Prof G Markets - The UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting, Amazon Takes On Nvidia, & 12 Days of OpenAI

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Scott and Ed open the show by discussing Saleforce’s earnings, Meta’s venture into nuclear energy, and the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Then Scott breaks down Amazon's decision to build a supercomputer, explaining why it’s a win for shareholders and a potential game-changer for reducing AI infrastructure costs. Ed explains why he thinks Amazon could be one of the first companies to truly disrupt the semiconductor market. Finally, they discuss OpenAI’s decision to go into livestreaming and explain what its surge in popularity could mean for the future of content creation.  Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. 231. That's the average number of apps used by many, many companies. This can lead to a lot of context and tab switching that drains employee focus and costs your company money.

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Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS. Because business can be slow, like wading through the mud. But Amazon Q helps streamline work, so tests like summarizing monthly results can be done in no time. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. That's aws.com slash learn more. That's aws.com slash learn more. Today's number, 170,000. That's how many unique drinks you can order at Starbucks. True story yet, I walked into a Starbucks with my ex-wife and the barista said, we don't recommend caffeine for pregnant women. And she said, well, I'm not pregnant. And he said, well, we do have diet free lattes.

Diet free lattes does not make sense. Diet free, sugar free. Fuckin' A. I'm in the Cotswolds. Let's skip to the Banter Park. I'm in the Cotswolds. Let's skip to the Banter Park. I'm in the Cotswolds with my dogs. Oh, lovely. And we're moving. So my job is to leave, take the dogs out to the countryside and stay in some bougie place and just be out of the way.

So here I am. Are you staying in a hotel or you got a house? What's the deal? It looks pretty nice what you got behind you. It's called Heckfield Place. And I was gonna go to Manor Estelle, but they didn't have any room. And then Soho Farmhouse could put up the dog. So Heckfield's kind of a, it's the Lexus.

Soho Farmhouse has a no dogs policy? No, only certain rooms, only certain sheds allow dogs. They all claim to be dog friendly and they have like two rooms for dogs. And I can kind of understand, cause don't tell anyone my dogs have ripped up this place. Jesus Christ. But it's, it's, we go on long walks.

We're in the British countryside. I keep thinking I'm going to run into Ellen. Supposedly Ellen lives out here with her wife, Portia de Rossi. Yeah. She escaped once she got kicked out of the U S basically. Isn't the British countryside the best? It really is incredible, right? Uh, let me think.

Let me pour some tea first. And I go with a no from you that you just don't really like the outdoors. I think that's the problem. I don't like the UK from November to may it's 40 degrees and just wet. I don't even see it rain. I just walk outside and it's wet. I'll give you this. When I first moved to New York, people said, oh, there's beautiful beaches in

Long Island and the Hamptons. And I thought I'm from California. These won't be beautiful beaches. And I went out there and found out that the beaches are beautiful. People constantly talk about the British countryside and I thought, you know, yeah, right. And I came out here. It is beautiful.

It's just, it's dark at 3 30 today. That's all part of the vibe. You just got to get involved with that and get on board. No, I just want to, you listen to Simon and Garfunkel and self-harm. It's just, that's not the vibe. Simon and Garfunkel get inside, have some tea, head to bed pretty early. Yeah. What, what have you been up to out here?

I was talking about me. Let's what have you been up to out here? I was talking about me. Let's talk about you, but keep it short because I'm not that interested. Well, speaking of whether it snowed for the first time today, which is pretty exciting. So New York is getting cold. Um, and that's the long and short of it in New York. Wow.

Are you engaging? Yeah. He's a charmer. He's a charmer. Get to the headlines. Uh, Jesus Christ. That's a charmer. He's a charmer. Get to the headlines, Ed. Jesus Christ. That's right. Let's start with our weekly review of Market Vitals. The S&P 500 rose. The dollar rose on Trump's tariff threats but declined at the end of the week. Bitcoin hit, wait for it, $100,000 for the first time and the yield on 10-year Treasuries was volatile,

shifting to the headlines. Salesforce shares rose more than 10% after the company issued higher than expected guidance for the current quarter. Revenue also beat expectations up 8% from a year earlier as the company secured more than 200 deals for its AI chatbot suite called Agent Force. Meta is seeking proposals from developers to construct nuclear power plants. The initiative aims to get the plants online by the early 2030s to help power the company's data centers. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in what the authorities are calling a brazen targeted attack. The incident occurred just before the company's highly anticipated investor day in New York. I don't really know what to make of this, Scott. Um, we've never covered

anything like this. I guess the first question I'd ask you is, is what do you think this means for UnitedHealth? Like How is UnitedHealth supposed to respond to a crisis like this? Well, it's a tragedy for the family, no doubt about it. I think United's gonna be fine. But what's come out, which was really interesting, I found is that the etchings on the casing said, deny, defend, oppose.

And this is the name of a book that's about how insurance companies get out of claims. And so this appears to be politically motivated or thematically motivated. What's been shocking to me has been the response online. And to say there's been a lack of empathy is an overstatement. People are circulating memes and acting as if, kind of quite frankly, the company and this person had it coming, is the way I read some of the memes I've been saying. And in the U.S., what you have is a healthcare system that has, is essentially bankrupting a lot of people.

40% of Americans have some form of debt as a function of dental or medical bills that they can't pay off. And the largest source or largest cause of bankruptcy is medical debt. And there's just no getting around it. The American healthcare system, in my view, is optimized for the top 10%.

If you're in the top 10%, you have the best healthcare in the world. If you're in the bottom 90%, you have expensive but bad healthcare. When income inequality gets to the point it's at, it usually self-corrects, but it self-corrects in a small number of ways, either through war, famine, or revolution.

I think this is an example. When you have the CEOs of companies being murdered, and it looks like it was politically motivated, it looks like it has some connection or link to the company and a viewpoint around the behavior of these types of companies. The healthcare system in the United States in this in no way justifies violence, but it does create a lot of despair and, and disability in our economy.

What do you think the conversations in the boardroom are right now? Like, do you think if this is indeed politically motivated and it looks like it was, do you think the boardroom is like, okay, people are angry, we're going to change the way we do things? Or is the boardroom thinking we need to up our security? I mean, just some statistics here, Metta spends $23 million on protecting the personal safety of Mark Zuckerberg, and Google spends $7 million. So a lot of other companies know that people are kind of out to get their CEOs, and United Health, I don't believe, spends any money on executive personal safety

or security. So like, what do you think is the response at the board level from UnitedHealth when something like this happens? Does it actually force them to sort of take a look at their business and how they make money? Or is it more like, we need to do a better job of protecting our executives? Yeah, I would imagine the first reaction is we need to keep our executive safe. Those numbers that you quoted around CEO security are about to explode. That's a good business to be in right now, offering executive security.

This isn't going to be a moment of reflection for them. Like most for-profit companies, they do whatever they can to try and maximize their profits and rationalize. Like, oh, I know, let's get some insulin, let's put a brand on it and let's quadruple the price or whatever it is. But they're not going to say we need to really think through healthcare in the United States. Yeah, exactly.

But that's what everyone online seems to think is happening here. It's like all those trolls that you mentioned, they're like, oh yeah, well, someone finally showed them. This doesn't help the problem, it makes it worse. It makes it seem like the people who, I mean, this is just in any way, if the murder of a 50 year old man with a family is rationalized,

you get a pretty serious chaos. And just the fact that these folks need security now is really, you know, it's disappointing. So the short term, it's just gonna be, those numbers are gonna go way up. You're gonna see security across every, I can imagine every CEO of a health company is saying, do I need security now?

Should it inspire a moment of reflection of why does everybody hate me or why are there so many people that hate me? Yeah, will that happen? No, and the guilty party here is not the CEO of these companies, the guilty party is the electorate who continue to let their elected representatives be weaponized by lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industrial complex such that they can charge more

for pharmaceuticals. They can charge more for diabetes medication. They can let insurance companies, you know, deny all sorts of claims. So, the US healthcare system is the most disruptible business in the history of business. It's raised prices faster than inflation. It's 17% of GDP. It used to be 5%, I think as recently as 1962. So in 60 years, it's now almost four times the amount of our government.

It's the biggest business in the US. And we need to turn folks into consumers again, where they actually look at the price and they demand more. But this is, this is going to, it's going to inspire a lot of very interesting conversations. I'll just leave it at that. Let's move on to Salesforce earnings now.

There we go. Salesforce, the agentic layer. They're killing it. They're reeking or getting efficiencies internally. reeking or getting efficiencies internally. Their quarterly earnings increased 8%, which isn't amazing, but it beat expectations. And their operating margins hit their highest number ever. And current quarter guidance came in strong overall, full year guidance for revenue growth stayed the same.

Is this a little bit of rah rah? Yeah. Because if demand for the agent force was really as revolutionary as Mark Benioff described it, they probably would have guided up. I mean, Nvidia says this is revolutionary and we're taking our guidance up. They're like, this is amazing. It's revolutionary, but we're going to we're maintaining guidance. Yeah. I think the story of this earnings call was AI.

They mentioned the word AI 21 times and they mentioned the word Agent Force 67 times. So they are very optimistic about AI. The question is whether that will actually pan out in the numbers themselves, because they talked a lot about Agent Force, and they said that they signed a lot of deals with Agent Force, and Salesforce only launched Agent Force a month ago, so we don't know yet.

So I think the thing that we'll wanna keep an eye on over the next few quarters is whether or not Agent Force, this new AI bot army is hype or if it actually is going to have a meaningful impact on revenue. Because, you know, just saying over and over again, it's great, it's great, it's great. We're so excited to deploy it. That's just not really, that's not really enough for Wall Street, I don't think. And let's just wrap up here with Metta's new proposal for nuclear power plants, or at least they're seeking proposals from other development companies

to construct nuclear power plants. Do you have any initial thoughts on that? Well, it's interesting. These companies are now kind of taking on the role of government in the sense that the only people who have the capital to build nuclear power plants is either the government or a giant utility that was government regulated and given a monopoly. I mean, nuclear has just had such a terrible brand. I remember I was in fixed

income at Morgan Stanley and going up to Washington for a dinner. And there was something called the Washington Public Power Supply, which was supposed to build a nuclear power plant. It overran, and it ended up being just this giant hole in the ground. I'm not sure if it ever finished or not. And they used to call it the Bonds Whoops Bonds. And it's been so out of favor, and all of a sudden, it is white hot.

Because the friction in AI isn't people, it isn't customers. It's something unusual. It's energy to power it all. And we said in our predictions deck because the friction in AI isn't people, it isn't customers, it's something unusual. It's energy to power it all. And we said in our prediction stack that nuclear would be the technology of 2025. Why nuclear? It's reliable, efficient, carbon-free, and powerful.

One nuclear plant produces as much energy as three million solar panels or 430 wind turbines. And there's just few ways to kind of spin up in three to five years, something that could potentially power 750,000 to 3 million homes, which is what AI is going to require. Meta's energy consumption increased 1500% in the last 10 years. And in August, Zuckerberg said, Lama 4, Meta's next generation of their AI model will need 10 times more compute to train than the previous generation. I think the thing that jumped out to me

is the point that you made about the idea that you have Metta basically taking on the role of the government at this point. Because the thing that Jigar Shah told us, and this was the head of the loan office at the Department of Energy, is he said, you know, we need the government to be funding this because we're the only ones with the capital

to make these risky investments. I mean, you look at Vogel, the new big nuclear plant in Georgia that was just built. That thing cost $35 billion to build, and it went $17 billion over budget. So these things are extremely capital intensive. But to your point, it's like, actually there is another entity that can make these forward leading investments and it is big tech, you know, it's, it's

Meta, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's potentially Apple at some point. on, it's Google, it's potentially Apple at some point. And I guess where my mind goes, it feels a little bit dystopian that we're at a place in society where the two gatekeepers of the future of our energy industry are one, the government, and then two, like a handful of tech executives. Like the idea that Mark Zuckerberg, who originally was the guy who built a social media network, and now he's kind of shepherding the direction of clean energy in America, which will just give him even greater and an even tighter grip on all of the infrastructure in the US from advertising to computing power and now to just pure raw energy.

Maybe I'm being a little bit, you know, tin hat but it just feels like we're going into a slightly scary place. Well, you got to ask yourself what's next? They control the news or can elect a president? You're just figuring this out Ed? Wait, let me get this. Your thesis is that tech executives are growing

too powerful that there might be a problem here. Huh, really? It's almost, this is the least mendacious thing that Meadow's done. I mean, if they, I don't know if there's a way for the government to get in the middle and say, okay, it's like when they build a building or a developer wants to build a

skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, they say, fine, but it's not going to be as big as you want. And you have to build a park or 10% of the residences have to be for artists or whatever, for people raising allergy fee, Labradoodles or whatever. I think this is a good thing. I think that AI similar that one. I think that AI, similar, that one of the things that always bothered me about crypto is it seems like we have this self-invented incremental usage of electricity that's equivalent to Argentina and that it's,

I'm not sure that we really needed that. But this is going to make our, that energy consumption look like a walk in the park. This, in my view, is the most exciting technology outside of GLP-1 drugs. I think it's really exciting, and I'm glad they're making these sorts of investments. The key is, do we need some sort of oversight to make sure they don't begin to sequester all power to a small number of companies,

and then use that as a weapon where other companies are basically dealing with brownouts every day. We'll be right back after the break with a look at how Amazon might start competing with Nvidia. If you're enjoying the show so far, hit follow and leave us a review on Profit Markets. Support for property markets comes from Mint Mobile. We've all been there. You take someone up on a great intro deal, only you find out later that that great price is going to skyrocket after the first month. Well, no more. Not if you go with Mint Mobile because when they say you can get a three-month mobile plan for just $15 a month, they mean it. Say bye-bye to your overpriced monthly bills

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Amazon is building an AI supercomputer known as an ultra cluster that will be powered by hundreds of thousands of its own Tranium 2 semiconductors. The chip cluster will quintuple the processing power for AI startup Anthropic, which recently received an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon. When the cluster goes live next year, it will be one of the largest AI training clusters in the world. So Scott, I think the most important thing here is the fact that Amazon is deciding to build a giant supercomputer, not with Nvidia chips, but with its own

chips, these Tranium 2 chips. Your thoughts on this news? I was really, well, one, you know, I haven't participated in the kind of the Bitcoin explosion and I haven't really participated in the AI explosion. And I was happy to see this because I own Amazon stock. And I just thought this was brilliant and really exciting. And I love the I love the idea of Nvidia having a competitor. I wish it was a smaller company, but it reminds me that some kid or some PhD student, you're too young to remember this, 10 or 20 years ago, strung together a bunch of

Nintendo game sets or game consoles and created like a supercomputer, just stringing these things all together. This architecture just seems really fascinating. As you said, if they can in any way, in any way, in any way, somehow create a credible competitor around their chips, even in the same universe as NVIDIA,

just their operational excellence, their B2B, their cloud offering, you gotta think they're gonna take a trillion dollars of market cap away from NVIDIA. So I thought, wow, this is really exciting for Amazon shareholders. And they're kind of offering cost reduction and control by reducing reliance on Nvidia. Amazon can now lower AI infrastructure costs

for its business customers while gaining greater control over its supply chain. I mean, this is, I just thought this was, you know, whenever you get a company that comes out of nowhere and becomes the most valuable company in the world, it's just, imagine, you know, Lake Erie of blood being poured into the water

and the megalodons it attracts. And this has attracted one of the scariest megalodons in the history of business, and that is Amazon. And they have the money to do this. The firm's most recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic included an agreement that Anthropic would use Amazon's AI chips. So the number two in LLMs is about to use Amazon chips,

which will train the chips, they'll get better on it. Nvidia stock fell 3%, but that's not that big a deal. And just one add on here, Amazon is already trading at a pretty rich valuation, but it's potentially gonna get some of that Nvidia or that GPU magic. We did a predictions podcast on Pivot and we asked Anthony Scaramucci, our friend, to come up with a prediction.

And his big prediction is that he thinks that IBM is gonna explode, because IBM actually has some really strong IP and scientists around AI that effectively Watson was the first kind of AI offering. And then he thinks with their CEO and their current offering that this stock is gonna explode. And I thought, wow, that's a really interesting take.

But it'd be interesting to see what companies are able to draft off of or kind of become remora fish on Nvidia and open AI success. But I just thought this was genius. I mean, you got to give it to the folks in Amazon. This is, I feel like this is a masterstroke. Yeah. It's also just like the perfect marketing message too. Because I mean, when you think about standard marketing, the standard play is that you go out in public

and you'll just like say out loud or you'll advertise like we have the best chips in the world. Or maybe you'll like have some research report that says, you know, our chips are You know five percent faster than Nvidia's or whatever and that's what we've been seeing most of these chip maker Competitors doing right now. You just sort of make a statement about your chip. Oz is more efficient. It's cheaper. It's faster Whatever than you just hope that the market believes you. But this is so much more compelling because to go out and build a supercomputer that is this big and this expensive

with only your own chips, not with NVIDIAs, implicit in that investment is a belief that your chips are better than NVIDIAs. Like it's the perfect show-don't don't tell strategy, which I find so much more compelling. And I would also assume that the market is going to find this a lot more compelling, especially, you know, the AI companies who want to, to use these chips. And that's sort of the most important thing here. So we've been talking a lot about all of these different chip makers. We talked about Cerebris, who came out and said, you know, we have the biggest chips in the world

and therefore ours are the best. And I didn't really buy it. And this thing, I'm suddenly like, okay, this, this, this is really going to shake things up for the first time in a market where Nvidia has 95% market dominance. It feels like Amazon could be the first one to actually disrupt this. Well, see above the biggest Megalodon's great white sharks in the world are coming for that 95% market share. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are all developing custom AI chips to reduce their dependence on the market leader. And then there's a, just a suite of AI startups looking to get a piece of the pie.

You mentioned Cerebrus, there's Grok, Accelera, and Tensterrent, which recently raised nearly 700 million in new funding from investors, including Bezos. So there's a three and a half trillion dollar carcass that everybody wants a piece of, and that's Nvidia. There's also just this one quote from the chief executive of AWS, which I find so compelling because it's so understated and so simple compared to all of the other marketing messages of these other chip startups. He said, quote,

today there's really only one choice on the GPU side and we think customers would appreciate having multiple choices. That was the statement. It's just so simple and so compelling. Yeah, there you go. And kudos to them. Kudos to them, they're out first, right? Yeah, exactly.

But you mentioned some of those other companies that are building. So you talked about Google. They're working on what's known as their tensor processing units. Microsoft is working with OpenAI on chips. Meta is working on a chip called Artemis. These companies are all not dipping their toes, but maybe dipping their ankles into chip making. But the wrinkle is that they all still have big partnerships with Nvidia.

Like they all still heavily rely on Nvidia. And so it we're getting to this point now where they're all working with Nvidia because they have to. But on the side, they're starting to build out their own businesses because they all recognize, well, we rely on Nvidia too much. So I would be interested to get your perspective on how is that all going to play out? And have you ever seen a dynamic before where sort of you're friends with the big company, but then you start trying to nip at their heels and ultimately you're trying to compete with them?

Yeah, it was a similar dynamic back in, I think in the 90s. I think Apple got sick of being so reliant on Intel and they started developing their own chips. So yeah, we've you have seen this before. Nvidia clearly doesn't have the power. They'd be worried about antitrust concern. If Nvidia wanted to play hardball, they'd say, well, if you're in the business of building your own chips, we're out. I think that would probably create antitrust scrutiny given their dominance in the market. So, I think that would probably create antitrust scrutiny given their dominance in the market. So all of these guys, every year they spend more and more money on NVIDIA, they're waiting in line, they're price takers.

These folks are not used to being price takers. These folks are the biggest, they're the biggest gorilla in the room. And when they meet with their vendors, they're used to saying, no, I want you to cut your prices by 10% this year and I need it faster and I'm gonna delay my payment terms. They're used to dictating terms. And so when a company shows up and starts dictating terms to them, they're just not used to it.

They can't imagine what world they're in all of a sudden. So I go, wait, all of a sudden I'm not the hot girl at the party and I have to kiss your ass and you're ignoring my texts. I mean, it's just, this is an alien place for these guys. We'll be right back after the break with a look at an interesting new take on product launches from OpenAI. Amazon Q Business is the new generative AI assistant from AWS because many tasks can make business slow, like wading through the mud.

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That's aws.com slash learn more. Support for the show comes from Alex partners. In business disruption brings not only challenges but opportunities. As artificial intelligence powers pivotal moments of change, Alex partners is the consulting firm chief executives can rely on. Alex partners is dedicated to making sure your company

knows what really matters when it comes to AI. As part of their 2024 tech sector report, Alex Partners spoke with nearly 350 tech executives from across North America and Europe to dig deeper into how tech companies are responding to these changing headwinds. And in their 2024 digital disruption report, Alex Partners found that 88% of executives report seeing potential for growth from digital disruption with 37% seeing significant or even extremely high positive impact on revenue growth. You can

read both reports and learn how to convert digital disruption into revenue growth at www.alexpartners.com slash box that's www.alixpartners.com slash vox. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Why do we like sports? Is it for the jerseys the players wear? The food you grab at the ballpark? No.

It's that feeling you get in your gut. That drive to compete. But competition isn't just on the sports field. It can breed innovation. And XPRIZE wants to use that competitive drive and motivation to tackle some of the world's biggest problems. What sort of problems? Climate change, accessible clean water, and healthy aging.

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accelerated carbon removal technology, and kick-started the commercial space industry. And XPRIZE is just getting started. The future is still ours to create. Head to XPRIZE.org to learn how you could help architect a brighter future for everyone. We're back with ProfG Markets. OpenAI has unveiled a new initiative for December called 12 Days of OpenAI, where it will showcase upcoming products through live streams held on its website across those 12 days.

The event has already gained traction with the company's tweet about the initiative racking up 2.6 million views and attracting coverage from more than 10 different media outlets. Scott, we've been talking a lot about public relations and investor relations and how that's all changing this year. What's your take on OpenAI strategy here? Specifically the fact that they are deciding to go into live streaming. Yeah. So first off, I hear the term 12 days of open AI and I want to go into the garage,

close the door, turn on the car. I mean, 12 days of open AI. It's like, okay, couldn't they have gone with like three days of open? I mean, so two weeks of this shit. Anyways, you've been talking a lot about this and how the earnings call needed to be disrupted or investor relations. And whether I think it was Alexander Karp walking around, livestream, Instagram, going direct to kind of retail investors, there's a ton of innovation around investor communications right now.

And this isn't investor communications as much as it is a product launch. And Apple sort of redefined the tech product launch and they literally ripped off fashion brands. They said, all right, highly curated, highly orchestrated, lighting, celebrities, big reveal. And instead of having Gisele Bundchen come down the aisle, we have Steve Jobs, he has a uniform. I mean, the lighting, the production value is capturing a perfect moment in time.

And it's now moved to they've kind of zagged to their zig and that they want it to be more authentic. I'm sure they rehearsed, but they wanted to feel raw and they wanted to feel genuine. And bottom line is, this is a prediction. I bet more people watch this product launch than watch CNN during those days. This will get more viewership from a more valuable audience than any cable network. Maybe not Fox, because Fox still gets a lot of people. There's a lot of people

in oxygen tanks saying, she's a looker. I love that bread bear. I'd like to grab a steak. He reminds me of a guy I served in NOM with. Anyways, um, what's going on with that? Uh, I think this is going to be hugely popular and redefined product releases. And I think the main takeaway for me is that I think that companies should be thinking about their earnings and their product launches less as just press releases and announcements, but more as content. Like ultimately that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to produce content in the same way

that we're trying to produce content on this podcast that is engaging and that gets people excited and that gets people interested. And you're not gonna do that with just a simple press release. The way you're gonna do that is with videos and with podcasts. And I think it's just very impressive that OpenAI has really led this transformation here. And they said, well, why don't we do a live stream? I mean, that they're sort of at the forefront of the transformation of content right now.

So I'm very impressed by the fact that they're taking this route for a product launch. I would like to just get your thoughts on live streaming as a medium, which I'm just finding very fascinating right now. I feel like live streaming was not very long ago with this very niche concept, this very niche, kind of weird corner of the internet, the idea of a live streamer was not something that held much cultural currency at all.

But in the past year, we've seen like an explosion of live stream, live streamers and live streamers. We've seen like Aiden Ross, who is a big live streamer who ended up interviewing Donald Trump before he was elected. And now Aiden Ross is all over the news and we've seen Kai Sanat, who's built this gigantic following on Twitch. His last live stream reached 50 million viewers, which is around 15% of the United States population.

And then here's this one stat that blew me away. More than a quarter of internet users today watch a live stream every week. So I would like to just get your take on live streaming as a medium. Why do you think we're seeing this explosion right now in media? The only thing I don't know, I kind of feel like live streaming is to original scripted television or video or just streaming what podcasting is to radio and that is initially out of the gates. An old guy like me says, what's the difference?

It's just radio. No podcasting is different. Live streaming, I feel as if, you know, I hear this and think, okay, we should do a live stream, right? Like everybody else, but I'm sure it's hard. I mean, you did a live stream like last week, right? You did it on section. Actually, I did it earlier today.

I'm just not thinking correctly. I did a live stream you did it on section. Actually I did it earlier today. I'm just not thinking correctly I did a live stream in AMA for for section. Yeah, it's I look the It's been around a while I guess celebs I don't know what the I guess live streaming is going B to C where it's it's mostly been B to B, you know section We did a live stream on AI ROI What a name! And 10,000 people registered and I think 3,500 showed up, but that's a good audience.

I guess when you have Robert Downey Jr. or Terry Crew show up, I'd be kind of curious to understand what is the zeitgeist, what's working, what isn't. But it just feels like, again, it's all kind of the same thing. And that is if you're walls and AOC and you go on a live stream,

you're basically going direct to consumer and you're cutting out the means of production. And the means of production is CNBC or Fox or CNN. And so you can do it much more inexpensively. You get to dictate the terms of it. Any economic rewards, you get to reap the majority of it. So it just feels like it's another collapse of the media industrial complex where the creators get to

garner more of the rewards because it's taking advantage of the infrastructure called DARPA and the internet, as opposed to trying to kiss the ass of some means of production that gets in the middle, whether it's Netflix, whether it's CNBC, whether it's Comcast, whether it's Disney, and you can just go straight to these folks. So it strikes me as if it's going to follow whether it's Comcast, whether it's Disney, and you can just go straight to these folks. And so it strikes me as if it's gonna follow the arc

of podcasting, it's gonna grow substantially. It felt like it had a moment a few years ago with gaming and then it kind of went quiet again and now it feels like it's coming back. Yeah, something I would add onto that that I've been thinking a lot about recently in content. As I've said to you before, I've just become fascinated with YouTube.

I look at what's happening with our YouTube channel, which is growing enormously. I mean, we're getting like hundreds of thousands of views on our videos now. And I've been sort of wondering, why is that? Like, why would you opt to watch this podcast on YouTube versus just listen to it in your headphones. And I don't think it's because people want to see our faces. I don't think that adds that much to it. I was thinking about this. I think the big differentiator with YouTube and with live streaming is the comment section. I feel like having a comment section is just an entirely different experience because you

get to share your own opinions, you get to hear what other people think, and suddenly the experience transforms from not just consumption, but it actually becomes like a social experience. And so what I'm finding with live streams right now, my take is it feels like live streaming is the comment section on steroids. Like you're getting to participate in the content with a group of people who are watching it at the same time. And I'm starting to think that any form of content that doesn't figure out a way to interact with the audience

in a meaningful way where the audience can comment and have an opinion and engage interactively. I'm starting to think that any of that content is really just behind the ball. It's such an interesting point. You just inspired an analogy, and I don't know if it's the correct one, but the reason you go to Premier League games,

during COVID they didn't have fans or they had a limited number of fans. an analogy and I don't know if it's the correct one, but the reason you go to Premier League games, during COVID they didn't have fans, they had a limited number of fans and they're just, you watch it on TV and it's the same players and it's the same rules and the same game and it just fell flat without the fans in the stadium. I wonder if this is effectively a game, traditional video now as a game where there's no fans.

That is, when I was on this AI ROI live stream, I occasionally would stop and read a comment, and we tried to interact with the audience, and it just had such a nice vibe. And the thing I love about Premier League is you go and the fans are just amazing. It creates such, they're so engaged in everything, screaming and booing at every little thing,

and making fun of people people and they're hilarious. But to your point, maybe that's what this is. Maybe the next level of kind of interaction and dope and entertainment is, all right, you have two streams. One stream is the content and the second stream is the fan reaction to the content. Because what I noticed myself doing today

on this live stream was occasionally when someone puts something really interesting or funny or asks a question in the chat, is the fan reaction to the content. Because what I noticed myself doing today on this live stream was occasionally when someone puts something really interesting or funny or asks a question in the chat, I would sort of selectively pull stuff out and highlight it. And think how fun that is for the viewer. I mean, it brings on a whole different dimension, the idea that you're watching the content

and the guy you're watching is actually interacting with you in real time. You compare that to just watching like Jimmy Fallon, where they have these very kind of awkward interviews and it sort of feels like you're watching like robots put on a production. It's a completely, it's so much more human, I guess. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's a really interesting point. It's sort of, you know, this company I'm on the board of right now, OpenWeb, manages the comment section of media companies, but comments are asynchronous. Someone posts a comment and then people comment on the comment, but it creates a lot more

engagement and which creates incremental opportunity for advertising. This is, all right, if we engage the audience, it's like the players yelling back or kicking the ball at an audience member, right? It's sort of, yeah. And it's sort of like, or you know, when the dad in left field catches the ball while holding his kid, right? It just sort of engages the whole audience. I think this is really neat.

I think we should announce now that we're gonna do a live stream so people can see you live, see how the edit really does impact our ability to make you sound intelligent. Yeah, I don't know if we're cut out for live streams. No, we've got faces for podcasting and content for asynchronous. It is very interesting that we're seeing companies start to embrace this. And I think it is all headed in one direction, which is that the press release is dead and newer forms of media like videos, TikToks, live streams.

That is the future. That is the future of public relations. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss, Mia Silverio is our research lead, Jessica Lang is our research associate, Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Profgy Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Tom Lee only on Proffesy Markets. And the dark flies in love, love, love, love. Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS. Because business can be slow, like wading through the mud.

But Amazon Q helps streamline work so tests like summarizing monthly results can be done in no time. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. That's aws.com slash learn more.