. Cheers. We'll see you soon. Well, that essentially... Let's rip some timeline.

3:00:59Let's rip some timeline. Okay, I want to watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels. When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding. This is sick. This is sick? Is this AI or is this real? Do we know? I hope it's real. I can't tell, so... This is Casey Hanward's dream. This is Casey Hanmer's dream. I hope this is a lot of, this looks pretty real. I was watching a video of somebody, there's a whole trend on TikTok of people throwing tires, the longest tire throw. So, because if you throw a tire off a mountain, it will just spin all the way down to the bottom.

3:01:31So you can throw a tire for like miles and miles and miles. It's a great content genre. Yeah, for some reason, solar panels over mountains do give me a little bit of disgust, whereas I get it, I'm less. Yeah, mountains are beautiful. Deserts, deserts I'm like blanket it Blanket it But this looks like It would be a really enjoyable mountain range To just go on a nice little hike And so I'm feeling the disgust But also impressed By the scale It's just crazy that There was no desert between these mountains And who they needed to get power to You know I don't know There must be people right there living in the foothills or something, and they need to put them in the mountains.

3:02:19I don't know. I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire. That's often a problem. Yeah, I'm curious around the efficiency, because just given the movement of the sun, aren't you going to have – it's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks, so wouldn't this – you would think that finding an area nearby that was flat would be more efficient, but who knows. Snapchat is – What's going on with Snap? Anyone from Snapchat coming on the show soon? Focusing on making money. They are, let's see here. Base16Z says Snapchat plus user growth pretty much guaranteed to reaccelerate with the new storage charges.

3:02:58So they're saying, you've saved 4 ,122 memories since 2017. You've used 16 gigabytes of your 5 gigabyte of free storage limit. will temporarily back up new memories that exceed your limit for up to 12 months. Or you can join Snapchat Plus and get your 250 gigabytes. So anyways, makes sense that Snap is trying to make more money. That's good news. I'm surprised that they haven't done any sort of big AI content licensing deal. And of course, they have a deal with perplexity to bring AI into the Snapchat product. But does Snapchat just not have any data that would be surfaced in an LLM? Like Reddit seems to have done such a good job with that, but I guess people aren't really reviewing things or discussing things in text-based formats on Snapchat.

3:03:55It's all kind of just day-in-the-life content. Anyway, what else is going on? Trump says... Here, Jordy, you want to go first? Yeah, so Trump says, doesn't see why we can't have 20 % or 25 % GDP growth. Says the market should continue to go up with great results. I mean, don't see why we can't have 20 % GDP growth? Because it's like never happened in history, maybe? I don't know. What was China? He is AGI-pilled. That's extremely AGI-pilled. Dwarkech has talked about this. Dwarkech literally has talked about this. 25 % GDP growth, the first AGI-pilled president, I suppose. Let's head over to the...

3:04:40Apparently China hit 19.3 % in 1970. Okay. Is that the Great Leap Forward or something? More recently, 14 % in 2007. I think Trump's looking at the data. Great Leap Forward was 1960-ish. Tyler, what do you got? Okay, so you guys gave me a month to write new jokes, but I already wrote some. Oh, you got one? Yeah. So these were, I did use LM to help, but these are not, never before seen. Never before seen. Buy the training set. Get them in the next free trade. Did you search them in Google to make sure that? Yeah, yeah. Yes. I looked them up. These are brand new. The chat's going to verify, and I don't want you to get exposed.

3:05:23Okay, first one. Ready? Okay. Okay. You're telling me Jerry rigged this car? Ooh. Is that Jerry rigged? Jerry rigged car? Jerry rigged. That's pretty good. I can't. But that's sort of like the point. But it's not a guy named Jerry. The whole point of the shrimp fried rice. You're telling me my friend Jerry rigged this car? Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. Okay. Second one. You're telling me a brain washed this cult? Oh, that's really good. Oh, yes. That is novel. There we go. That is a great one. You're telling me a brainwash this cult? You need to tweet that right now because that's 100k likes right there, 10k likes.

3:06:03That's very good. Okay, I got two more. You're telling me a star crossed these lovers? That's sort of literal. That's sort of like what it is. That's sort of what it is, yes. Okay, you're telling me a tongue tied this boy?

3:06:22you gotta post all four of those and see and and i would predict that that the brainwashed cult does number one does numbers uh the tongue-tied boy also does decent numbers and the other two flop okay i'll tweet them now and then we'll see tomorrow yeah yeah yeah okay that yeah that's a great that's a great test but well done well done we gave you a bunch of cult is that is novel that That is novel. And that's not coming from any of the LLMs. Oh, that shrimp fried rice bench is really, really good. Let's go over to Rune. He says, everyone will go public soon because they finally feel the heat of a well capitalized competition.

3:06:57The wrath of Nyan. There was no reason to seek enormous amounts of capital until recently. We will see natural interest rates north of 3 % in the end of secular stagnation. Everyone's going public. Oh, in other news, Eleven Labs partnering with Meta to power expressive, scalable audio across Instagram, Verizon, and more, bringing natural and diverse audio to billions of users. Also, you got the founder of Eleven Labs on the cover of Forbes. Look at that. Look at that smile. Look at that smile. GigaChad filter engaged. Yes, yes. Not beating the GigaChad filter allegations. Yes, yes. I mean, Forbes headshot photographers, it's a great, great product.

3:07:40This is something that's very special. So congratulations to Mati over at 11 Labs. And the whole team. We're making the cover of Forbes. That's a huge moment for him and the whole team. Speaking of AI. Presidential AI challenge? First Lady Melania Trump is introducing the Presidential AI Challenge. Artificial intelligence is America's next competitive edge, driving advancements in your career, supporting your family, and strengthening your community. I'm sure no one will. disagree with any of that. This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators to shape America's future.

3:08:17Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future. Be part of the Presidential AI Challenge today. What is the Presidential AI Challenge? That's a good question. The Presidential AI Challenge will foster interest and expertise in AI in America's use. Early training and the responsible use of AI tools will demystify this technology and prepare Americans. I think this might be the challenge. I think the challenge might be to figure out what it is. To understand the presidential AI challenge. It's like a riddle. This is a riddle. I think it's some sort of like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery.

3:08:55That's the whole goal, to test the American people. Can they understand what it is? Okay, I think I figured it out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school. And there's challenge projects that groups of students will be able to participate in, as well as awards and prizes. Hopefully solid gold trophies. Massive trophies. Yeah. Statues. I want to see the comically large checkbook come out for the winners. Maybe grants to schools. Maybe the exact projects haven't been released. There actually is a cash prize. Sick. $10 ,000 per team member. Wait, is it Peyton Melania coin or Trump coin or US dollars?

3:09:46I think you mean Trump meme. Trump meme, that's right. It's not Trump coin. Get it right. It's Trump meme. It's the best. Okay, here's some questions. You also win cloud credits. That's so amazing. You do? Okay, that's actually amazing. I love that. A presidential award certificate. So boom, certificate. You're getting cloud credits. You're getting$10 ,000 for your school, homeschool, or community group. And you're getting$10 ,000 per team member in the middle school category and the high school category and the educator category. That's amazing. So, I mean, Tyler, you, I guess there's no college tier.

3:10:23Too old. So you have to go back to school and participate and win. Get a fake ID that says you're 13. just to go back and dominate the presidential ai challenge yeah yeah well uh you know it's exciting uh good luck to everyone is the presidential fitness challenge back i don't know did that get uh it has to be back they're putting gyms in airports of course of course you're gonna have to run a mile if you're an american kid uh according uh the first wait wait I didn't see this. The first child was born in a Waymo? Yeah, according to Avital. That is crazy. Says Lisan Al-Gaib. I mean, you are truly the puppeteer of the silicon intelligence if you are born in a Waymo.

3:11:09You merely adopted the Waymo. I was born in it. That is truly the most 2025 story. You merely adopted artificial intelligence. I was born in a Waymo. Being born in a Waymo. So, I mean, being born in a taxi cab is like a classic thing that's been described for years. Sagar and Jetty is coming on the show on Friday. He says, I guess that's tomorrow. He says, on H200s, the pro-selling to China theory relies on it being good for U.S. interests to keep China on the U.S. technology tree and forestalling Huawei. In my opinion, this ignores the singular flavor of U.S. biz relationship with China since PNTR.

3:11:47In every case that U.S. companies became intertwined with China, They became less favorable to U.S. interests and more malleable tools of the U.S., of the Chinese state. And so he is bearish on the H-200 plan, but we will dig into it all with him tomorrow. In other news, Kaser Yunus, the CEO of Applied Intelligence, is on the timeline. He's joined X. He says, after 16 years and 10 months sitting on a fantastic handle, he says, I'm finally writing my first X. Also, we'll start writing more regularly. My first post is, ironically, on why I'm posting. And so he shares a link to a blog post. And Ryan Peterson says, welcome, brother.

3:12:35But also, writing a long-form blog post is not being on X, lol, which is very funny. On the blog post, he says, after many years of railing against going on X, I'm finally pulling the Band-Aid. and getting on the platform. Historically, if you've watched my talks, you've heard me say that one of the keys to applied success is focus. And I'm often demonized. I've often demonized social media, specifically acts as wasteful and distracting. It encourages superficiality, showmanship, and the wrong values of a real substance. Quote, well, well, well, how the turntables. Some of that is still true, but as a company has grown, the balance has changed.

3:13:11The value of having a microphone now outweighs the downsides. So I'm going to try this. So glad that he is posting. Let's hit the gong. Let's hit the gong for him. And then we got to do the Salesforce.

3:13:25Before Salesforce, I want to say congratulations to Cher Giel Ozer. He is the founder of General Agents. He launched his product on April 2nd and was acquired by Jeff Bezos. very very exciting congrats to the general agents team give me the Benioff numbers how much is he making on AI according to Tane, Salesforce says their agent force ARR is now 540 million 4.3x year over year congratulations to Mark Benioff this is why he might be renaming the company agent force we will see we will see and closing it out one more Jason says the original Omega Speedmaster 29151 is one of the best looking watches of all time and this is a particularly good looking example from 1958 Hairspring knows how to shoot a watch and it is stunning stunning silhouette thank you for tuning in, have a great rest of your day.

3:14:43We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please do. Have a great rest of your day and Merry Christmas. Goodbye. Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.