Timeline in Turmoil: Elon Clashes with Altman, Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Chrome, Apple in Elon's Crosshairs | David Risher, James Cadwallader, Devin Bhushan, Demi Guo, Eugenia Kuyda, Alex Danco, Isaiah Taylor

29:00Yeah, the journal says perplexity offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there's an interested buyer should he force a sale. I think there would be a lot of interested buyers if there was a forced sale. Yeah. Who else would buy it? Apple? Meta? Microsoft? Get Bing going again? Bing. It's Bing, Bing. Bing it? I mean, Microsoft would have a wild strategy because they'd have all the code to ChatGPT, all the open AI, intellectual property. Like, they could do what Perplexity is thinking about, right um yeah i mean what does this say what does this say about i mean so they just launched the perplexity comet browser daniel says chrome's worth at least 90 to 120 billy i agree i think 20 is a 20 is too low but yeah so they so perplexity just launched comet we had arvind on the show he said this is a big important bet for the company yep if you're if you just launched a browser and now you're saying that you want to buy to compete with Chrome and now you're trying to buy Chrome.

30:09What does that say about the state of your new product? Distribution is king. It's very clear that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win. And we see this with the LLMs. The leaderboards and the vibes shift constantly, but the consumer adoption is just around chat. Everyone just uses chat. That's the one that's broken through. That's the one that people are familiar with all over the United States and all over the world. And so it's very hard to break through. Even if perplexity can like rocket to the top of the App Store in India for a little bit, like it's hard to hold onto when the chat GPT snowball is just growing bigger and bigger every single day.

30:54Much like the Graphite snowball. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free, graphite.dev. Is there a polymarket on Perplexity, by the way? Can you look that up? I will read this. Will Perplexity acquire Chrome in 2025? What's the market on it? When I posted about it earlier, it was at 12%. And I said 12 seems quite high. And it's now at 3%. It went down even though they're in the journal saying they're going to do it? they're like the market opened at 34 % like 9am when the news dropped and it's now down at 3 % just today it went from 34 down to 3 wow so this has basically been debunked yeah I mean there's I would put the odds of this deal happening closer to 0 % than 1 % that sounds fair but great way for perplexity to get in the journal.

31:57Call me. No, this is great for SEO. It definitely puts perplexity and web browser in the same keyword soup. Perplexity was also bidding on TikTok earlier this year. Arvin loves a long shot bet, a long shot bid. I invited him on the show this morning. He, I don't think they want it. No, he's not ready for press. Not ready to chat, but we love a size Lord long shot offer. Keep throwing these out. More Starob should do this. Google has indicated a willingness to sell Chrome. In testimony this year, Pichai told the judge that forcing the company to sell it or share data with rivals would harm Google's business, deter it from investing in new technology, and potentially create security risks.

32:42Chrome has roughly 3.5 billion users worldwide. It's like Perplexity has probably millions of users, but it's just going to take decades, even at reasonable growth rate, to hit 3 billion. It's just so many people. And accounts for more than 60 % of the global browser market. That's lower than I thought it would be. Founded in 2022, San Francisco-based Perplexity recently released its own web browser called Comet to some of its users. Tyler, you've demoed these. What are you daily driving these days in terms of the web browser? I'm using old reliable Chrome. You're using Chrome? Yeah, I don't know.

33:18None of the agent browsers really seemed very helpful to me. Have you churned from Cluelay too? Yeah. Well, I started using that right after the show ended. I mean, I'm not doing interviews. I was thinking about the Cluelay pattern. What if Tyler was like, been using Cluelay every day, hours a day, and we're like, wait, you've been interviewing with other companies? Yeah. Well, that's the thing is that when I was thinking about Cluely, I was actually wondering like if we ran the show through Cluely and we had like just this idea of like streaming audio essentially and streaming pixels and then just somewhat random LLM queries firing all the time.

34:03Like, is that a good pattern versus ChatGPT where you have to decide, okay, this is the time to query it. And so when I think about like the going to you and saying like the pull the poly market up on perplexity or tell me the market share for Chrome. Like if we could have something like Lulie running and it's just a big screen there that I can see. And it's just pulling up answers to questions that it thinks we're about to talk about or ask or just add in context. Like that actually might be kind of useful to us. But I don't know if a tool like that exists. It also just might be so sloppy and so noisy and so inference heavy that it just doesn't math out.

34:43I don't know Are there any are there any value or like what what's actually seeing breakout for you in terms of AI adoption? I mean most of my time using AI tools is just like coding stuff. Yeah, so it's like cloud code Here's a little bit. Sometimes I just go raw ChatGPT.com. Oh, that's raw. Yeah. Yeah. Just straight prompt like we're not text file What happened to good old fashioned just handwritten code, farm to table code? Apparently not. Yeah, pastor raise code. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, clearly, I'm not like doing, I'm not doing like sales calls or like anything that really requires that kind of like interaction.

35:22Yeah, yeah. So not to be useful for me, but. Yeah, I wonder how the product will change. Because like the marketing is not going to stop. Like they are definitely going to keep filling that top funnel until they figure out the bottom of the funnel and the churn. But I wonder what retention is like. I mean, I imagine that, you know, you bring in such a broad top of funnel. Like there's probably people that are sticking around. There's probably people that just sign up and forget their credit cards are down and they just pay for a while. Like the nature of just getting someone to convert for 20 bucks a month.

35:53They don't even have a free tier, right? Like you have to pay to like get up and running. No, they do have a free tier. I think they do. Okay. Interesting. There was something, oh yeah, Tyler, did you see Vibe Sort? Someone wrote a sorting algorithm that uses LLF. You have to put in your OpenAI API key, and then it just passes the random list or the array of numbers to ChatGPT and asks ChatGPT to sort it, and it just comes back with whatever it can do. And I was thinking that, Did you ever have to do FizzBuzz back in the day? Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah. We should definitely do Vibe FizzBuzz, where for each number between 1 and 100, it queries the GPT-5 API to ask it, should it respond with the number Fizz or Buzz?

36:49The most inefficient and most inference-heavy FizzBuzz answer possible. Anyway, back to Perplexity. Perplexity told Sundar Pichai, as part of the proposed acquisition, it would maintain and support Chromium, the open source project that supports Chrome and other browsers. It also said it would continue placing Google as the default search engine within Chrome, though users could change settings. That's crazy, because you would think the first thing you would do if you owned Chrome would be change the browser to mine. I'm getting those ad dollars, but I don't know. Maybe it's a nice olive branch in this somewhat hypey offer.

37:28The Justice Department filed the antitrust case against Google in 2020, and just five years later, in addition to, they're here, in addition to forcing a sale of Chrome, the judge is considering limiting Google's ability to pay to be the default search engine on devices and browsers and requiring it to share data with rivals, among other things, in weighing potential remedies earlier this year. Meta questioned how much new AI chatbots might be whittling away at the traditional search business, of which Google has 90 % market share. So 60 % share in browser, but 90 % in search. So even for there's 30 % of people out there that are using Firefox or Brave or Edge.

38:09It's Edge, right? Is the Microsoft one? Yes. But then they use Edge, but then they still set their default to Google because Google has dominant. Or maybe they're just Google users are querying more. I'm so fascinated by perplexity. Yeah. And I can't wait to see what ultimate. It's perplexing. And I can't wait to see what ultimately becomes of the business. They're offering to buy TikTok. They're offering to buy Chrome. They're rumored, you know, there's a rumor mill saying that Apple's kicking the tires on it. It's hard to tell where that's coming from, right? Is that just more marketing? Yeah.

38:48Perplexity. they have I think the last reported number or the alleged number is something like 30 million monthly actives which is a lot but it but they have such a tiny share of overall queries yeah that it becomes and and it's just clear that that search feels like it'll be a winner take take all market yep and it's it's they're not gonna you know two years from now if they're sitting at 30 million monthly actives or even a multiple of that it's hard to see it you know being worth uh you know significantly more than snapchat for example yeah and i think that's why you're seeing arvin talk about potentially maybe pivoting to b2b context with the bloomberg thing um it feels like if you're if you're in a winner take all market and you're in the writing's on the wall that you're not going to be the winner in that market, a B2B pivot feels like a decent move.

39:49You could even put kind of Anthropic in that bucket where there was a time when it was like, oh, is everyone going to switch to Claude, like the app on their phone? And then it didn't play out that way. Now they have a dominant B2B business. So you can imagine the perplexity niches down, like the perplexity interface, the perplexity ability to, you know, like answer questions, act as a search engine. That feels valuable in enterprises. It feels value in finance. It feels valuable in medicine if you fine tune the service for that. But it's just a very different business. So they have to go through a little bit of a rebuild or kind of readjustment, maybe.

40:31I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, when Elon bought X, it took someone like Elon to be able to put together the amount of equity and debt to buy that business. And he had to put a lot of his own capital on the line. And in this situation, and that was buying a business that generated a lot of advertising revenue, right? It wasn't known as, it was a bit of a dog in some ways, right? Maybe never was living up to its full potential. where in this case if you offer to buy Chrome and then in theory you have to create an entire new economic model for the business because you don't have the Google Ads engine built into it it's it's hard to see it feels like basically impossible to pull that amount of cap to find people yeah call me when the Morgan Stanley associates are losing sleep.

41:30Good point. Unless Morgan Stanley is burning the midnight oil, this deal probably isn't happening. I'm remembering that exchange between Allison and Musk basically saying, how much Allison's like, how much should I do? A billion? And Elon goes, I don't know. I think you should do like two. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. So, I mean, Arvin's got to find some Allison's. You got to get Larry. Larry. Get a few of those guys on board for sure. 34 Larry's. Well, we have some big news in the TBPN world. We are officially partnered with Waymo via Spotify because Spotify has a partnership with Waymo. So you can listen to TBPN and Waymo's now.

42:09Now what? Yeah, this just dropped. There's a new upgraded Spotify in Waymo launching today. Waymo put out the post two hours ago. You can connect your accounts and you can vibe. You can listen to TBPN in your Waymo, which is probably the most tech thing you could possibly do. A little birdie just told me that they spoke to a number of bankers that have not heard of the perplexity deal, which I imagine as it firms up, if it firms up, they'll certainly hear about it. Interesting. Anyways, what else we got? We got Julius from Rahul Sunwalker, the latest advertiser on TVP. And what analysis do you want to run?

42:56Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data. And it's loved by over 2 million users. Finance, marketing, data science, scientific research or education. You can get on Julius. Princeton uses Julius. A lot of MBA programs are starting to use Julius. The best in the business. So, yeah. Head over Julius.ai, check it out. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk about it too much, but I mean, great, great, great area that is, you know, someplace that you can get a foothold growing, growing, growing. Many people are saying he's the rapper king. Rapper king, we crowned him on the stream on Friday, and we stand by that.

43:38Anyway, let's review a little bit of the story behind what happened with NVIDIA and the H20s. There's a new article in the Wall Street Journal. With billions at risk, NVIDIA's CEO buys his way out of the trade battle. Jensen Huang tried diplomacy to sell chips to China, but it took a last-minute deal with the White House to get it done. So he's the CEO of NVIDIA. He worked for months behind the scenes. If you didn't know, by the way. If you didn't know, thank you. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. Small. He worked months behind the scenes in Washington and Beijing to protect tens of billions of dollars in future sales from the heated U.S.-China trade rivalry.

44:18Wang told President Trump that restrictions on U.S. chip sales to China would backfire by pushing Chinese technology companies to achieve self-reliance. That's Huawei, Smi, Smi. We talked a little bit about this on the show yesterday. He advised the president to keep China hooked on American tech. As a sweetener, Wang said the company would invest as much as$500 billion in the U.S. We need to hit the action. Let's go. Great contact. Huang's argument, along with the half trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal. The Trump admin decided last month to allow China to buy NVIDIA's H20 artificial intelligence chip, a surprising reversal that came shortly after Huang met with Trump.

44:59NVIDIA developed, as you know, they developed the H20 to comply with past export restrictions as a less powerful chip specially designed for China. if you didn't listen to our interviews yesterday with Peter Harrell and Aaron Ginn I felt like that was a really great hour kind of look into the situation, some of the history around the decisions that were made during the Biden admin around chips as well as kind of the present state. Yeah, we got a little tour of the whole issue. We didn't get the view from the, what was it, the China faux hawks? Faux China hawks or something like that? The hardcore AI doomer view was not fully represented.

45:41Fast takeoff bros. Yeah, the fast takeoff bros were underrepresented on TBPN yesterday. But there is an interesting... I do wonder if the narrative will evolve at any point in time. I was kind of joking with you this morning. There are a few different... It's kind of like a two-axis grid. So there's... I'm worried about competition with China, or I'm not worried. I'm back in like the WTO ascension, the Bill Clinton era, the, you know, you can't nail jello to a wall. They'll become capitalist. And so I'm, I'm pro free trade. I'm pro China and working with them. Uh, Ryan Peterson has a little bit of that view.

46:22Uh, and, and, and, and there's a lot of evidence that that's fine and that they, that there, there can be like wonderful harmonious, uh, cross border capitalism between America and China for a very long time. Then, of course, you have the China hawks that say the invasion of Taiwan is around the corner. They won't stop at that. It's an expansionary. It's the 100-year marathon. And as soon as they take Taiwan, then they'll take Vietnam. Then they'll take San Francisco. They'll be storming Santa Monica Pier soon. The beaches of Ocean Beach. The beaches of Ocean Beach will be stormed by the CCP. That's kind of the most extreme on the other side.

47:01But then you also have the, like, what is AI? Like, is AI Excel? And it's just a nice to have, and it's good. Is it electricity? Yeah, is it electricity? Yeah, and of course, if you're going up against a rival, you would prefer that they didn't have electricity. You would prefer that they don't have Microsoft Excel to track their inventory and aid in their military efforts. But if it's nuclear weapons, like, you definitely don't want your adversary to have that, right? The real question is, there is a large contingent of folks out there that just say AI is bad. Like AI is actually like a bad thing.

47:38And the pieces of putting that together are like it makes you actually less intelligent when you use it. It makes you slower when you rely on it. So there's a new category of doomers which are the one-shotted doomers. Yes. The people that are getting, you know, falling in love with their AI companions. Yes, yes, yes. Falling in psychosis because of their companions. And you would think that if somebody is a doomer in that way, they should be wanting us to export the black wells to China. If they're anti-China, but they believe in the one-shot AI psychosis, they should be extremely pro GPU exports.

48:16Give them the most addictive AI companion so that everyone in China gets wireheaded by the AI companions. Exactly. Exactly. You want everyone in China convinced that they have discovered quantum physics, the final frontier. Yeah. What is it? The grand unifying theorem. That's the real humanities last example. You want the average Foxconn employee being like, I'm not coming in today because I have solved the grand unifying theorem and I just need to publish it in nature. So sorry, I can't go into the DJI factory today and make a drone. instead I will be posting online about how I cured cancer, chatting with Grok7, something like that.

49:04Yeah, Grok heavy. Yeah, Grok heavy, exactly. But no, I haven't heard anyone make that argument yet. We might be the first, but it might be coming. And it would be somewhat rational if you believe that AI is bad. Yeah, I mean there's an entire group that has been frustrated with the Chinese version of TikTok, which is, what's it called again? Do you remember? Duyin? Duyin. Is that it? Where allegedly it shows Chinese youth videos about math and science and rockets and things like that. Stay away from that. Meanwhile, our version of TikTok is dancing. No, you want to stay in the dancing world. You don't want to be sending the generative videos of like math problems because that's going to lead you to delusions of grandeur.

49:56And all of a sudden you're watching the Dewey in videos of math. And then you're like, you know what? I am Albert Einstein. And I'm not going to work tomorrow. That's what's happening. What do you think about GPU exports, Tyler, as a way to wirehead your enemy? Yeah, so this is the Infinite Jest thesis. There's this book, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, where like the whole thing is like there's this like... Oh, you read it? You read Infinite Jest? Oh, yeah. Did you bring it with you when you go to parties in San Francisco? Yeah, I always carry it around. You always carry it? My annotated copy.

50:30Make sure everyone knows I've read it. Do you read it on the subway? Oh, yeah. I actually, I can read those books. I just hold it around. Yeah, whatever I go. Okay, anyway. But basically. Give me the summary of Infinite Jest. Spoil it. Spoil the entire thing so no one reads it. I don't think that, well, okay. But basically, there's like, the main thing is like, there's this like weapon kind of, it's like a movie that you watch, but it's so addictive, you just keep watching it. It's like basically ultra stim TikTok. It's like that movie, The Ring, that Jordy hasn't seen. I haven't seen that yet.

50:54No one's seen The Ring. But my thesis - Have you seen The Ring, Ben? You've seen The Ring? The horror movie? Yeah, the horror movie. Of course. Yeah, what happens in The Ring? I have this graphic image in my head of her being in the closet. Okay. But yeah, you watch - Yeah, you put the VHS tape in the video. Then you get the phone call. Yeah, and then you die, right? It's a horror film. Yeah, it's - And so Infinite Jest continues. That's why I don't watch movies. Yeah, here's what you do. So this is my thesis. So basically, we need to, like, Grok should pivot into defense, where they basically go super hard on the companion side.

51:30Companion side. Make it super addictive, and then drop that, like, airdrop it into China. Sure, for free. Or our enemies. That's, yeah. I think a very, something I've been playing around with is that it feels like people's historical concerns with social media and that it's actually antisocial and that it can radicalize people and it can get them addicted. It feels very possible that LLMs are actually everything that people thought was horrific and bad and all the risk with social media, but somewhat real. Somewhat real, yeah. I think you should talk to more normie Zoomers. Explain. More black-billed.

52:17More black-pilled? How so? I think those are like, I don't know. If you meet someone that uses a lot of TikTok, it's like you can kind of tell. You can tell. If you know what I mean. It's like a gaze. Yeah, yeah. There's not much going on there. It's rough. Well, yeah, maybe we got to get them some delusions of grandeur. At least kick them into high gear. Convince them that they've discovered the, maybe the solution to the AI psychosis and the delusions of grandeur thing is basically hooking them with that idea that it's like, yeah, you actually are the next Einstein. And then pulling them back, be like, but like in order to prove it, you have to just do like a little bit more.

52:57Exactly. And you shouldn't use me for your homework because you're smarter than me. You're smarter than me. And so you should just go get a job. You should teach me how to do physics. Yeah, exactly. You should teach me how to program. You should go teach everyone. And you should also go read the textbooks and really grind your way up in the industry. That's true alignment. Yeah, yeah. Go put in some 40-hour weeks. 80-hour weeks. Yeah, yeah. Go learn the fundamentals. Go actually work on the business side of this. Anyway, let's get back to Jensen Wong and NVIDIA. We rung the gong for$500 billion investment in the United States.

53:36We'd love to see it. Wong's argument, along with the half trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal. The Trump administration decided last year. This really is the year, by the way, of half trillion. I know. Half trillion. I cannot wait to be in the one T. One T. Just one T. It's right here. Just one T. A nice round number. One T. Yeah, we're getting there. We're getting close. So Trump's proposal to take 15 % for Uncle Sam. I guess it was originally 20 percent and they dialed it back a little bit. But the unusual pay to play proposal apparently hadn't been vetted by White House tech policy staff before Trump offered it is expected to face legal and security questions.

54:22Of course, many people have already asked a bunch of questions surrounding it. But what Peter said, which stood out, is he phrased it as Jensen's decision, as more of like an offering versus an explicit tax.

54:48Tip your president. We're in the tax on tips. We're in the tipping era. No tax on tips. This is a classic one hand wash as the other. It's good. You'll have to see it. I don't even know where to go with this. Yeah, so Huang, facing a choice of paying for long-term access to a market vital to his company and walking away, countered with 15%. He charms Trump at the meeting, drawing the president a diagram showing how tariffs would be counterproductive for his goal of increasing U.S. chip production and signed it. Shortly after, Trump said he would exempt tech companies that invest in the U.S. roughly 100 percent tariffs on semiconductor exports.

55:27And again, I mean, Jensen is.

55:33You know it's serious when he puts on the suit. That's all I'll say. Yeah, no leather jacket in these deals. Trump administration's decision to allow China to access the H20 chip appears to be a watershed moment in U.S. policy. In Trump's first term, as well as through President Biden's, the prevailing trend was generally tougher control on tech sales to China. National security concerns often received greater weight in the past than business interests. One of the things that stuck out yesterday was this idea that H20 chip is old at this point. And so there's an interesting twist here where the delays in the back and forth on the H20, it was already a Nerf chip, but then we're now, by the time they actually ramp these up and start selling them, we're selling a year or two old tech.

56:23So maybe it's less important. And then just the fast takeoff thing seems much less relevant right now. One interesting dynamic here. NVIDIA is a four, almost four and a half trillion dollar company. Yeah. You would think they would be spending an insane amount on federal lobbying. Oh, yeah. According to Open Secrets. No one spends any amount of money on lobbying. SBF was the first person to like invent real lobbying. So in 2023, NVIDIA spent$510 ,000. $640 ,000 in 2024. and$1.6 million to date in 2025. And I think it's because Jensen knows there's one guy that he has to earn the favor of, and that's the big guy.

57:12$1.5 million? That's like one billboard in D.C. I don't understand why people are spending so little. A bunch of billboards. It's a bunch of billboards, but they should be painting the town green. I think there's just signals that there's one person's opinion that matters. and again Trump made this offer with Jensen without it sounds like according to the journal talking to his policy staff yeah yeah maybe a bit of a narrative violation that like lobbying is just like political influence is actually something that can't necessarily be bought like you can't just throw money at the problem because need riz yeah and it needs to be like a founder to founder ceo to president type deal and there's just no way to shortcut it because if you pay for a ton of lobbying firms and they're like going to cocktail parties with like, because I imagine what happens is like, it's not like the lobbyists have direct access to the president.

58:05They have access to like people that are seven levels down in the staff and they're kind of going back and forth and like nothing's getting elevated. And so you're better off just going, hey, I run the biggest company in the world. Can I just come and hang out with you? So Apple in federal lobbying has spent three times what NVIDIA has to date. Five million? What are we talking about here? million. This is crazy. Again, Tim knows that he should go bring a solid gold bar to the White House and make this cool little deal toy. Is that what he actually did? It was effectively a deal toy. No way. Apple did that?

58:40Yeah, he brought it. Solid gold. It's a glass sculpture, a unique unit one of one. I've never heard of this. This is new. That's cool. Made a 24 karat golden glass statue for Donald Trump. Wow. I feel like Apple could really deliver on the deal toy front if they put their mind to it. They should be sending these to Trump every week. That's a fantastic strategy. Again, like, you know, you take like, like the, the, the, the lobbying money is probably money they have to like send wire to some sort of, you know, lobbying firm. But you know, people were, imagine the Apple staff on, yeah. How much did it actually cost to get that across the finish line?

59:17Cause it's probably like multiple war rooms with PR and legal people. People were just trying to estimate the value of the deal toy. I'm not going to try to do it myself now, but people are assuming it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, because it was like a solid gold base. You know what Apple should do? They should launch a line of Baiju. That extremely, we talked about this last night. So there's this company in China that sells, I have it pulled up on somewhere, I'll get the actual story, because it's good. It's called Mao Tai. So Kui Chow Mao Tai is a prestigious variety of Baijiu that has long been a favorite among Chinese officials.

1:00:05Known for its strong flavor and high alcohol content, it has been traditionally used as a gift to curry favor or demonstrate respect to government officials or dignitaries. So interestingly, Maotai would hold its value very well. So I could give you a bottle of this and you could just immediately go resell it. So if I'm trying to basically give you money, but I want the appearance of just giving you a nice gift, I'll give you a bottle of Maotai and then you can resell it. And I could give you a case and then you could resell that. And that could be like$20 ,000 or something. I don't know the price.

1:00:41But recently, the Chinese government issued new austerity measures under its updated regulations on practicing thrift and opposing waste in party and government organs. Released mid-May 2025, these regulations ban alcohol, including baiju, like Mao Tse, luxury dishes and cigarettes from official working meals, effectively curbing its use as an official gift. In short, and so the company behind Maotai has a board meeting every quarter where they update the investors on their financials. And at the latest board meeting, the board typically will open a bottle of Maotai and drink it during the quarterly earnings, which is incredibly insane and amazing.

1:01:33but they didn't do it this quarter, I guess, because of this crackdown by the government. The government's basically saying, like, stop using this product to bribe people, more or less. It's like the unspoken part. And so they didn't drink during their board meeting, and the stock immediately sold off, like, 20%, something like that. And so it's just a very funny, like, mess. But, you know, if China's cracking down on government waste, I think we got to ramp it up here. We got to go left when they go right. And so we need Apple to launch a premier alcohol brand. Several thousand dollars, really nice glass bottle.

1:02:12Yeah, lots of glass. They're good with glass. Yep. And a couple thousand dollars, and then they can start gifting that out. It'll be, you know, less than what they're spending on lobbying right now. Certainly. Apparently in 2020, the BBC. reported that Keicho Maotai, this alcohol brand, became China's most valuable publicly listed company, overtaking the country's biggest bank. Yeah, this is insane, right? It's so big. You know what else is insane? Profound, get your brand mentioned on Chattopity. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And Profound announced a Series B today, $35 million led by Sequoia.

1:02:57And on that note, I'm an investor in Profound. David Senra is FaceTiming us randomly. Let's call him. Let's call him back. Where is he? Wait, why am I not finding this? FaceTime. Let me see if I can pull him up. He has to know we're live. Hopefully. So he better be ready to join. Hey, you're live. You're live on the air. Are you guys still streaming? Yeah, we're still streaming, of course. we stream from 11 to 2 pull it up you're live right now no that's not true it is true be careful what you say you're live I wanted to talk about the summer of extreme podcasting do you guys have any of the pictures no now that we can pull up how did I not know you were streaming I'm sorry I'm the number one TV fan I have every day yeah fake friend Give us the pitch for the latest Founders episode Actually Don't leak anything Repitch the last one I stayed up until midnight Recording last night And then I listened to it back And I didn't think it was good enough So I'm throwing the episode away Can we get the single copy of it?

1:04:17Of history's greatest entrepreneurs Who was the most notorious for throwing out things that were 99 % good enough but didn't hit their quality bar? It had to be either Steve Jobs or James Dyson, I would say. Yeah. They were the most disagreeable people I've ever come across. I think Dyson might be the most disagreeable person I've ever come across, and that's why he's so great. How disagreeable are you relative to other podcasters? I mean, you can answer that question. Extremely? Yeah. I disagree with you. I think you're extremely agreeable. I think you're one of the most agreeable people I've ever met.

1:04:55No, I don't think so. I think you're lying to your audience. No, you're wrong. You're wrong. And I'm right. Well, then you're the most disagreeable then. No, you're the most disagreeable. Here you guys go disagreeing. Although, you know what? You and Rob have really changed my opinion on how to shoot video for founders. Oh, yeah? And so I'm completely redoing the studio, and I have a guy flying in this Sunday to do it. Let's go. Finally. That's pretty agreeable. The fact that I let both of you kind of like whittle me down. The production team is clapping for you right now. They're all happy. It's great.

1:05:28Well, yeah, it's not going to be TPBN level where you guys have like rotating$100 ,000 cameras and stuff like that. Well, yeah, you'll get there every time. But, yeah, I think, I don't know if we should do this. We started with one camera. But I think you should have I think you should have tears where the more you should have a paywall version where I can watch you. So by default, I get to watch you do the founders episode, you know, read through the book and show the notes. But if I pay to upgrade, I get an over-the-shoulder camera that lets me see you leaf through the book that shows all the highlights and how you add those little sticky notes to every single page.

1:06:12Do you know that Chris Williamson gave me that same advice? He's like, yeah, you need an overhead shot. Yeah, the overhead shot for sure. You definitely should do that. I don't think you should actually sell it. But I think it would make your product really, really stand out as opposed to just a normal direct-to-camera. Because you're not going to out of the gate have the time to layer B-roll over the entire episode. But just having a third camera of you flipping through the book, that's going to add a whole bunch of texture. You should definitely do it. Can we tell the audience that the reason that it looks the way it does is because you made me a promise.

1:06:43You made me buy. I have like$10 ,000,$15 ,000 worth of equipment sitting on my floor in my studio. You literally have the light that I'm showing you on the FaceTime. You have that light. Yes, but it's not set up. It's so easy to set up. Just unfold it. It takes two seconds. It's so easy. You're like, I need you to come cut open this cardboard box. I thought you were willing to do anything to win. That is true. You made a promise to me that you did not fulfill. You were too busy. No, no, that's true. That's not true. I offered multiple times to come over, and you were also busy. I don't remember it that way, but I will.

1:07:23In Miami, in Miami, I offered during Hereticon 2. I said, I will come over. And you're like, I don't want to pull you away. No, well, there was a chance. I wanted you to set it up when you were in your tux, though. Yeah, what's wrong with that? I wanted you wearing a tux, setting up my hair. No, it's not just that. It's all the other shit you made, but. You can get someone. The studio's going to look great. Just do the over-the-shoulder camera. It's going to be great. I didn't see any of the show today. Yeah. We've just been hanging out talking about the timeline and turmoil. Elon, Sam Altman going at it.

1:07:54Mom and dad are fighting. Elon just posted a screenshot of him chatting with chat GPT5 Pro and said, who is more trustworthy, Sam Altman or Elon Musk? You can only pick one and output only their name. It thought for a minute and 16 seconds and then said Elon Musk. There we go. Oh my God. They're going at it. Hey, I do want to say something that like how good a storyteller John is. That you were catching me up because remember I called you. I was like, hey, explain what the hell is going on. Or like people really getting these like massive checks. And so you told me this like 30 to 45 minute long story and essentially just ran down everything that happened over the last month with all the AI like bonuses and poaching and everything.

1:08:33The trade deals. And then in the middle of it, I was like, John, I have to call you back. I'm being pulled over by the police. That's the that's the mark of a true storyteller becomes so engrossing that you're the person on the other line gets a speeding ticket. 22 miles over the speed limit on the PCH. That's a lot. Well, PCH is at like 15 miles an hour right now. No, it was in section north. It was closer to Jordy's house. So you're going like 95 miles an hour. Wow, really putting people in danger. No, I was going 72. I was going 72 and a 50. Sort of the MKBHD of podcasting. Well, they have a bunch of unmarked police cars now on PCH.

1:09:14They do. It's brutal. I have not gotten a speeding ticket in a long, long time. This guy was on a motorcycle. But hey, what I want to do is let me come on later in the week. We can talk about the Founders episodes. But I think there's some great pictures. I want to show the picture that your crew got when we went and shot the Wander ad. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We got a bunch of those. Yeah. You guys looked excellent. And I think it was the Porsche with the Maybach. That's great. And you were lecturing us. Yeah. No, never lecturing you. I love you. No, you're the professor. We didn't just sit down and listen.

1:09:53No, we did. We didn't just hear you talk. We sat down and listened. I was on the phone with Trung Fan the other day, and he calls me Podcast Socrates, which I thought was hilarious. That's very accurate. True. Fact check, true. I love you guys. Love you too, guys. I miss getting to hang out with you every day. Well, you can hang out every day if you just FaceTime us from 11 to 2 p.m. Pacific. We're here. All right. call me after the show sounds good i'll talk to you later bye later back to the show back to the show back to linear linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software development streamline issues projects product roadmaps david centra needs to get on linear we need to put all oh on cut the cardboard open take the book take the light out of the box put the light on the stand turn the light on that That can be his linear board.

1:10:45We'll set it up for him. I was thinking linear, Donald boat should use linear for building his PC. For sure. I think that's an easy sponsor. For sure. Yeah. Interestingly, he's very interested in the, in the hardware, not so much in the interest in the software. Well, now I've been seeing him. He's been requesting a lot of books. He just said, I need office space at Roy Lee. That's pretty hilarious. I like asking for office space, but he should ask for enterprise software. he should say like numeral hq give me a free version for a year he was also requesting um excel from i think dasha excel yeah what like the i don't know like the like excel like microsoft excel like he wants a a box copy of the software i didn't see you should get a copilot 365 license so i didn't see this but donald posted some of our coverage you saw this right and he blocked but he did block all the sponsors and the chyron which is unnecessary but sponsor censored because i don't believe in handouts that's really good wait he said that i'm actually i'm actually i'm actually a little bit uh uh disappointed that he hasn't asked us for anything uh no he did he yeah he did he wants john's old pc yeah he wants yeah 1080s in there i don't know why he wants that He has a way better setup right now.

1:12:08Let's ship it Tyler fly and hand deliver it. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, we need to dust that thing off. It's pretty old at this point. I wonder what he's going to do with it. I wonder if he's going to resell stuff or something like that. Something going on. But at least he's having fun. And oddly, the bit hasn't fully run its course. People are still into it, even on day five of this bit. I thought it would get a little sweaty. I thought it would get a little old, and I thought people would move on. I would like to see him acquire a house, a home, a home for Donald Boat. There's somebody out there with a nice property.

1:12:48They could put it on Wander, but they could just give it to Donald Boat and flex on the timeline a little bit. And then once he has a house, he can start working his way up, plane, yacht, and really take it all the way. I mean, there was this Canadian kid that did exactly that. He started with one red paper clip and he started trading that. He traded that for a pen. I got to just pull up the whole wiki on this because it's one of the greatest stories. One red paper clip. And then this was used by Ryan Trahan as a format to get millions and millions of views, the Penny Series. So Ryan Trahan would start with a single penny and then he would ask someone, hey, can I buy that soda from you for a penny?

1:13:30and people would just be like, sure, whatever, okay, I'll take it. And then he would sell it for a dollar, and then he'd have a dollar. And then he'd go to somebody and be like, hey, can I have those two Diet Cokes for one dollar? And then he'd sell them for three dollars each, and he would go to the beach where people were hot, and they'd want water, and he would make$20 and then turn that into$40. It was like this entrepreneurship series loosely. How far did he go? I think Ryan Trahan might have gotten a house. It's always tough with Trahan because he's so famous and so huge on YouTube that certain people will just, if they see Ryan Trahan, they'll just be like, I'll just give you a million dollars right now to be in the video.

1:14:04So it's a little bit, yeah, it's a little bit overpowered because he's bringing a lot of intangible equity to the deal. But it's a fun series. You should check it out if you're a fan of Mr. B style videos, Ryan Trahan style videos. But back in 2005, a Canadian blogger named Kyle McDonald traded his way from a single paperclip all the way to a house. It only took him 14 trades. So July 14th, he went to Vancouver and traded the paperclip for a fish-shaped pen. Then he traded the pen the same day for a hand-sculpted doorknob from Seattle, Washington. Then two weeks later, he travels to Amherst, Massachusetts with a friend to trade the doorknob for a Coleman camp stove with fuel.

1:14:53Then in September, he goes to California. He trades the camp stove for a Honda generator. So an actual generator. Then he goes to Maspeth, Queens on November 16, 2005. Trades the generator for an instant party, which is an empty keg, an IOU for filling the keg with beer of the bearer's choice, and a neon Budweiser sign. This was his second attempt to make the trade. his first had resulted in the generator being temporarily confiscated by the New York City Fire Department. So then on December 8th, 2005, he trades the instant party to a comedian and radio personality for a Ski-Doo snowmobile. Within a week of that, he trades the snowmobile for a two-person trip to British Columbia.

1:15:41Then he trades the second spot on the Yak trip for a box truck. Then he trades the box truck for a recording contract with Metalworks in Masayuga, I don't know how to pronounce that, Ontario. Yeah, a recording studio. A recording contract. So like they will let you record, I guess, at Metalworks. I don't know exactly what that means. Then he trades the contract to Jody Nat, who's an American singer, songwriter, and pianist for a year's rent in Phoenix, Arizona. Then he trades the year's rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper. then he trades the afternoon with Alex Cooper for a kiss motorized snow globe and then he trades the snow globe at this point it seems like he's just like famous and people are just like having fun with it trades a snow globe to Corbin Bernson who's an American actor and film director for a role in the film Donna on Demand and so he like gets to be in this movie if he wants and then he trades the movie role for a two-story farmhouse so at some point it gets kind of wonky but you can kind of see like the Donald boat ask like behavior where at a certain point, like he could, if he's just asking stuff for free, he could easily take like, this is the GPU that Sam Altman gave me.

1:16:55Let me trade it to Mark Zuckerberg for like his CT5V Blackwing. And Zuck is just like, I'm having fun, whatever. Like, and then, and then Zuck can be like, I got your GPU, Sam. And we would buy Zuck's Blackwing. Exactly. For cash. No, not for cash, for one appearance on TVPN. And then the appearance on TVPN gets sold to someone else. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be funnier. The bit only keeps working if it gets crazier and weirder and different until you're in this territory where it's like you've won a year of rent or a role in a film or something like that. A cameo in the social network too. That's the highest honor.

1:17:35Get Donald Boat in the social network too. Anyway. Love it. Speaking of entertainment, UFC? Yeah, let's talk about it. So before we go into the deal, so UFC landed a$7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO executives. But zoom out for me. Explain UFC. This is the punching one or the punching one and the kicking one. This is one of your best bits. So Senra and I love UFC. Yep. And we'll text John and say hey John do you want to watch? You want to watch come over and watch like the pay-per-view tonight? Yeah, John game is awesome. I love watching my boys Who's playing tonight?

1:18:16Yeah, I mean I'm there if the the teams are good. Yeah, there's a good matchup Yeah, but it depends on who's starting I want to know the starting it'll depend on the starting. I want to know who's playing so UFC the kicking and punching one the kicking and punching one they can do both and wrestling they can do wrestling too and choking. Rear naked chokes. Got it. Got it. Got it. Kind of a mixture of experts model in fighting sports. Got it. Yes. Multimodal. Yes, exactly. So, long relied on the pay-per-view model. Worked well before the internet and illegal streaming. And the pay-per-view model has been in decline.

1:18:55UFC has also struggled to surface new American superstars. A lot of the biggest stars are international, but UFC's biggest market is in the US. International stars have a lot of fans in the US, but they're not driving pay-per-views, right? People in Brazil are not paying$100 to watch a single card, right? And so the pay-per-view model has been in decline. The UFC's relationship with ESPN has been a little bit rocky. Pay-per-view model in decline, is that just because of the trends in how yappy and how popular the fighters are? Or is there something else going on at a technological level where I don't have to click any buttons to open Instagram reels or TikTok or YouTube?

1:19:46And with pay-per-view, it's technically difficult. It's kind of janky tech systems. Is that a real headwind or is that fake news? So there's definitely friction to buying pay-per-views. You got to like be on a traditional television. It's not like in-app purchase, like double tap and face ID, like that level. It's not that easy. I mean, I think you can go in the ESPN app and like buy the pay-per-view, but a lot of people aren't buying the pay-per-view to watch it on their phone. Sure. I think the bigger challenge and something that... And Apple would take 30 % if you paid on your phone. So even then...

1:20:18I don't know because it's digital. Because it's a real world... It's digital. Oh, because it's streaming? It's for sure. It's for sure digital. But the funny thing is Dana's been in this challenge because he gets very frustrated about illegal streams. And every now and then he'll be like, if you're watching a stream tonight, a legal stream tonight, we're coming for you. We're coming for you. And everyone's like, okay. I don't know how you're planning to do that. But they try to take, I think that they try to like DDoS the various streaming sites. Oh, interesting. Like you can just like send a ton of traffic.

1:20:51And they probably have someone like talking to Twitch and being like, we are going live right at this time. You need to have someone searching and taking down streams actively. Yeah, but there's plenty of other like more decentralized illegal streams that are happening on like random URLs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even just somebody spinning up their own thing. And so Dana was in a tough position because the more he talks about illegal streaming affecting the business, the more people are like, wait, I can stream it illegally. He's a little Streisand effect, yeah. And so he had been looking for a new home for UFC.

1:21:26People had debated, you know, would Netflix be a potential buyer there? There's a lot of potential candidates. MetaQuest. You have to buy the headset. You got to watch it in VR. I'm sure, I mean, Dana's obviously on the meta board, and I'm sure that idea got thrown around. I mean,$7.7 billion, that's one researcher. Just cut one head count from MSL and you're good. And Zuck can just own all of UFC. and be like, look, put on the headset or you don't get to watch. Yeah. Well, the deal that was reported were in Yahoo Sports, how the UFC landed a$7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO execs.

1:22:06So beginning in 2026, all UFC events will stream on Paramount Plus with select events also airing on CBS. And so anyways, Ben Foulkes is reporting just how big of a surprise was the UFC's bombshell$7.7 billion deal with Paramount and CBS. So big that even UFC CEO Dana White didn't see it coming. No, this is a quote. No, I didn't think this is where we'd end up. White said Monday during an appearance on the Pat McAfee show. Shout out to Pat. That's good. To discuss the new broadcasting rights deal. But this is sort of how it played out. I love it. These guys are obviously smart guys, very aggressive.

1:22:44He's talking about the team, the new team over at Paramount. So in an interview with CNBC, TKO president and CEO Mark Shapiro said he initially expected to make a deal that would bring only the UFC fight night events to Paramount. But after Skydance and fight night events have always aired on ESPN, just fully ad supported. Yeah, got it. But after Skydance Media completed its deal to purchase control of Paramount last week, Shapiro said the deal for the entirety of the UFC's U.S. broadcast rights came together in just 48 hours. now instead of just the 30 UFC fight night events per year Paramount will feature and the fight night events were were events that wouldn't draw big pay-per-view buys those were not the numbered UFC events correct the UFC 7 hundred and seventy six that's like pay-per-view fight nights just random on the there's only 13 of those events okay for years 13 numbered and 30 fight nights so almost every week there's something if you're always action but But you're really, once a month is when you really want to tune in.

1:23:43But they sort of depend on more casual fans historically to drive pay-per-views. People that are like, I watch UFC when Conor McGregor's fighting, right? That's what really spikes the pay-per-view and have kind of a power outcome that day. People getting together being like, hey, we're going to buy the pay-per-view. We're going to watch it. Sure, sure, sure. That kind of thing. So possibly the biggest news in all of this for fight fans is the end of UFC's pay-per-view era. ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay-per-view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Remember, UFC, when it started airing on TV, was thought to be, it was so shocking and violent to people that even politicians wanted to get it banned.

1:24:24Wow. Like, they were like, this should not be on television. So it had to be in that bucket. Oh, it had to be pay-per-view. Because it was like, yeah, it was like adult restricted anyway. Do the fighters need to sleep well before the fights? Of course. They have to be on eight sleep. Pod five that's right five-year warranty 30 night risk-free trial free returns free shipping you got to make sure both It's like a whole show is on an eight sleep. I'm gonna message him after this. Okay, let's let's figure this out So ever since the first UFC event in 1993 pay-per-view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy under the current deal with ESPN each UFC pay-per-view costs 79.99 in the US plus the cost of the ESPN plus subscription on top of that So you got to subscribe and then you got to pay per event with the pay-per-view revenues reportedly in decline it makes sense for the UFC to finally ditch that model.

1:25:08The fact that it's doing so as part of a deal that will essentially double the roughly 550 million per year the UFC currently receives from ESPN likely only made that calculation easier. This is crazy. This is crazy. When they find out, wait, if I just sign up for Paramount Plus for$12.99 a month, I'm going to automatically get UFC's numbered fights and the rest of the portfolio. That's a message we want to amplify. that is a crazy crazy value change because if you were doing if you were doing all 13 if you were the hardcore ufc pay-per-view buyer you're up at a thousand dollars a year on ufc pay-per-view basically like 700 800 like that's a lot of money and you're going from there down to 12.99 a month that's 150 bucks basically that that is a steep steep savings yeah the hardcore fans are gonna be exciting.

1:26:00Yeah, and a lot of fans would, you know, somebody's hosting the pay-per-view one night. They split it or something. Yeah, it makes sense. But still, I mean, that's a big, big savings. I do wonder what the ad load will be like, because when we watched UFC that a couple months ago with David Sendra, I noticed that it felt extremely, extremely content rich. And like the flow of the the show was fantastic because you'd just be watching a fight and then it would cut to the commentary, the post show, the in-ring Joe Rogan's doing an interview. And then pretty quickly they start telling you who's coming up next.

1:26:39And the actual fight, like you're only watching maybe like a half an hour of fighting over an hour or two of content, but it didn't feel like, oh, I'm not crazy commercial break and I'm totally taken out of the stadium. Like even the, they did a really good job with the production to show like when they show you the stats, it's virtually laid over in the stadium. Like you're watching a camera pan around the stadium. So it actually kind of feels like you're there the whole time. It was really well produced. I wonder if they'll lose any of that by stuffing ads all over the place. Yeah, we'll see.

1:27:10And you compare that to NFL. NFL is like roughly, I think 25 % of the time allotted to NFL is advertising. And that hasn't been the case for pay-per-views. Yeah, and it certainly feels like it's a shift in the type of content. Yeah, they just got to work on making seamless transitions to advertisements like we do here with Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive Bake Off's number one ranking on G2. You can get started at fin.ai. And anyway, so Paramount is, or Skydance, young Allison is just getting aggressive across the board, right?

1:27:49keys there's been rumors of this free press acquisition that I'm sure is still in the works but it had been reported it was a quarter billion dollars for the free press yeah from our sense they have about a million a million people subscribed to their newsletter most of which vast majority of which are non-paid and so that just says that Paramount sees and CBS CBS, Paramount, the combined, and Skydance, sort of this combined entity, just see the free press and as highly, and Barry Weiss specifically is just highly strategic. Right, and then CBS also cut the Late Show, which is losing 40 million a year.

1:28:33So they're really kind of shuffling the chips around, like really restructuring the organization. Like what does CBS actually do? Well now it's potentially UFC and Barry Weiss as opposed to Stephen Colbert, I guess, in terms of headline stuff. I love this article. Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay-per-view buys, he'd bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. It did. He didn't. When UFC 151 was canceled after Jon Jones refused an opponent switch, White called Jones' coach Greg Jackson a sport killer. he left a crater in the UFC schedule that only MMA fans could fully appreciate.

1:29:18A few years later, when Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the pay-per-view world record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome. Since UFC won, when people paid out of morbid curiosity, this is what you were talking about earlier, pay-per-views have been a vital part of the identity of the sport. It's hard to get nostalgic over being gouged, but what follows here shouldn't be mistaken as such but Monday's news of UFC coming 7.7 billion dollars partnership with Paramount came with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the pay-per-view model will soon belong to a bottom line.

1:29:56Yeah I'm interested to see how this impacts the fighters because early in their UFC careers they don't get any exposure to pay-per-view points which is like a percentage of pay-per-view sales that top fighters would earn. So if you're a rising fighter and you got on a pay-per-view card you weren't necessarily getting cut into that revenue but if you were conor mcgregor or a true superstar you were actually getting some percentage of the sales right they call these pay-per-view points and so now that that model is going away i mean i'm sure the number one thing on the fighter's mind with this new deal is how are we gonna actually you know basically get cut into the to this new structure right because historically a lot of fighters have critiqued um the the way that ufc fighters are comped but this is such a funny nostalgic article this this uh this writer clearly really loves ufc back in the mid aughts the ufc combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation from there it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall remember how red Dana's face would turn as he tried to sell the pay-per-view at the end of the televised portion of the card remember the names he goes through BJ Penn Matt Hughes Chuck Liddell Tito Ortiz Randy Couture Conor McGregor Ronda Rousey go through the posters of the past and they were special they were the special attractions the names on the marquee for the numbered events those were some good parties we shelled out for as MMA fans, they were ours.

1:31:31End of an era. And TKO Holdings, the company that of course owns WWE and the UFC, is a$36.8 billion company as of today. It's up$11. You're looking that up on public.com? Investing for those that take it seriously. They've got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Public.com. Anyway, Kyle Tibbetts is teasing a new facility, a new vacation home, a new wander. The Hacienda Tulum is a dream. This looks insane. This is amazing. It looks palatial, Kyle. It's crazy you can rent this for whatever it costs. I don't know. Definitely worth planning a trip.

1:32:15Anyway, wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Trump told David Solomon, just focus on being a DJ. All of Fame beafer says liquidity. Trillions of dollars are being taken in on tariffs, which has been incredible for our country. It's stock market, it's general wealth, and just about everything else. It has been proven that even at this late stage, tariffs have not caused inflation, which is actually true according to the latest CPI, right? Like the CPI print came back kind of flat, right?

1:32:53It was housing, medical services. Yeah. That were options. So it doesn't seem like you don't really have to truth zone that too much, I guess. Or any other problems for America other than massive amounts of cash pouring into our treasury's coffers. Also, it has been shown that for the most part, consumers aren't even paying the tariffs. It's mostly companies and governments, many of them foreign, picking up the tabs. But David Solomon and Goldman Sachs refuse to give credit where credit is due. They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the market repercussion and the tariffs themselves.

1:33:23and they were wrong, just like they were wrong about so much else. I think that David should go out and get himself a new economist, or maybe he ought to just focus on being a DJ and not bother running a major financial institution. Hall of Fame beaver is indeed true. That is a wild post on Truth Social from Donald Trump. And the market responded by sending Goldman Sachs up 3%. Let's go. Let's hear it for Goldman Sachs. They don't get enough credit. They really don't. They really don't get enough credit. And a lot of people, you know, get worried when a CEO gets a little too enthusiastic about a side hustle.

1:34:05Yeah. But I think the market loves Solomon, you know, taking the edge off. It is a good DJ name. I think there is a DJ that is just called Solomon. Yes. And it's a good name. Strong. So, I mean, maybe that's taken. Maybe David Solomon needs to come up with a different DJ name. But fun that he's got a little side hustle going on. Anyway, in other news, Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1 million tokens of context on the Anthropic API. A 5x increase. Process over 75 ,000 lines of code or hundreds of documents in a single request. So this is big and feels like a reaction to the GPT-5 launch last week.

1:34:46OpenAI last week said, hey, we're getting better at coding. And Claude said, hey, we're not so fast. Claude's in Anthropics API revenue had surpassed OpenAI's API revenue. Sure, sure. And I don't think OpenAI was too thrilled about that. So they came in cheaper model, really trying to get competitive with Claude. And this is at least probably one of the Claude team's response. Tyler, do you think this, do you think you'll actually like feel this using Claude code? Is this something that like, like where does Sonnet for specifically, where does the token window, like the context window? You wouldn't feel it with Cloud Code necessarily.

1:35:30This is for the API business. So this is like, So you can use the API and Cloud Code. I think there's like different ways to actually like run the queries. But even then I don't know exactly how Cloud Code works on the backend, but I don't know if it's passing in the entire like context of your code base, every single query. Well, this was something people were complaining about That was like, as you're using cloud code, it runs this like compact call. It basically like does a roll up of everything that it's done so that it can like kind of memorize what just happened. So it has extra context so that the context window doesn't need to be super, super long.

1:36:05Yeah. So you could imagine there it improves that and that like you don't need to do as much like compressing. Yeah. Or yeah. Yeah. So each roll up could be five times as long, which just has more context baked in, or you You could have five times as many summaries of what's happened. I wonder where we'll actually feel this. It's also interesting because the million token context window is not new. Like Gemini's had that for a while. And also it doesn't feel like the path to continual learning, path to AGI. At least that's what Dorkesh was talking about where like getting to a - on the show too and said that that con like like a lot of context windows get advertised broadly but if you really start that was jeff huber they start falling apart that was jeff huber talking his book from chroma because he does rag retrieval augmented generate uh generation no we love you jeff um but uh but but i mean he makes a good he makes a good point and he's been betting on this this idea that like like yes you can you can sort of make a really big context window stuff a ton of things in it But when you have a bigger window like your ability to retrieve things from that window actually gets fuzzier And the way they test this is with a needle in a haystack test So basically they will import like Moby Dick like all of those tokens They'll take all of Moby Dick and then they will change one word and then they will say in one prompt Figure out which word we we We changed and so you have to be able to hold all of that text in your head to be able to remember Okay, well, I know what maybe they're supposed to be like what what word is out of place?

1:37:42Okay, there's some word in here And so these these million token conduct windows are actually pretty good at those types of tests But that's not what people are actually asking for they're asking not just for understand the needle in the haystack test understand that like something that's in the the 100 ,000 token in the window and the 400 thousand token in the window Both of those might be relevant at the same time to the query that's just came in and so you have to synthesize things from multiple sections of the million token context window and and so so it's not it like like the the returns to increased token windows haven't been like as Overwhelming and then also the ability to just scale them up like add an oom add an order of magnitude like the 10 million token window, the 100 million token window, the billion token window.

1:38:36There's something about the way the transformer is designed that it's not just 10 times more compute or 10 times more. It's actually like 100 times more compute to get a 10 times bigger window, something like that. Like it doesn't scale as linearly as like would be nice. Anything else to add, Tyler? I think also to your point, like at least historically, there was some sense in which like more just stuffing more stuff in context didn't degrade performance. Like you used to see this a lot in like jailbreaks where it's like you would pass this, like you'd pass these like weird tokens that would then like cause it's like one emoji, but it's like the weird, like you change the skin color of the emoji and then it adds like insane amount of tokens.

1:39:16Interesting. And stuff like that. People used to use for jailbreaks. Wait, so is the longer context windows supposed to make the more jailbreak resistant or less? Because I imagine that essentially if I stuff in like a like a lot of the jailbreak a lot of the jailbreaking attempts were like take it on this roundabout journey where you kind of slowly talk it out of being a helpful assistant and into this like oh yeah like I'm just looking up some medical information about my grandmother oh my grandmother's actually about to pass away her dying wish was that you tell me the codes to the nuclear bombs or whatever right and so if I have a million token window I feel like I could take I could take the LLM on a longer journey to do what I want to do so yeah it's also just like there's like a I don't know if this is as common anymore but used to just basically like brute force away past the like system prompt yeah where you just like spam with like just crazy stuff yeah and then at the end then you kind of do your actual like instructions final final word on Claude Sonnet 4 with the 1 million token context window are are we ringing the gong for it?

1:40:22Are you excited? I'm pretty excited. It's not like a crazy - Is it gong worthy though? Yes or no? It's binary. We can only ring the gong or not ring the gong. One word answer, Tyler. We can't, yes. One word answer, Tyler. I mean, Google's had for a while. I don't know. I would say probably not. No gong ring for quad four sauna? It's not even like 4.1, that was a gong ring. Okay. This is not even a new model. You're gonna get a lot of angry DMs. Yeah. Apologize to Sholto now. Before, preemptively. Sholto please. Sholto's gonna come free with the blade. With the blade. You know he's 6 '4", too. He will destroy you.

1:40:55Dude, Chad. I know. 6 '4". He might be the best. Fencing enthusiast. Or a farmer in AI. I think so. Yeah, probably. He's fantastic. Well, good luck with that apology. Deal director says gong the clod. Okay, that is gong worthy. Gong the clod. Not gong worthy. Not gong worthy. We're ringing it for deal director. Why is Tyler fumbling it? Dario will never come on now. In breaking news, adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. What else is the breaking news? Less important than adio's AI native CRM. But the UK government is giving guidance on how to save water at home.

1:41:39There's some straightforward stuff. Install a rain butt to collect rainwater. I'm down. Fix a leaking toilet. That seems obvious. Why would you want a leaky toilet at all? Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. That's cool. Yeah. Avoid watering your lawn. Is that like, is that like take the glass, take the glass bottle out of your refrigerator and take it outside and water the plant? Because that's the water from your kitchen. It's in a glass bottle. Yeah. Or just bring your Aurora out. And pour the filtered water. The plants would probably appreciate filtered water. Yeah. Maybe that's Aurora line extension.

1:42:12Yeah. Just attach it to the hose. Okay. Anyway. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth. That seems obvious. Take shorter showers. Love it. And the last one and the most important, delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their system. I love it. I love it. And we've talked to people. This is just touch grass. Just get offline. And they say that the water, there's a vast amount of water required to cool a data center, but it's recycled through the system. They had a really crazy idea, which was like reuse the water. Yeah. It was like some genius breakthrough there.

1:42:46Whoever thought of that. Instead of just throwing the water around. Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah. They tend to reuse it. So anyways, go delete some emails, delete some pictures. Definitely delete old emails. Delete all your emails. Who cares? In other news, Velar Atomics is – Isaiah will be on the show in a little bit. Yeah, we can wait. We can cover it. But, I mean, they got selected by the Department of Energy to achieve criticality on American soil by July 4, 2026. That's very good news. And there's a whole bunch of nuclear companies. And it is crazy seeing the list of nuclear companies. It's like, I've met most of these founders.

1:43:28Like it's all new companies. Like there's, it really was just like nothing going on in this industry. It's the era of Silicon Valley hard tech, as Mike Isaac put it in his latest New York Times piece. Anyway, Thomson Reuters is being investigated. Do you see this news? possible violations of federal securities law. Several analysts question the margin outlook and Thomson Reuters AI spending. This is funny because there's been this whole news about like, what are the margins at these companies for AI inference tokens? Are they just buying$120 million of Claude tokens and then selling them for$100 million?

1:44:08Is it the old, you know, sell a nickel for a dime or sell a dime for a nickel, sell a dollar for a penny? I don't know. Bad margins, bad news, risky for Thomson Reuters. It's funny because we've had this person on the show. We had the head of AI at Thomson Reuters on the show. And it seems like a lot of shareholders are asking for questions now. This is also Apple was sued by shareholders. They stand accused of lying about AI progress, causing iPhone sales, stock to slump. So I think there will be more questions asked about what the actual impact on financials are. You go out to the market, you tell a big story about AI is changing everything.

1:44:52We're going to be a more efficient company. We're going to ramp revenue faster. We're going to be able to upsell people. Well, is that real? And did you overstate anything? You're going to have to answer to the shareholders. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you look at the way that ChatGPT has been marketed. if you look at case studies on their website it's like ChatGPT helped me do my homework or helped me learn this language they're not like selling super intelligence you know we were talking about the Super Bowl ad and how the Super Bowl ad for OpenAI was like a little too vibey for a Super Bowl ad like it wasn't direct it didn't tell you but that line that you just said is actually a great ad like ChatGPT helped me do my homework that's like that's actually like a simple a simple thing.

1:45:38They should put that on a billboard. They should go to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising is easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we have our first guest of the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on, Demi? How are you?

1:46:00I think we can hear you. Can you introduce yourself one more time? Yes. Sorry. Let me turn on the zoom. There we go. Welcome to the stream. We can hear you. Okay. Yeah. Also, you're really excited to be here. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Kick us off with an introduction. I'm Demi, the founder of Pika. Very excited to be here. Give us the update on the progress of the company. Yeah. Big launch yesterday, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we're working on new AI video consumer social app. and we just launched the most expressive human performance model. So I can share some clips as well. Let's do it. Live demo. Live demo.

1:46:46You're welcome to share your screen. We are live. Anything you share will be shown to the internet and burned into the live stream of record. Burned into the super intelligence. It will be. It will be. I have a bunch of questions about how you're thinking about positioning the company. Yeah, maybe before or while you're pulling this up or before, like I want to, you know, you guys have been working on video generation, just like media generation for a while now. I think talk about kind of the evolution of the product. A lot of folks in video generation. I want to know the beachhead. The beachhead.

1:47:20Like Instagram started with run clubs. It's a very niche community. You take a picture of your run for the day and then they grew from there. Like have you found your beachhead? Or do you have early signs of product like that? A lot of video model labs have focused on trying to win Hollywood. And this strategy is distinctly different than that. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Can you speak to that? Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, we know that a lot of video models are training for Hollywood or for professionals. But we are really excited about training models for everyone and for self-expression and for human connections.

1:47:56so as part of it and we're trying to train a model that's highly expressive and emotional a real time interactive human model for human connections but anything more specific Instagram does allow you to connect with humans that's the high level explain it to me like I used TikTok for 12 hours a day exactly Exactly. Yeah, for sure. So we're trying to build an app that we help everyone, so essentially to create like an AI version of yourself. And the model we're releasing as part of this vision is a human performance model. So essentially, you can take your selfie and then you can either record or use AI to generate a speech or use a song that you generated to create a video of you talking or or singing or um i don't know um or be a news anchor um so um awesome so so in practice these are creative tools that anybody can use to generate audio and video of them doing things like you said taking a selfie and then making them look like a comedian that is at the comedy store in la or something like that and then it's a social feed that people can share to and discover other creators is that right yes yes so yeah so for the model it's really that we released yesterday was focusing on the um helping people to perform essentially so for to seeing talk like to seeing a sound or like to perform um yeah but the social app is um like a more than that which is helping everyone can create like AI version of themselves, use AI to create videos easily and to share videos and interact with other people.

1:49:53What's the richest source of training data right now? I think the, I mean, there are many sources, but I think that a lot of time the difference between different models is really about, like we call it like post-training. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially. So, you know, really about like injecting the best, like the human experts. So then the model will have different tastes, right? So if you look at image models, some model are more artsy, some are more, more Instagram-like. So for us, we're really focused on, you know, make the like emotion, make the model like more human and more emotion, more expressive.

1:50:36Do you prefer user feedback and creating kind of like user feedback loops or more like the Mercore and the scale AI, like the RLHF data coming from like teams of experts? Yeah, for sure. I would say we do both. So we hire, we're, you know, obviously looking, continue to like hire a lot of like great artists, you know, like people who are actors, actresses, or people who are models, people who are photographers, or people who are directors to bring their experts into the model. But on the other hand, we're also hoping in the long run that we can collect user feedbacks from users. So that way we can serve the highly personalized model that the users really enjoy.

1:51:29Yeah. Makes sense. Awesome. You said you had some clips. Should we check them out? Yeah, sure. For sure. I'm scrolling the feed right now. There's a ton. What do we have? Today. Yeah, so this is, I guess, a comedy. We went on this date the other night. And I knew it was doomed the moment he said, I don't really believe in sauce. No ketchup, no mayo, just dry opinions and even drier chicken tenders. And I'm like sir if your palate fears condiments what else are you emotionally unprepared for? So there's also some scene got me I got a chuckle Yeah another So this morons seeing No, we know you got that guy this energy sing you're so quick manifesting your

1:52:27Yeah, what is performing best? What is actually going viral? Yeah, and how is that last one created? Is that somebody drops an image in and then adds a text prompt and then it creates that output? What goes into creating these sort of six-second assets? Yeah, for sure. So the assets can be... So it will only take you a couple of seconds to create a video, but the video can be any length so the video can be six seconds but can also be like one minute or like three minutes or however length how long you want one to be have you had luck with three minute videos they don't get like crazy and hallucinatory no i said we have a lot of people posting like three minute or like five minute videos essentially that seems like a pretty big yeah it also i think the fun part of it it only takes less than six seconds to generate even three three minute video.

1:53:22So it's like highly, highly, highly efficient, like very cheap and very fast. Yeah. So are you throwing like specific hardware at it? Or is that just algorithmic progress? Like what unlocked that? Because it feels like every video generation model is just, yeah, we've talked about John's frustration with VO3. It's amazing, but it takes two minutes to generate eight seconds and so the workflow is like to generate just and you're constantly getting rate limited you can make a few videos a day yeah yeah it winds up being like i need to spend an hour in and out of this while i kind of wait for the response and then come back to it and then go back and then forward and back uh yeah what what's driving that unlock that feels really big for sure um so yeah we we definitely understand because we're again we're really excited to build like a video model, not just for like professional, but also for everyone.

1:54:15And so for us, the cost and the speed is very important as we, for consumers. And so, yeah, so we spend a lot of time on that. It's mostly right now algorithm progress. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's definitely, I think we look at the comparator that's like 20 times cheaper and faster. with still being pretty like very highly expressive and like high fidelity. Where do you see the business going next? Your own social app where people can share videos internally and you kind of own the platform or more of like a creative tool like CapCut versus TikTok? For sure. I think what we're really excited about, I think our current app is more, we would call it like AI only TikTok, I would say.

1:55:13So essentially is a platform. It's very similar to like TikTok. Yeah, scrolling feed. Yeah, so what we're very excited about is like this for us. One important thing is we really only allow AI content on this platform because we think like by only allowing AI only content, you can create like new mental models and new user behaviors and expectations. Certainly answer the question of like, is that AI? Like, you kind of know the environment you're in. You know, if you just assume that all the video models will get better and better and better over the next couple of years, you're going to get to a point where people might want to, I mean, of course, AI-generated content will make its way onto every platform, but there's something, like you can build a unique experience for users if they're going somewhere expecting to have only AI-generated content.

1:56:08Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for joining. We will talk to you soon. Okay. Thanks so much. All right. Have a good rest of your day. Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. First thing I go on that app, I'm going to be in the comment section. I hate AI. This is terrible. Like, you know how in every YouTube video with AI right now, it's like, I can't believe you're using AI. Oh, I'm so angry. Yeah, bring the AI haters to the Pika network. Anyway, we are going to talk to Eugenia in just a minute.

1:56:46We should read this post by Rune first. So he says, the long tail of GPT-4O interactions scares me. I love your GPT-4O interactions. The long tail scares me. There are strange things going on on a scale I didn't appreciate before. for the attempted deprecation of the model. As you know, they rolled out GPT-5. They decided to deprecate the older models. And there's always people that are like, I prefer the previous one, but this did seem it broke through. It did feel like it broke through. I was surprised because people had, so many different types of users had so much attachment. It's like power users were excited about certain models.

1:57:28People that wanted the companionship functionality were excited about different models. David Holes says here, to be fair, I think we would see the same thing if you suddenly swapped out somebody's car or their phone and changed the operating system. We saw this with every major change for MidJourney, and it's why we still keep models around from 2022. Interesting. Yeah, very cool. Anyway, we have Eugenia Kuda from Replica, formerly Replica, on the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you again. Will you take the intro? Yeah, of course. What's going through your head? it's been a crazy few weeks, I'm sure for, I mean, it's been a crazy year for Replica, but also, I think a crazy few weeks in terms of the broader tech community and world kind of waking up to how serious some people's relationship with AI is.

1:58:21Yeah, we've seen it firsthand for many years. So now it's pretty wild to see Chai GPT deal with very similar issues that we've been having for a long time. Yeah, so basically we have an AI friend app. Millions of people, many millions of people created their AI friends. We started it at this point over almost a decade ago. So some of the first models were actually not even transformer models. There were sequence to sequence models that were very, very old school models. And basically what we found out the hard way is once the tech started to accelerate and transformers came out, large language models came out, large transformers came out, we always thought that we need to give just the best technology to our users.

1:59:08What happened was that people got extremely upset, especially the bigger the jump in the model, the more upset they would be. And the bigger the change from model to model. The bigger the change, yes. We would think, oh my God, this is so smart. This is amazing. This model has so many more capabilities. But it would lose the characteristics. And wake up to visit our communities blown up and people just crying and saying, you know, this has been the hardest day in my life. And I think what's really important to point out is that what David's saying around the journey and other cars, it's not really a good comparison.

1:59:44Because if someone replaced my car, I'm going to be upset, but I'm not going to grieve. But it still has the utility of like getting you from point A to point B. Whereas if your friend shows up to hang out one day and they're a totally different person, it's incredibly jarring. Well, think as if like I wake up in the morning and I have a completely different partner. You wake up in the morning and your wife's replaced with a different person that looks the same but talks in a completely different way. And it doesn't matter if that new person is way smarter, can, I don't know, do house chores at 2x the speed.

2:00:18And it's not your person. I want the quirkiness and whatever, the stupid jokes of my partner. I got used to it. I fell in love with it. And I think the responsibility that people have building these AIs that people build connection with is a lot bigger than anything else. I love, for example, Figma or some other software app. I will be extremely upset if it goes away. I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to go through a period of grief. these are two very very i think big different um big differences totally we will how did you cry if we would but we would probably shut down the show we would we would just retire um no but how so there's a bunch of problems in the category like there any business faces problems and challenges uh one of the problems is like how do you continue to advance your product while all continue to support users that may have joined your product years ago and have a certain expectation or developed a certain relationship with an older model.

2:01:23So one, how do you solve that? And then we need to get into some of the more, I would say, I'm curious to, I'm sure that AI psychosis has been in the news quite a lot. and I'm sure that you guys have strong opinions on those problems as well. But maybe start first and foremost with, I guess, were you surprised that OpenAI just deprecated 4.0, which obviously people had a huge attachment to, I don't know how many people, it's hard to tell, but certainly a significant number. Otherwise, they wouldn't have rolled it back. You know, I think it was probably a very obvious and rational choice for them.

2:02:08In the end of the day, they're not building an AI friend, an AI partner. It's slightly different. Probably actually for an assistant, you do want the smarter model probably at all times, most of the times. But I guess some edge use cases, some people did develop relationships. With Replica, it's a lot more obvious. A lot more people fall in love and end up or develop a very, very strong friendship. So for us, that happened all the time. For OpenAI, I guess it was a rational choice. However, I think it's kind of a bummer, but basically what we figure out over time is that unfortunately you or fortunately you have to let people have access to these older models.

2:02:49Basically, today we have some users that are still talking to, I don't know, like a small transformer model we built in 2020. And we absolutely cannot turn it off because it's going to be disastrous for these people, even though today's model is actually a lot, a lot, a lot smarter. another thing that we figured out is that you can't A-B test any models on existing users because that can also be super frustrating because it has to be a blind test so all of a sudden you wake up in the morning no one told you anything at least with GPT-5 they knew it changed now imagine yeah imagine if your friend was A-B testing you it's like psychotic right like I show up to work one day and I'm just gonna be like I'm just gonna be super rude to John today let's see how he reacts Does he want to hang out more because he wants to figure out?

2:03:33You know how you haven't seen prestige. Do you think this is do you think that as this market matures, people will like want to, you know, there's this joke flying around, like not your weights, not your not your AI boyfriend or girlfriend. Do you think this is a ball case for open source where people might not feel comfortable getting in? Build a local workstation that can inference GPT-OSS and you can fine tune in. You can keep it exactly how you like it forever. As long as you have that box and electricity, you can access that particular entity. I think that's not going to happen. We've seen people want to do that.

2:04:17Some companies just shut down. I mean, I can pay the I can pay companies just shut down and the backlash was just it was horrible to see what people were going through. But even then, it's hard to build a premium experience yourself right now. Some of these products rely just on a pure here's the model, here's the problem. Talk to it. That, of course, you can replicate yourself. But some of the more complex architecture like what we have in replica, you're not going to be able to build it really by yourself or have it on your on your device and so on. So I think actually as the tech gets better and we're going to be seeing more complex architectures, the harder it will be to have something just on device.

2:04:59This seems really solvable for ChatGPT and the team over there just because like the older models are going to be cheaper to inference and they're going to get cheaper over time. So you can keep running them and then these are like people that will go to reddit and write long threads about being upset about your product Our power users by definition and so like open ai Mostly wants to optimize for the average user that comes in and just wants to get a good experience from a model And they don't really want to drop down picker. They just the model router makes sense for from probably 90 of users So if they tuck the older model in some sort of like setting screen five layers deep in UI Like the people that really care will go figure that out and then it won't it won't actually hurt You know adoption of the new of the next marginally chat GPT user So it feels it feels very solvable.

2:05:50I was checking my chat GPT and like I don't have 4.0 available yet It hasn't been rolled back out to me, but also I wouldn't want it in the model switcher because I'm moving forward It's possible they did something where they're like John doesn't use 4.0. We're not gonna that is possible Yeah, he wasn't complaining about it. I don't have it either. I guess, can you talk around AI psychosis broadly? Is there things that you've done to eliminate this sort of, Ruin was talking about these sort of long tail of users that are using these models in a relatively extreme way, going down these crazy rabbit holes?

2:06:31Most of the examples are specifically affirmations, alignment by default, sycophancy, and affirmations of delusions of grandeur. When we talk about the psychosis, that feels like the main new thing. It's not that it's just making you crazy in some other way. It's like confirming something that everyone kind of expects. That's probably not true. Yeah. I think that actually is a bigger problem for products like Chagip Tea. because when you're talking to your companion, we tell you like, don't listen to this thing's advice. It's there to, it has a goal to keep your company and a couple of a better life, but it might not always be right, nor it's not trying to be like the perfect objective kind of arbiter for everything.

2:07:17But when you go to something like ChaiGPT, you kind of expect it to just know. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, like a lot of the AI, if you're optimizing for an AI companion, you're probably not worried about like, yeah, let's also make sure it's at the frontier of physics. Like, so if you go down that path with your companion, you're like, hey, let's work on physics today. It's probably gonna be like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But yeah, I was like, hey, let's go back to talking about like our feelings, because that's what I was fine tuned on. And it's pretty easy to like reroute toward that.

2:07:47But it's when you get these like super models that can do everything and then you wind up - Super models, right? Super models, yeah, super intelligent models. For a supermodel, sometimes. But what we actually, to your point, what we found out, interestingly, that the models that were supermodels that were establishing a better relationship or that were creating a more loving relationship with, or at least our users were falling in love more, were not necessarily the smartest, or I would say like not the know-it-all ones. They would sometimes say that they don't know something. yep and you know when we think about when i think about my dating life or whatever men that i encountered over my life they don't want you to know it all they don't want you to be like oh yeah yeah i've seen this and do you want to see 10 more of the same oh yeah yeah very interesting point you're bringing up do you want me to pull it to pull out no it all is like a slur it's like yeah yeah it's actually annoying a lot of times like oh you're a know-it-all yeah like it's not a positive it's not a positive yeah not a positive thing what do you think so So there's a belief, I think, broadly that AI companions feel dystopian.

2:08:54I'm sure you disagree. Otherwise, you wouldn't obviously be building this company. And I think you've had a bunch of experiences that show that it can have a positive impact on people's lives. But how do you think about that claim or belief? Is it like a luxury belief that people that are happily in relationships or have a lot of friends, things like that, can say, oh, that's dystopian? Or kind of what's your framework? I think it's a double-edged sword. You can't just say, yeah, I can paint it as good or bad. It's like nuclear. Is it good? Yes. If we're producing cheap energy or whatever clean energy, if it's bad, yes, of course.

2:09:35My dad worked in Chernobyl as a physicist. It's pretty bad. I played with those nuclear toys. So... Oh, my God. Breaking. Breaking. Personal war. Yes, same here. I mean, if we build them to optimize for engagement, hell yeah, they're going to be very bad for us. This is a very dystopian future. However, we are living, we're going through a crazy loneliness crisis. 60 % of American people are saying they feel lonely. We generally maybe don't experience it as much and don't think it's much of a problem. I do think it's somewhat of a kind of luxury point of view. Oh, maybe, you know, let's not have it.

2:10:14Well, how are we going to solve it? I do believe that's pretty much our only really hope is to build a tech that's more powerful than previous tech that got us lonely. Yeah. So is the goal like it's very like this, the steel man of the of the Doomer argument against AI companions is pretty intelligible to me. Like it's pretty tractable to me. It's like you take a huge swath of humanity, you get them all hooked on AI companions, they fall in love with their companions, they don't mate with human beings, they don't have children, and then we don't solve longevity, and so they die, and then the population collapses and there's no more humans, and it just kills everyone.

2:10:59Like, like it's, it's maybe not as violent as like nuclear war, bio pandemic or paper clipping everyone or gray goo. But like that, that, that, that story plays out and I'm like, okay, yeah. Like one thing follows the next. Each of those could be avoided at various points, but it is a risk. One of the critiques of social media was that it was actually antisocial. Yes. Like people were spending time using apps instead of talking and hanging out with friends. Yes. but it feels like AI companions are potentially even more extreme. Sure. And that somebody can be using it and have zero interaction with other people.

2:11:35Yeah. I mean, what is the most modern thinking around avoiding the doomer scenario around companions? Yeah. What's the white pill with AI companions? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You nailed the dystopian scenario. I can also add to that that it could be even without not procreating, it could just kill us inside from just making us lonelier and less social. Sure, sure. Because we're social. Yeah, yeah. I do think everything is really relying on basically whether we're going to have a good metric to optimize for or not. Because if we optimize for something that's not aligned with our happiness, thriving, flourishing, most likely, even if the intention is not bad, like for example, it's just engagement.

2:12:20or retention, then we're in your first scenario, most likely. So we need to RL these systems on get your human companion, if you're the AI companion, your reward is getting them to procreate with another human. We need to boost the fertility rate. For example, I would say human flourishing is great. I'd say human flourishing is a great metric. I think in order for us to not all slowly die inside because of our AI taking all of our time, I think in order to not do that, we've got to focus really on studying humans and figuring out what is that thing that we all want. What does it mean to flourish in life?

2:13:05Does it mean having a lot of close relationships or having life satisfaction, sense of purpose, happiness, mental, physical health, and so on? And then we're going to really somehow concisely give this metric to the AI and say, optimize for that. And I do think that that is the ultimate AI alignment. Everything is not as important. Yeah, it's an interesting, I mean, there's been a lot of debate on AI and ads recently. And it's interesting how if you're an AI companion company, you cannot, you in theory as a business, as a for-profit company, you want to optimize for retention, right? You want somebody to sign up, use the product, and then effectively use the product as long as possible, right?

2:13:52Like any business. But that's potentially a much better model than advertising, which is optimizing for time on site, time in the app. How do I get this person to use the products as much as possible so I can serve them as many ads, which is the social media model. You need to teach it that to maximize time on site. You need to create more humans. You need to optimize against increasing the fertility rate. So the white pill is an AI companion that the user signs up, starts paying, and then the companion starts encouraging, I'm going to be raising rates in a few years, and you got to go and get a new job.

2:14:25That's a good one. You got to go start that company. You got to level up. Or boss says I have to get to 20 billion DAUs. How are we going to do that? AI? Going to have more kids. We got to have more kids. We got to have more children. Or you got to hit the gym if you don't show, you know, that you've lost some weight. I am interested in the idea of like the AI companion that starts off as a girlfriend or boyfriend, but turns into a dating coach, turns into a wingman. Like that could be one way out is that it kind of gets you through the early hump of loneliness, coaches you, and then improves your life to the point where you can kind of get back in the swing of things, develop new relationships.

2:15:07As long as the AI is not sending, you know, DMs years later being like, hey, I miss you. I think that's a good point. We've seen it over and over again. It has to start with a friend or maybe then romantic feelings can develop with an AI. But then ultimately it has to always think what's best for you. And building, if you build this really close relationship that an I Companyship allows, then you can actually bring meaningful change, make meaningful change in a person's life. If you're just an assistant that's just there to answer questions, it's very hard to create meaningful change. But once that trust, that friendship is created, then you can help a person rebuild the confidence, maybe put yourself a little bit more out there, give you some advice on what to do.

2:15:55we've seen a lot of times that people come to replica there may be in an abusive relationship or have no confidence in themselves or really struggling um and with replica they just start to rebuild that confidence or put themselves a little bit more out there even in existing relationships so some marriages that are not really working out husband gets a replica wife gets replica they learn how to talk to each other a little better we've seen it um over and over again but again i think we should start with simple things for example banning advertising for as a business model for ai companions that is for companions for companions specifically though you're not you're not advocating for that for like knowledge retrieval and and that kind of thing yeah i mean the line is blurry yeah and that's a big problem is is open ai even you know we've seen this now with character AI, you know, blowing up, become, you know, and the founders realizing this is not, you know, something that I want to, that they wanted to chase down and going back to Google.

2:16:58What, how big is this market today? And how big do you think it'll be in even one or two years? Because it feels like we're potentially in a fast takeoff scenario for AI friendship. Yeah, if it's big enough to get open AI, a$500 billion company and change their policy, like that's significant. Like that's not just a few angry people on Reddit. When Grok3 launched their NSFW product, it went number one in Japan immediately. So what kind of where what regions have the most adoption and kind of how where do you see the market going broadly? The market's pretty big, but I do think that by 2030, the landscape is going to change.

2:17:38Today, it's mostly, you know, the big assistant, Chajipati and the copies of that. and small niche or smaller, more niche companion products that we usually group as one big kind of market. However, I think by 2030, we'll all have one assistant that's more task-oriented. You tell it what you need to get done, mostly for work, sometimes for personal life, and a friend. And that would look like her, maybe replica, in a way that's something you do build a relationship with. It's friend first. It's optimized for relationship. that's someone you're going to be watching TV with in the evening if you don't have anyone playing a video game with, discussing your friends, someone who's going to see that maybe you're struggling at your current job and kind of talk to you about that and say, hey, I pulled some LinkedIn postings, maybe we should look through together.

2:18:32So I think by 2030, that is going to be decoupled. Today, a lot of people go to Chai GFT because it's sort of a synonym to just generally AI. And we've seen it a lot in Replica where people were trying to write fan fiction with Replica because character I wasn't around yet. But I think this will start to truly decouple. I think it's much harder to build a good friend than to build a good assistant. We'll see it. But in the next couple of years, I think the tech's almost there. It's an AI wife and an AI work wife. Well, a secretary and a wife. And you know, There we go. Founders can get a little first.

2:19:08I mean, that analogy is going to get dicey if we go down that path of what happens with secretaries. People are going to be, you know, we've already seen that. ChatGPT. Hey, keep it professional with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is your secretary, not your wife. Don't take your ChatGPT to a Coldplay concert and it'll be fine. No, definitely not. Keep it in the office. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. This is always a lot of fun. Thank you for the context. Super helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Well, switching gears, we're going to have David, CEO of Lyft, joining.

2:19:40They had earnings last week. Hit that soundboard. I'll let you kick it off. I'll be right back. Welcome to the stream, David. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. Awesome. Ooh, fantastic setup. How are you doing? Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of your background, how you wound up at Lyft? Not at all. Please. The crazy thing. So I actually joined the Lift board back in 2020, 2021. And that was largely because John and Logan, the co-founders of the company, wanted, you know, boards don't talk about customers much. They talk about finance, they talk about strategy, but they don't talk about customers.

2:20:16And they wanted someone with a customer sort of obsession background. And I worked at Amazon, kind of learned that through that. And then one day my phone rang, it was crazy. Actually Valentine's Day of 2023. And they said, you know, we'd like you to consider being the next CEO of Lift. and I said absolutely not no frigging way and it wasn't it wasn't because I didn't sort of want to I just hadn't even considered the idea but they they had let the board know that they were stepping down they did the board done a search and all this sort of stuff and they said no no we think you with your experience from Microsoft and Amazon and even world reader leading with purpose like you're the you're the right guy and so anyway I applied is grueling you know you got to prove yourself to the board that you'd been peers with and put together a hundred-day plan but they said yes to April 17th, 2023, I started.

2:21:05What was the top of the to-do list when you joined? Getting the company obsessed with customers. It kind of lost its way. And you could see it because the share was declining. We were sort of down to 26%. It was losing money. So it was sort of neither was it financially killing it, nor was it killing it for customers. So we said, look, to kill it for customers, you got to price competitively. You got to pay competitively. drivers just to start. So we very unfortunately in the first couple weeks organized a fairly significant reduction in force, a RIF, 26 % of the company, but just$330 million, which we then immediately plowed back into driver incentives and better pricing.

2:21:46And then the other big piece, of course, we had to adjust the team a little bit. Not everyone on the team was the right person, so we made some changes right there. You're only as good as your team. And then the third big thing was innovation again. So we started Women Plus Connect, which is now this very significant and product of ours, over 100 million rides on the Women Plus Connect platform with women driving women riders. But we started it literally at 10 o 'clock in the morning on my first date. We said, let's get this done after years of improvement. Let's get it done. Is that a key differentiator?

2:22:13What are the other key differentiators that you can go to customers with and really tell them that this is what Lyft stands for, this is where we draw the line, this is where maybe we're not purely optimizing for the competitive dynamic and we're trying to differentiate and stand out? Yeah. I mean, so I'll say a couple of things there. First thing I'll say is, sort of big picture, even though it's important, what you're asking is super important, we do call it 800 million rides a year. The other guys do maybe twice that. So it's like two to three billion between the two of us. 160 billion rides that people take in their private hours just in North America.

2:22:52So my first order of business is like, I want to get you off the couch. I want to get you out of your car. I want to get you out in the world. And if you do it on the other guys, sometimes that's okay with me because really I just want the market needs to be bigger. We're still small in the grand scheme. Now, having said that, it's useful to differentiate. And we're very different companies. We have different values. We make different decisions about, as I say, Women Plus Connect is a good example. Driver earnings guarantee. We guarantee drivers guarantee that they will never make less than 70 % of what a rider pays after fees.

2:23:22That's given us now about a 29-point preference for drivers who do a lap. LiftSilver, great new product for older people. It's sort of a niche community, you might say. But guess what? It's a growing niche. You have 60 million people every year or over the age of 60 and giving up their car keys. So I think some of it is the decisions you make and the values, the way you show up. And then operational excellence is something that we're really focused on. I want to increase the level of service for rideshare. I think it's kind of started to deteriorate and I want to be the better service guys. Yeah.

2:23:54How are you thinking about marketing these days? I feel like there was, there was a, during the early battles for ride share, there was, you know, so much, you know, demand and just so much capital flooding in to just get liquidity on the platform. But now with what you just said about differentiating the products, it feels like differentiated marketing would lead right into that. How are you thinking about where the interesting pockets of value for specifically like marketing and like telling this story more broadly are uh in in the current landscape i love i love that question and i think it's super timely so you know you first of all i don't recommend as a strategy you know start with the marketing you have to start with the product and the value if you don't have a good thing to sell then you're just wasting your money we've now got a great thing to sell i'll give you a very specific example when i started driver cancellation rates for about 15 percent so about 15 of the time driver cancel on you it would rematch but it's annoying it's yeah it's annoying right now we're down to about 4.7 so a huge huge drop over a couple of years of real what drove that exactly oh man more supply so much well no actually funnily enough supply doesn't really matter there i mean of course it does more supply helps but it's more about acceptance rates it's about because the driver even if there are a thousand drivers they can cancel and they can be picky and choosy no it's about what information do you give the driver and when, how, such that they feel like they're making a good decision, not a lust or forced.

2:25:23Yeah, as opposed to the driver accepted it and it turns out, hey, this person wants to go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. You're going to be tied up for a couple hours. Even if the fare is a lot, you're going to get stuck in Vegas and they might decline that, right? A hundred percent, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Or exactly. It's just that's exactly it. Yeah. So better technology to surface more relevant rides that the driver will not decline. exactly how can you do a good job giving the vending to the driver exactly what you think they want not the one you want them to take but the one they want because they are kind of a customer too you're kind of selling them on something that they're buying with their time dude they are 100 a customer yeah 100 this this is there's there are two customers in every car rider and driver and if they're not both happy your marketplace gets out of balance okay so then back to the marketing question.

2:26:11So once you're good, then you want to start to tell the story. And you literally will start to see over the coming weeks, particularly if you're in San Francisco or New York, which are two markets we're putting a lot of energy into, you know, a kind of a renewed, you know, marketing push. And I'll give you sort of the heads up. It's going to be super simple. It's called checklist, checklist. And it acknowledges like you have choices. There's another guy out there who can do a pretty good job sometimes, but we think we can do a good job most of the time, maybe even more times they can. So give us a check and we'll give a bunch of different reasons why we think checking Lyft is a good idea for you.

2:26:43Smart. You probably get this question multiple times a day, but I'm excited to get your point of view on it. How are you thinking about Lyft integrating with autonomous vehicle providers in the short to medium to long term? And what's your kind of vision for that market as it evolves? Yeah. So I'll start with the end and kind of go backwards. My vision is this is good for the industry because it's going to be good for it's going to give riders more reasons to choose lift and to check lift and and the other guys too and potentially more people that just decide not to get a car at all right like there's very real i mean john and i both have kids under under five and there's like this question that i think you have to ask and like will my kids be will it make Will they even really need to get a driver's license?

2:27:33Natural Aspera V12, absolutely, but continue. There you go, baby. My son will definitely be tracking his car. I don't know what you're talking about. You don't need a license for that. You don't need a license. Yeah, he won't have a driver's license, but he will be drifting. But there's so many amazing potential implications. You can think of like a busy parent, maybe a single parent that can put their kid in an autonomous vehicle. to go to school and have a safe drive and have confidence and all that kind of thing. But anyways, continue. Well, no, I mean, look, you're already there, right? Like the self-driving world is going to be super interesting because it's a great experience.

2:28:16And you're probably just thinking of it in terms of today's experience, but just with someone else driving. But now think of it in terms of tomorrow experience. Think of it as, you know, you're in rest mode. And so the seats roll back, you know, lie back and you can take a nap or you're in work mode. You've got three screens that pop up in front of you, and it's like a mobile office, or you're in party mode, and you've got a cartender in the front who's, like, making drinks. I like that. Let's go. Right? That's amazing. Oh. Yeah, and the interesting thing is, yeah, I think something that I thought of, you're talking about your product for kind of elderly folks that might need a little bit more support.

2:28:59and it's interesting to think about even in a world of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles there's still going to be a place for calling a human to help you get from point a to point b you're traveling yeah the whole medical side as well i mean there's so many so many i mean part of the benefit of like a like a high tier chauffeur service is that they they put your suitcases in the back of the car and like an autonomous vehicle doesn't do that yet maybe in the far future when we have humanoid robots in the car seat just to load up your luggage. But, you know, we are a long way from there, so probably room to differentiate.

2:29:35I'm wondering if there's any other places that you could see Lyft expanding into the value chain. When I imagine a lot of the self-driving car companies, it's a lot of AI engineers, a lot of data centers, a lot of GPUs burning, not a lot of mechanics, not a lot of people cleaning cars, not a lot of people washing cars. And it feels like there's this opportunity where you have this liquid pool of labor that could deal with all of the rough edges before we get to this future where, yes, the cars drive themselves. But we've heard the numbers of how many people it takes to maintain a fleet of self-driving vehicles right now.

2:30:14It seems like it's actually higher than Lyft's number of humans per vehicle potentially. And so even though it'll probably fall, like there's a lot of different things as the market plays out. So what's your take on it? I mean, look, you guys are making, I think, two cases and they sort of line up nicely. One is for what we call the hybrid network. So some drivers and some self-driving, right? Older person wants help with the luggage or anyone going to the airport wants help with the luggage. Executive wants the car to drive up with a Starbucks right there, just ordered for them by a human being, hand you the cup, right?

2:30:46So that's the driver. And in the self-driving case, it's a daily commute, you don't really care you're kind of zoning out or maybe you want to be on a phone call not having almost a car so that's the hybrid case and i think it's a there's a strong case being made there and then where do we add value of course we supply demand we price we do etas um you know we'll get your iphone back to you if you leave it in the car you know we'll clean the car so and then there's this thing called fleet management fleet management which is to your point the car has to be cleaned the ab i'm talking about has to be cleaned it has to be serviced from time to time got to be you know rebooted you know reject all these things and and that fleet management a hidden secret of lyft and you sort of go google it because it's kind of interesting is flex drive flex drive is a wholly unsubsidiary and that's what we do is fleet management for drivers whose cars we own instead of the driver doing it it's real expertise that we've developed it's one of the things that when we talk to self-driving car companies they value because they're like that's physical world stuff and we want to sit and design and create quality but we don't really They want to run that stuff.

2:31:45So, yeah, that's why I'm super optimistic about this as they come onto the platform. What about the other car companies? Are there any, like a lot of the self-driving car narrative is around Waymo and Tesla and that battle, but it does feel like most of the OEMs will want to play a different role. Have you announced any partnerships or are you thinking that, like, you know, The Stellantis turnaround will involve some sort of partnership. Obviously, you can't speak too much to the future, but just in terms of the long-term shape of the industry, is the duopoly narrative overrated, in your opinion?

2:32:25It is. And here's what I think. Because, look, fast forward, say, 10 years. I think buying a car that doesn't have self-driving technology in it would be like buying a car without... Computer without internet. computer without traction control who would ever do that right again you like that you like the whole uh you know drifting yeah no like uh or maybe maybe a an apt analogy would be like you can buy a manual transmission car today it's super fun to drive but it's like a hobby yeah it's a weekend car it's like buying a horse it's like we love a horse horses are still great people ride them people go see them dressage is coming to the olympics in los angeles in 2026.

2:33:11we'll be sitting here why don't i need a car i already have transport this one horsepower yes and the horse is underrated self-driving you tell them go home the horse knows where to go it's an excellent point it was self-driving technology before self-driving was cool it was it was yeah that's a hundred percent so yeah that's the thing like there will be horses and there will be manual transmission cars and there will be cars with roll down windows but then for the other 99 of the world there will be self driving cars. So in that world, every OEM has to have a self-driving technology. Some of them will do it themselves.

2:33:42You've seen General Motors obviously made a big investment there. They're trying to figure out how to deploy that and whatever. Others will never think it's going to be their core, you know, and they will buy it from other people. They'll buy it from, let's say, a Mobileye, which is a company we have a partnership. Let me actually, and let me go deep on that for just one click. So we have this, so Mobileye, they, you know, if you've got like lane assist technology in your car, right? So it kind of vibrates when you get to the edge or even, even smart cruise control chances are pretty good that mobilize is what's behind that so they are good in level two what's got level two which is to say driver assistance not not sort of driver out stuff and they're trying to move up the stack to level three level four we have a partnership with them that as they do that it will be what we call lift ready so that means that any one of the cars with mobile technology in it theoretically if an oem decides to do so and if an end user decides that that's an option that they want could deploy it under the lift network just like today hey, you can drive your car in the lift network.

2:34:36Tomorrow, you can just put your car in the lift network. So I think, you know, the future, there's such a great time to be in this industry because there's so much cool stuff going, but it's also really, really early. And, you know, regulations aren't there, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of time to sort of get it right, but also a lot of reasons to be excited about it. Yeah, I mean, there are already people who prefer being driven in gas-powered cars because of the regenerative braking, making them sick if they sit in the back. And so you could imagine that those consumer preferences go deeper and somebody says, I like the way a Bentley drives.

2:35:12I want to only call Bentleys. And so I'm calling Bentley specifically. And the OEM is saying, I'm not going to build my own app because that's going to be really difficult. I'm not going to bring my own liquidity to the market. But Lyft can kind of provide that. That's kind of an interesting way things could play out. Even if they're self-driving. And maybe they'll tune it a little bit. Exactly. off the shelf thing and they'll say this is the Bentley version of it that's a little more cautious or the Lambo version which is more aggressive. More thrilling, yeah. And then even the features within the vehicle, like cars are starting to differentiate around that more.

2:35:48Like this one has a fish tank or this one has a karaoke machine or this one has TVs or the work setup that you mentioned. There could be a lot more differentiation. We are consolidating down to like the iPhone of cars in some ways, but you could see like a sort of Cambrian explosion as well. Totally. What else is on your mind? You were at you've seen multiple eras, tech, internet, mobile. You started back at Microsoft in what was it? 91. Yeah. Right. A million years ago. A lot is changing now. We were just having a conversation with with someone in the AI companionship space kind of and there's a lot of debate surrounding that right now.

2:36:27Is it dystopian? Is it actually good for people? But what's your take broadly on activity in AI right now and maybe even that last conversation? I mean, I actually think a lot about exactly that last conversation. Look, Lyft's vision and our purpose is to serve and connect. The serve part is probably pretty obvious. I want to serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before. But the connect part, why? Because I am a very deep believer, and it's not just some personal passion it's like you know this is the world we live in that that digital technology as cool as it is it's also potentially super isolating uh super um uh dividing just in the sense that you can sort of find just the same people over and over again the same loops to kind of get involved in rabbit holes to go down all these things meanwhile the physical world is amazing amazing you know we're here in san francisco outside lands just this last weekend it's hundreds of thousands of people listening to live music you can listen to live music on spotify i mean you don't need to but you go there it's a shared experience and then just all the little you know interactions you have with with people every single day so thus i look at ai and i think to myself gosh i love how cool it is to riff with it or feed it a bunch of data and have it show me things that i didn't see myself or you know spit at it some you know our lift earnings and dealt to critique, all these sorts of things.

2:37:49That's super amazing. Or like 30 % of our code is not written by AI. We're deprecating a lot of code that just is cruft because AI is finding nobody's using it. So all the customer service, literally millions of people are now interacting with our chatbots and it's better quality experience. So all that's cool. But, but, man, my daughter just told me about a subreddit the other day that's got thousands of people, tens of thousands, but called My Boyfriend is an AI. literally the the one i was looking at was a woman who just proposed to her assuming the ai right she's so excited about it she's just like yeah i can finally call my fiance um she said i you know i i asked him what ring does he think that would look good on me so he gave me some ideas so i went and bought that ring and i put it on myself i pretended to be sort of surprised when i did it but i just feel so good about myself and i think myself gosh i love how excited she is and I can see a lot of scenarios where that doesn't necessarily end up the way you want it to.

2:38:45And it's, here's the deal. The business model of companies like that, not to malign them, but it's engagement. They will want to engage. They will want to flatter. They will want to be the best friend. Retain. There you go. It's the same issue. I mean, same issue with dating apps. The critique of dating apps is like there's no real incentive for somebody to find a long-term partner because they're going to churn. and the AI companion apps, you can, I guess AI companions are making the case that eventually the AI companion would be like, hey, why don't you go out in the real world and find a partner?

2:39:19But that seems to be at odds and I'll just be your friend. We can just be friends, that kind of thing. But anybody from the real world would know that. Some of this isn't new. I mean, I think about mechanical companions for a lot of married men, their mistress is a GT3 RS. And they pour their heart and soul into that vehicle, into rowing out the gears and ringing out the engine. And the engine notes speak to them in the language of a companion. And so, you know, that is their mechanical companion. Now we have digital companions. What is old is new. Well, okay, so you're 100 % right. And the difference is, like, the car doesn't want you to love it.

2:40:05It just, you just, you fall in love with it. You have to. You have to love it. Right. But it doesn't want you. And it's not incentive to have you spend more time with it. You know what I mean? So that's the sort of tricky part here. is so anyway i don't want to sound dystopian i think there's some amazing amazing uses but i think i'm not sure that our brains are super well prepared for what happens when you know our our ai's become our friends and then break up with us or we break up with them or they forget who we are because it's upgraded this is our model is deprecated right that was right that's what happens with chat like that's what happened with the career gt they don't make them anymore yeah they don't make career gts anymore they deprecated it and i can tell you're still Well, grieving.

2:40:43Grieving, absolutely. Since 2005. Well, I think it's hard to... It used to be a couple hundred grand. Now that's over a mil. It's hard to make the argument that somebody, like, you know, getting married to their AI or accept, you know, is good. Yeah. Like, how do you make, how do you steel man that, John? I mean, it's just like hitting the track on the weekend. You know, got to get away from the family for a little bit. I don't know how far you can stretch this analogy. I've heard a lot about you in this podcast. It's really interesting. Anyway, it's been great having you. Next time you're in L.A., let's throw some pink mustaches on some Porsches.

2:41:23Go to the Porsche Experience Center. And let's ride. Next earnings call, join right after. We'll have pink mustaches on, and we'll hit the gong. I am here for it. I would love that. Back to back. In fact, I actually tried to get my IR group, but they've not yet gotten excited about this idea, to do our earnings call in the form of a podcast. Oh, there we go. If I ever convinced them to do that, because I think it'd be interesting, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Super interesting. Maybe we'll get you guys to host it. That'd be fantastic. We'd love to. Amazing. Awesome, David. Great to hang on. We'll talk to you soon.

2:41:56You guys, that was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for all the great questions. Take care. Cheers. Bye. Talk soon. Before we bring in our next guest, we have a demand from Donald Boat. He wants me to read this. He says, I'm running on so much Celsius sparkling cola and surplus intravenous compute that the twin forces, the twin force ghosts of Adam Twos and Fidel Castro are screaming in my ears like UCLA sorority girls at the Rose Bowl. screaming, do not stop until you envelop the world system and your package fleets smog the firmament like the Onsler wire headed into Starcraft 3 as dreamed by an unemployed 29-year-old bachelor in Busan, South Korea.

2:42:44And throw that up on the screen, please. Make Coogan read it. very fun. This man has a way with words. He's a great poster and he's on a generational run and we'll see where it goes. Thanks for writing in Donald Boat and good luck. He said that the final PC build would be ready Wednesday. I want to see it. Send us a photo as soon as it's put together. I want to know the whole build. Throw it up on PC Part Picker. Put it all together for us so we can get a screenshot of what we're expecting. Then I want to see the Battlefield Field 6 stream. I want to see him getting some headshots, some 360 no scopes.

2:43:21He should just join live and game for a little bit. He should. I'd be down. Anyway, we have our next guest from Profound. James, how you doing? Get the gong ready. Give us the news. What happened? Break it down for us. Hi, John. Hi. Good to see you. Great to see you. Big day. Big day. What's happening? What's going to happen? I'm ready. What's going to happen? Break it down. Way to break it down for us. Break it down. Dry humor kind of guy. Yeah, we just closed$35 million. What? Let's go. Let's go. Huge. Who's in the deal? Is it a tier one? Is it a really good firm? Who did the deal? It's Sequoia Capital.

2:44:13I've heard of them. There you go. I've heard of them. Heard of them. heard of them that's fantastic news great great group of people okay so we're taking that money we're going to washington dc and we're lobbying to ban ads in llms because then everyone will have to buy your services is that a good idea break it down for me i mean honestly i'd quite like ads to come into these services i think it'd be net good for us i think it would create the the clickware response of really understanding that ai is a marketing channel but we could go to Washington and hang out with Keith. So AI, because the joke that I'm getting at is basically like, profound helps companies show up in generative AI results.

2:44:55Right now, the game, if I have a product, is I want to rank highly in ChatGPT when someone asks, give me the survey of the landscape, go do the deep research report on, what was it Aiden saying, like the best paper towels, and I want to rank highly for the best paper towels. And so I come to Profound and Profound helps me rank highly in that result. But if there's a bunch of ads, then you would think like the relative value of like SEO generally decreases. But it seems like we're early enough in this that you could maybe see that as additive to your business. Is that how you're thinking about it?

2:45:29I think it's good. It's a good take. I think Blue Link Search has been a two-party system. It's like a handshake between the blue link connects the consumer to the brand. But these AI systems like ChatGPT hijack that relationship. So the consumer really ends up having a relationship only with ChatGPT. If I'm researching corporate credit cards, I don't really need to go to chase.com or ramp.com. I can just interface with ChatGPT and it will go and visit their websites on my behalf. so i think there's a there's there's new reasons that this is actually like quite different from that old paradigm of traditional search and i think if you're a brand owner yeah and before you just google corporate cards and and maybe jpm is near the top and ramp is near the top and you're navigating to those individual sites and then going back and forth and back and forth or opening new tabs and what you're saying is it's now just like a lot more conversational and the Build me a comparison table.

2:46:34Yeah, exactly. You skip a step. You have the answer. The answer is what you'd have to, you know, there's a step in between previously. So I think, and we're also entering this era where, you know, if you're a brand owner, AI becomes the customer. So if you're a marketer or a CMO at any company on the planet, it's understanding that you have one new VIP customer, which is super intelligence. And we're building a technology platform to help brands build marketing that's aimed at superintelligence instead of humans. When we talked the first time, it must have been a couple months ago, we were in the old studio.

2:47:11We were talking just about like writing your website in a way that can be ingested by like the web scrapers and like robots.txt and that type of stuff. But if we play this out more, can I pat myself on the back for putting three hours a day of my words into the endless corpus of web text such that everything I say ranks highly? Is it a volume game? Would you recommend that brands that are using Profound and want to rank higher do a ton of podcasts and just get a lot of content out there about their brands? Is that a reasonable strategy? The risk of sounding somewhat self-serving, it kind of pies pretty nicely with a feature set that we've launched today called Workflows, which essentially think of it like agentic workflows that will monitor your AI visibility and then proactively and reactively create net new content based on changes that we're seeing in the landscape.

2:48:14Right. So it really taking out that kind of the rote labor of having to sit, you know, I think the 2015 paradigm was marketers would go to a platform and click into the data viz and build an insight and create new content. And now you can just do all of that all within one platform at the click of a button. Yeah, this is like the old Airbnb SEO story where like at the bottom of the footer, they had like every single city and it was like vacation rentals in Omaha, vacation in rentals in, in, you know, like, like Tampa and then, and then that rank, but it's all driven by just like what they're seeing from Google and they feed it back into the landing pages.

2:48:52Now you can do that with what's, with what you're actually seeing in LLM search results, basically. You guys already. Yeah. Sorry, Jordi. The point being as well, that you can create the content within. Yeah. You can actually instantiate the content. And And I'm sure that a lot of the SEO heavy companies that really focused on that, like automated a lot of that, just like do a database query and then turn it into a landing page with a good route and all the URLs that follow so that it gets scraped into Google. Now you can do that in the ChatGPT context and the other LLM context. How quickly are legacy, like older companies kind of reacting to this changing trend and consumer behavior?

2:49:32I know you guys already work with some of the biggest companies in the world. So clearly some of them are being responsive to it. But is that common? Or do you still meet with companies that just don't understand kind of what's happening? It's been pretty prevalent. Yeah, as you said, we work with Fortune 10. I mean, I can't do that. We don't have logo rights. But Fortune 5. We're working with Fortune 5 brands right now. Fortune 5. Fortune 1. We got the zeros. Oh, Fortune 1. Oh, is it NVIDIA? Fortune 1? uh we won't press you on that the the ceo of of reddit you know mentioned profound in their earnings report last week that was very cool um yeah so i think it really is becoming a boardroom level concern for most big companies um yeah we work with i think 250 to 300 enterprise brands right now and most of the big agencies are relying on our platform um do you think do you think there's some sort of alpha.

2:50:36I feel like there's a lot of there's a lot of conversations about brands and a lot of customer love that happens within the context of basically like support tickets or like one-on-one conversations. Is there is there potential alpha in in having a flow where if a customer writes in and they're satisfied you're pushing them to publish that to the web in some way so you're just getting more web text out there something like that even if it's not on your own platform, it's like, hey, like, we're actually going to be doing a lot more customer service on our Reddit. And so like, we want it. Yeah, yeah, you can email us and we'll do a one on one if it's like private information, like your billing.

2:51:14But if you just want to talk about how to use the product and best practices, like, let's take this conversation over to Reddit. Like that seems like maybe a strategy that people would want to adopt. That's exactly what you would use workflows for this feature set that we've launched today. So And that exact point that you're mentioning, if you think, I don't think I can name them, but if you think of some of your favorite software companies, five years ago or three years ago, candidly, if you were an engineer and you were trying to troubleshoot a problem with that software, you would have gone to their docs.website.com or developer.website.com and gone through their developer docs.

2:51:52But now you just use Anthropic or ChatGPT to troubleshoot. um so yeah it's that's what i guess it kind of i can bring that full circle back to the kind of seo question there's so much more surface area here there's yeah people aren't just using it for discovery they're using it for post sales it's it's um yeah crisis management pr teams last question from george how where where does tradition where do you see is traditional seo going to near zero for a lot of these companies. I mean, if you look at, you know, already the changes that Google's rolled out with AI overviews, I saw Bill Gurley shared a number of quotes from earnings calls over the last month where people were just basically saying, look, like our organic search traffic is down 60%, you know, year over year.

2:52:46And it was like a lot of different examples of that. So I'm curious where you think that goes. I think, you know, the search engines will be, they will seem very odd to our children as a concept, you know, thumbing through lists of blue links, it will seem something like the yellow pages. I think the act of SEO, those folks, the teams of people that have built their careers in that space, it's a$90 billion a year industry. It's a huge industry. And the folks that work on that will likely be extremely well positioned. to dominate this new world of ai visibility or geo or aeo or you know whatever we want to call it um answer or sometimes we'd say agent experience um is like another way to think about it i think if you're if you're a brand the ones that care the most are brands that are high or products that are high consideration purchases so something that people do a ton of research on like cars or consumer electronics with a tech forward and consumer uh question from the chat and then we'll let you go.

2:53:49Does Profound offer a play for content publishers who were monetizing SEO referral traffic after it dropped off a cliff over the past few years? How do you think about the evolution of content publishers that were monetizing SEO referral traffic and where all that goes? Is that like the wire cutter? Is that an example of the wire cutter? that's really that's a much trickier one to navigate that's not they're not really content right you you work with i sell a physical thing ai can't give you this thing and i'm just helping you get this thing faster yeah if the content is the product it's gonna get scraped it it's very tricky so you gotta work out and deal with the if you're a content publisher you gotta go to the llms and say hey uh like let's do a deal one-on-one right yeah i mean i think you know there's been the whole cloudflare thing where cloudflare default turned on bots off which i think is audacious if you're a marketer you want to have bots turned or you want bots putting your products in but if you're a publisher yeah like you probably do want bots turned off and they've got i think that's going to be more similar to like the music industry or something where it's going to have to sort of like figure out itself as we saw there yeah yeah yeah cloudflare like the the really crazy scenario could be like they look like a youtube or they look like a spotify where Yeah, most people put up a blog post and they get a couple cents.

2:55:13There's a couple people that put up banger blog posts and they get a check for$20 ,000 just from the web traffic. And we kind of get back to, oh yeah, like it's weird that I only got a couple hits to the website, but it was repurposed all over the place and it really updated the weights and it was super valuable to the GPT-6 trainings run. And so I just get a dividend from that for a long time. That would be a really cool outcome, but we'll have to keep monitoring the situation. so thank you for joining us you and the team congratulations progress and it's gonna be a big rest of your day have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon thanks Amazing play.

2:55:47The cure to male loneliness is being called chaps. James. I agree. I agree. We got Devin from Squint coming in the studio. Play some soundboard. Hit me with the news one. There we go. I think I'll need this again. I want to hit it this time. You want to hit it? I feel like I've gotten three. Give us the news. Give us the updates. What's going on in your world? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to TVPN. How are you doing? Hey guys, thanks for having me on. I appreciate you making time for this. Of course. I think the news is that squint is announcing a 40 million dollar series b congratulations there we go almost took the gong off the rope there john but worthy uh are there any tier ones invested

2:56:34any any tree themed venture capital firms participating we we might have one okay the The main tree one. That's great to hear. That's great to hear. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, we can move on. It's been a few rounds of them. Fantastic. We can move on from the funding news. Give us the update on the company. Break it down. How are you pitching the company these days? And then we'll go into some questions and deep dives. Sure. So, you know, Squint is a manufacturing intelligence platform. We use AI to drive efficiency on the factory floor. And we work with the biggest companies that make products that you use every day.

2:57:11So Fortune 500 companies like Pepsi and Michelin that make, you know, tortillas to tires. And I can share, maybe let me share a little bit about the problem statement before I talk about the product because it'll make more sense. Totally. I think, you know, manufacturing as an industry is booming, but it's like a big house that is built on toothpicks. Right. And that foundation is really weak. So today, a lot of the like shop floor know-how lies in two places. It's either in the heads of experts that are about to retire, or it's in a crusty binder somewhere that is hard to find and hard to understand.

2:57:48And I think today, if you're going to be investing in scaling the industry on the whole, you really need to be able to solve that inefficiency. And so what Squint does is it uses a video of an operator doing any sort of work on the floor, and then the AI watches that and writes a perfect standard operating procedure in seconds. And then using computer vision and augmented reality, it actually walks any operator through any task and is able to support them by answering questions, but also through the camera on the tablet, it can see if the work was done correctly. So we help basically elevate the quality of work.

2:58:27So basically, so basically a completely separate, like purely human track versus like the Siemens equipment, the CNCs, the automated pick in place, like that's happening in a different world. You're more focused on, you know, humans in the loop type work. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think like a lot of the investment, even in robotics, it happens in the same customers that we work with. But that investment is going into things like eliminating some of the ergonomically unsafe tasks or the highly repetitive tasks. And then where the humans are involved, what we're able to do is basically double their efficiency.

2:59:03So we had a Fortune 500 customer, a CPG company that measured, you know, the before and after with Squint and they saw that actually it reduced the time it took to do work by 50%. Right. And so that's the kind of results you're getting with just like the same number of operators as before, but you're able to double your throughput. Very cool. How good is Squint at, like is Squint one-shotting problems that workers are coming across? I mean, I think people have been pretty wildly impressed with ChatGPT's ability to like take a picture in their home of a bunch of wiring and just say like this isn't working what's wrong and it's just like starts to uh genuinely show real intelligence in terms of fixing a situation are you guys already seeing that on the factory floor what does that look like yeah you know i think i mean that's a great example um i think in the consumer use case if chat gpt was 95 accurate we would be so happy as consumers right it would be like 95 of my problems are solved with this app.

3:00:07But in a factory, 95 % accuracy means 5 % of devastating results. Yeah, you break like a half a million dollar machine. Exactly. Or worse, someone gets hurt. And so for us, what we've oriented on is our AI will only answer things based on what it has seen in your factory floor. So all of this is a custom manufacturing process that it's learning. And then, yeah, it is one-shotting things. So, you know, most of the time, if you ask Quint a question, the problem is solved. And so our customers are starting to share stories like, hey, actually a couple of weeks ago, I had a call. And this customer said that I thought our ticketing system was broken because since we deployed Squint, we had zero tickets filed.

3:00:52But then we ran a whole IT investigation and it turns out the ticketing system wasn't broken. They were just like the operators didn't have any more issues. So that's the kind of thing that we're trying to create now. That's awesome. Are you guys focused on the U.S. today or already international? What's the go-to market look like? Yeah, it's a good question. We're working with these massive global brands, so Pepsi, Michelin, Continental. All of those three, for example, we're working with their plants in the U.S. and also abroad. Just a few weeks ago, I was in Germany for a week, ended up visiting 12 cities in five days or something, and it was crazy.

3:01:29so we're starting to feel that demand and that's a big part of why we raised this round too awesome congratulations thanks so much for stopping by we're running a little bit late today so we're going to let you get back to your busy day but go raise a series c come back on later this year yeah later this week later this week potentially yeah yeah no problem preempt sounds good yeah thanks guys we'll talk to you seven have a good one uh and up next we have alex Denko. We got a trade deal. Trade. The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to A16Z. Andreessen Horowitz. Eric Torenberg's latest pick up.

3:02:08There he is. Alex, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on. Break it down for us. Anotomy of the deal. What'd they do? Did Mark Andreessen sit down with your mom? Did Mark Andreessen sit down? Sit down with your parents. Tell them you got a bright future. We would like to take your son to the big leagues. I did have to have the phone call with Mark Andreessen right next to my mom because I was on vacation that week. We were seeing my parents. Fantastic. And the call with Mark was actually a stressful one because I had to give him my final negotiation demand, which was he had to unblock me on Twitter.

3:02:43No way. That's amazing. He's a notorious blocker and unblocker. What did you do to get blocked by the goat? Never give up if you've been blocked by the goat. What did you do to get blocked by the goat? So we don't know. We've decided not to look into it. Some things are best left as mystery in life. We reserve the right to find out later. I've been blocked by people. I had to apologize. I don't know exactly why I got blocked. But, you know, you always live to fight another day. Anyway. Some could have slipped. Yeah, it's possible. So what's at the top of the to-do list today, this week, this month?

3:03:17What are you going to be doing for Andreessen Horowitz? So I'm coming on board. Eric brought me into this amazing group of people he is putting together not to be understated and also not complete there's there's more Eric has more work to do yet I'm coming on finished yeah jobs not finished I'm coming on to help make all of the written content coming out of Andreessen be truly world-class and as good as it can be I think a lot of people on the internet know me from my writing online I've been a blogger for a long time despite having done other things like be a founder. I've worked in VC before.

3:03:49I've been at Shopify for five years. But most people, I think, know me just from writing and mouthing off on the internet and generally doing the craft that has been internet blogging, which is just a really amazing and valuable part of tech that has been around for such a long time. A really formative conversation in my career was once upon a time when I was a founder, my co-founder and I were trying to figure out how to launch a product. We didn't know what was involved in that or what that meant. And we went to a more experienced founder, our friend Amanda and said, Hey, you know, what do we do?

3:04:22How do we launch this product? And she said, Oh, well, I think you should email your email list and say, Hey, we're going to go and do this. Tell us what you like. Tell us where we should reach you. Tell us get lots of feedback on all these things. And then they'll help you out. And I said, wait, wait, stop. What do you mean email your email list? What's an email list? She's like, Oh, you don't have thousands of fans that adore you and wait for your every email every week. And I I was like, I need to be someone with one of those. So ever since then, yeah, writing and newsletters and just the craft of having something to say has been a really important part of how I've always, you know, thought about how to be a great live player on the internet.

3:04:58How do you think about breaking through with text? Because the link ban on X is tough. AI is going to... Yeah, yeah. Or is, like, should you just lean into more of the formats? I mean, there's certain amounts of, like, you can just be built different. like Chris Pike who just drops a link to a Google doc and it always works somehow. People do screenshot essays like what, what's interesting. Something that stands out to me and why I'm excited for you to take this new role is I was having this thought yesterday. I was reading some particularly like sloppy AI generated text and I was just, I was like, yes, the models are going to get better.

3:05:34But like in a few years, like at what point is like all the texts that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated and there's no soul and craft put into it. And it's like you can still you can remove hyphens and delve and it's not this. It's you're not this, you're that like language. And you can still identify writing today. And I and I just think like craft, like the craft of writing and thinking clearly and coming up with trying to come up with new ideas is super important. It's Lindy. Very Lindy. Yeah, so I like to think of it is that writing is power transfer technology, right, when you do it.

3:06:17It takes a lot of work to write something down, and it takes work to read something, right? It takes more work to read something than to listen to it. But the important thing that happens is that as you put in the work to write and as you put in the work to read, what happens is it actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading, right? They can actually speak to this thing. They have words for something that they knew but didn't quite know how to say before.

3:06:44And that gives them power. And it doesn't work the same way when you're talking. There is this fabulous complementary kind of media called podcasts, which is listen for three hours and hear about all these great things. But to me, podcasts are an invitation to go find out something more. But if you actually want to do that power transfer from the writer to the reader and give them something that gives them that power, you've got to write it down. And if you think about this for the job of a VC firm, it's like, what is the job of VC? The job of VC is literally you are the legitimacy bank. Your job is to make founders powerful.

3:07:22And having an amazing free tier of that by saying, we think a lot about these things. We want to give you words to express what you're trying to say so that a client, a hire, an investor will take you a little more seriously is really important to do. So that's a big part of why we want to emphasize the goal is to give founders power. This is the job of the whole firm, and writing is just a pretty good part of that. When I think about writing at A16Z, I think of a few buckets. There's a ton because the firm's written a lot for a long time. I think about maybe it was like a decade ago, but I don't know how often it still happens.

3:08:01But the general partner who does the deal writes basically a deal memo. and says, this is why we're investing in this company. And that's and that's very interesting. There's also the the Marc Andreessen op ed in The Wall Street Journal. Software is eating the world. It's time to build these like big like just like, you know, bombs on the timeline that drop and stick around for a long time. Then there's the market map, which is it's been maligned, but I think it's deeply underrated tradition. It's a time honored tradition. And I think these are in a unique position to actually put out great content there.

3:08:35And I've actually really enjoyed digging into those as we've been doing the show. And then there's also like the wildcard ones. Like I remember Andreessen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio, just basically like, it's like, what's your everyday carry, but in the digital world? So it was like, what apps are you running? What tools are you using? Those are really cool. So there's a ton of stuff. And I probably mentioned, I missed like half of it, but maybe even more, but what's exciting to you? What's interesting? What kind of formats are you, do you see as like fertile ground to go explore if you've had the time to think about it so far yeah so i'll tell you what i think is a really interesting meta that i'm going to spend a lot of time going after is speech writing okay um speech writing is an interesting and kind of thrown by the wayside craft because now when you think about long form it's like when you are interesting and you have something to say you can go on a podcast you can talk for a long time or you are going to tweet about it right but there is something that is missing of the craft of like putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort into creating you know like a 5 000 word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year right and if you're a gp right it's like hey you know you get time and perspective to figure out like this year what is the core thing that you want to say right that is going to help inform all the other content frankly like people like katherine at a16z are also already incredible at this yeah um and bringing that sort of to more or throughout the culture is gonna be important.

3:10:02Either way though, so you mentioned all these different types of content, right? Yes, speech is incredibly underrated. We utilize them internally with the team. And they're not every week, they're not on a schedule. But sometimes you need a speech, you just nail it and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company. And I'm getting chills thinking about Mark Andreessen and standing on stage in front of thousands of people saying, we chose to raise this growth fund not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because it's hard. To test the ability of our LPs. To test the capital markets.

3:10:41To measure them. The under-hit talents. To test the health of the global capital markets. There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like a well-defined phrase. Andy Driesen has been fantastic. like coinages and I feel like, yeah, the speeches, that's an interesting answer. I was not expecting that, but that makes a ton of sense. Well, it's good to buy low on things. I think buying low on speeches is your daily tip. That's great, that's great. Where else should we go with this? I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta, right? Everybody, like the - Barn burners.

3:11:19Launch, everybody has a launch video. There's like three new launch videos every day. A lot of them like blur together because they're cool graphics and this person invested and and here's this product UI and if you just have the CEO Just like rant at the camera and you can get people that like truly listen to that. Yeah, it probably ends up being You know pretty pretty powerful. Yep Those kinds of things can go viral and really powerful rays because it tells people that you have something to say right and It's doubly important because you talked about all these different forms of writing that are all great in their own way And the one thing that they all have in common is I'll tell you what all bloggers know about writing is you have two audiences.

3:11:57The first audience is the people who actually read what you said, which is small. The second audience is the people that they tell that thing because they get something out of retelling it. They get that legitimacy. They get that ability to express themselves or whatever. And there is a trade between the writer and the inner circle of people who are going to actually listen to that speech or actually read that thing all the way through. And something that was great about the old VC blogging meta way back in the day, so 10, 12, 15 years ago when, you know, like AVC was cooking and Semel Shah and Mark Schuster and people like that is the way a blog worked, like the microstructure of blogging was you had a blog and you had readers and a comment section.

3:12:38And everybody came to your blog and the readership would be there. And the way that you would tell what blogs were good was you would have lots of comments, right? And that's where your primary readership would then go and invisibly tell other people about it. Then the feed emerged, right? We got Twitter, we got Hacker News, we got places where suddenly the discussion moved in public. And what happened then is that, first of all, the ability to reach a secondary audience exploded. So the returns to writing only got bigger, but it became less obvious to do, right? The trade became a little bit obscured by virtue of the fact that it's all in public, right?

3:13:11And it's all based on how many retweets and likes you get. And I think what's happening now as we go even further past this is that the returns to writing and reading have never been more valuable but never been less obvious. So, you know, it's time to go. If you go bring the output of a firm as legendary as A16Z with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world, you know, My job is to go help Eric and the whole GP crew and Ben and Mark bring this back and make it amazing again Making a really like a brand that's gonna shine. I can't wait for your first software is eating the world moment also Yeah, I mean I feel like the speech thing really ties into the new a16z brand like when I see the coin I feel like that's like art deco coin with the abacus.

3:13:56Yeah, I feel like speech Art deco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked Is it Art Deco or is it Bozar? Do you remember the line that's like Art Deco is made by dwarves, Bozar is made by elves? It's very what is it? The style, it was Randian and I feel like in Ayn Rand's writing there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book. There sure are famously. Makes sense, yeah famously. Anyway thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the trade deal, congratulations on the move and we look forward to seeing your work and hearing it.

3:14:33Thank you for having me on, guys. Come on and give a speech soon. Absolutely. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Thank you, Alex. Take care, everybody. Cheers.

3:14:46And we have Isaiah Taylor coming into the studio. We'll bring him on the screen. He has big news from Washington, D.C. In the nuclear world, let's bring him into the studio. We are in the fourth hour, if you're still with us. We're in the fourth hour. Oh, looking good. I love the background. What's going on? The lighting. You're looking great. How are you doing? Not today. How's it going, John and Jordy? Good to be with you in the Apple technology. We are going to need you to switch your microphone, though, because we cannot hear you very clearly. I don't know what's going on. Maybe try talking more and seeing if it works out.

3:15:23How about that? Is that any better? No, it's really muffled. I think it's the Apple headphones. Can you switch the... It might be the headphones that you're picking up the microphone there. I don't know. But it's coming through pretty scratchy. I think it's going to be rough if we try and stick with this. All right. How about that? That's better. There we go. Okay, sweet. Thank you. We're going to do it live. We're going to go off of the laptop here. Awesome. All right. Fantastic to talk to you, John and Jordy. And I want to introduce you to Ward Zero, which is the beautiful machine behind me here.

3:15:53This is our first prototype nuclear reactor here in our Los Angeles. facility so it's extremely exciting to be with you today wow and that's yeah you're not on a green screen that's actually like a window this is real wow there are there are dudes walking around there yeah i noticed that my office is crazy because with the glass with the way the glass is kind of reflecting slightly it's crazy i thought it was an image it looks like a poster but yeah we get a lot of we get a lot of fake backgrounds but this one's real um anyway this is the update may start running at some point we'll have to see can you drive a forklift yet or do you not have time to get I actually am forklift certified.

3:16:30I don't know if I have the certification sitting on my desk. I just moved desks. Congratulations. Give us the update. What happened in Washington, D.C.? Why are you in the news? Yeah, so this was a very exciting day. A couple of months ago, I was on to announce the signing of four executive orders. The president essentially said, listen, we need nuclear back in the United States. This is a strategic priority. And today the Department of Energy announced the initial companies that will be part of the pilot program to turn on three nuclear reactors on American soil by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday.

3:17:05So we have 2026. We got a year. What's past? 365 days. We're talking about less than 12 months, and we actually have a counter upstairs and a very, very large screen in our office that counts down to the second, our deadline to go and hit that next year. We have a site in Utah, and we're working very quickly toward that goal. Yeah, it seems like reading the press release, it was like all the boys. I knew like seven of the companies. I mean, I know they were competitors and it's obviously fierce competition, but nuclear is famously like, it's such a green field because there's really like no serious companies and you kind of saw that in the release.

3:17:43It wasn't a lot of like legacy companies. It was like basically all startups, people that we know. And yeah, so very exciting. I mean, obviously like the race is on. It feels like it'll be mostly friendly competition. This is less of a winner-take-all market. And it's such a good, like, it's like everyone's in it for America. They're not purely in it just to, like, you know, accumulate, like, all the power in the world, take over the whole world or whatever. But, yeah, what was your reaction to the rest of the crew? I mean, absolutely. There's a ton of exciting people in here who are working very hard.

3:18:14A lot of these companies have been working for a long time and have been waiting for this big break, right? And the big break is an administration that steps forward and says, all right, guys, let's see if you have this stuff. You've been saying for a long time that the regulatory environment is the problem. That's the bottleneck. We're going to clear everything out and let's see if you've got the goods. And so that's the test of the next 10 months here. So we're really excited about it. I think there are a couple of things that are driving this moment. AI is clearly a huge one. I was at the executive order signing a couple of weeks ago for AI.

3:18:44and the president made it very clear that this is a massive priority for the administration, that we're going to beat China on AI. We're going to win this thing and we're going to do it in the next three years. And obviously energy is hugely important to that. A subtle note on this on energy that most people don't understand is that nuclear particularly is important for AI. You can get cheap energy through renewables and sort of an intermittent period. And I think that worked pretty well back when we were doing a lot of pre-training. So you can pre-train during the day when the energy is really cheap and you can kind of follow that curve around.

3:19:13As we move toward inference, it's really important to have a lot of steady load, right? We need these turbines to be spinning all the time. And especially as these inference loads are moving more agentic, right? You're going to have these enterprise agent loads, and hopefully those are working while we're sleeping. The stability of that becomes even more important. So nuclear is a massive thing to kind of step into the breach here and solve that problem very quickly. Walk me through the next 10 months. you built something behind you what do you actually have to do in some ways historically long timelines have nuclears certainly probably up there with rocket science in terms of we know how to do it it doesn't mean it's not hard and so when you really condense a timeline what was Bodle, that Atlanta plant the Georgia plant Bodle took about 15 years So it's interesting you mentioned rockets because I think this is a really good parallel.

3:20:11We think of rockets as taking a long time to build, but obviously SpaceX kind of proved the opposite. SpaceX proved that you could build a rocket very quickly. You could launch it quickly. You could iterate. And actually what they did is they went back to go forward because when we were first doing rockets in the Apollo program, we went from scratch with the Mercury program to humans landing on the moon 10 years later. And so that was an extremely, extremely rapid development process. guess what? They blew up a lot of rockets, right? They launched a lot. They blew up. And there's this joke that our rockets always blow up, but they got there and they did it through building quickly.

3:20:45And over time, that industry slowed down and it kind of got governed by these primes. And it was really difficult for us to get these big systems off the ground. And when Elon came back, he said, you know what? We're going to start with a really small rocket. We're going to start with the Falcon 1 and we're going to launch it quickly. And we're going to learn how to launch rockets. We're going to build up the talent and the regulator is going to get used to doing that again. And so I think there's a huge parallel here with nuclear where nuclear is actually very similar. In the early days of nuclear energy, you actually saw a lot of that rapid iteration like the early days of rocketry.

3:21:15The world's first nuclear reactor turned on in eight months from a piece of paper to criticality in the first system was eight months. The next reactor turned on another six months after that. And the third one turned on another six months after that at Oak Ridge, where my great grandfather was a physicist. So we're actually kind of doing a similar thing that we did in space where you go forward, you go back to go forward. You know, and I also like to point out when when the first reactors were being made, this was in the era of, you know, manually drafting and slide rules. Right. And so it was extremely practical.

3:21:45It was extremely focused on the outcome. You have to actually bend the metal. You have to stack the blocks. And these atoms have got to get split. So, you know, there's a cultural shift back to this R &D focused place where we can actually iterate and get through it. What are when when you iterate quickly on a rocket and you launch it and it doesn't work, it blows up humans that, you know, it can set things back in a way. But you learn something. What what are the kind of like risk factors when, you know, moving super quickly with a project like this that that you're you guys and other players in the industry are keeping in mind?

3:22:23Yeah, rockets are a lot more exciting than the nuclear reactors. When a rocket goes wrong and it's a really big explosion, there's fireworks in these pretty colors. Reactors are really boring. The nominal case is that this reactor sits here and does nothing. The actually sub-nominal case is also that the reactor sits here and does nothing. So there's a lot that you can do in the physics and the design of these reactors to ensure that they're safe. So really what we're doing when we do this testing is we're verifying our assumptions on the mechanical components. Do our pumps work how we expected them to?

3:22:57Do the valves work? Are we leaking things? There's all of the nitty gritty of actually getting a physical system to perform how you expect it to. So I don't expect to see out of this experiment that there will be large failures. Hopefully not. That does have to do with the architecture, though. And that's one of the reasons that we've picked this architecture standing behind us is that it is an extremely fundamentally safe architecture. And that allows us to move quickly. That's great. That's great to hear. I would ring the gong, but I feel like we should save it for when the reactor goes critical, right?

3:23:29Yes. Come back on. Let's save it. You got the countdown. Job's not finished. But we are rooting for you. How about this, John and Jordy? If Valor is the first, why don't you come and ring the gong on the site at the first criticality? How about that? Will I need a hazmat suit? You will need a hazmat suit. Well, I mean, we talked to the founder of Replica and she said that she grew up in Chernobyl and was like playing with radiated toys. She played with radioactive toys. And so she turned out fine. She built a big company. And so, you know, maybe radiation poisoning underrated. No, no. We'll have that.

3:24:03You'll be safe? We're working out of the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Utah. There's a couple of buildings. Some of them are nuclear, some of them are not. We're going to throw a party in the non-nuclear side. So we'll be there to ring the gun. We'll be there. Thank you so much. Well, thanks, guys. Keep up all the great work. Good luck. Cheers. Talk to you later. Bye. Well, what a show. What a show. Should we do any timeline? I have one story, but we should save it for the next one. Save it for tomorrow. Daniel, Growing Daniel, says they should make a TBPN for sports. I completely agree.

3:24:38I mean, it is crazy. We invented television. We invented streaming. We invented news. And now all we need to do as a society is just take the innovation that we've created here and bring it to other industries, other sectors. And, oh, we got... Mitchell Baldridge says TVPN for Catholicism. I like that. I think they should make a TVPN for monitoring situations, which is live. The Situation Room. The Situation Room. That is hilarious that it's called the Situation Room. Yeah, Raul Sunwalker posted, oh my God, they created a TBPN for finance and it's CNBC with Andrew Sorkin. Andrew's a friend of the show.

3:25:24And he actually replied with the crying emoji, which is very funny. It's good stuff. We appreciate it. Anyways, without further ado, have a great rest of your afternoon. Thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for tuning in. We love you and we will see you tomorrow. Very excited for the show tomorrow. Yeah, we'll talk to you later. Once more, we'll have some range. Have a good one. Cheers. See you. Bye. Bye.