YouTubers Win the Box Office, Salesforce on a Tear, Bernie Sanders: A.I. is a Public Resource | Adam Iscoe, Danial Jameel, Mike Schroepfer, Nico Ferreyra, Sue Khim, Bernie Su

15:59Sue Khim:What do you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it. My vote's Obsession. Obsession. Scott, what'd you think? Obsession. Okay, and what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?

16:11Nico Ferreyra:So Obsession was great. It felt like, I feel like the, filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently like this like ari aster type wave okay remember leaving midsummer and just feeling like like like gross for like days and i felt like obsession like walked it back a little

16:27Sue Khim:bit and it was a bit of a comedy too so it was fun uh i felt like the the memes are all over it which

16:32Nico Ferreyra:is great yeah um back rooms we all kind of walked out i love back rooms production design should win an award but something was missing from the movie i think apparently they built 30 000 square

16:42Sue Khim:feet of actual set for back rooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like, I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like we'll just continue using, like you're already working in CGI. Like it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like it's actually less true to go build the set, but they did. And clearly, you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out.

17:12Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, I thought it was really fun. Scott's got something. I want to shout out Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession, too. She went to our film school.

17:20Sue Khim:Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben Thompson.

17:23Nico Ferreyra:Your guys' class at your film school, which I think no longer exists, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. So well done.

17:34Sue Khim:So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. While he was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017, he said, in 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote goodbye gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood, created the conditions for his predation. So he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising.

18:12Sue Khim:However, the Internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every day in 2016.

18:31Nico Ferreyra:With two phones. watching two things on both phones yeah subway surfers screen yeah just going like this well if you have vr you can have way more screens open because you can just you can't when is subway

18:43Sue Khim:surfers getting an adaptation that feels like that's due for a trilogy subway surfers the movie i think we got something are they have they has we cannot be the first people to think of subway

18:54Nico Ferreyra:birds is like a you know oh yeah they're making a third one or no but i want it to be a movie where you're just like, you know, on, you're basically just going one direction.

19:06Sue Khim:No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues, he says, it's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short form video, et cetera. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return.

19:38Sue Khim:They actually have to leave the house. It's also notable, I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies like Johnny Harris, video essayist, talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of the Middle East, history of Europe, and history of China, Taiwan. And his last few videos have been two hours long, which is just a movie. He's just making an actual documentary. It used to be there was a 20 minute cutoff. Well, it used to be like eight, 10 minutes because of the ad breaks. You'd want two ads in there. Then people sort of went to 20, 30 minutes because of watch time.

20:11Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, and the only other difference is I feel like if somebody is making a documentary or film, they'll do more maybe walk and talks, things like that. Whereas I feel like the classic YouTube video is just like thinking about your YouTube videos. You're just set up in an office talking to the camera.

20:29Sue Khim:Yeah.

20:29Nico Ferreyra:But just that slight difference makes what makes it feel like way more like a film.

20:33Sue Khim:Yeah, totally. There is an interesting way where you can you can pretty, pretty easily rotate from video essay scripted long form. Get just write the script longer and longer. I put out video essays that have been over an hour to go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in and then do some sort of like walk and talk at the beginning. and you can have like a low budget documentary very, very easily with just a few shoot days. And I think a lot of people are moving towards this, but it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a two hour video.

21:07Sue Khim:And I think a lot of that has to do with how the algorithm surfaces content at certain moments in time and then also resurfaces moments. So for a two hour video, they know that they're gonna need to give you like a couple shots on goal to show it as a thumbnail. And then also if you click on it and you watch 10 minutes and then you close your phone and you go do something else, they know that that doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video. And they will say, hey, do you want to keep watching that? And so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a two-hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a casual world.

21:43So Ben Thompson continues.

21:45Sue Khim:He says that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that this is simply a new place to discover talent, and that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact AWS had on venture capital. Cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers, and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms, meanwhile, didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals.

22:20Sue Khim:so it is with this new wave of talent the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations not that not just their ideas that's what i was talking about the the audition the youtube growth and the youtube product and the youtube series that gets 82 million views in the in the example of backrooms like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind hollywood to actually marshal behind you um and that's the same thing with the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a Series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR.

22:55Sue Khim:And all of that is possible because you don't need$10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. More true than ever in the age of AI. The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's almost certainly true. Kane Parsons, who made Backrooms, has 3.2 million subscribers, which feels low based on how big Backrooms is, but that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to actual subscribers. Curry Barker, who made Obsession, has 1.2 million subscribers, again, on that comedy channel. And then Mark Fishback, who made Iron Lungs, Markiplier, has 38.7 million subscribers, huge account from years of streaming.

23:37Sue Khim:And he purposely leveraged that to get distribution. Bloomberg sort of broke it down. uh he uh he he was set to release his three million dollar film uh iron lung in 60 independent cinemas fishback led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters and request iron lung screenings this is something that a lot of people say in like cpg like oh fill out this form request me in ero on or whole foods but it's usually really really hard to get someone to actually do that uh because the conversion rate might be like 0.001 but if you have 40 million people that are you know loosely entertained by you and you get you know yeah a

24:17Nico Ferreyra:fraction of a percent 10 000 people who really really really care yeah yeah yeah i mean you

24:22Sue Khim:talk about a thousand true fans he probably has a million true fans out of that 40 million that are yeah but subscribing one percent of those actually it's still 10 000 phone calls it's a lot and so the film was ultimately picked up by major chains including amc which has been on a tear amc said that this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years. And I think the stock is up.

24:43Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, up 20 % today.

24:43Sue Khim:The stock is up 20 %?

24:45Nico Ferreyra:Yeah. Wow. $100 billion company.

24:47Sue Khim:$100? Wait, what? No, no, no, no.

24:49Nico Ferreyra:It's a$1 billion company.

24:53Sue Khim:Yeah, they put some data centers in the theaters, I guess. Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark Holdings also.

24:59Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, they set it up so if you rock in your chair, you get a free film. You get a free film. They capture the energy. But you're powering. You're powering.

25:06Sue Khim:small rack of GPUs. Yeah. Potentially powered by Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, the unsatisfying aspect that Ben Thompson's referring to is best understood through the lens of the movie Backrooms and Obsession finished ahead of from Variety. So he talks about The Mandalorian and Grogu, which we mentioned, and he calls back to George Lucas's original film. So his initial claim to fame was American Graffiti, which made over$200 million on a$777 ,000 budget. That's a crazy ROI. Over 200x return on investment for American Graffiti.

25:52Sue Khim:The success gave him the support to make Star Wars.

25:55Nico Ferreyra:How do you, Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been I've been I've been pitched like invest in my movie before but given that I don't watch movies I didn't feel like it was really my strike zone but how does it typically get structured like if a film needs a million dollar budget like are are the investors getting like an independent film needs a million dollar budget yeah how does equity work any any rough ideas

26:28Sue Khim:typically there's there's a series of buyers and investors.

26:32Nico Ferreyra:Sorry, I'm distracting you guys from running the show.

26:34Sue Khim:Very similar to... We'll do it live. Scott's job is to change that. Oftentimes, a screenwriter will sell an option to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. The production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it, and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. they might attach a, they might go pitch a, do the deal to bring on a star. And then from there, they go to another producer. And then the last time, the last moment is the actual marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards and like the Super Bowl ads.

27:19Sue Khim:And that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent$3 million, that means he spent$3 million paying the actors.

27:33Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, because even with Obsession, I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA. Yeah. Like at least a million dollar campaign right when the videos were coming out saying like Obsession just turned$750K into$100 million. And so I was like, well, So a lot of times that might happen after the fact. Yeah, that's an after there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now. Let's like.

27:57Sue Khim:And then and then basically at every phase, there can be sort of an in-kind investment where you get they call it like points on the back end, basically. But it's basically like the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman. He took a very low salary up front, cash up front, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series. You're saying he's goaded? He's goaded. He's actually goaded. I think he made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Marvel franchise that came from that. And there is a world where he would have said, no, I want only cash up front.

28:33Sue Khim:You're going to have to pay me a ton. And then a production team has to come in. They put the money in. They get the equity. And then they get that on the back end.

28:39Nico Ferreyra:So now that Curry has this insane hit.

28:41Sue Khim:Yep. he can make a Star Wars.

28:44Nico Ferreyra:Are people going to come to him and say, like, I want to basically buy your next five films? Totally.

28:50Sue Khim:Yeah, multi-film deal. It depends on what he's pitching. Somebody could just come to him with something very open-ended. They could come with him to something narrow. Maybe he's already working on something, has a script, has an idea, and then wants to get that made or locked up. Or maybe he wants to be... It's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, hey, we already have this IP. Maybe we want to bring back Scream, and we would love for you to do it.

29:20Nico Ferreyra:He actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw with A24. There you go.

29:24Sue Khim:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, with A24. Wait, Curry is? Yeah.

29:26Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, so a generational run. Off the back of Obsession, he got his next feature,

29:30Mike Schroepfer:which is called Anything But Ghosts. Okay. And then from that, he hopped on with A24 to do the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So he's already got stuff lined up.

29:37Sue Khim:Which has already been remade a few times, but it's established intellectual property and bringing him on sort of de-risks in some ways, but it also just brings some fresh energy to that IP where whoever did the first Texas Chainsaw or the reboot, maybe they're doing something else or maybe the studio wants to take a different direction. And so they licensed that IP because Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not an A24 property from day one, but at this point, they went and got the rights and then they got the director and then they put them together, and so it's all a package deal. Anyway, Ben Thompson's blackpilling on Star Wars.

30:15Sue Khim:He says, it turns out, however, that actually making good movies still matters. A late Gen Xer like me, who as a teenager, saw The Phantom Menace twice in its opening weekend. So excited was I by the return of Star Wars, and did the same for The Force Awakens, has basically no interest in The Mandalorian and Grogu. Has anyone in the studio seen The Mandalorian and Grogu? No one? No one's into it. It's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for Andor. That was more my speed. And he agrees. He says, I'm clearly not alone. It's been clear for a while now that all the things that Disney worries about when making a Star Wars film or TV series actually making it good has not been one of them.

30:58Sue Khim:Brutal. That's the thing with the IP-based business model. However, Disney seems to have assumed that because they control distribution, thanks to the massive consolidation of movie studios over the past years, that they could shove whatever supply they wanted through the tubes and audiences would slurp it up because they had no other choice. This is the exact opposite of YouTube specifically and the Internet generally. On the Internet, distribution is free. Anyone can set up a website or start a YouTube account, and they can post whatever they want. Content that breaks through has to do so on its own merits.

31:29Sue Khim:It is good. Is it good and compelling or is it not? If it is, it gets more and more views. That's what the algorithm does. It is respond to and amplify interest. And if it's not, like 99.99 % of YouTube content, it's barely seen by anyone. In short, the reason these movies are successful is not just because their makers were spotted by powerful producers or because they brought their own fans. I agree with this. It's not enough just to bring their own fans. It's because the necessary precondition for those two things happening is actually becoming popular on pure merit. It's a more merit-based system.

32:01Sue Khim:These movies are successful because their makers are good, and we know they're good because they're successful on YouTube. No, that doesn't mean everyone on YouTube is good. Indeed, that's the entire point. There's no quality bar to get onto YouTube, which means the quality bar to get noticed on YouTube is much higher than any gate. Indeed, as much as Hollywood types might look down on YouTubers, it's the latter who are far more impressive, at least if the goal is actually trying to make something that resonates. Very good. Very, very fun. Anyway, let me tell you about big my agents meet the canvas your AI agents can now create modify your finger files with design system context go check it out at big my calm Famously not dead still cooking sasspocalypse is over.

32:45Sue Khim:We'll get to that later in the show a car You're not a car. No one's a car.

32:49Nico Ferreyra:Did you see the new George Lucas Museum cinema?

32:53Sue Khim:I thought this was interesting that this was going viral at the same time or launched at the same time. You know, it's sort of a turning over.

33:02Nico Ferreyra:Makes me want to throw on a tux.

33:03Sue Khim:Yes, it looks very cool. Apparently, a billion dollars to make this, a billion dollar investment in this whole facility, the George Lucas Museum Cinema, opening in September. This looks absolutely amazing. Quote, all through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers, while the other one shows short films, some only a few minutes long. It's in Los Angeles. If you're coming by the TBP and Ultradome, make a stop at the George Lucas Museum Cinema. Very, very cool. There's also a cool video here of the history of liminal spaces we should pull up because Backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos.

33:43Sue Khim:Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman Show. Haven't seen it? I've seen it. It's great. I can't believe we've never seen Truman Show. It's so good.

33:54Nico Ferreyra:Should we get some liminal spaces here in the Ultradome?

33:57Sue Khim:The Ultradome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups. Unbox Therapy is a famous one.

34:09Nico Ferreyra:You guys haven't seen it, but do you know the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is? No. What's that? I mean, I guess no spoilers.

34:14Sue Khim:Oh, okay.

34:15Nico Ferreyra:Yeah. We can put tape on the wall. People who have seen it will know what that means.

34:18Sue Khim:That's a very cool shot. The Shining. The Shining. I never put The Shining in the same bucket as this. It Follows. That's a good horror film. That's a great one. Very cool. Anyway. We can just vibe out to liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen to... The Shippinator? ...with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business from YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about subway surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic.

35:05Sue Khim:Ooh, all the simulators? Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator the movie. Can you imagine? We got Data Center Simulator. Or what was the other one? Coconut Simulator? We gotta get Coconut Simulator the movie. Realistic mode. capybara simulator the movie that's just a nature documentary get get david attenborough in there you're done you're good um very interesting well uh churning entertainment finance this david attenborough narrating gameplay from capybara simulator oh i think that i think we got a hit on our hands call a24 they're ready uh well bernie sanders is uh talking about taking a stake in the AI labs.

35:48Sue Khim:He says, AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op-ed in the New York Times, a guest essay. I need to confirm my account if I want to log into this, but we can see the... I think I subscribed to my phone, and so it doesn't sync with my Chrome installation. I don't know. Let's see. Andrew Curran is highlighting it. This is rough. Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing a one-time 50 % tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund.

36:39Sue Khim:This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take it 50 % and like, when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies like decades to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for stock buybacks. Maybe he wants to just be fire selling. Yeah.

37:03Nico Ferreyra:After the IPOs. He's just like, this is the problem. I didn't tell you how there was going to be a dividend.

37:10Sue Khim:A dividend in sales.

37:13Nico Ferreyra:No, I mean, the positioning, I'm trying to get into my New York Times account too, but the positioning blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge? Yeah, I was looking at a lot of the bio. TBPN is built on humanity's collective knowledge. True, true. If humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines.

37:40Sue Khim:Hey, be careful what you say. the United States American citizens might own 50 % of TVPN soon. You never know with this.

37:47Nico Ferreyra:You never know. You just never know.

37:49Sue Khim:You're tempted to play here.

37:50Nico Ferreyra:But. Bad example. But yeah, the other thing is, you know, we have.

37:56Sue Khim:Yeah, AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a, it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew. And we'll see, we'll see where all this goes. You know, I don't know. We'll see. um it's uh a lot of people are sort of framing it as rather have universal basic tokens maybe that would be the dividend i don't know um he says uh but it's interesting so he's trying to

38:22Nico Ferreyra:ban data centers with the data center moratorium yes act yes but then he also yeah wants half yeah uh those two things feel like like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall

38:35Sue Khim:Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, you know, misalignment here. He says, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I think that there is a world where if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say, we're all going to slow down simultaneously.

39:20Sue Khim:That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50 % control over everything. Tyler, what do you think?

39:25Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA.

39:27Sue Khim:Yeah.

39:28Nico Ferreyra:You don't need like actual equity. Yeah. Okay. This is my kind of contrarian take. Okay. But this seems like extremely bullish, right? Okay. Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person. Yeah. But implicitly he's saying these are going to be the biggest.

39:41Sue Khim:He's saying that the stock's underrated. Yeah.

39:43Nico Ferreyra:He's saying that these are going to be the biggest companies we've ever seen.

39:45Sue Khim:Yeah, because of all the stocks we're going to zero.

39:47Nico Ferreyra:And they're going to be so big that this is going to be disruptive to the economy. Sure. This seems like he's extremely AGI-pilled.

39:52Sue Khim:It seems like it, yeah.

39:53Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, it's like this seems like he's basically saying the data center stuff is probably not going to work out. I'm not going to be able to ban these things. Yeah. Mark in the chat says, Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a babysitter when there are no other options. Interesting.

40:14Sue Khim:Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

40:24Nico Ferreyra:Another Mark in the chat says, My wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys. Mark is on vacation tuning into TV. Say hello to everyone for us. We hope you're enjoying the sun. Mark, and thanks for being with us.

40:40Sue Khim:Thanks for tuning in. So my question is, I mean, obviously this is a New York Times op-ed. I know what you're going to say.

40:47Nico Ferreyra:You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppen?

40:53Sue Khim:I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. but first off, I mean, the big news today, Anthropic is confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public. Open AI, there's rumors of an IPO file.

41:08Nico Ferreyra:Well, yeah, and that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is Google, Google's a leading lab. For sure. Does Bernie want?

41:16Sue Khim:But then, yeah, but then is Salesforce an AI company?

41:21Nico Ferreyra:Is Meta?

41:21Sue Khim:Is Meta? Yeah, Meta is certainly spending like they are.

41:24Nico Ferreyra:We were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like, me? Trying to build personal supertouches?

41:30Sue Khim:I'm not an AI company. I'm not an AI lab. You don't need to take half my company.

41:33Nico Ferreyra:I'm not an AI lab.

41:34Sue Khim:I'm just doing some experiments. I got these GPUs to recommend better videos to you. 99 % of the value that we're creating is just recommendations. He's going to take half of all birds. Oh, no. He's going to take half of all birds. But seriously, how deep does he go down the stack? I mean, Intel, Trump already took a 10 % stake. NVIDIA. NVIDIA? NVIDIA makes a lot of sense.

41:53Nico Ferreyra:The American open source hero.

41:55Sue Khim:But what about Microsoft? Like Microsoft doesn't have like, they have a huge partnership with OpenAI. They don't have a frontier foundation model, but they're definitely like a front door to a lot of AI services with Copilot and they're vending these tools in everywhere. And so there's just a whole, like Amazon. I heard Amazon Rufus for AI shopping. Surprisingly, surprisingly effective. It's working very well. Like this is an AI assistant that's powered by other models under the hoods. It doesn't need to be the most aggressive mythos, 5.5 pro. It doesn't need to be the frontier, but it's actually working and customers are using it.

42:32Sue Khim:Same thing with Sparky at Walmart. And so is Walmart an AI company now? The definition around this will be hotly debated. But of course, you don't want to get too over your skis here because this is just an op-ed. It's not in legislation. It's to provoke thoughts.

42:46Nico Ferreyra:Well, if the argument is that basically if something is built on humanity's collective knowledge, the government should get half.

42:53Sue Khim:Yeah.

42:55Nico Ferreyra:You can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world is built on humanity's collective knowledge. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think everybody should get ready to, I mean, even your own home, right? Your own home is built on humanity's collective knowledge. Somebody invented the two by four. Exactly.

43:15Sue Khim:Yeah. Somebody invented cutting down trees. Yes. So maybe it ends with some sort of tax on corporate profits.

43:23Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, tax on corporate profits would feel.

43:26Sue Khim:If a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government. That would be.

43:30Nico Ferreyra:Why has no one thought of this, John? I don't know. I don't know. Take this to DC right now.

43:35Sue Khim:Okay. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So there's a hot debate. Apollo's chief economist says there's zero evidence of AI-related job losses, and this went viral. Torsten Slock, the partner and chief economist, says zero evidence of AI-related job losses. He says weekly ADP employment data, there's zero evidence of job loss. Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts, and the data center build-out is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts And on prices of semiconductors, equipment, and energy, the bottom line is that AI spending boom, the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and inflation.

44:18Sue Khim:As a result, non-farm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the$95 ,000 expected by consensus. This is Jevin's paradox playing out in real time. Cheaper technology is creating more demand for more jobs. And he has a chart there, and you can see ADP is in a really strong position. It looks great. It's really good. There is more nuance here because if you dig into this, what's actually driving the hiring boom is healthcare and the AI affected areas. There's not a massive wave of layoffs that's happening broadly. We're seeing layoffs at different tech companies. But broadly, like white collar work is not going through a massive unemployment spike.

45:01Sue Khim:But the employment spike that we're seeing, the upward trend in ADP weekly employment is still driven mostly by healthcare jobs. And so I don't know how much you can actually say Jevons paradox in real time. Maybe you can in the sense that asset prices are going up. There isn't wide, broad unemployment. So there's more justification in hiring more in the healthcare sector. But this felt like maybe a little bit too soon to take a victory lap on this. I'm not exactly sure. It's certainly a better place to be than seeing unemployment go up. We want to see lots of hiring. We want to see a low unemployment rate, and that's what we're seeing, which is great.

45:43Sue Khim:But it is early, and we're just getting to start to implement these tools, and there's still risk all over the place. Maybe not as much risk as what Jason Oppenheim thinks, though, because he went on the iced coffee hour and made an audacious claim about job displacement, pinning it at 80 % of people out of the workforce, 80 % unemployment. We can play this clip from the ice coffee hour.

46:14Nico Ferreyra:There won't be any work.

46:15Mike Schroepfer:I disagree with Kevin.

46:16Sue Khim:There won't be any work.

46:17Danial Jameel:I don't think we'll have 80 % of people out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about. So I think what we have to do is start creating, showing and creating value for those things. Start ascribing value to family and to hobbies and to sport and to relationships more. And it has to be less about work.

46:38Adam Iscoe:So I hear a lot of I thinks, and you guys are real estate people in the eyes of the viewer. What gives you guys credibility to talk about AI? Fair question. I would say that I've spent probably 500 hours listening and reading a lot of podcasts. Did the homework.

46:52Sue Khim:I think it's the quintessential intellectual pursuit of the last two years of my life. Called David Sander. Listening to podcasts is the quintessential intellectual pursuit. Jeremy Gaffan on Suicide Watch. Tyler, you had something?

47:06Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, just for some context. In the peak of the Great Depression, unemployment was 24.9. 24.9. And he's saying 80%.

47:13Sue Khim:Okay, so three times, four times the Great Depression is what we're looking at with AI?

47:18Nico Ferreyra:yeah it's just it's so it's so funny to listen to to go and just like listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with with the 80 percent number it's wild because you also have to you you would have to qualify that like what what set of technologies actually enable that because you certainly would need like you know uh highly effective efficient humanoid robots you know fully deployed throughout society. But yeah, I don't know. Strongest take we've seen yet.

47:49Sue Khim:Yeah.

47:50Nico Ferreyra:So very concerning.

47:52Sue Khim:But this is a stronger take potentially.

47:53Nico Ferreyra:This is the other side of it. Sam Sulek revealed that 95 % of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace discipline, grit, or hard work. Instagram.

48:08Sue Khim:How did this?

48:11Nico Ferreyra:this really looks like instagram i made this this is a fake quote i sent this to john

48:15Sue Khim:over the weekend it looks very like the fact that it added the little instagram buttons makes it look way more legit i know you made this but i i still did a double take it's absolutely wild uh so funny anyway let me tell you about the new york stock exchange want to change the world raise capital at the new york stock exchange we're very happy to be partnered with the new Workstock Exchange. It's really going. Really going today. And thank you to ARIA, ARIA.Tech. They produced all of our show graphics, the Chiron. Legends. The intro. They've worked with us for a long time. And they also activated my AI Siri for some reason.

48:56Sue Khim:I don't know why that happened. On my phone and my MacBook. Wow. What a day. Salesforce is on an absolute tear. We talked about the dueling narrative. So Anthropic is IPO-ing, or they have confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. There's a race between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Meanwhile, it was so over for all the SaaS companies, but the SaaSpocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing.

49:35Sue Khim:A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their traditional business. Mark's got to be feeling good.

49:43Nico Ferreyra:He invested$50 million into Anthropic, I think, in 2023 or 2024.

49:48Sue Khim:Cheeky 100x?

49:50Nico Ferreyra:Very cheeky. Very cheeky. I think he's at 5 billion. He's feeling good. He's now going to deploy 2 billion euros into France. Love it. Our strong team of - He has 1 ,800 employees in France. Wow. Wow. More committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is this is the new this is the new vibreal meta. So anytime you do a business transaction, snap a selfie with your business partner, post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, you know, sort of videos throughout history of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that.

50:29Nico Ferreyra:just take a selfie post it you're good to go much more efficient okay so and i'm dropping after this partnership i just got to say i'm we're canceling my personal beef with uh france oh that's great

50:43Sue Khim:this is a fantastic progress benioff won you over and uh yeah if they have benioff's full faith

50:51Nico Ferreyra:they have my full faith and uh already this two billion euros i think is significantly more than their previous investment that they announced that created the original beef.

51:04Sue Khim:Yeah, yeah. Beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year 27. Q1 results. Record revenue,$11.13 billion, up 13 % year over year. This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Operating cash flow of$6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion ARR, or yeah, ARR, combined with Data360 and Informatica, now at 3.4 billion in AI data ARR. We're not just talking about the, here. We're not just talking about the agentic future.

51:43Bernie Su:We're delivering it.

51:45Mike Schroepfer:The number one agentic CRM powering the shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real, the future is unstoppable. Fire emoji.

51:56Sue Khim:34 % non-dap operating margin.

51:59Nico Ferreyra:What is a sarsaparilla? What's a sarsaparilla?

52:02Sue Khim:Sarsaparilla is a beverage. It's like a Coca-Cola. It's a drink that you get at a soda bar. Sarsaparilla. What? Sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla. I'm seeing... Nostalgic soft drink. You just call it sarsaparilla. I know it says sarsaparilla, but everyone pronounces it sarsaparilla, I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink, herbal plant, native to the Americans. Sweet, earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for$20 a bottle at Erewhon. Don't you think? Absolutely. I bet bringing back sarsaparilla, good business. Somebody do the call area, call day job right now.

52:40Sue Khim:Start your branding packages. And I think you got a winner if you bring back sarsaparilla successfully. Well, Mark Benioff teased a little bit of the progress on our show. And we can play this clip from him on TBPN, giving us a little bit of a view. into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing in their business.

53:00Bernie Su:I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year, a year ago with you guys. But if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year 26, the year it just passed. Because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year. And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20 % more salespeople. Salespeople. Because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever.

53:34Bernie Su:We're demand. Through every market from small, medium, large customers. You know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs, building a great business like TBPN, really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack. I know you use other products. Got us. That's our job is to make you successful. He got us. And to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an app.

53:58Sue Khim:Sales guy, final boss.

53:59Bernie Su:He's so good.

54:01Nico Ferreyra:Final boss. It is, I think the pushback there would be, well, you do sell customer service agents. You don't sell coding agents. But you are selling sales-focused agents. So basically you're getting so much efficiency in these other places that you don't need to hire more people. But in the kind of category in which your primary products operate, you're he's not making the efficiency argument he's making the demand argument he's saying we have so much demand we need more reps yeah but he's selling a product that should be able to

54:37Sue Khim:sort of meet that demand right uh yes and no i mean he's selling he's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep if there's a booming economy more sales you would think that there's more people that go into sales more people that need a shopify or sorry a sales force like installation alongside them. There's still a bull case there. I mean, all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported. And there's certainly like so much of the diffusion discussion is around actually meeting someone, having a human in the loop, having someone alongside you as you implement these tools.

55:18Sue Khim:So you don't go over your token budget token maxing token maxing seems like a uh a harebrained scheme cooked up by an sdr just okay going to salesforce agent force what should i do tell them to token max tell them to create a leaderboard where they produce as many tokens as possible like okay so okay agent force

55:38Nico Ferreyra:got it buddy did you know that jensen was such a good dancer i had no idea do we have a video of

55:44Sue Khim:this we do okay let's play this and then we'll read brandon grel's deep dive on jensen's Computex 2026 keynote, which is being hotly debated. Look at this. It's pretty good. Look at this. He's got it. He's flowing. Oh, I like the swimming. He's having fun.

56:02Nico Ferreyra:He's got to be feeling pretty good this quarter. Yeah. You got to read into these, right?

56:06Sue Khim:Yeah.

56:07Nico Ferreyra:I mean, we read into him doing the arm-linked, you know, chucking beers in Korea.

56:13Sue Khim:5.4 trillion up 6 % today. Wow. Absolutely wild. Where's he sitting on multiple?

56:31Sue Khim:Pop quiz. What movie features a dance to this song?

56:38Nico Ferreyra:Is it Pulp Fiction? It literally says it in the caption.

56:43Sue Khim:I don't know. Sometimes you're so you'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John.

56:49Nico Ferreyra:Jody, have you seen Pulp Fiction? I have. Oh, OK. I have. That's one of the five.

56:54Sue Khim:The five movies. We're slowly discovering that there's more than five movies. There's like 20. It's a good time. Anyway, let's go through what Brandon Grell summarized from Jensen Wong's Computex 2026 keynote. NVIDIA CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES, but more enterprise focused even. He introduced the NVIDIA RTX Spark Super Chip, an ARM-based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production, and he announced several foundation models.

57:36Sue Khim:A world model, an open-weight flagship AI model. Do we have a model card for that yet? That seems like big news, open-weight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the 5.5s, the, what is Anthropocon? 4.8 now? and the three fives from Google. Like the closed source models have been on the frontier and there's been the chart showing that the open source models from China have been sort of decelerating or they're just, they're growing more linearly than the American closed source models.

58:13Sue Khim:So is there a gap there? Where does NVIDIA fit in with their open weight model? That's an interesting question. And he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple Silicon Moment. And Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Can you play Crysis on it? Can you game on this thing? Is that cool? Or is it all about running agents locally? I wonder what the demand for these local agents on the desktop will be because so many so many workloads You know, you just hand it off and you wait 20 minutes and you come back but There is some value to being able to do at least like the voice transcription locally just all sorts Yeah

58:59Nico Ferreyra:If you can do like tool calling then that basically gets you like most of the way there because then all the hard things Sure outsource well sure and then for like gaming I'm still very excited to see any of these like real-time video models used in gaming this seems like it'll be a thing you do with these like super nice we got to get david bazooki back on the show

59:16Sue Khim:uh for to talk about roblox and the and the the real-time uprezzing of roblox games because i think that that's such a such an incredible technology i think it's gonna be really popular but it's gonna take time for it to actually roll out uh anyway uh there is a cut down of jensen's keynote that you can watch we linked it in the newsletter and uh we we will uh go into that more later but we have our first guest from the new york times he's a journalist adam isco uh just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction markets and he's here with us in the TV Fan Ultra. I'm Adam. How you doing?

59:45Nico Ferreyra:With a slat wall.

59:46Sue Khim:Slat wall.

59:47Nico Ferreyra:Ready to podcast.

59:47Sue Khim:Wait, is that a slat wall or is that a virtual background? What do we got? What do we got? It's real. It's real. You think I'd do a virtual background on the Yolng? Thank you. Thank you. With the suit.

59:56Nico Ferreyra:With the suit. You look fantastic. Bringing a slat wall and a suit. You are ready to podcast. Okay.

1:00:01Sue Khim:Are you in New York City? I'm in New York City. Long time listener. First time caller. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Fantastic to have you. Since this is the first time, and we do have some time to kind of unpack this, I wanted to hear a little bit about your journey, your history, how you wound up at the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process. Just sort of give me the 101 on you, and then we can dive into Prediction Market specifically.

1:00:27Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, you know, at a party, if someone asks me, what the hell do you write about? Are we allowed to curse on the show? Is it no FTC? You're welcome to. We don't. We don't. We don't, but you're welcome to.

1:00:36Sue Khim:I'm surprised the New York Times would let you. Are you allowed to drop profanity in The Great Lady?

1:00:41Nico Ferreyra:I can tell he's a bit of a bad boy.

1:00:43Mike Schroepfer:In The Great Lady, bad boy. It's been the great controversy with me working at The Times. I spent the last five years at The New Yorker. It's a magazine that encourages profanity in the pages. But The Times, you know. A little more bites up. Things are a little different there. I've spent the last five years at The New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City or it's like, you know, every year I read a story about a cool boat on the New York Harbor. Cool. You know, I'm just trying to like go interesting places and see interesting things.

1:01:15Nico Ferreyra:What drew you to the boat? I got to know about the boat. Yeah. Since you brought it up. Oh, well, I mean, y 'all ever see a shipping container ship?

1:01:23Sue Khim:Yeah.

1:01:23Mike Schroepfer:Like you ever want to get on one? You ever been on one?

1:01:26Sue Khim:I don't think I've ever been on a shipping container ship, but I have wanted to go on one. I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very cool. You've been on an aircraft carrier? I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vincent as part of the Distinguished Visitor Program. There's a program that you can sign up for. You have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. And I had a friend who waited years and years and years, and they slotted me in at the last second. So I got to go with a lot of big Hollywood producers and stuff, and they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for two days, meet everyone.

1:01:57Sue Khim:Yeah, two days. You're at sea with them, and you have no cell service. They don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate. Okay, well, we left from San Diego. We're probably around Mexico. But yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they fly you off and stuff. It's a wild experience.

1:02:12Mike Schroepfer:We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York Harbor. We came under the Verrazano Bridge and it was great. The cargo was a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. Oh, interesting. It was a gift from the French government to us.

1:02:27Sue Khim:They gave us another one?

1:02:28Mike Schroepfer:They gave us another one. Wow.

1:02:30Sue Khim:They just run it back.

1:02:32Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to get on the ship. So I just sort of made some calls and I asked around. And they were super psyched to have me on board. That's awesome. Yeah.

1:02:41Sue Khim:How do you think about sizing stories in that context? Like when you're at the New Yorker over a couple of years, I imagine that there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like how much, is it just a conversation with your editors and the team on, okay, I actually have something here. I need to go heads down on this for months and pull on this thread. and there's a 70 % chance it's great, 30 % chance it goes nowhere. What is the process? Because we have the same show every day. It's always the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're like, we're going to do an eight-hour show next week, but we're going to take a couple shows off.

1:03:15Sue Khim:How do you think about sizing projects?

1:03:18Mike Schroepfer:It's such a great question. If you're going to write about a used car auction in Brooklyn, you know that that piece is going to be 850 words. It's going to be a little tasty morsel for the reader to enjoy. But if you want to do something where you're really trying to contribute to society, to our culture, then you need more words to tell a deeper story. If I want to write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City and have New York City be a proxy for the nation, then we need 6 ,000 words. We need 10 ,000 words, which means I need six months or a year to work on that project. And then, of course, you know because the new yorker is a business you know you also need to be writing shorter stories along the way while you're spending your investigating something that's really sort

1:04:04Sue Khim:of topical and important how did you first come into contact with prediction markets oh my gosh i mean i don't know about y 'all but isn't isn't i don't know your friends just like

1:04:16Mike Schroepfer:you know degenerate gambling on on sports or on on on all of these things for some reason i actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports.

1:04:26Sue Khim:They are most active group chat.

1:04:28Nico Ferreyra:No one has ever

1:04:29Sue Khim:talked about a sports bet, but they were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe what was it? Three cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver, uh, before the silver bulletin, the five 38 dashboard, everyone was refreshing that constantly. He famously called all 50 states correctly. It was a bit of luck. But those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures everyone's attention. And during the last presidential election cycle, it felt like the prediction markets were really having a moment. But I didn't actually know that many people that were actively betting on them one way or another.

1:05:06Sue Khim:It was more just a curiosity to say, oh, well, that source might be biased or that source might be biased. But at least if there's just money on both sides, maybe it's more neutral. Maybe it will give me a stronger vision of the future. And I think that's where a lot of people, a lot of the goodwill around prediction markets came from because it sort of told the story of the election somewhat more independently or more accurately. And so I think they carried a lot of that goodwill into the sports betting that you're talking about.

1:05:35Nico Ferreyra:But yeah, I've always been, personally, I've been interested in the tension between uh if you're just using prediction markets as a data source and like you're just logging onto a website not even logged in yeah you you kind of want people to be insider trading because that's going to make all the data more accurate yeah but but the platforms i'm not saying like generally that's good for society but i'm just saying like if you just want to get uh an idea of what's going to happen in the future if there's no insider trading happening It just means that people are just purely just better. That's not true.

1:06:10Sue Khim:That's not true. Because in the election. Yeah, I mean, they could be doing like sophisticated research and things like that. Exactly.

1:06:15Nico Ferreyra:But on some of these markets, like for example, like the war markets around Venezuela, you were seeing like spikes in activity. And then, okay, it turns out somebody that did have inside knowledge on the operation was putting the whole operation in this.

1:06:28Sue Khim:Yeah, it's going to be better.

1:06:29Nico Ferreyra:Because they wanted to make, you know, underground or whatever.

1:06:33Sue Khim:Yeah.

1:06:34Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, but when you look at the election or you look at financial, anything, sort of unemployment or the Fed rate or what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non-public information. You can sort of do what Wall Street has always done, which is go out and find an edge. Go out and find the best information possible. Go and talk to a bunch of people. Go and look at really complicated weather data to predict oil prices. I mean, you can you can do like sort of really intense research as just like an individual or a group of individuals working together. And so you don't need to be that guy that like, you know, compromise national security by illegally trading Venezuela.

1:07:16Mike Schroepfer:You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average sort of user or better and kind of create tremendous informational advantage for people. I mean, the chat that I came across sort of crazy is that a third of adult voters in America consulted a prediction market. Right. That's like a that's like a lot of that's a lot of people.

1:07:39Nico Ferreyra:They're basically at the ballot box being like, hmm, who should I vote for?

1:07:43Sue Khim:And I mean, in low liquidity, I only vote for winners.

1:07:45Nico Ferreyra:Who should I vote for?

1:07:46Sue Khim:Yeah. No, no. I think people do. I think people do actually see, OK, there's momentum. It's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win. Then they artificially shift the odds of that candidate. They spike, and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, I'm at 60 % on the prediction markets. You should definitely donate because I'm going to run away with it. And then it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's like a weird cycle there that could be bad.

1:08:21Sue Khim:I don't know.

1:08:21Mike Schroepfer:I think six months ago, maybe eight months ago, there may have been at least pre pre 2024 election is may have been possible. But the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient, just like in the market on Wall Street. Yeah, I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially hype up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just buy your money. Okay, interesting. Interesting.

1:08:45Sue Khim:Okay. So tell me about like what smarter money looks like in this context, because we've heard about, you know, big hedge funds. Citadel is doing clearing and there's, I think Steve Cohen's fund has a desk for this type of stuff. There's like traditional Wall Street. Then there are sharps and then there are the average traders. Like how do you segment the market? How would you characterize the different market participants? Yeah.

1:09:10Mike Schroepfer:So I would say that the average trader and like, that's me, to be clear. We're just getting crushed. Absolutely decimated. I actually want to, I want to, I want to read y 'all something that, that, that, that one of my sources told me, this is someone turned 200 bucks. They're quite sharp. They turned 200 bucks into half a million bucks just last year. wow and so and so and and you know it's a grad student i'm going to keep them sort of protect their anonymity they're quite worried about being crypto kidnapped um sure they go by the screen name frozen um and they said i really am just taking money from people every dollar i gain is someone else losing and there's a lot of people joining and betting and losing and leaving and then there's a group of a couple hundred guys uh winning and that's the whole story.

1:09:57Mike Schroepfer:And you know, that's not the whole story, but, but that's a lot of it, uh, is that you have, you have really smart people just crushing the average trader.

1:10:06Sue Khim:Okay. So what I find weird about this is that I like, I, I, I don't have that many friends who fall into the, but, but do the people

1:10:15Nico Ferreyra:that get crushed quit right before they're about to hit it big?

1:10:18Sue Khim:Yes, clearly. I wonder. Um, so, So I have had friends who have been in that camp of like smart grad student, tech person, able to build a real model. And I always go to them and say, you shouldn't be trading because there's a much more sophisticated market participant sitting at a hedge fund with a data center worth of compute behind their models. And they're going to crush you. And so I'm surprised that an individual of any sort can have an edge in this market. Like, is it just that, like, did you try and talk to any of the Wall Street funds that would more professionalize that, like, this activity?

1:11:02Sue Khim:because it feels like even the smart, clever, individual, disciplined individual who's maybe feeding off of the casuals that are just coming in and out would eventually get crushed by something that's even more robust and professionalized.

1:11:18Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, I was so delighted. I had a wonderful conversation with Jeff Yass, who coped on the stick, one of the most respected trading firms in the country, if not the world. and I asked him this question and he said, we are just getting taken for a ride. We're just getting crushed by these sharps. And I was sort of trying to figure out why. And I talked to someone who actually, you know, SIG is trying to go out just like a number of other places and they're trying to hire these sharps, right? I talked to someone who had an offer from SIG and I said, you know, why didn't you take it? Well, you know, wouldn't you get better health insurance?

1:11:59Mike Schroepfer:And he said, not only am I just making a killing, but I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can, you know, he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades, how is a film going to do on Rotten Tomatoes? And he's turned, you know, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but he's made quite a bit of money. You know, seven figures easily. And so, you know, he's guessing, not guessing, he's predicting, he's building models to figure out how is a Rotten Tomatoes, film going to perform and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites and he's doing things that maybe SIG through their corporate policies wouldn't allow.

1:12:36Mike Schroepfer:And he asked in the interview, could I do this technique? And they said, yeah, probably not. And so in these markets, and there's just so many markets. Well, is that because it's illegal?

1:12:48Sue Khim:No, it's not. Yeah, it might be against terms of service.

1:12:52Nico Ferreyra:Not like a law, but like a terms of use. Just TOS violence. Yep, yep, exactly.

1:12:57Sue Khim:Interesting.

1:12:59Mike Schroepfer:And this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because he's someone who, you know, he, you know, pardon me, I'm going to swear, but he self-described as sort of like a dipshit from the Midwest. You know, the first thing he talked to was like, you know, hey, I'm this guy. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. Yeah. And I'm able to out-compete Wall Street with a$600 Lenovo laptop.

1:13:22Sue Khim:That's crazy.

1:13:22Mike Schroepfer:Like if I didn't go to a fancy school, I could never have gotten a job on Wall Street. This is not my world. But I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction markets.

1:13:31Sue Khim:The American dream. Call Sucker and Jetty. He's going to be so happy to hear that. I know. I mean, there has been a ton of pushback. But it feels like the greatest gift to the prediction market industry has been AI being more controversial. and I'm wondering if you are tracking any of the potential political moves that might change the regulatory landscape for prediction markets. They've grown so fast, feels like there's federal preemption, they're going to be legal everywhere. But has anyone popped out as a voice of what regulation might look like in this market, whether there's just, hey, no insider trading or, you know, make it more of a level playing field, more disclosures, even something as simple as with a lot of the Vegas casinos, you can self-exclude.

1:14:20Sue Khim:I don't know how that applies in a modern prediction market world, but that's something that the anti-gambling lobbies would certainly like to see, I imagine.

1:14:30Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, I mean, I think the regulatory landscape is incredibly important with all of this stuff. The Trump administration has been incredibly favorable to Kalshi, to Polymarket, to, the CFTC, which regulates these things. They also regulate, you know, like the derivatives that you might trade lean hog or, or weed or corn on. Um, so, you know, the Trump administration, CFTC has been much, much more sort of willing to play ball, um, with, uh, with prediction markets. And so, you know, you talk to folks and they say there may be, you know, come 2028, come 2029, if there's sort of a change of power in Washington, things may shift, things may change.

1:15:14Mike Schroepfer:and in the meantime I think you know who knows it's really hard to think beyond three months from now so it's really hard to think that far out but in the meantime there's a lot of people doing really really good work you know Council on Foreign Relations for instance is doing really really good work on thinking through how do we just kind of come up with sort of sensible solutions on how to better regulate things you know how can we make sure that you know our national security is not imperiled by you know a lone wolf kind of going out and trading on there's going to be a strike in Venezuela

1:15:43Sue Khim:Yeah, exactly. It seems like there's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole where there's some really, really, really, really problematic markets that have negative externalities like the Venezuela one you mentioned. And then I still don't really have a first principles problem with a broad presidential election market. That seems totally reasonable, totally useful, very valuable. I found prediction markets useful all the time. We were checking call sheet constantly throughout the OpenAI Elon lawsuit because we were trying to cover it independently and it's a good source of, okay, what does the market think?

1:16:15Sue Khim:And it was accurate throughout the whole affair. But yeah, I mean, certainly people can get sucked into all sorts of different markets and there are going to be hotly debated issues for many years, but it does feel like this is like the key focus at the federal level will be AI, at least for the next couple

1:16:35Nico Ferreyra:What do you think sensible regulation looks like? because in the case of there had to have been some guidelines that would have somebody in the special forces, if they check the rule book, say like, hmm, should not send a signal to the internet that we are going to attack a foreign country, which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on strike on Venezuela. Absolutely.

1:17:02Mike Schroepfer:It's terrible.

1:17:04Nico Ferreyra:But that doesn't feel like, that just feels, like, it's not even necessarily, like, that must have been violating, like, a number of policies, I would imagine.

1:17:15Mike Schroepfer:Policies and federal law and, you know, the Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. You know, you also want to see better enforcement, right? You want to see, you want to sort of flag these things before they even start. You know, I talked to Kalshi about this. I talked to Polymarket about this. And they say, you know, they say, hey, we're really working hard to stop this kind of insider trading. We're working quite hard on it. We're building AI systems to do it. We have teams of people working and working and working on this. We need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that.

1:17:50Mike Schroepfer:And this is where there's lots and lots of other great reporters at the Journal at the Times, at NPR.

1:17:58Sue Khim:There was a good story in the Journal about an independent watchdog that discovered a Polymarket Trader was betting on Google search results and he wound up working for Google. So he just had the exact data available, which obviously is a violation of the terms of service. Yeah.

1:18:14Nico Ferreyra:What percentage of the sharps do you think just have inside info and are kind of taking you on a, you know, basically telling you a little story about...

1:18:25Sue Khim:I built a cool web script for...

1:18:26Mike Schroepfer:I think, you know, I talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of sort of really top traders. And, you know, I asked for receipts. You know, I wanted to look at their models. You know, I went down to Texas and, you know, knocked on doors. I went and there was a group I went down to Texas with to sort of check out their approach to modeling the Texas Democratic primary. And they called themselves MAGA Kiwi Club. It's, you know, 12 or so guys. And they went and knocked on, you know, more than a thousand doors, nearly a thousand doors to try to get a leg up in this election. And they were right. You know, they were right.

1:19:05Mike Schroepfer:I think there are some there are some sort of really bad wolves out there that are taking advantage of the system. But the sharps, the sharps that we're talking about, people who are using information to make the markets more efficient are in a totally different category. And that's sort of that's the vast majority of the activity that in Wall Street. making my platforms.

1:19:25Sue Khim:We have a question from Emily Sundberg. Why is a New Yorker writer taking a job at an AI tech company?

1:19:31Mike Schroepfer:It's a great question. That's a question from Emily or from me?

1:19:34Sue Khim:It's from Emily for you, clearly. From Emily for me. You know, I

1:19:41Mike Schroepfer:love my job. And I've been so lucky to have gotten to talk to all kinds of just wonderful people over the last five years. I have a sense that things are changing. And I really, rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and watch as things sort of change and become a tech reporter, I think this would be the thing that I would do is I'd go be a tech reporter. I'd write wonderful stories about what's happening. And I got the sense that I couldn't do it from the outside. Like I've become increasingly convinced that AI is the thing that I need to think about over the next n number of years.

1:20:26Mike Schroepfer:And I didn't have a sense that I could do this as a reporter from the outside without having the street cred at some level of being in the AI world. And then I went around and I had to find a place that shared my values. And I was lucky enough to, by happenstance, meet this guy Ivan who runs this company Notion and I really loved his vision of the world and I loved this company's vision of the world and I thought okay I'll give it a shot, we'll see and it seems like it's the kind of place here that you can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world and it sort of has a sort of genuine curiosity and a genuine ambition to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world.

1:21:22Mike Schroepfer:I'm quite excited to do it.

1:21:25Sue Khim:How do you think about the opportunity at Notion to tell stories about the technology that ultimately drive traffic into the Notion ecosystem versus actually give insight into what would make Notion a dominant product for the next generation of writers? Those two opportunities seem both interesting but is there one that's sticking out to you?

1:21:49Mike Schroepfer:Well, maybe you could ask a different question or ask it slightly differently. I don't quite understand.

1:21:54Sue Khim:So Notion is a product that writers use to actually research all sorts of people, but people also use it for organizing information of all sorts. But there is a world where you, as a member of non-technical staff, help advance the product. And then there's another side where you tell stories and do more written output to attract customers to Notion. So it's more like product versus marketing if we went back in time.

1:22:27Mike Schroepfer:Yeah, I mean, I don't think product or marketing really resonates with the thing that I really do here. I think I'd be a terrible marketer. I don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product. But what I think I can do is come into this place, ask a ton of questions about what's happening here go elsewhere ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere and then yeah maybe tell interesting stories or maybe the first thing i can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does ai look like in the economy what is and maybe yeah maybe there maybe there is a uh an economic benefit for the business sure uh sure hope so um but but i think there's also just sort of a deeply felt duty here to do good work in all kinds of different ways.

1:23:15Mike Schroepfer:And so I think, you know, part of that is, is, is this.

1:23:19Sue Khim:Very cool.

1:23:21Mike Schroepfer:Awesome.

1:23:21Sue Khim:Anything else?

1:23:22Nico Ferreyra:No, it was great to meet you.

1:23:23Sue Khim:Great to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show. Breaking it down.

1:23:25Mike Schroepfer:Congrats on the new role. A cargo ship, you know, just call me up. Let me know. Let's run it. Next one. I'll talk to you soon.

1:23:31Nico Ferreyra:Great to, great to hang at him. Have a good one. Cheers.

1:23:34Sue Khim:Goodbye.

1:23:37Sue Khim:Let me tell you about public, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. There's a whole bunch of IPOs going out. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI. If you're on public, you want to make sure that you don't go and buy the wrong ticker. Because apparently people are doing this on Wall Street bets. Somebody claimed to put$129 ,000 to work in SpaceX IPO. They wound up buying Virgin Galactic by mistake. That's a different company. But the Virgin Galactic stock is mooning on the rumors of SpaceX's IPO.

1:24:17Nico Ferreyra:Virgin Galactic has the ticker SPCE.

1:24:21Sue Khim:Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me.

1:24:23Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, fortunately, this guy, I mean, hopefully he helped after the comments came in because he'd be up 126%. Wait, it's still up?

1:24:33Sue Khim:Who knows? Maybe there's a comeback for Virgin Galactic. That would be very cool. I mean, I think a lot of, I don't know what will happen to the rest of the space economy. Potentially there's more capital for SpaceX, more competition, more demand for a duopoly if you're a wireless carrier and you don't want to be locked into Starlink exclusively. And so you want to get an ASTS working for you and you continue to back that, or if you are a company that needs to launch satellites into space, you are helping Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to chop down the wood that they need to do to get to space regularly, and so that's actually bullish.

1:25:11Sue Khim:Or maybe they just eat it all up. Who knows?

1:25:14Nico Ferreyra:Tyler says, yo, we just got an ad read. Just made my day. Just made my day. We love you guys.

1:25:21Sue Khim:Kyle Kuzma, friend of the show, guest as of last Friday, said, look at IBM, hashtag quantum. He's having a lot of fun following the market. He was a great interview. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Micron is also way, way up. They extended gains to rise above$1 ,000 a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle. Of course, it's very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2000.

1:25:48Nico Ferreyra:One person on the team is clapping especially hard over there. A Micron. uh i believe it was so funny because uh i was seeing this right as i was getting notification that uh the um ceasefire or whatever the negotiation had uh blown up and of course micron overpowering yeah geopolitics two different things not dependent on the straight of her moves

1:26:14Sue Khim:apparently uh well the stock is now the company is now worth over 1.2 trillion the stock was worth just$60 billion 13 months ago. Absolutely remarkable. There are some rule changes from the SpaceX IPO.

1:26:28Nico Ferreyra:Micron is a Lambo candle.

1:26:30Sue Khim:Lambo candle. That's a Lambo candle. Up 22 % today. Absolutely insane. Rule changes for the SpaceX IPO. Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to just five. This forces over$30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S &P 500 funds must absorb 19 % of SpaceX's float within six months. The Russell 1000 and NASDAQ 100 funds will absorb 24%. The rules built to protect passive investors. One S &P 500 required 12 months of trading and four quarters of gap profitability since 2002.

1:27:14Sue Khim:Both are waived now. NASDAQ cut its inclusion window from 90 days to 15. and the FTSE Russell cut it to five. All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends. So lots of buying activity for SpaceX. Nick Carter says, so this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end. And yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to deal with this. If you, for some reason, don't want SpaceX in your S &P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetic S &P 499. You can probably do it on public. Yeah, you can probably build something that is neutral to this move.

1:27:56Sue Khim:Of course, if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll be happy that it is in your retirement account. And if the progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about, it should work out for everyone. But there is a lot of risk in the system, so we will continue to monitor it. But well, there has been a lot of back and forth about how much you should work. How much you should work. Corgi is going back with Kari at Linear. We can go through this big debate. It's a lot of a lot of long posts. People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebbings had the Corgi insurance founder on the show.

1:28:36Sue Khim:And he said, if you're not working seven days per week, you're going to lose. Kari takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him. Interesting timing with the Wilmanitis. Grindslop. Grindslop essay. I think that the Corgi Insurance, I was unsure if it was just random timing or if the Corgi, was the Corgi Insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Wilmanitis post or was it recorded?

1:29:03Nico Ferreyra:No, I think that Nico, this is just part of their culture as a company. It's working for him. And it's working for him. It's clearly working for him. There's a lot of reasons not to have a culture that sort of expects people to work seven days a week, but there's a lot of reasons to have one. And in Nico's defense, he's built, I think, a$2.4 billion company in a very short period of time.

1:29:31Sue Khim:Remarkable.

1:29:32Nico Ferreyra:And it's a remarkable feat. But Kari, on the other side, has also built a very big business and done it in maybe a more calm way. This is personal. I felt like over the last 18 months, we've worked harder than ever in our careers. But weekends are very much time off. And part of that is, I mean, we're still talking like multiple times a day and making decisions around the business. But I actually felt that was especially necessary because five days a week we're coming here and hanging out, trying to put on a show for three hours. And so the weekends are a good time to be able to actually – it feels like unwinding is particularly helpful for that.

1:30:17Sue Khim:I mean, overall, Will and I, he makes a bunch of good points in the grindslop essay, but I'm different and they don't apply to me. That was basically my takeaway. Anyway, we have the founder.

1:30:27Nico Ferreyra:Apparently two-thirds of Corgi's employees have the company tattooed.

1:30:31Sue Khim:Oh, okay. So Wilmanitis was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay, which we should read at some point. It's a great essay. If you haven't read it already, Wilmanitis, Grindsloth.

1:30:40Nico Ferreyra:We could read it and put ads in it.

1:30:42Sue Khim:We can. Finally, the final form of the content Ouroboros. Well, after all, an essay about a podcast. Well, we have our next guest from Saris here in the TBP and Ultram with us. Welcome to the show.

1:30:56Nico Ferreyra:Do you believe in working eight days a week? Yeah. Where do you stand on this? Where do you stand?

1:31:01Sue Khim:Five days a week seven days a week. Where do you stand on on relentless work above all else?

1:31:15Sue Khim:Me yeah, we can hear you here. You can't hear us.

1:31:18Nico Ferreyra:Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Why don't you jump out?

1:31:21Sue Khim:And you will bring you back and bring you back in okay?

1:31:25Nico Ferreyra:Well, he was about to say every person on my team has a tattoo somebody should

1:31:32Sue Khim:make headphones that work seven days a week. That would be an innovation. That would benefit us. Anyway, what did Kari say? He said, I get that business insurance is similar Nobel-level type pursuit of groundbreaking physics and the Manhattan Project. Hopefully, the blast radius will be contained. They are burning back and forth, fighting back and forth on the timeline. The timeline's in turmoil. Well, we do have a challenge that I want your take on because I actually saw this post and I did a whole deep dive and I have a very informed opinion. I want your take. So Alex Tabarrok, friend of the show, former guest as of last week, says this one is genuinely difficult.

1:32:10Sue Khim:And Selah in SF, Selah underscore, says you have a one-way flight. Do you have this pulled up? I want you to see these images. Tyler, you too. Wait, are you laughing at this or something else? Okay.

1:32:22Mike Schroepfer:But I'm looking at this.

1:32:23Sue Khim:Okay. Okay. I want everyone to weigh in on this. You have a one-way flight somewhere unknown within the red boxed region. You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given$2 ,000 in cash or precious metal equivalent, an uncharged phone, three days of food, two changes of clothes, and an Israeli passport you're not allowed to get rid of. Your mission is to get to New York City. You get$10 million if you arrive within one day,$5 million if you arrive within a week,$1 million if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose? And the first option is right between Panama and Colombia in the Darien Gap, which is uninhabited.

1:33:06Sue Khim:There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Chiron too? What happened? Our Chiron, of course, is created by area.tech.

1:33:12Nico Ferreyra:I did have a crazy, pretty wild travel story generally in that region. I was in Panama.

1:33:19Sue Khim:You crossed the Darien Gap?

1:33:20Nico Ferreyra:I didn't cross the Darien Gap, but I was dropped into Panama, and I was going to a place called Bocas del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean. And I took an all-day bus, and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port, like at around midnight, and there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I was trying to get to. You were stuck. Because legally, I guess they're not allowed to make boat runs. Yeah. And we ended up having to find a guy that was willing to make the charge. So we made the trip lights out, which was very sketchy. You're not supposed to be traveling by boat at night in harbors without lights.

1:34:09Nico Ferreyra:But this one captain was on board. And there was no lodging in that little port town. So it was like either sleep basically at a bus stop in a Caribbean port town or make the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat. We were surfing that next morning.

1:34:32Sue Khim:Okay. So the options are North Korea, remote Russia, the Iran-Pakistan border, Gulf of Oman box, or the Darien Gap. Which one would you go with and why? Tyler, do you have a pick?

1:34:45Nico Ferreyra:I'm going Darien Gap.

1:34:46Sue Khim:Yeah.

1:34:46Nico Ferreyra:Why? So you can get a ferry around, right? Because you hear about these sorts of people motorcycling, like, you know, South America to Alaska or something.

1:34:54Sue Khim:Yep. And I think the passport is less of an issue.

1:34:56Nico Ferreyra:So you just get to the border.

1:34:57Sue Khim:Yeah. I think if you land in Iran, you're screwed. If you land in North Korea, you're immediately a political prisoner. And Russia, probably the same thing. Also extremely cold. Very, very harsh conditions. Would you go Darien Gap as well?

1:35:14Nico Ferreyra:yeah the two the two thousand bucks i mean is the big constraint right because it's not really enough for a significant uh incentive for someone yeah and you only fly business class so like you

1:35:25Sue Khim:would be stuck as you get there and you'd be like well sir business a one-way flight uh from pyongyang to new york city business class is going to be 2500 no no idea i mean i just think if you're

1:35:37Nico Ferreyra:trying to get to New York from these places with$2 ,000 and you don't have...

1:35:45Sue Khim:No, Daring Gap for sure, because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medellin. Either one is going to let you, with that passport, get to New York City. Oh, right. For sure.

1:35:53Nico Ferreyra:But I'm an American.

1:35:56Sue Khim:Yeah, but you have this Israeli passport. So that's the one that you... They will see this. But it's a valid passport. It's a valid passport. And so they will see it and they will say, okay, well, if you're in Iran or North Korea, they will say absolutely not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Regardless of your actual passport. Whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say right this way, sir. Like you can go to New York City. It's much easier. Anyway.

1:36:20Nico Ferreyra:Gabe says if I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a Mossad super agent on an undercover mission, which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post and not sure what happens next, but I picked that one.

1:36:32Sue Khim:And Sean Frank agrees with us. Darren Gap first. Anyway, I believe we have our next guest. here with audio. Let's bring in Danal. Are we back? Daniel, how are you doing? Yeah. Oh, we're back. I'm well. Fantastic. Thank you for hearing, folks. Let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened?

1:36:50Danial Jameel:Sure. I'm Daniel. I'm founder and CEO of CRCI. We build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions, focus on the back office. It's one of the unsung heroes of any company in the back office. So we're helping automate a lot of the tedious, complex tasks that the humans don't enjoy.

1:37:09Sue Khim:So how diffuse is your customer base? Because credit unions, I mean, I feel like there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in the United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. Is that your goal to be, I guess, more like mid-market versus like, we're going straight to JP Morgan and we're going to be at that level on day one?

1:37:28Danial Jameel:Yeah, that's a great question. We are working with one of the larger G-SIP banks. But to be honest, it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with this particular story or a segment of the market. And as you put it, right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8 ,000 of them all across the U.S. And they're serving, you know, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. It's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage. or we have another customer in Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans.

1:38:04Danial Jameel:So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the heart of the economy. So it's kind of cool.

1:38:10Sue Khim:And how much of the business is like, I mean, we're already in unsexy territory. Let's get unsexy or how much of the business is like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems? Because, I mean, I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that, getting that into something that's, you know, interpretable from any computer system. It seems like it's still a challenge.

1:38:43Danial Jameel:Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this story. The first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy. especially with foundational models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect humans, the work that humans do, with the regulatory environment, with the infrastructure, with integrations, with systems, not everything is AP accessible, with semi-structured, unstructured data, like you said, papers and so on. That orchestration, that's where the magic is. And I think that's where the vote is for a lot of startups to come in.

1:39:19Danial Jameel:because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear, foundation models will probably figure that out. So I think that's the first part. The second part of the story is more human again. And it's what we call, or what I call the dignity of work, right? So I'll share a story with you. Like we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on. But let me share some stories on the ground, right? So we have one of our customers, their team had a bathtub of 300 sort of loan documents. and they are literally spending the time from 5 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. five days a week completing their backlog because 9 in the morning they have to get to another backlog.

1:39:56Danial Jameel:We launched ours about like three weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6.20. They can be with their families. That's dignity of work. That's amazing. We have another case where it's heel up loans and mortgages.

1:40:09Nico Ferreyra:That's what happened with other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank.

1:40:14Sue Khim:Yeah, which is great. just more efficiency, higher productivity, which is the good news.

1:40:19Danial Jameel:Exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is, you know, we've had a case where the president of a credit union sent me a text that, hey, we were planning on hiring five people this quarter. But because the output of with Cyrus is so much higher, they didn't hire those five people. However, they gave a raise to the existing team. Everyone's happier about that, right? So those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing.

1:40:52Sue Khim:Okay, give us the fundraising news because we're running late. What did you raise? Who funded you?

1:40:57Danial Jameel:Yeah, so it was, I guess, Love at First Sight with a partner. We raised$28.8 million in the same thing. Nice.

1:41:08Nico Ferreyra:Congratulations. It was ATC. What partner led the deal?

1:41:13Danial Jameel:it was Alex, man. It was on first site. And then we got to meet with Joe as well, who's just an awesome guy too. So it was great.

1:41:22Sue Khim:That's great news. Well, sorry for cutting this short. A little bit of technical difficulty, but thank you so much. I'm sure you'll be back soon. And good luck with the journey. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Cheers, guys. Great to meet you. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. I own the data platform that powers it. And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Mike from Gigascale Capital. Mike, how you doing?

1:41:52Danial Jameel:Doing awesome. How you guys doing?

1:41:54Sue Khim:Former CTO of Meta, by the way. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the fun, the strategy. I have so many questions.

1:42:03Danial Jameel:Yeah, so I've been in Silicon Valley 25 years, been an operator, joined Facebook Meta 2008, scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook AI Research Lab. I stepped away from that job. Just everything.

1:42:16Sue Khim:Just every important project there. A lot of stuff.

1:42:18Danial Jameel:A lot of stuff. I mean, with a lot of great people. So I don't want to overly take credit. But I saw this change happening in the world a couple years ago, which was, I thought we were moving from atoms or bits to atoms. It was just like the physical world mattered again. That is, the marginal cost of software went to zero. The thing that really mattered is how much stuff can we build? and how are we going to build it? And so I started a venture capital firm to sort of prove out this thesis. I want to prove it first by investing my own money to make sure I knew it was working. And then our company started working.

1:42:50Danial Jameel:The question isn't, do they want to buy it? It's how fast can they make everything? Because they're making it sort of better, faster, cheaper than the way we did it for the last, I don't know, 100, 150 years in a lot of cases. And so we brought on a set of institutional investors and raised more money and are just getting going on this journey. How much did you raise? 250. $250. $250.

1:43:08Nico Ferreyra:Quarter bill. What were some of the standout companies in that first kind of angel fund that you mentioned that made you think you were onto something?

1:43:21Danial Jameel:Well, there's a bunch of them. So, Pantolasa is building ocean data centers for inference. I think you had Garth on here a little while ago, is one example. Heron Power, which is a more recent investment, but it's just on a tear. They're saying like, hey, the way we brought energy to data centers is using 100-year-old technology, literally. We've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your Model 3, Model Y, and we're putting them on the grid. And we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. We've got Radiant Nuclear is building a container-sized microreactor.

1:44:00Danial Jameel:It gives you a megawatt and a half of power for five years with no refueling. And they've got Form Energy that said, hey, you know, these data centers, you have power swings, you might have renewables, which are on and off. We're going to build a new kind of battery that lasts 100 days. So if you're dependent on solar and it's cloudy for three days, no problem. I got a four-day battery. And that battery is super cheap because it's made out of it literally like rusts and unrusts iron. It's like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery. It's big and it's heavy, but who cares because it's on the grid.

1:44:34Danial Jameel:So, again, you're just like rethinking problems in a different way and using modern technology. And you come up with a solution that works for everyone.

1:44:41Sue Khim:How are you thinking about publics versus privates? Because there's this massive boom. And I'm so excited about Doug and Radiant and nuclear and bringing new solar on the grid. And there's so many different key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where, like, it's just hard to pull forward these foundational technology efforts in the private markets and startup world where, yeah, you're doing something completely new. It might take five years. And so in the meantime, it's just call up G.E. Vrnova and 10x the amount of, you know, natural gas. And that is like a technical debt that I think we're going to have to pay at some point.

1:45:24Sue Khim:And I'm wondering about, like, is there a crowding out effect? How do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool, but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets? And I'm just wondering about, like, where, like, is the time compression, is the time scale a factor one way or another? Is it a benefit or curse or both, double-edged sword? How are you thinking about that?

1:45:49Danial Jameel:Yeah, I mean, I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups. So I think you're going to get my belief that it has never been a better time to start startups. And I'm seeing this firsthand. I mean, just think about the speed at which I can build tools, you know, using AI, using robotics in the physical world. You know, even just using platforms like Stripe and Ramp and like all of these. It's just like the amount of time you had said monkeying with things before is just like free. you can have these tiny 6, 10, 12 person teams have incredible, unbelievable impact. And you throw off all the all the dead weight of doing it the way you've done it, even for the last 10 years.

1:46:25Danial Jameel:You started a company six months ago, you would you would form it differently than if you started it 12 months ago, because like that's that's prior to, you know, Opus 4.7. And it's just just an incredible time. And we haven't talked about this just like an immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla, who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like, oh, we know how to do this like 10x better, faster, cheaper, starting with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories. You know, we used to build factories with like a central like steam thing that would spin all these like shafts.

1:46:59Danial Jameel:And you built your entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor. But everything else was the same. and productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works. This is how I think it's happening in robotics now. We're dropping in a robot where a human used to be. And you're like, wait a second. If I just took a building and said, actually, my goal is to feed the robots and keep them 80 % utilized.

1:47:28Danial Jameel:How would I build this factory? And that's a very different structure than replacing a person with a robot in terms of it. And that's where I think you get 5x, 10x points.

1:47:37Nico Ferreyra:Are you worried we're going to run out of problems in the real world for startups to solve?

1:47:45Nico Ferreyra:No, I'm kidding. I do.

1:47:47Sue Khim:No one's ever asked me that one.

1:47:49Nico Ferreyra:No, I mean, it is fun. Return the funds.

1:47:52Sue Khim:There's no more ideas.

1:47:53Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, yeah. Just return capital. We're done. Return capital. We solved it. No, but any intuition around the next big category and sort of atoms? Like, is it just robotics generally? Like, do you have any ideas around like timeline of robotics and the application of them across different industries? Because this is one of those, you know, categories that I think it's been, it has been happening. It's real in certain industries, but it's been promised for so long. this time around does feel a little bit different, but I'm wondering how you view it just because obviously if you get the timeline wrong, you can get the bet wrong entirely.

1:48:39Danial Jameel:Yeah, predicting these things, we have two bets in Fusion and Fusion has been the joke, it's 10 years away every 10 years for a long time, but this time it's different. So robotics I think is quickly going into that zone. I'm really bullish on industrial robotics and we've already used robots in fact and car factors all the time um and so the question is can you move into like slightly less well-structured things like taking a box if you look at a lot of like factories and warehouses like there's a surprising amount of like unboxing and boxing that happens i get a box i get a box cutter cut it open i pour all the stuff out i get rid of the plastic bags it's all done by humans now um that's a really hard thing to automate with like a kuko robot like because it's just every box is a little different and like the bag I get stuck and all the rest of it.

1:49:27Danial Jameel:And so like, those are the sorts of like things that I think are going to be really, cause you're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet. So I think the home is like, and like, I'm excited about it. I want a robot to fold my laundry and empty the dishwasher. Can't wait. But like, man, you're playing on hard mode to like start in the home. I've shipped home electronics. Like people drop stuff. They spill wine on it. Like there's all sorts of things that happen in the home that I just don't have to worry about in a factory.

1:49:57Danial Jameel:So I think you're going to see it in factories and warehouses first. And then you're going to sort of see it go out from there.

1:50:02Sue Khim:Spilling wine on your Oculus or your Quest, that's a wild time. That's something you would do. I'm sure it's happened. You ship millions of them.

1:50:11Danial Jameel:Oh, yeah. No, no, no. This is the thing that created all the gray hairs is like you do all this work making this awesome product. And then you're like, oh, we have this thing called a drop test. The consumer takes it out of the box and it's supposed to go on my face. instead of putting my face i drop it on the floor and like does it break or not yeah and so we spend all this time like dropping them and putting these high-speed cameras to watch like which part breaks and then go reinforce it yeah it's just like that creates a lot of weight and that hurts the product

1:50:35Nico Ferreyra:yeah yeah and the bigger issue with robotics is like then you have like you know there's not a huge risk of like if i drop the oculus does uh maybe it does some minor damage to the floor and the device itself but you add these like big humanoid form factors and suddenly it's like the dog died because like the the robot you know just fell on it you know this is uh or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that yeah i mean besides laundry and emptying

1:51:02Danial Jameel:my dishwasher i wanted to like make me breakfast right but like now we got a robot like operating with hot oil you know on a stove with a flame like what could go wrong that's gonna be wild uh solar

1:51:12Sue Khim:uh i feel like there's you know the the elon musk of space is elon he did electric cars he's working on robotics. He's been a little shy about solar. I mean, he's optimistic about solar, but he hasn't actually scaled up American manufacturing capacity of solar. We have a number of founders, you know, if you have Palmer Luckey and defense, and there's a number of nuclear founders who have sort of taken up the mantle to go on the press tour that's necessary to get folks excited about nuclear. I haven't seen that in solar as much. Am I just not paying attention? Is there some sort of fundamental constraint why solar is not going through as much of a fast takeoff?

1:51:55Sue Khim:We've talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. That's sort of this acquisition, changing the management. It's very exciting, but it's not the same startup, seed round, visionary founder all the way through this really broad vision. And I'm wondering if that's going to happen, if we're early, if it's already happening and I'm just not aware. What are you thinking about solar generally?

1:52:17Danial Jameel:Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen. And it's 99 % cheaper than it used to be. It's mostly manufactured in China. It's a scaled manufacturing problem. That's not a great problem to go after as a startup, where it's like manufacturing scales will determine the cost. How compete China? against china like good luck so so i think that that that explains a lot of it um what i do think is going to happen is if i'm just trying to make a you know 400 millimeter by 300 millimeter solar panel cheaper than china good luck but like for a long time we treated these things like they were like precious minerals and so if you look at a solar farm you like lay down all this steel and you put up all this framing and all the rest of it to like put this panel on well when that panel was the most expensive thing on the field, then like, yeah, that makes sense.

1:53:05Danial Jameel:That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, like steel frame, costs more than the panel. And so I think what we're going to see, and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this who are saying, like, let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor, from an automation perspective, and like, just go after installation cost. And assuming the cells themselves are basically free, it's basically glass. Like, what would you do differently? And that, again, I think this notion of like constraints have changed is what creates a new opportunity. So that's to me what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar.

1:53:36Sue Khim:Yeah. And even from, uh, obviously there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with the U S and China, but at the end of the day, like a solar cell is not the same as buying like a full computer or something like that spyware on it. Like it is just a chip there that, that it's, you know, where would the spyware be exactly? And so I think, I think you'll see more like hybrid approaches like this, like what Waymo is doing where they're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames, but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board. So it's a little bit more, you know, less politically dicey, I think.

1:54:11Sue Khim:Yes. Anyway, last question on fund size, fund structuring. I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. How are you thinking about actually participating over time? Do you think you'll be doing SPVs to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that? And do you have a strategy in place?

1:54:36Danial Jameel:Yeah. I mean, so the first thing we have been doing is just going to work to get these companies fundraised. So we have a giant network of others. So Panthalossa is a great example, just raised a huge round from Peter Thiel. We were very early investors in that. So the first thing is get these companies successful. Then you have the options. In terms of how we take advantage of that access and option is something we're going to figure out over time. I think this is the beginning, not the end. We are oversubscribed in this fund, so there's lots of opportunities for us to raise other vehicles. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

1:55:07Danial Jameel:And get going, but I wanted to keep it, I give all our entrepreneurs advice, stay focused. So let's get out the gate, stay focused, prove that there's a bunch of early stage. To your first question, are there opportunities for early stage companies in this space? I think so. I think you're going to see a lot of interesting progress in the next year. And then we'll have lots of different ways to structure how to participate as these companies grow.

1:55:27Sue Khim:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, excited to meet more of your companies. Yeah, good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Great to hang out. Nice to see you both. Goodbye. Okay. Up next, we have Nico from Default with an amazing Series A. I've known Nico for a long time, but it's his first time on the show. So we'll bring him in to the TV. How are you doing, Nico? Good to see you. Phenomenal. Long time to see you. Get that overnight success button ready. Overnight success. Yes. Another one. Yeah! Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Give us the news. Tell us what happened.

1:56:01Sue Khim:These guys get out of their system.

1:56:03Nico Ferreyra:Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners. Good to see you. I'm Nico, one of the co-founders here at Default.com. Most recently, Default.ai. We've got a nice URL redirect you on. Here we go. Wait, you were Default.com? Wait, you're going from.com to.ai domain? We kept the.com, still main domain. had to pick up default.ai, had to redirect. Just to protect the brick.

1:56:28Sue Khim:He's a.com respecter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am. How dare you disrespecter. The.com. No, very good. Tell us about the product.

1:56:37Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, so we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top of funnel orchestration tools, primarily for inbound scheduling, inbound routing, enrichment, for very fast-growing B2B companies. and over the last 12, 18 months, we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents. It was still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade. And we took a really big bet and basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year. And last Wednesday, about five days ago, we launched it to the world and it's been great so far. This is my 12th meeting of the day.

1:57:20Nico Ferreyra:So I'm glad to jump off the demo router.

1:57:25Sue Khim:Explain the flow. When does the agent come into the process? I imagine inbound lead, B2B SaaS company, they have a landing page. There's at some point they collect a form or an email and then the magic happens. Like what is the magic? What is happening?

1:57:41Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, John. So the way we used to work before we launched our new products, we'd basically come in. we'd hook into the forms of your website, we'd add a little piece of code that told us how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, etc. And then we'd build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top signals, and your CRM, and your sales team. Now what we do is we give you an out-of-the-box data layer. And what a data layer is, it's a real-time data warehouse. You plug into your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar. We pipe in all of that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these usually really tough to answer questions about your business.

1:58:32Nico Ferreyra:Everyone says all growth problems are data problems, at least in go-to-market. Effectively, what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems as well as different activity like meetings and form submissions and website website visitors into a language that you know agents can actually understand and use to answer you know these really tough questions isn't this going to grow into a crm at some point it feels

1:59:08Sue Khim:like the opportunity to do a compound startup do many more features like you have not only is your is your company AI enabled on the product side, but your engineering teams enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case or do you have ambitions to build out something that looks like a legacy workflow? Is there demand for that? Or do you see the whole, the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM?

1:59:47Nico Ferreyra:I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today, even as they're navigating this really challenging, really challenging kind of transition, even at really, really large scale. These are the same problems they were running into 10 years ago. So there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today for us. That being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers really, really built some really cool stuff internally and completely flipped the way things have been done for the last couple decades. That being said, every road in this category and more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or similar.

2:00:36Nico Ferreyra:So, yeah, we've built with that mantra since day one.

2:00:42Sue Khim:How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins? Like if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound and has a go to market motion or in B2B software, there are other niches within B2B software, right? more dev tool focused more finance focused b2b software do you find that there are sort of mini network effects in these niches have you been successful finding a few or do you want to deliberately cast a wide net so you can sort of cross-pollinate all the the the learnings from one category to the others like immediately

2:01:28Nico Ferreyra:So, I would say, you know, really early on, we were focused on working with the fastest growing, you know, really the fastest growing startups. And there was a bit of a, you know, I don't know if network effect is how to put it, but a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on. You know, people would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite new recently launched and fresh off the assembly line product. and they'd see the little Powered by Default logo down at the bottom. And that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. But it's really interesting.

2:02:05Nico Ferreyra:I think a lot of our customers, we serve a lot of customers in software, a few in medical devices, some services businesses, fintech as well. And more or less, everyone runs into some version of the same problem, which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another and really kind of create this sort of like data soup or this like Frankenstack is what we call it that just makes it really, really hard to grow. It creates this like growth tax. You know, every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain, you know, past a certain threshold depending on the vertical or market, you know, requires sort of army of operations people to sort of maintain the Frankenstack and keep it at base.

2:02:50Nico Ferreyra:I like that. Yeah.

2:02:51Sue Khim:So how prevalent is the Frankenstack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like Databricks exists, Snowflakes exists, like everyone has this beautiful data lake. And of course, and not only that, Zapier exists and there's Vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. Is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked does become best practice? And then is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations?

2:03:28Nico Ferreyra:Yes, I'll give two answers here. First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM.

2:03:33Sue Khim:Okay.

2:03:34Nico Ferreyra:I'll say that first and foremost. Second, I think it's very rare that we run into a scaling revenue org that has very deep technical proficiency and is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse or writing SQL. Typically, they're pulling reports and trying to answer a lot of these normally tough to answer questions. That being said, one of the things that I've been, you know, the team and I have been really excited about here over the course of the last year is seeing so many really, really fast run companies like Owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Morton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible go-to-market operations team.

2:04:15Nico Ferreyra:They built so much internal, basically just building their own distribution product, their own foundation they can use to scale. And as a result, they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage. And they started doing that very, very early on. You see the same thing with other hyper-growth companies like Ramp and Rippling and many others. But the best companies treat their distribution as a product and as an extension of a product. And, you know, I think that is getting earlier and earlier in terms of when companies start prioritizing that.

2:04:49Sue Khim:Tell us about the wrap.

2:04:50Nico Ferreyra:Well, before that. Please. Seven-day work week. Five-day work week. Logo, tattoos.

2:04:57Sue Khim:Two-day work week.

2:04:58Nico Ferreyra:Do you have the default as like kind of a back piece? Yeah, I've got a little nice stamp down here, yeah. Nice, nice.

2:05:06Sue Khim:A whole back.

2:05:08Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, I mean, you've got a lot of space back.

2:05:10Sue Khim:I mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days?

2:05:14Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, it's intense. You know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year. It's basically a Manhattan project for GTM. For B2B CES, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, but it is a competition.

2:05:28Sue Khim:You want to win, and there's other players. And, like, you know, if you're on the beach five days a week, like, you're just going to get smoked. This is real.

2:05:36Nico Ferreyra:Yep. We're definitely not on the beach five days a week. I'm too pale for that.

2:05:44Nico Ferreyra:We're solving a lot of really hard problems. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really, really excited at solving the growth rate problem and trying to help our customers grow better and faster. A lot of the problems that we run into are a lot of the same boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds, you know, thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out. And, you know, we're very excited about the future.

2:06:16Sue Khim:Amazing. Tell us about the round.

2:06:20Nico Ferreyra:Yeah, so we did a$10 million A last year. There we go. There's another one?

2:06:32Yeah, one more.

2:06:33Sue Khim:There we go. Sounds like Eric.

2:06:40Sue Khim:There we go. That's hard.

2:06:42Nico Ferreyra:That's a hard one. That's a hard one. Anyway. Expert mode. Great to catch up, Nico.

2:06:47Sue Khim:Thanks for coming on the show. Catch you all soon.

2:06:50Nico Ferreyra:We'll talk to you soon.

2:06:51Sue Khim:Goodbye. Cheers. Very fun. That is the hardest one to hit. The glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Kim from Brilliant. She's the co-founder and CEO, and she's here with us in the TV Penultra. What's going on? Sue, how are you doing?

2:07:07Bernie Su:Hey, thanks for having me. I'm doing great.

2:07:09Sue Khim:Thanks for hopping on the show. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and the launch and for you to just take us through it.

2:07:18Bernie Su:Yeah, so I'm Sue. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant. We just launched Brilliant's new AI tutor. His name is Koji. He's a little green guy. He helps you learn how to think and problem solve in math and coding. If you come check out the product, everything starts out very visual and interactive. And this tutor can see how you're interacting with all the concepts and the problems you're solving and point and sketch and annotate on the screen with you. So we call it a graphical tutor because it's designed to feel like someone sitting next to you, looking over your shoulder and ready to help.

2:07:54uh talk about how people have processed the intersection of ai and uh and education to date

2:08:03Nico Ferreyra:it's been such a big uh such a big selling point overall uh and personally i think it's most powerful as as a way to ask like the dumb question that you might be uh embarrassed to ask you know a friend or an actual teacher or even a tutor. But how have you kind of processed it? Obviously, you can use the base models themselves to learn, but there's a lot of missing functionality and opportunity for you to kind of, you know, extend out that kind of raw capability.

2:08:38Bernie Su:Yeah, totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot that, you know, the student who would never, ever raise their hand in class and ask a question or, you know, even with a tutor, it's just kind of like, I still don't get it. Like, can you explain it a third way? It's hard to do. And, you know, I think that these models have helped a lot with that, like lowering that embarrassment. And one of the things that we haven't yet seen them do is design for something other than the moment of explanation. I you know when we designed this tutor we designed it for that moment of understanding not for the moment of explanation and there's actually a lot of research on tutoring that shows that when human tutors don't just sit there and explain stuff to you the tutoring conversations become a lot more interactive and then students just do a lot more of the work and you know these like magical outcomes of why tutoring is so broadly effective you know ultimately a lot of that just comes down to the learner spending more time on the material.

2:09:42Bernie Su:And, you know, if the tutor talks too much and just, like, spits out tons of stuff for you to read, that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work and then, you know, lowering the embarrassment, improving their motivation and engagement, and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident tackling these things on their own.

2:10:08Nico Ferreyra:Do you feel like you have a duty to make learning addictive?

2:10:13Sue Khim:I was going to ask something similar.

2:10:15Nico Ferreyra:Because there's a lot of big companies out there. I won't name them. They certainly want people to spend as much time in their applications as possible.

2:10:25Sue Khim:It's like every company, but yes.

2:10:26Nico Ferreyra:Not every company. But let's say the algorithmic video feed. Sure. They want as much of our time as possible. I feel like you have a duty to try to make learning as addictive as possible because it's a positive addiction. I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world, furthering their skills, etc.

2:10:50Bernie Su:Yeah. We talk about this a lot. A big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. and you know the the goal is that you scaffold the learner and allow them to ask questions until you get to a point where they can do it for this for themselves and then you want to get out of the way so you know one of our goals is that if we are doing a good job over the course of learning a concept goji should become totally unnecessary like you should be asking the questions that he used to ask you and you know one of the things that uh like i find a funny parallel is that on our board is uh someone who started the dating company okcupid and then he went on and you know became the ceo of match was on the board of tinder and he's like you know the funny thing about consumer dating apps is that if you're successful churn is built into the product like you want people to turn because like you don't want people just in the app just going on dates all the time and not meeting that long-term partner.

2:11:51Bernie Su:And so we do measure whether or not people churn, but we measure it very differently from how most other consumer products would think about it. But I feel like learning is much more,

2:12:02Nico Ferreyra:learning is way more continuous. Like everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner, whereas maybe it's not so healthy to aspire to be a lifelong dater, somebody that's just like, I never want to. But, you know, I don't feel like there's never been a subject that I've, like, learned about where I've just run out of things to learn.

2:12:26Sue Khim:Well, it's interesting. That happens to me all the time. I feel like I'm like, yeah. But I'm talking about more. I'm done. I know everything about math. I know everything about science. I'm kidding.

2:12:33Nico Ferreyra:No, but, I mean. Of course. You're joking, but there is specific things where you're like, okay, I've learned enough about nutrition. Totally, totally. And I don't really care about it too much, you know, let's say. But, like, I've learned the basics. I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics. For me, that's nutrition. every single point, every single place that I've gotten to in terms of an overall understanding. I'm like, wow, this goes deeper than I thought.

2:12:53Sue Khim:Yeah. How are you thinking about multimodality? I feel like the big labs all have different ways to turn out a result that's not just a big block of text. There's an image, an infographic. We saw with Google I.O., there's the Omni model that can show a 10-second video diagram or an explanation, a whiteboard lecture. And it feels like there's maybe a gap right now in that you have to come to the model or the chat app and ask for what you want. You have to say, I want this as an infographic or I want this as a video. Or you might even have to go to a specific model or a specific company. Like if you want video, you go to Google.

2:13:33Sue Khim:If you want an image, you go to ChatGPT. And I'm wondering if you're thinking about how that fits into your process of actually picking the right tool for the job.

2:13:46Bernie Su:Yeah, it's very, you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process. And it's one of those things where when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like, typically, the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question, you get your answer, and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these, like, homework help type learning queries, people answer, people get their question answered, and then they leave. And so the model gets back no data on did the learner actually learn this thing. And, you know, going back to the point about, you know, addiction, the thing that we try to get people really immersed in is like tons and tons of like dense, real time reps to in learning a topic so that we can self improve and hyper personalize in real time.

2:14:36Bernie Su:And to do that, you have to have a dense user model, you have to have a learning graph, you know, that's not going to come out of a model company anytime soon. The UI UX matters a lot too. It has to be purpose built or teaching with all the features that come along with that. And also, you know, just some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic. Like you have to be correct and you have to guarantee that correctness. And so I think there's a lot of things that ultimately just add up to a lot of friction when you are asking the user to pull and sort of scaffold and structure their own learning.

2:15:10Bernie Su:Whereas, you know, our philosophy is we're going to pull you in and give you things to do that are the right next thing for you to do.

2:15:17Sue Khim:Amazing. Where can people get started?

2:15:19Bernie Su:Go to brilliant.org and we have apps as well in the App Store and Play Store.

2:15:24Sue Khim:Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to finally meet you and congrats. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Bye. Before our next guest joins, we have a new release, new information from Sam Sulik. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work five days a week or seven days a week he says you only need to work five days a week don't overdo it you do not need to work 24 7 over training reduces performance most of the time you're not working on the manhattan project work hard recovery keep some balance so why is he actually say this uh no i just took your image and put it chat gbt but it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding uh you know you do need to take rest days in bodybuilding so So it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say.

2:16:12Sue Khim:But that, of course, is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Fortunately, we have someone with some very real news joining us. We have Bernie Su, the Emmy-winning series creator, to talk about movies. Go back to the YouTubification of Hollywood. We'll get his takes on my takes, my very novice takes. But why don't we start with an introduction on you and yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about you?

2:16:37Adam Iscoe:Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Bernie. I have been working in the entertainment industry and tech-adjacent industries for over a decade. I've created many shows across YouTube, Twitch, and other new media platforms, including some shows that were in traditional Hollywood, but I'm most known for my three Emmy-winning shows, Emma Approved, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which were the first and second primetime Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show, and the show Artificial, which was the first Emmy win for a Twitch show, which also won a Peabody. And it's an honor to be here, guys. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.

2:17:15Sue Khim:Thanks for popping on. So, I mean... Rattle off your takes. Okay, so I don't know if my take was that contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029, and we have back-to-back-to-back YouTube massive successes at the box office, something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10 million YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out, but this summer, it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with Obsession, Backrooms, and Iron Lung.

2:18:00Sue Khim:And I'm wondering how you're interpreting those three movies. Is this an actual turning point? Has this been a slow, gradual grind for years? And maybe this is less of an important moment than, maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing, and it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent viral news around backrooms, obsession, iron lung, et cetera?

2:18:21Adam Iscoe:I mean, you kind of said it there. I think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. So if you, I speak at VidCon every year, for example, and I've asked every year in this kind of the same panel, like when is like you are when are the creators of youtube going to take over hollywood and all that stuff and i'm like they are already going getting there yeah they're just not seeing it and like you're seeing the ramp up and of course it's just getting bigger and getting bigger and getting bigger it's like like um i think uh you know regarding say like the emmys like mr beast is not a youtuber he's a prime creator yeah because he has a show on prime that's what he's going for right so so these this is we're now seeing in movies as you said like now we're seeing it in the last, like you said, the back-to-back-to-back run of this year.

2:19:03Adam Iscoe:But this is something that I've been seeing for five years or so as this ramp up. And you're kind of, where the earlier genesis of this was is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber-led movies, influencer-led movies. The movies probably weren't regarded as great movies, but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude in there. It's like, oh, you've got 10 million followers. Let's just put you in here. And the problem with that is that that doesn't work because it's not on brand with the audience that it's coming from. So now with Iron Lung and Markiplier and all that stuff, it's his.

2:19:40Adam Iscoe:It's his. So it's very much him being him. Beast Games is him being him just amplified. And you're seeing that tech and social media play coming in all at the same time.

2:19:52Sue Khim:Yeah, I've heard a lot about this in casting calls these days where actors and actresses will just get asked like, oh, well, do you have 10 ,000 on Instagram or 100 ,000 on Instagram? And it feels like that is, it may be, it's some sort of signal, but it's not really going to move the needle on, is this going to be a success at the box office if a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people? it's more just like are you serious and have you figured out the instagram algorithm to like get

2:20:24Nico Ferreyra:views what do you think living in la for most of my adult life yeah i've been surprised i've met a bunch of people who are like work in in the in the movie business yeah directors producers sure and you'll ask them like oh do you do you have like a youtube channel like and they'll be like no no i don't i don't i don't do that and uh it's always like surprising to me because it's basically saying like i'm going to let other people and like gatekeepers sort of like dictate

2:20:53Sue Khim:my creative out well if you already have the key to the gate why do you need to it's no problem for

2:20:57Nico Ferreyra:you because you're going right in no i know but no some people like that are trying to break in sure so personally if i was trying to break into the movie business i'd be making movies start digging like as much as possible even if they were you know 10 minutes 20 minutes you know or just figuring out some of these other formats yeah like i think that's like when you look at obsession. That's an example of somebody who really, really, really, really got their reps in, even if it wasn't the format that led to the breakout proper box office hit.

2:21:29Adam Iscoe:I'll add to that right now, all these young creators, like you said, breaking in, you are more armed today with just tools. Not just audience, but audience and tools. Whether you're on on the AI side or not with the creative and the gen AI, you have all this automation and all these efficiency points that you can activate. I mean, Backrooms was Blender.

2:21:52Sue Khim:Blender, it's a free open source CGI package. Exactly. And you go to Skibbity Toilet and it's like made in Valve Filmmaker and people are making movies in Fortnite and Halo from a long time ago, if you remember Red vs. Blue. Of course, another Bernie. Yeah, and so I guess my big question is, Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige and it's still seen as the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have a film on the silver screen and have a box office smash, that's great. But in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now. I'm not anticipating a flippening where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense, But I'm excited by the idea of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious Hollywood filmmaking scene.

2:22:47Sue Khim:But I'm just wondering, like, how much of this is about cultural shelling points, these moments that bring us all together versus something that's more abstract prestige? Like, what is the long-term relationship here? Because it doesn't feel like you're going to see, oh, YouTubers aren't making any money anymore and everyone went back to making money in Hollywood. It feels more like Hollywood's just getting some juice back and restructuring a little bit to bring some young talent up. But YouTube will still continue to be a behemoth in terms of monetization on ads and brand partnerships and whatnot.

2:23:22Adam Iscoe:Yeah, all of that is accurate. I would just add clarification on YouTube. Yes, it is bigger, but it's also more diversified because it's just so many channels. It's like Hollywood puts out whatever 50 movies a year at most. and YouTubers are doing that, one YouTuber is doing that a month. Yeah, yeah. Or not movies, but videos. You get one. Yeah, yeah. Totally.

2:23:41Nico Ferreyra:We're putting out one Hollywood's worth of content.

2:23:44Adam Iscoe:Like every month. Per minute, per second, whatever. But so what you're going toward there as far as the business side of things is kind of what I call the franchising. Yeah. Right? So Hollywood is still the best place to amplify your franchise. Take something and send it to a bunch of other places. Yeah. So obviously this is a little cherry picking, but like k-pop demon hunters is masterful in the sense of that it became a franchise overnight and now the irony and fun of it is that holly was trying to catch up to it it's like oh my god we need more everything we're like behind on the toys we're behind on the merch behind on the videos we need another series right now all that stuff okay so it's it kind of comes hand in hand and you're finally seeing it as you kind of mentioned at the top of this thing which was that the youtubers are now okay you know what i'm really good here on this platform let's go up let's give it a shot let's see if we make it work and we're seeing successes as we as we were talking about i'm sure there's many failures okay but we're seeing those successes now and now like the market pliers and these guys like they have basically a burgeoning franchise now whether it continues over years and sequels and everything doesn't mean it has to be a sequel by the way like if it becomes a video game yeah and that's successful that counts yeah probably more totally like maybe even more right so like going kind of what they call transmedia it's a weird term but like if they can jump to different formats and different avenues that's where the if you're talking about the money like that's where the real franchisability of this thing comes from and youtubers if anything are actually way more nimble i'm not saying they're better i'm saying they're more nimble at this than hollywood because just because the map the the the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate behemoths which have tons of resources but have all this bureaucracy that could slow the system down.

2:25:27Adam Iscoe:So that's where we're seeing this kind of, not a clash, but it's like an evolution as this goes forward, where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys' movies, it's like, all right, all right, let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way. Let you guys do what you do too and see where we land.

2:25:49Nico Ferreyra:What do you think Obsession will do for low-budget film funding? Like the potential return here is so extreme. I imagine a lot of people would see this and go try to fund other projects like this. Or is it so out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it?

2:26:12Adam Iscoe:I mean, Hollywood loves trying to replicate. We've actually seen this kind of cycle before. We've seen it with Blair Witch Project over 20 years ago. We've seen these versions of these virally things, Paranormal Activity. These started as very, very low-budget movies that were just very, very cleverly done, became sensations in their own way, and became franchises. And you also saw this kind of wave of found footage movies after Paranormal Activity.

2:26:43Nico Ferreyra:and like what is it about what is it about horror movies that like is it's a category that seems to

2:26:49Adam Iscoe:do well with with a low budget um i think i think uh it's because it's very just we are it's very understandable like universe and it's not a there's no language barrier there's no like cultural jokes you have to hit it's universally understandable yeah and so it's one of those things where um like you know as much as we love comedies and we're like why aren't these comedies of hit like it's still our cultural tastes are like like what's funny to us in america so like

2:27:15Nico Ferreyra:fear fear is like more universal than than comedy and you can create like an extremely scary situation with just a house in the woods right yeah exactly you don't need on the production

2:27:27Sue Khim:side yeah just a house in the woods works whereas even if you're doing a romantic comedy you might want to shut down a street in manhattan for a scene that's outdoors or go to some physical place and like travel around or let alone sci-fi where you have to do a whole bunch of cgi and be on the be on a spaceship or something building complex sets whereas you know you can go and

2:27:46Nico Ferreyra:film something in a team is also saying no a-list actors usually it's weird to see a marvel star in a horror movie yeah why don't a-list actors it's more relatable because if i see tom cruise there

2:27:57Sue Khim:i'm like he's not gonna die but if i see some some no-name actor i'm like oh that that person could go next. I don't know who's going to be the last one standing.

2:28:05Nico Ferreyra:So it's kind of a way for new talent in front of the camera and behind the camera to try to basically break in. So you're saying we're going to see 1 million obsession knockoffs in the next 12 months.

2:28:19Adam Iscoe:I mean, I don't know about 1 million, but we're going to definitely see some. That's for sure. The question is whether they're good or not and all that. But it's like going back to your with horror, you can bring the budgets down, you have to pay Tom Cruise, right? If you're going to bring Tom Cruise in, everybody has a cost there. And if horror can just kind of generate its own audience, well, why are we paying for it? Why do we need to shell out all this money to bring in a star, a named star or someone with a big following to do this? So it's a business play. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's historically the case.

2:28:53Adam Iscoe:Look at any horror franchise. It's rare to even see any type of A-list, B-list, whatever, recognizable star even headlining it. Like, look at the latest Final Destination, right? That's a seven-movie franchise, I think, and it's like even the seventh movie didn't have really any household names that were in there. Scream is a little bit of an exception. I'll give it that. But Scream has kind of built its own. Sure, sure, sure.

2:29:17Nico Ferreyra:How long until you think we see a hit in theaters where 90 % of the budget was AI compute?

2:29:25Adam Iscoe:Whoa. A hit.

2:29:27Nico Ferreyra:Can you define a hit? A hit is like over 30 million. Over 30 million.

2:29:33Sue Khim:At a box office and over 3X return on budget or something like that.

2:29:37Nico Ferreyra:That's a good question. I mean, I think we're going to see in the next.

2:29:39Sue Khim:If they put 10 in, they get 30 out.

2:29:41Nico Ferreyra:Somebody has to be working on it. The question is, do they have the talent? Are the models actually good enough?

2:29:48Adam Iscoe:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we were doing AI in the lot was literally last week and there was a lot of stuff that came out of it. Right. The Amazon announcements and like the Higgs field movie. Sure. Heat check, I think. I'm sorry if I misnamed it. Like that's a that's a hundred percent, I think, or 90. It qualifies as far as your compute power situation. Could it do, you know, 30 million at the box office? I based on what people I've not seen it, but based on what I'm hearing about it, I'm going to guess no, but move me wrong, please. Sure. Like if you're going to go for it. But yeah, I do think it will come.

2:30:18Adam Iscoe:I do. I think there's two factors. here, right? So one is the, does it matter that it's AI? Like most of the public worldwide audience just wants to be entertained. Sure. Okay. It just wants to be entertained. Like if it's real or not, like we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like, we just want to be entertained, good movie or bad movie. Okay. So there's that. But right now you still have this kind of public ritual shaming of like, oh, it's AI, ban, ban, ban. And we're still seeing a bit of that coming out of it on a lot even so so when we think of like experiences that like we know we're building we're just like okay we use a lot of ai right now okay um and like we're just trying to build entertaining experiences so to me like it's i would say it's sooner than later except for just that that x factor of the vitriol like i just don't know how to predict that one yeah of when

2:31:10Nico Ferreyra:it will be okay but but it does feel like there's someone out there who hasn't broken in yet who has nothing to lose who's just going to be sitting at home just prompting yeah and and it could that's why i think i think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before there's

2:31:30Sue Khim:also they're also oh for sure so it might be like an ai movie that could break through because it's either like self-referential or making fun of AI or doing something in a different way. Like Toy Story was about toys. It wasn't replacing actors with CGI. And so there's like less of a conflict there. So if you're doing some sort of story that could not be told without AI and it's handled the right way, like you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there. And maybe you don't jump straight to like you were expecting Tom Cruise, but it's just an AI version of Tom Cruise, that's probably going to be pretty poorly received.

2:32:08Adam Iscoe:I mean, you're speaking my language, so I'm going to just slightly explain what I'm working on so it kind of relates to this. We're at Pickford. We showed experience last week over at Sony, which was basically a detective series where the audience could interact with it in real time because the AI was writing the show as it goes. So literally impossible without the technology. So this is one where my colleagues in the filmmaking and AI spaces, we talk about, well, what's more exciting is not just, hey, let's make an AI movie. What can AI do to juice up the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before?

2:32:45Adam Iscoe:Not a cost thing, like a possibility thing, right? And so when you have a series like what we're trying to build, which is interactive, which can only be done because of live prompting audiences in theaters on phones, now you've driven the experience to the theater, which we're going to self-plug do at animal draft houses around the country this year. Now, we're not going to, I doubt we're going to generate$30 million, like you said, as be a big hit. But, you know, we've proven at least in our small sample sizes that we can provide an in theater, communal, entertaining experience, be interactive, be consequential as a paid ticket even.

2:33:25Adam Iscoe:And we're using AI tech and it's just like, it's entertaining. Yeah. animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very, very, like, it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah, yeah, sure. But at the end of the day, we are entertaining. And that's what we are in the industry, first and foremost. All the tech aside and all the business aside, that's what we're here to do, right? If we're not entertaining, classic, you know, Russell Crowe, are you not entertained? What are we even doing here? So that's where I look at it. Yeah, very cool.

2:33:56Sue Khim:The personalization stuff is super interesting. I had a funny experience maybe 20 years ago or so. I grew up in Pasadena, and I was watching this movie in Pasadena. It's Kill Bill, Tarantino. Nice. Love it. And I'm watching, and the bride pulls up in this yellow truck, and across the bottom, white text pops up, and it says, this scene takes place in Pasadena, California. And I was like, this is so weird. Did I buy the localized version of this movie? It just happens to take place in Pasadena. but you could imagine a horror film that takes place in like any town USA that like uses your you know geolocation to make it more customized to you it feels more scary because you're like oh this could be happening in the right outside my window there's a whole bunch of different ways that you could instantiate like little personalizations that would be putting you

2:34:45Nico Ferreyra:you know if you needed a scene of a car like driving past like welcome to any town USA

2:34:50Sue Khim:generate it with the google map yeah like on the fly potentially not for every place but uh But yeah, I imagine that whatever breaks through will be newer and weirder and break boundaries and won't be a clone of the things that we love like Star Wars because we have Star Wars. We don't need AI version of Star Wars. We need something entirely new and creative.

2:35:13Adam Iscoe:Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. So it's like I have this thing where I say like AI is not going to out Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones. Like we're not, it's not going to do that. Like AI can do things really fast and can fill buckets really good. good with like you're trying to fill content on your feed. Really great at that. So it's not going to do that. So on the high-end art side, the great artist will probably incorporate some little bit of AI, but it's not going to end to end that thing.

2:35:35Sue Khim:And then on kind of your side with customization,

2:35:38Adam Iscoe:I really do think that's, selfishly, I do think that's the play because AI is really good at speed and optimization. And it's really hard to do customization without speed and optimization. So now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage, which is the sloppiness that we're getting to okay so not only on your side with the pasadena example which i think is an amazing amazing example of customization for possibilities got me thinking about it actually i also think it's about consequentiality which means that did you feel like you impacted it right like did you feel like while you're watching the movie did you do something does it maybe it's an eye thing maybe it's the same thing can you feel like you're part of it and i do think that the young generations the gen zers the airs and everything they're already growing up with a parasocial relationship to their content.

2:36:24Adam Iscoe:End to end. That may be also why these movies are getting successful because they feel like they have a relationship to the creator and they feel like we're going to go. But to feel like they have an impact in their content, I think that's where the blue sky is. That's where I feel it's coming from and that's where I'm trying to get to myself in my work.

2:36:42Nico Ferreyra:Make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary. I think you can pause it. No, no, pause. And if I pause, you sense it, and you just tone it down a notch.

2:36:52Sue Khim:Oh, okay. Tone it down a notch. It just gets less scary.

2:36:56Nico Ferreyra:And if you let it play, it just gets worse. It's like a separate volume button. It's just like a nature documentary.

2:36:59Sue Khim:I mean, you could have a movie that you have a separate volume button for, like, I want G-rated. Because I don't want to get too spooked.

2:37:06Nico Ferreyra:I don't want to get too spooked.

2:37:07Sue Khim:I somehow think that would break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun. Lots of new projects coming.

2:37:13Nico Ferreyra:Well, thank you so much. Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, come back on the show when you launch it.

2:37:19Sue Khim:We'd love to talk more. Happy to. Looking forward to it, guys. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. We have some more updates from Sam Sulek. He says, Hollywood isn't losing. It's teaming up. YouTube creators are no longer outsiders. They're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube. Now the best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters. Wise words. Wise words. He also weighed in on startup tattoos. We have another one here Sam Sulik hot take this is a whole format now the Sam Sulik hot take is is going viral in his young LA Tank top here.

2:37:57Sue Khim:You don't need to get your startup logo tattooed even if you were an early employee You do not need to work 24 7 over training reduces performance Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues fun times also Sam Sulik's very first post on X 5 ,000 likes 260 ,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful. Catfish, too.

2:38:20Nico Ferreyra:Check this thing out. Looking good. Dream guest. People ask us. Yes, this would be a good one. What's your dream guest? Hands down. Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek on AI. I really enjoyed him on Modern Wisdom. The hyperscalers, the build-out capability

2:38:36Sue Khim:He's been working on a build-out for years. He's going fantastic. Some of these AI CEOs could learn a thing or two from him. That's true. That's true. Build out yourself before you build out that data center. Approval rating will be a lot higher. You're worried about the wrong build out.

2:38:50Nico Ferreyra:You're worried about the energy bottleneck. You should be worried about a protein bottleneck.

2:38:57Sue Khim:Exactly. Your own protein shortages. Protein is the energy of your muscles. Well, we can close with Will Manitis. He says, I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five year run in techno capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery. Well, he's bullish.

2:39:20Nico Ferreyra:He's flipped extremely bullish recently, which I don't know if that's bullish or...

2:39:26Sue Khim:Him being bullish? Bearish. If he's bearish, you should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research. Make your own decisions. Just do it on public. Adam Faze also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead. I thought this was very, very cool. Wildly different. And like all of these can be printed or framed.

2:40:02Sue Khim:I mean, I guess they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be replicated for the party goers. very very cool analog this is why vinyl records are at an all-time high there's demand for both the content barbell this is very cool and the slop and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artists

2:40:21Nico Ferreyra:from adam phase very very cool i had the pleasure of running into adam on the street oh yeah you last week when i was getting coffee i ran up to him with my camera and i said hey sir what do you do for a living what do you do for a living um was he amused mildly that's what you aim for i was

2:40:42Sue Khim:more amused by my own bit anyway uh oh last thing arena magazine arena magazine is dropping issue number zero zero eight at sea they're covering deep sea mining ship building undersea cables maritime autonomy autonomy island building american sea power and so much more best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand, shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out, ArenaMag. One of our favorites. You can subscribe to get the issue at arenamag.com. We love the folks over there. So much more to talk about, but we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week.

2:41:19Sue Khim:And... It's June. Leave us five stars. It's June. You see that, John? Yeah. It's June 1st. What was surprising about that? We said that on the intro.

2:41:25Nico Ferreyra:I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it. It's June. It's June. Another month. Time flies. Another month. When your podcast.

2:41:32Sue Khim:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for their newsletter at tbpi.com. And we will see you. It's been an honor. Tomorrow. Come on. Flashbang.