What’s Going On With Google Gemini Deep Research? | E2072

27:27So Arush, one thing I've seen people talk about quite a lot is the idea of having memory inside of their AI models to know what they've searched for, their own context. Maybe not their own data, but at least what they put into these systems. So when I see that, to me, in my mind, I now have several different threads of research that I'm pursuing. I mean, one, are those stored somewhere that I can go back and find them later? And then also, is there a merge button? So you went on and did more there. I would love to bake that into what I had before. So is there a way to throw them together? Yeah, absolutely.

27:56So all of your research lives inside that thread. And so that thread stays. So you can always, I like on my side, I like have a bunch of pinned threads, as you can see. but like typically what I'll do as well is, so all that report lives there. And then if you want to like save it, direct edit it, things like that, we've got this open in docs button. And so if you click that, all the content moves over, but also all the sources as well, right? So the idea is like, if you ever want to know like, oh, you know, where did this number come from that I'm reading in my report, even while it's in Google Docs, you'll still have all those sources carried over.

28:38Now, the other thing though is, I think your point was like you want to be able to like refine or add content to the document. Yeah. And you can actually do that. So you can actually, I'll wait for this one to be done, but like since this one's still cooking, but you can do things like, you know, could you add a section about, you know, why people care about Fusion? And it'll go ahead and sort of add that content to the report. You can also ask kind of quick follow-up questions about the content. Like not everything requires five minutes of research. You can just say, you know, when was NetEnergyGate founded?

29:11And everything that it's read up to that point stays in context. And so if you're asking a question about something that it's already read as part of its research, it'll try and just give you that answer immediately without having to go and search the web again. So it creates a search experience on top of the material it went out and grabbed and kind of pre-chewed. So it makes kind of a very mini Google just for you on the exact thing that you've been working on. That's kind of cool. I dig that. And so as you kind of keep going deeper and you do more research, everything just stays in context within that thread, right?

29:45And all the material. So if it read 80 pages before and now it's reading 33, it's all still accessible to the model. All right, founders, let's talk about your fitness. Yes, you can't build the next Google. You're not going to build the next Uber if you're not taking care of yourself. And this includes exercise. That's why I want you to check out FitBot. FitBot is like having your own personal trainer right in your pocket. I use it. I love it. It designs workouts tailored to you and your goals, as well as the equipment available to you and, of course, your fitness level. So if you're just starting out or you're already crushing at the gym, FitBot helps you level up your fitness.

30:25How does it work? It's pretty simple. They use machine learning. They use exercise science, and they build you a custom workout plan that's just for you. And it's based on things like the muscle fatigue of your past workouts and your recovery. So listen, you don't wind up like doing too many quads and not enough abs and too much back. It monitors all that for you. It tracks things like muscle fatigue and recovery. So you avoid overworking or underworking any muscle group. And if you don't have a gym, that's not a problem. FitBod works anywhere and it keeps your workouts fresh and effective. So for example, when I'm on the road, I might go to one of those hotels that has like a tiny little claustrophobic gym.

31:01And all they have is like dumbbells and a treadmill. No problem. Easy peasy. You tell FitBod what is available. It makes your workout. Now, I might be at a full gym where they have a circuit, where they got kettlebells, which I love, and then it will give me a workout based on the kettlebells and the circuit machines. And what's really interesting is I use the watch app and I can just sit there and log my sets in the workout app. I can change them. There's a little key where like you still want to get biceps, but there's three or four different ways to get biceps worked out. You can pick the one you want to do.

31:28They have over 1400 videos to guide you through every move in FitBod and you can kick off 2025 nice and strong, take all the guesswork out by getting 25 % off your FitBod subscription, or you can just try it for free. FitBod.me slash twist. That's F-I-T-B-O-D dot M-E slash twist. FitBod. Personalized fitness that grows with you. And this is something Stephen Berlin Johnson was working on with Notebook LLM, right? A similar concept, which with that Google product, you can upload your own PDFs. It's not going out and searching the web necessarily, but I took some PDFs around like case studies on McDonald's and the Ray Kroc.

32:08I found a PDF of his old biography. I put it all in there, put in some interviews with him, and then I was able to ask him questions and all that was in, I guess, technically the context window. So that's going to sort of let you query a unique data set and get that information. And we're actually doing that with our founder university program. We took the entire syllabus, put it into a notebook, LLN, and Kelly made it so founders could ask it questions about marketing or product market fit and just search that subset and get answers. It's almost like an automated version of a venture capitalist.

32:44So this is all absolutely amazing. And you guys are being thoughtful about... Oh God, there goes my camera again. You guys are being super thoughtful about how you treat the sources and people can opt out of this, I guess, if they were not in the index. Yeah. Or something to that effect. There's some robots.txt if people feel like, oh, this is unfair. I don't want my content in there. Right. So, yeah. So, yes. So at Google, we publish opt-outs through robots.txt for things like how your content can be used in Gemini models and products. So there are robots with TXT. The other things to kind of talk through is like, this can only find what's on the open web.

33:30Right? And so if you really care about... So, you know, a lot of content is behind paywalls or, you know, subscriptions and things like that. And again, it can't access any of that content as well. Well, you should get a FT and a New York Times subscription. There's only 20 bucks a month and just have it go in there and go wild. Actually, so Arush, I have a question about this because we're talking a lot about what this product can do for you and when i go back to the original announcement of deep research which i am pulling up here you guys said it's your personal ai research assistant but when i go over to notebook lm uh it says your personalized ai research assistant and look i know there's a meme about google sometimes having two products that are kind of the same but um not to be puckish when you think about the two how do you explain to folks which one they should be testing and tinkering with if they haven't used either?

34:22Listen, I think we're trying to really put the user first and think about what would be great products sort of starting with this technology and try and get it out there. And what you might see is some convergence between products because as they both evolve, they might start borrowing the best bits of each one. For deep research, it's really about researching the web, right? So it's like hey um you have a question you don't necessarily have any content to ask but you you want it to go research the web and build an understanding based on that and that's where gemini deep research is really um i feel like you should just go over to the notebook lm team and uh just like kidnap them and then bake that into deep research and then i could do kind of both at the same time and again not trying to be annoyed i just think that they're they're doing things that are slightly different but related and they're both cool it i just don't want to see them siloed and end up being overly, I don't know, separated for no reason.

35:18That's what it feels like a little bit from where I sit. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And by the way, they're awesome people. They're a super scrappy team. They're super helpful and collaborative. We've learned a lot from them. And same with us, right? So over time, what will happen is you'll say, hey, you guys are a small team doing cool stuff. We're a small team doing cool stuff. Why don't we collaborate more and more? All right. Well, I have two more questions for you. One, I was very impressed with the charting ability. I showed that off at the top because that annoyed me because it was so good. But what about the ability to do other forms of illustration, drawing charts, drawing flow diagrams, or just illustrations?

35:54There could be a multimodal element to the output here. And I'm curious how far along that technology is and if it's coming. Yeah, we're definitely keeping an eye on it and definitely trying to explore and try and push the limits of the model. I think what you'll see is as these models get smarter, a lot of that stuff becomes better and better. So it knows how to, like, what is the important information to pull out and put into a chart, how to format, like what's the best kind of chart? So I really feel like you are scratching at the surface of an awesome branding opportunity. Like the field research idea is such a clear way to explain to people that this is going to go out and look at stuff.

36:29It's not a theoretical physicist, whereas notebook LM versus deep research, slightly fuzzier. And so I wonder if, and this is not a criticism of Google per se, but I wonder if a lot of the AI companies are naming stuff for us nerds and not in a way that actually converts as well to the general public, which leads me to my last question for you, Arish, before I throw it back to Jason, is how popular is Deep Research so far? How's it doing in market? Yeah, we've been really surprised and very pleasantly surprised at how it's being received. Normally, the V0 of a product, you expect to have quite rough edges and you expect things to pick up when you start making improvements and going into like v1 and v2 yeah we're really excited like we've been really impressed and surprised by how how receptive people are um part of it may come from the fact that it was talked about at the all in podcast uh jason your check is in the mail by the way oh yeah uh well you know i just i i talk about stuff i find interesting in the world and this is certainly up there it does seem like um you guys are slowly rolling it out you got to be thoughtful about capacity and users.

37:37And I'm assuming like hallucinations, I see the sort of disclaimers because this isn't perfect. How close is it to, you know, just LLMs in general, in your mind, and we'll wrap on that, just in terms of data integrity, in terms of getting rid of hallucinations and making sure you're giving people good information, which I know is Google's concern. You have this like trust with Google and it's hard to put out an AI product that isn't fully baked, like, let's face it, ChatGPT and some other people just put out experiments. But with the Google name on it, you're not really in that position to put out experiments.

38:15So talk to me about how you're dealing with that issue, how much people can trust the information as presented, how close are we to getting rid of hallucinations, how often do they happen, how do you mitigate against them? Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. It's definitely one of the most important things we looked at when designing this project and keeping track of it. And, you know, dealing with hallucinations is just like this ongoing industry-wide kind of research problem of like, how do we make these LLMs not make stuff up? So we're definitely, I don't, I would never say like we've solved it or anything like that.

38:52Like even deep research will have some mistakes and hallucinations. But one of the things where we're trying to kind of help the user out is basically trying to be as source forward as possible. So like, even as you read the report, you'll see dozens of inline sources. And those, and so the idea is like, if there's really important information that you want to make sure is like, you want to double check and make sure it's really, you know, really accurate, we make it as easy as possible for you to kind of double click into that underlying source content and verify for yourself. And that's also why, you know, you save it, you can export it to docs and stuff like that, all that stuff still remains, so that at any point you want to be able to kind of refer back to see where this information comes from, it's as easy to do as possible.

39:38It's going to get really interesting when you guys have reminders and agents. I saw ChatGPT released a reminder product today where you could just say, this research report is done every week. Tell me what's changed. And it goes through the 20 companies in that table that Alex was showing the batteries and says, oh yeah, by the way, there's a funding report. We found a press release or some story in Google News that there's a funding update and you can then sort of send an alert to folks, hey, by the way, you may want to check that research. It's been updated for you automatically. Yeah. Yeah, it's super cool.

40:18I think we're starting to scratch the surface of what are all the different avenues we can explore with deep research. I think this idea of sort of, you don't want your like, if you have like a research analyst, you don't just want them to tell you the answer once. It's like, no, monitor the space for me, monitor the sector industry. I want to know what's going on as this evolves. And yeah, having, being able to sort of partially automate that and then have like, have an agent do that for you would be super cool. So it's Google alerts plus search, but the new version of it with deep research and automated AI reminders and updates, It's, I really, the kids these days have it too easy because they can just cheat and everything now because if I had this in high school, I, oh man.

40:58It's interesting you say that, Alex. What if it just looked at your history and every 24 hours went through your search history and just said, hey, is there any way we could make this query better for the user? And then it just in your sidebar showed you, hey, previous searches that have some updates to them, you know, are here. And it just said, put an alert on seven, six, three. You click it and it's like, oh yeah, there's two more companies we added to this query. Do you want to see them? Be like a great re-engagement strategy for users. It's like fishing for information. You got to put the line out and wait to get a nibble.

41:31And then when it updates, you go back and check that particular spot. Yeah, it's just really cool. So Arush is a fisherman, got it. There you go. We'll keep grinding on it. As you know, I'm giving this an A plus. This is one of the most impressive things I've seen so far to come out of Google in this new era. And I love the fact that you are starting to include images, charts, you know, and the other Google services. You know, I think we'll know when this is really clicking, when Google local data, Google flights data, my Gmail, my Google docs, you know, those things become citations inside of this or are presented.

42:09And it seems like you're well on your way to getting all those incredible Google services that are out there to be incorporated. I just did a search on Gemini for skis and, you know, certain type of skis for doing groomers and, you know, really well-groomed trails to go fast. And I was very impressed that it, you know, not only gave me good information, but it cited really good sources that I use already and that I was able to click through. So I think, you know, content creators, and I've been on and on about this, they're going to have to make a decision. Is the click through worth being included in the index or not?

42:43and it's going to be your choice to do that because you can be indexing Google search, but not be ingested into Gemini at your choice, right? These are two different toggles now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Listen, amazing job. And we will, I would say, keep us updated, but we just hit the dropdown in Gemini every day and take a look. So we know what you're up to. We're watching it for you. And we will have feedback. We'll have notes, trust me. Yeah, and please do send them, by the way. Yeah, feel free to reach out and give us feedback. We love it. It's such a wonderful time in the technology industry to have this new category of product to play with every day that is really making everybody better at their job.

43:29So really great job. It's really helped everybody on our investment side of the business to become experts faster, our researchers, get expertise and knowledge quicker. And that really was always Google's mission, right? Index the world's knowledge and make it available to everybody. Now you're indexing reasoning and all kinds of other really great things, anticipating the knowledge people want. Great job, A+. Thank you so much. Thanks, Rish. We'll chat soon. Thanks, guys. See you soon. Jason, I want to make a business model question here about this. So we talked a lot about the economics of this because you and I are always thinking, what are the gross margins?

44:05What's the business here? are you selling a dollar for 50 cents? Here's the flip of that though. In this case, if I was Google and perplexity is gaining momentum and people are talking about AI search and getting off of traditional properties, why not just give this to everybody, eat the cost? You've got so much money and try to really buy that mindshare with just the fact that you have a hundred billion cash. They'll flip the switch at some point. They did it already with the summaries at the top. Remember the summaries, you had to be logged in, you had to turn them on. And so there's a lot of expertise inside of these large corporations that know, you know, this is the moment in time that this product is ready, you know, that we can release it on the public.

44:47And yeah, they do have the innovators dilemma of, you know, if you roll some of these features out and you just give people the answer, do they not click on ads? And then that could be headwinds against the ad business. So I'm sure they're being super thoughtful about this. I do think there's going to be a whole new ad model that emerges, which is going to be, you know, when you do a research paper like this, you could include in it offers. So let's say crunch, you know, some of the data is from Crunchbase. Crunchbase could say to get in-depth data, you know, you've got a couple of companies listed in here, but it would know that the person is researching startups and technology companies, Gartner Group, Dell Computers, AWS, Google Cloud, whatever.

45:35They know you're doing this type of research so they could embed in it the free version, little segments that are AI constructed ads. So imagine an AI constructed ad inside of this research paper on, hey, we have a research paper. We have a database. We have, or you just know, hey, we're both into gadgets and technology. Here's the latest gadgets and technologies. Would you like to fire off this query of what's the best laptop? We know you're on a Mac mini that's from five years ago, whatever. We know your machine's slow. We know that you were just looking at new machines and here's like an overview of it.

46:15So what may happen is people may click on less ads, but the ads they do click on might be super helpful. You and I don't like to click on ads. We're like part of that group of people who don't click on ads probably. It's true. But if we got enhanced ads that were really well constructed, hey, why should I buy a Dell instead of this new Dell Inspirion, you know, lightweight one? Why is it better than my MacBook Air? Why should I switch to Android from iOS or vice versa? Just those typical queries, you know, it might explain to you, hey, listen, you're paying$1 ,500 for your iPhone, you can get a pixel for 900.

46:51And here's the features that the pixel has that you might be interested in. And so that's going to be wild. AI-based ads could be a whole other category. You know, like the marketers don't need to come up with the message. The message can be created by AI and customized to you or me based on what's in our research. Well, the user creates the crux of what they're working on. They create the context, the demand. All you have to do is to just take that information, use AI to craft an ad from a relevant partner, and then serve it up. But the user creates the opportunity. So you're really going to want to drive usage for that to work.

47:24Not opposed to that. Also, if Google wants to buy Crunchbase, I wouldn't say no as a shareholder. All right. So you want to talk about OpenAI's new task feature. Can we show that really quick, Jason, to the folks? Sure. I think it's a great idea to show it. Yeah. This is a new feature that I just saw go across my feed today. And this is really what's at the heart of this innovation, great competition in capitalism. You've got OpenAI, Grok, Claude, Gemini, all really trying to outdo each other with great features. And here is ChatGPT saying, hey, remind me every day at this time to do something, right?

48:05And people are starting to do these things. And I guess in this case, it's saying, make me a custom workout. out yes so i went ahead and gave this a whirl for us because i wanted to have a non-canned demo so jason first of all i showed up to uh chat gpt and i tried to ask it to set a reminder and it said i cannot do that and i was very confused you actually have to go up here to chat gpt for oh with scheduled tasks it's in beta so if you can't find it don't do what i did that's where it is i said can you set an alarm reminder or task to tell me every day at 9 a.m to meditate and do push-ups and uh easy peasy it has to give me notifications and i'm kind of okay great but here's my question why does it do this now this to me seems kind of off-piste in a way that deep research doesn't are they trying to build a super app is that what they're doing here no i think what it is is you know these this is a mini version of agents a repetitive task these would be prong jobs you that a developer would do like a chronological job, a time-based job.

49:11So let's say every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we do the show and we know that we look at the top stories that I'm talking about in my X feed, you're talking about in your X feed, and that are on tech meme and that are being talked about by these 10 people. We could say, what are these 20 people talking about? give me a ranked list of which are the most popular stories that these 20 people are talking about online then go to these you know 10 youtube channels index those tell me what topics they're talking about and build us a docket so the building of the docket is you and i thinking about what's in the zeitgeist this could be a backstop against that and kind of you combine it with deep research which now you say make me a deeply researched document of these topics and we're looking at the doc and it's done every day i'm gonna try this on i'm gonna use this on friday for the friday show i didn't have enough time to actually revert my whole process but i'm gonna just start with this in a way that i never felt like if i use chat gpt to start something it always felt like it was written for a seventh grader you know and it wasn't quite what i needed it was always a little too basic but i'm just going to start each section of the show for my prep with just this and let's just you know let's see what it what it does if it makes me smarter good in a year it will be able i would predict a year from now in january 2026 we'll be sitting here with cron jobs firing while we're doing the show summarizing stuff and telling us in real time based upon what we're saying during the show so imagine we're talking during the show and i said you know i was at Ewan I doing this cat skiing, it would just go in Restream, give us three videos of Ewan I Resort with a title, pulled up to the most interesting part of that clip.

51:03And instead of you going and searching for it, you would just say, oh yeah, this one, this one, or that one. And so what's going to happen is AI is going to study what we do every day and then figure out if it's a repetitive task, what it could do. So Restream, if Restream was monitoring what we did every day or your browser was monitoring it and you connected it to the transcript of this as we speak it's queuing up for you hey maybe you want to show one or two or three of these things oh jason's talking about the mac mini 4 here's a picture of it oh alex is referencing i don't know second life and how that used to work and it has like the second life debut video or some quick facts on second life so while we're talking here if we're talking about second life imagine if an infographic came up on the screen.

51:49Second Life was a company that did this, like pop-up videos where they had like little nuggets. Well, that's coming. So I think we're going to be in a very interesting position. And of course, we're sitting here saying, well, what's our jobs? Our jobs is to have a discussion about it. And just because we get more information, the velocity at which we'll consume information or have access to stuff is just going to go up. it's just going to be like the most well-produced content in the world will just happen without as much effort, which is what happened when the Wikipedia went from... I remember when Wikipedia first launched, I went to the China page and it was like, China is a country in East Asia with this many population.

52:29It was literally one sentence and it said, this is a stub. And that China page became a full-blown page within a couple of weeks. But I do remember that experience of going to the early Wikipedia and seeing like a China page that was like... Everything starts somewhere. Correct. But actually, you know, non-jokingly, I wonder if one thing we're going to continue to bring to shows like this, like us being podcast folks or people who convey information, when the information itself becomes slightly easier to create and disseminate, I wonder if one of the biggest things we're going to bring is humor.

53:01Yeah. Like not even kidding. I really think that that might be clutch to keep people engaged. Like we might just be like helping people stay focused. Absolutely. I mean, that's what the nightly news became at a certain point. You were like, you know what? I like Jimmy Kimmel's version of what happened today. He tells a couple of jokes, gives some context. I like what the McLaughlin group does on Sunday. I like what All In does. I like what This Week in Startups does. I like this round table, like that round table. So yes, context on top of the content is really, really fun. and I think you're seeing a lot of media outlets kind of move to that where they'll have, like the New York Times and Washington Post started to do TikToks where they take the journals and say, tell me about the story you wrote.

53:46And they just said, yeah, you know, I've been working on the story for six weeks. I went here, I went there. This is the crux of the story. And then, yeah, go read it. But for some people, they just watch that TikTok and that's their total consumption of, you know, 300 labor hours of research. Yeah, I don't want to put my spouse on blast because she's amazing and i love her and she's the best but also like sometimes she'll like i read a story about that i'm like oh what did it say and then she goes oh actually i read the headline and i'm just like honey you have to understand that that that wounds me in particular like that's ah yes but different worlds different jobs different careers different you know different domains uh i want to show you a demo though a different demo you're not ready for this you haven't seen this yet um you don't even know what it is but i'm going to explain to you what i'm to show you it is from a startup to be clear so right here is a little video okay that i'm going to play and see what you think hello jason have you considered making alex the ceo of twist and giving him a billion dollars so rate that for me on a scale of one to believable so right now it looks like an animatronic out of westworld which is to say it's almost crossing the uncanny valley you know if you were not paying attention and looking at your peripheral vision you would think that's a real person talking because i was focused on it i could tell that was ai generated but you know because of the tone of her voice and it's not she was not quite perfect no not quite yeah i would say seven of ten if i which means six or seven of ten peripheral vision npc non-playing character walking by i might not notice it but like a lot of these things like sora and some of the new video creation stuff if i'm paying attention i know it's created by ai because i see six fingers or some weird in this case i was watching her lips move they didn't exactly she has 10 fingers total i just counted okay perfect this is a this is a video from a startup called synthesia or synthesia perhaps and i i was looking into them jason because they just raised 180 million at a 2.1 billion dollar post in ea led uh just for context june 23 was their last round 90 million excel led wow uh 1 billion dollar post so i saw those numbers and i was like whoa okay those are big and then what's cool is on their website they literally have a do you want to try it out do this and so i just made a video for us to test it and that's i came up with that text as a joke i didn't sure know if it was going to be good enough to show but this is what people are going to be using inside of corporate environments for training, for talking to customers.

56:22And I think that even though you and I can see that it's AI, I think it's probably good enough for that stuff right now. If I walked up to this in a kiosk and it was like, hey, welcome to McDonald's, what would you like? And I said, I'd like a filet-o-fish and a cup of coffee. And it was like, okay, great. And it recognized my face and it said, okay, Jason, put your thumbprint here, look at your irises and would you like to use clear to pay for your order like i don't know why you know clear at the airports yeah why doesn't clear with the biometrics do a deal with starbucks and mcdonald's so when i'm at the kiosk i can say use clear it does my eyes and that charges my card automatically i think because the headlines would be starbucks partners with creepy eye scanning tool they're stealing your your dna i opted into it trust me like i don't care.

57:16I know you know I'm here. If I open the McDonald's app or the Starbucks app, you know I'm in the store. I have to geolocate. I'm paying. Sure, you know I'm there. I'm on camera for 10 hours a week doing live streams. So for me, my privacy is already gone. It's an illusion. So I would be absolutely amazing if there was a clear button that said, pay with clear. Why doesn't pay with clear exist? I have a question for those execs. Pay with clear should exist at these places boom whatever card i have authenticated with clear biometric it let me when you go to whole foods they now have the palm scanners that they put out do you use that i don't shop for groceries myself unless i'm taking the kids for the experience of going to the store which you know it's like a social thing to go shopping and yeah you know we'll pick at central market here in Texas, like the high-end HEB will pick stuff, but I would totally use the Palm scanner.

58:16Because again, if you've got apps on your phone, they know your location, they know you're in the building already, who cares? And you know what? It's going to be more secure. And what is the cost to me if somebody were to hack? Credit cards are all insured basically. So you're not responsible if people use your credit card. It's unsecured debt that someone else holds. So totally. But I feel, and maybe this is just me getting into my Luddite years, but I'm kind of like, I don't want to scan my hand, Amazon. I've already logged into Prime at the little checkout thing so I can save 13 cents on cherry tomatoes for my daughters, but why do you need my palm print too?

58:52It feels slightly accessible to me, but maybe that's the future. Maybe clear hand scanning, crossed with better AI to follow us around. Maybe it makes for a better, more ubiquitously digital future. But I do think there I begin to go a little bit. As long as they still take cash, I think all these places should still be allowed to take cash. Yeah. And I think I may lose my mind at some point. Right now I'm all in on it, but at some point I may lose my mind to start driving a 1970 Mustang convertible or a 1973 three uh you know uh corvette with no technology don't leave my phone at home and just have a lot of cash in my thing and just be off grid and not have anybody know where i am but you know narcissistically like nobody cares you know like this is the one thing nobody cares nobody cares where i'm going what i bought if it gets hacked and people are like oh my god he ate a filet of fish and a you know a mocha you know who cares like it's it's it's not any kind of information and i guess maybe because i'm a micro celebrity i have a different worldview of this which is when i was in japan i got stopped 20 or 30 times while skiing and i'm wearing a helmet and goggles and people are like i just want to let you know i love the podcast while i'm in the gondola it's a little bit weird but yeah i'm used to it i don't care you know like uh i've already lost my privacy to a certain extent with the people who watch the two podcasts so i i feel that i've been recognized twice in my driveway and that always freaks me out a little bit because in san francisco small it's an industry town right yeah of course yeah i'm in providence uh which is a not an industry that's a college town yeah that's been a little little wonky i can't imagine and to be clear i am not a micro celebrity i i'm on a podcast you actually do have to think about this more than I do.

1:00:44So your perspective is security situations and you know, you know, uh, but people are generally like super normal. I mean, only one time somebody asked me to take a selfie in a bathroom. That's another story, but I do think this stuff is very cool. Uh, and I could see those actually working. Yeah. Just to put that round into context for everybody, this is a crunch based search of all the rounds thus far in 2025 that are into AI companies that are over a hundred million. There are eight of them so far. One's private equity, two are debt, five are kind of venture equity. But for 15 days, for half of the first month of the year, this feels pretty hot to me overall.

1:01:23It doesn't seem like we're slowing down on the investment front. I do want to make sure we touch on TikTok today. So folks, the news today is that TikTok, when the 19th hits, if the Supreme Court does not come to help it, it's not going to, as required by law, simply no longer be distributed in app stores that's kind of what the law says google apple have to stop showing it instead jason they're going to just flip the switch and turn the whole thing off and strategically i think this makes it turn it off my dance is going to turn it off download your subs download your comments i mean i i i don't mean to make light of this but it is some people's world.

1:02:06Yes. Like their entire world. I think everyone wants to look at this issue through a single lens when it's actually a multifaceted point. Like I can have national security concerns that lend towards me being in favor of TikTok being banned. And I can have general perspectives that I don't like the government ever controlling speech, period, even when it deals with a foreign company. But the thing that I'm kind of stuck on right now, jason is this now that we're moving towards the end of tiktok users are swapping apps and it's not like by getting rid of tiktok we're going to see actually a change in where apps are from uh for those on the audio version this is a tweet from ben smith of semaphore and ben's worked everywhere um just a well-known media guy it's an app it's a screenshot of the top apps in the app store and the first one is i wrote out the pronunciation um xiao hung shu it's the little red book application Then there's Lemonade, which is a ByteDance property, I think.

1:03:01I don't know who made Clapper, but Temu is also here. In the top 12, there's still a bunch of apps from Chinese companies. I don't know what this Redbook is. I saw some viral tweets of Taylor Swift promoting his legendary CCP journalist Taylor Swift. I'm sorry, Taylor Lorenz. Oh, I was very confused there. I'm sorry. Sorry, my brain is still on Japan time. I was going to say, you said you're not jet lagged, but that's a funny one. I'll take that one. You're fine. You're doing great. She was sort of talking about it and then people were kind of goofing on her about it. This is 100 % proof that the Chinese and the CCP is making a really crazy decision right now because there's so much geopolitics at play.

1:03:54they could make this a sacrificial lamb and divest they've had plenty of time to divest they've run the clock out that was their decision i have sympathy for them if this wasn't a strategic asset for them on an intelligence basis they would have divested it they have um i think they call them golden shares in the company yeah which is when the central government buys kind of one share in your business and then they get permanent board seats and if i understand it correctly jason also vetoes over certain business practices i do and divestitures and they have access to all your data so you remember like dd the ride hailing got in some kind of trouble because they hadn't given all the ride hailing data to the government so the government in china speaking about privacy knows every single ride you've taken without a subpoena So somebody in the government can just be like, show me Alex's trips.

1:04:49Yeah. Okay. An American would be like, that's crazy. That's your private information? The government can just take it? Yeah. A French person would be like, mon dieu. What happened to GDPR? It's a GDPR. We're going to get in trouble. France, we love you. Excellent. Croissants, amazing. French are amazing. I mean, you wouldn't want to go to war with them, but it's, yeah, just roll over. But hey, listen, they blocked us from flying over. That's not even true. What are you talking about? We wanted to go bomb in the Middle East. They blocked us flying over their country. They were like, no. Yeah, we got freedom fries out of that, but I'll tell you - You got to go around our country if you want to go bomb another country.

1:05:28Who ate dirt in World War I until the US was like, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, we'll show up. And then we showed up when they'd done all the work. Yeah. The French get a bad rap, I would say, occasionally unfairly on the war front. Also, Napoleon, not German. okay listen all i'm saying is remilitarize japan that's my position bring bushido back japan needs to be fully armed maybe we cut out this section is your geopolitical corner with alex and jason talk about military history it is uh it's a military asset it's an intelligent asset that's why they haven't given it up it's all right i mean you don't need to be a genius if this was a financial transaction they would have taken public already yes they would all be basking in their 500 billion dollar valuation jeff yes everybody who owns shares in this would be popping champagne they would love for this thing to be divested and for them to secure the bag all the shareholders are in a complete panic about this yeah and you know what um they just have to divest or um and you know it's it's actually good for rule of law.

1:06:34We have some level of rule of law in this country. And when we make a decision and it becomes a law, the new president can't just be like, you know what? I changed my mind. That's not how this works. You have to work with the other branches of government. The other branches of government, bipartisan, have spoken. Whether it was Kamala or Trump or RFK had won, you can't just say like executive order, it gets to stay. I think he can give it a stay of execution after the 20th for a couple of days, but I don't think before he can. So this thing's going down, right? Yeah. I mean, Supreme Court is, you know, they had oral arguments a couple of days ago.

1:07:14The general vibe I got to listen to, I think I listened to a little bit of that, but not, I didn't get to listen to the whole day. At least that's not my job. But the commentary amongst the legal scholars out there is that it's not looking good for TikTok. That oral argument didn't go as well as they might have hoped. So I do think you're right. It's going to be interesting to show off. I just think it is very ironic that everyone's going over to an app called Little Red Book because we want to get them off of TikTok. Like, oops. All right. We're back on Friday and then next week's going to be a busy one for the nation.

1:07:47Okay. And I will be going to the inauguration on Friday myself. So we'll may tape a little earlier, but if you want to get the docket, it's thisweekinstartups.com slash docket. You can always see the docket thisweekinstartups.com slash live or go to YouTube and sign up live. Or you can sign up for my LinkedIn, Alex's, x.com slash Alex, and you can join Docket team. So we got the Noti gang that comes in when the notification happens, but we got the Docket squad. You can join the Docket squad, read the Docket, give us your suggestions, your questions, and help do the research on it so we all get smarter together.

1:08:19We'll see you all next time on this week in service. Bye-bye.