TBPN Live - Google's Antitrust Victory | Aparna Chennapragada, Richard Socher, Pablo Palafox, Will Bryk, Charlie Wu
Episode Date: September 3, 2025(01:08) - Google Stock Soars After Antitrust Ruling (22:23) - United States vs. Google White Board Breakdown (32:52) - Ben Thompson Sees Strategic Victory for Google (46:31) - Leadership T...urmoil Hits Nestlé (51:33) - Timeline Reactions (01:11:18) - TBPN City Tier List (01:16:47) - Timeline Reactions (01:55:48) - Aparna Chennapragada, Microsoft's Chief Product Officer for AI at Work, has a rich background in product development, including leadership roles at Google and Robinhood. In the conversation, she discusses integrating AI into Microsoft's productivity tools, emphasizing the balance between adding AI features and enhancing user experience. She highlights the importance of meeting users where they are, whether through chat interfaces or embedded AI functionalities, to make work more efficient and intuitive. (02:14:03) - Breaking: Apple Steps Into AI Search Arena (02:22:42) - Timeline Reactions (02:32:03) - Richard Socher, a prominent AI researcher and entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of You.com, an AI-powered search engine. In the conversation, he discusses You.com's recent $100 million funding round, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, and highlights the platform's rapid growth, now handling over a billion API calls monthly. Socher also addresses the evolving landscape of search, emphasizing the shift towards AI-driven models and the importance of accuracy in search results. (02:42:26) - Pablo Palafox, co-founder and CEO of HappyRobot, discusses the company's recent $44 million Series B funding led by Base10 Partners, with participation from existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He explains that HappyRobot is building AI workers to automate repetitive tasks in the supply chain industry, such as negotiating freight rates, scheduling shipments, and collecting payments, allowing human teams to focus on strategic and higher-value activities. Palafox highlights that their platform integrates with existing enterprise systems and is already in use by over 70 enterprise customers, including industry leaders like DHL and Ryder. (02:48:03) - Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO of Exa, discusses the company's recent $85 million Series B funding round led by Peter Fenton, highlighting Fenton's extensive experience in guiding companies to IPOs and his alignment with Exa's vision. He elaborates on Exa's mission to build a search engine tailored for AI applications, emphasizing the need for AI-specific search infrastructure distinct from traditional human-focused search engines like Google. Bryk also touches on the challenges and strategies involved in developing such a platform, including the acquisition of a GPU cluster to support their research and the importance of training embedding models to enhance search quality. (03:00:32) - Charlie Wu, founder and CEO of Orchard Robotics, discusses the company's recent $22 million Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, which will accelerate the development of AI-powered camera systems for precision crop management. He shares his personal journey, highlighting his family's background in apple farming and his early interest in robotics, leading to the creation of technology that provides farmers with detailed data on fruit count, size, color, and growth rates. Wu emphasizes the transformative impact of their technology on agriculture, enabling farmers to make informed decisions that enhance yield, reduce labor costs, and promote sustainable farming practices. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're watching TVPN!
Today is Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025.
We are live from the TBPN Ultradome.
Let's look at the wide.
Let's get the Ultradome on screen.
There we go.
It's Krust.
You can't really see the troughs.
But anyway, we will be revealing more of the dome as we build it out.
We continue to build out the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.
today. Show off the truss a little bit. Do you have a camera? How are you going to show off the
trust? I don't know. Well, we have a big trust and we're going to hang some lights from it and show
people off. I think Jordy's going to do some pull-ups or something. He's going to climb. I don't know
if we have the insurance for this, Jordi. This is very, very risky. There he is. You can see him
in the background. Anyway, we're talking about Google today. We covered it a little bit on the show
yesterday. But it made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. You'll love to see it when tech
businesses, companies that we love and feature every day on the show. We're pushing
them to rebrand it to the Sand Hill Journal. Yes, the Wall Street Journal. Everything is technology.
Hill Road Journal. Google Dodges, the worst penalties. Search giant can't pay for exclusivity,
but it isn't forced to divest Chrome. So good luck if you're out there bidding for the Chrome
browser. Google's holding on to it. I'm not selling.
You're going to have to drag me out of here saying Chrome at Google.
Arvin just punched the hole through the room.
So did Sam.
Yeah.
I think a lot of those, I mean, the post-mortem on that is like all those companies were kind of trying to like mess with the legal case, right, to just kind of be a thorn and Google side.
Is that basically the takeaway?
Or do they actually want to buy it or something?
It seemed like some sort of weird thing.
I mean, I think a lot of people would love to own Chrome.
Yeah.
But also a lot of people would love to just troll Google in the midst of their high stakes case.
Anyway, so yesterday the news is Google wrapped up the case of the Justice Department, and the result landed somewhere between nothing ever happens, and we are so back, in my opinion.
Haki says, I think we all owe Sundar an apology.
Yes, time to fill out the Sundar-Pachai apology form.
I was not familiar with your game, Sundar.
You're an absolute dog.
Can we pull up the Sundar chart?
Yes, yes.
Do we have a Sundar graphic we can pull up?
He has been looking fantastic.
He has clearly been enjoying bulking season, and so we'll pull that up.
So lots of pundits have been bearish on Google for years now.
I've probably issued a bearish proclamation at some point during the show,
but it was easy to do, right?
Because the narrative was very clean.
They failed to release a consumer LLM chat app as quickly as OpenAI.
And the crazy thing is first mover advantage really, really mattered.
First mover advantage did not matter in class.
out. AWS came out first, GCP came out second, Azure, third, or second and third. We don't
even know, and they're both huge businesses. Very oligopolistic. Not true. Here we go.
There we go. Sundar. We've got to get this revised. But he looks fantastic. Yeah, wow. He really
has been hitting the gym. I'd love to see it. Anyway.
Really filling out the word there. First mover advantage really, really did matter in
consumer. We've seen that with the amount of LLM queries from consumers. Open AI.
running away with it. Obviously, there are lots of other good businesses to building AI,
but in terms of consumer, even though Gemini, that app launched three months later to consumers,
it wasn't fast enough. And it obviously was made, like, it stung all the more because the
Transform was invented at DeepMind at Google. And so you have this narrative of like, they can do science
and they can do consumer products. And so Open AIs running away with it. And it was very easy to be
like Open AI is going to disrupt Google, people are not going to be searching on Google anymore,
blah, blah, blah. And there's still some good, there's some good cases for cracks in the search
business, I think. Semi-analysis has laid out one that seems pretty reasonable.
Yeah, this case could have been a lot different if LLMs hadn't exploded.
Yes, totally, totally. And so the interesting thing is it's been very easy to write the Google
Bear case. At the same time, Bucco Capital Bloch, friend of the show, has been Google bull posting
for a long time.
Ben Thompson has come out
kind of pro-Google,
really outlining what's going on.
We saw that breakdown
of the various parts of their business.
And when you look at it that way,
you're like, wait a minute,
okay, like a couple trillion dollars.
Like, if you're only,
the Wall Street analysts that put this together,
they were only valuing Google search
at like 800 billion.
It was like, cloud was worth a ton.
D-Mind was worth a ton.
Waymo was worth over $100 billion.
YouTube, you add all these things up
and the properties become very,
valuable. So when you look at it in its
totality, all of a sudden, Google looks a lot
more stable where you can say, yeah, maybe
search sells off a little bit over the next 20
years. It's clearly extremely lindy.
And then simultaneously, like, YouTube
gets even better because there's AI generated content.
They have all the ability to generate AI
video, and like, there's just a whole new wave, right?
So there's a million different ways that they can play
this, and Sundar's clearly an absolute
dog and never doubt him
ever. Never again.
But the interesting thing that you mentioned is that
in an odd twist, the pressure from open AI and consumer AI chat interfaces potentially competing
with traditional Google search might have sort of saved the search giant from more severe
penalties. And Ben Gilbert of acquired summed it up well, he said, the court recognized the
advantage Google hasn't paying browsers for distribution, but held off on banning it because of the
new AI disruption threat that they face. I can read from the actual PDF from the case. The court
well recognizes what is skewing a payment ban. Eschewing. Eschewing.
A shoeing. A payment ban may mean for competition due to Google's massive financial advantage
in its superior monetization. Distributors will be incentivized to stick with Google because it can pay more, thus leaving in place the very forces that effectively have made the ecosystem exceptionally resistant to change in the space and early, sorry, the money flowing into the space and how quickly it has arrived is astonishing. These companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades.
except perhaps Microsoft.
They also are moving toward monetization on commercial queries.
These new realities give the court hope that Google
will not simply outbid competitors for disruption
if superior products emerge.
It also weighs on favor of caution
before disadvantaging Google in this highly competitive space.
So for now, Google will be permitted
to pay distributors for default placement.
And if you've been living under a data center,
that is making Google search the default in Safari.
on the iPhone.
There's other placements as well.
Yeah, it's a very, like, online take almost.
It's a very tech Silicon Valley take to see in a court document.
Like the context here is very fascinating to me.
Like, written in this legal document is then venture funding in internet search
was considered Silicon Valley's biggest no-fly zone.
Like, yeah, you can't raise money for something that's competitive with internet search.
Like, it's just not a thing.
But today established a company.
U.com.
Yep.
Trying to play in search.
Founders coming on later today.
They're now an enterprise AI company.
Oh, interesting.
Okay, so full pivot.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sure they're using some of the same foundational tech.
Of course, of course.
Yes.
Today, established technologies are making and startups are receiving hundreds of billions
of dollars in capital to develop Gen.
I products that pose a threat to the primacy of internet, traditional internet search.
Interesting.
Wouldn't it be amazing if, like, the Apple wallet, like by default,
had just like a ramp card in it.
They should just place for like default
ramp in Apple. I feel like we should
make this deal happen somehow. It is the official part
of business. But until that happens, go to
ramp.com, time is money saved both.
Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting
and a whole lot more all in one place.
It's unbelievably good.
Yeah. The other news, I mean, just to give some extra
context on the financial outcomes here,
Tane has been on the show, summed it up the financial
results. Google stock is up 7%
And it's a big, don't never say law of large numbers ever again to me.
So you can pop 7% in a day off of one legal result.
Apple stock is up 3% representing $250 billion of added market cap on the antitrust ruling
that Google can continue to pay Apple, but in a non-exclusive manner and won't need to divest Chrome Android.
So there are a bunch of good takes we're going to go through people who have been studying this way more than that.
Again, the reason that Apple is up is they have 20% of.
20 billion a year coming in from Google that is effectively like one line of code.
And it's, yeah, it's ultra profitable. It's incredible. Yeah. And, and it's something that like,
when I was thinking about that going away, I was like, this is actually like pretty, pretty material to the business.
Like, it's, Apple's a huge business, but we, I mean, we watched that Tim Cook interview from, what, a decade ago.
And he was like, we made 50 billion in revenue, 10 billion in profit. And now they're making, what,
five billion a quarter from this, something like that. Like, this is a, this is a, this is a,
serious amount of money. It's definitely like a material piece of the business.
Yeah, they're sitting at a 36, 36 times earnings. Yeah. So we take away that.
They make a lot of money. Hundreds. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like 500 billion or
something. Hundreds of billions of dollars. Crazy. Okay. So anyway, we're going to run through
Ben Thompson's take because he's been studying this for the entire journey and for years.
And I feel like he knows this stuff way better than we do. Um, but I do have some questions that I
to dig into, we can kind of debate this, Jordy.
So, and by the way, the chat was, uh, was concerned because John
exley was not in the chat, uh, he's on a flight.
Give us an update.
But he got the flight Wi-Fi.
So let's go.
What an absolute God.
And thank you to all the brothers in the chat for checking on, uh, brother John.
Yes, yes, yes.
Uh, it's great.
Uh, so my question is, uh, we're going to go through the timeline.
Uh, Tyler Cosgrove has written out the full United States.
versus Google case timeline we're going to dig through we're also going to go through ben
thompson's but my question that i want to answer is what do these what do these pay for default
deals look like going forward specifically in artificial intelligence there is going to be a
particularly odd dynamic around how lLM queries route on the iPhone by default like the last
possible moment to start taking AI seriously and build like a serious uh AI foundation model
lab. The last
moment that you could credibly do that, I
feel like it was earlier this year.
That was when the last train
left the station. And who
was driving that train? Mark Zuckerberg. And what
did he do? He went and tried to buy everything
that was viable and hire everyone who was
hireable. That weren't viable.
Yeah, for sure. And what he wound
up with was not exactly
a dream team. He didn't get Ilya.
He didn't get Dario. He didn't
get Demis. But he got
a really solid crew, right?
some great business guys.
Some great business guys, some great researchers.
He also just filled out the researcher tiers.
Like he's got a ton of researchers.
So I'd be like he's done a good job.
He wasn't worried about salary caps.
No, no, not at all.
And so we were debating yesterday whether Alex Wang was a good pickup for META.
And my conclusion is like he is the best possible option and I think it'll pencil out.
I think it'll be a good deal.
It is a big acquisition and it'll be interesting to see how we look on that in a decade.
But I think the opportunity is so big, it makes sense.
At the same time, like, what would Apple even do if they wanted to compete in AI?
Like, everyone is taken off.
All the pieces are off the board at this point.
They don't have the DNA for mega acquisitions, so they're not going to go and try and buy
Anthropic.
Like, that's just not how they work.
They don't like writing $100 million checks for talent.
Tim Cook only makes $74.6 million a year.
They're not going to pay some AI researcher $100 million.
It's just not going to happen.
And so everyone else sort of has a dance.
partner at this point. Apple wouldn't just be like trying to turn the cruise ship that is Apple.
They're building an entirely new cruise ship. It's just not going to happen. So I don't think
Apple is going to try and build a serious frontier lab. I think they're going to partner on this.
And the question is, where does it leave them? They have something incredibly valuable. Do you know
how many active iPhone users there are worldwide right now? One and a half billion?
1.4 billion. Isn't that a ton? That just, I feel like I was,
If I had to just guess, I'd be like,
Job's not finished.
Truly.
Truly.
But so, like, that is incredibly valuable because it's not just, it's not just over a billion users.
It's over a billion users that have money.
They can charge $9.99 a month forever, randomly.
Yeah, yeah.
So many different monetization.
But it's also, it's like, it's the top $1 billion, really, like, basically, of, like, earners
because it's the most expensive phone, usually.
And so, and they also have that button on the side that right now activates some,
something that should feel like AI, but is very clearly far from the frontier.
And so the logical outcome feels like a partnership here, but what will the scale and
structure of that partnership be?
If OpenAI really nails Agenda Commerce, as semi-analysis suggests, it wouldn't be crazy
for Open AI to pay Apple billions of dollars to be the default.
And so right now we're thinking about if you push the Siri button, you trigger an LLM inference
query that's very expensive. Every time I hit Chad GBT, it's a couple cents. If I do some crazy
reasoning things, some deep research report, might be a dollar. I don't even know. It's expensive, right?
If I'm sending off some agent to go and like research every single different type of tennis.
You drained an aquifer somewhere. Yeah, that's what it feels like, right? It feels like every time you hit
you hit a query, it's expensive. And so, but that's going to flip. And I think each query is actually
going to be monetizable and they're all going to be, they're basically all going to be profitable like
Google searches. And so if they are profitable, if every time someone hits an LLM, it's not a
cost center, but it's actually a profit center, well, then Open AI can pay to get more search
volume, some more query volume. And so that means that maybe Open AI will wind up paying Apple
billions of dollars to be the default. And of course, they're going to try and build their own
device, and there's a lot of other dynamics, but would they go with Gemini? Because they're already
on Google for the search default, but would they go, would they do that? Or is that to,
is that never, are they never going to be able to compete there because Gemini is so deeply
integrated with Android and the Android phones are over here, kind of doing their own thing?
So, you can imagine. And over this year, there's been rumors bubbling up of Apple in conversations
with Anthropic, with ChatGPT, with Gemini, right? And a lot of these companies have been
throwing around some very big numbers.
with Tim and the Apple team.
And I think they had, at least back then,
they seemed to have some stickers.
So right now, it feels like the Foundation Labs
are going to Apple and saying,
every time we run a query,
it costs us one cent, 10 cents, a dollar, whatever.
You got to pay us to use our amazing intelligence.
Yeah, to bring value to your users.
But I think it might flip.
And I think that each query might actually be profitable.
just at the query level, because there's going to be commerce that's triggered from those.
So in the future, you'll pick up your phone, you'll press the button on the side,
and you can instantly fire off a best in class OpenAI agent to do your bidding.
So you'll say, order me some creatine, and it'll just go do it.
And that will be valuable, and that will actually drive, that will be a profitable query.
And so Open AI could potentially be paying Apple for the right to do that.
So right now, Open AI and Apple do have a partnership in place, but the reporting suggests that no money is directly changing hands, but I don't necessarily expect it to stay that way.
So, I don't know, what's your take?
How do you, do you think that this is reasonable that Open AI could be paying Apple billions of dollars within the next, I don't know, five years?
Or do you think it flips the other way, and Apple is the one shelling out billions of dollars for access to frontier AI models?
models from maybe Anthropic, maybe Open AI, maybe someone else.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, the people that are paying for ChatGBT today probably have a pretty
insane overlap with iPhone customers.
Like, it probably looks something like this.
I think that Sam recognizes, I mean, every consumer tech entrepreneur has, like,
realized how important it is to integrate at the hardware level, right?
This is why Zuck is hell-bent on winning in VR, right?
He's been sick of, like, being at the app layer.
And I know that Sam does not want to be in that same, you know,
why would he pay billions for Johnny Ive and that team?
Like he understands the importance of the hardware layer
and certainly will recognize the leverage that Apple is going to have
over the entire ecosystem.
I think the question is a lot of this just comes down to, in my view, are consumers going to be paying for AI in the long run?
I haven't been totally convinced that the everyday American is going to be spending, certainly not $200 a month.
I don't even know about $20 a month, right?
It's going to ultimately flip.
And so I can see there being a period where Open AI is willing to pay to be like the default intelligence.
product within the Apple ecosystem. But again, it is just going to be a really, it'll be an
interesting dynamic in partnership, right? Because it's going to, it's so, there's so much
tension there because Apple is going to want to, Apple is already selling intelligence as a reason
to upgrade the iPhone, right? And they've gotten lawsuits over this because they sold Apple
intelligence and then people are like, this isn't very smart at all. What did it, what did I just
buy, right? And so are they going to be incentivized to say, even 70 IQ is a form of intelligence.
It's just a low level of intelligence.
They didn't say Apple high IQ intelligence.
They didn't say Apple super intelligence.
They just said Apple intelligence.
It has some level of intelligence.
Apple, room temp.
Room temp, intelligence.
Room temp, high Apple.
What do you think, Tyler?
Do you think that Open AI will be paying Apple?
Or do you think Apple will be paying other foundation labs?
Where will the flow of money go in the next few years?
Yeah, I don't really see it.
flipping very soon to where like prompts or tokens are like actually super profitable
because you need like both massive you need like way better capabilities and it needs to be
way more efficient because like if you just have more capabilities still like right now
most people are not paying for chat chabit they're just using the you know free plan which is like
if you compare i mean if you compare 4 oh like look at like five months ago if you compare 40 to like
oh three yeah it was like massive you know difference and people still weren't paying in cost or
in in in capabilities yeah yeah and people still weren't paying so you need to be like way better
you know for people to actually start paying or you need to be way cheaper yeah I don't know if I
agree with that I I feel like 4-0 was definitely good enough people were obsessed with it people were
like falling in love with it right even meek mill like I understand as a power user like didn't get that
much out of it, but...
Yeah, but I think you, like, if you ask normal people
what they think of, like, AI, they're like, oh, yeah, this is not going to
take my job at all. Yeah. When in reality, if you
used, like, O3, and they, if they used O3 every day, if they were
a power user, they'd be, I think they'd be way more bullish on
AI generally. Yeah. So I think that
might be evidence that people, like, I don't know,
are not... I think, I mean, one crazy
dynamic is Apple says, I mean, if they were to do
a deal with Open AI, they could just say, like,
great, like, we're going to sign up every, like,
How many paying subs do you have?
Great, we're gonna start heavily.
If Apple just starts heavily pushing chat GPT,
they will by default get there 30% from the app store, right?
But they could work out.
So like this could end up being like,
even if Open AI is not directly paying Apple for it,
it could end up generating.
I don't think it's enough.
You don't think it's enough?
I don't think it's enough money for the value
that it'll bring on, if it was actually integrated
into like the Siri button at the low level,
I can just press a button and say,
order me creatine.
Order me creatine and it knows my address
because it knows my home address
from my contact in the, in there.
It has my payment information saved.
It does all of that.
Like, I don't know if taking 30% of my chat GPT subscription
if I subscribe and if I subscribed on mobile,
but really most people are going to subscribe on desktop
and opening eyes is going to be constantly being like,
Hey, go over here and, like, use a web view to, like, subscribe this way and stuff.
I don't know.
It'll be interesting to see how it pencils out.
I feel like there's going to be some new deal that's going to happen.
Someone's going to pay.
Someone's going to bid.
Someone's going to pay out.
Yeah, the Google team says, hey, we're already paying $20 billion.
Why don't we double it to be, Gemini be the default?
Can you imagine?
I mean, if Gemini was the default on iPhone, that would be bizarre.
But, I mean, it does kind of like it does kind of match with the with the search deal, right?
Anyway, let's read through Ben Thompson.
Maybe we maybe go through the history first to get us up to speed, Tyler.
Do you, do you mind taking us through it?
So this is the United States versus Google.
Yeah.
Which started in 2020.
2020 starts in October 2020.
So that's under Trump.
Okay.
So yeah, I think let's just go over like kind of the central claim of the actual case first.
So it's basically that Google is violating the Antitrust Act of 1890.
It's wild to think about, you know, before Donald Trump was a technology founder
with True Social, there was a time where he was beefing with big tech.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So long ago.
Instead of just competing.
Oh, thanks for getting us up on VHS.
We needed this.
Fantastic.
Only possible on Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations.
Multi-stream your VHS tapes and reach.
your audience, wherever they are, head over to Restre. It truly is, technology is incredible.
Yes. Also, yeah, continue. Okay, so, so Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. I also put some of the
the victims, previous victims of this act. So we see standard oil.
Standard oil. American Tobacco Company, U.S. Steel, AT&T, this is what broke up Bell Labs.
Probably set us back a couple decades. Do you know who founded Bell Labs?
Pop quiz. Who founded Bell Labs? Wait, is it like
Oh, I don't know. Is it Claude Shannon?
No?
No.
Who founded Bell Labs?
Oh.
Bell.
Alexander Graham Bell?
Oh, Alexander Graham Bell.
Yeah, that's correct.
Yep.
Alexander Graham Bell started Bell Labs.
Let's go.
We don't know how to name.
We don't know how to name companies.
I know.
I was looking at the names.
Standard oil.
American tobacco.
U.S. steel.
What is the A and AT&T stand for?
Is that America?
American technology and
Let me ask Gemini.
Okay.
What does A.T.
Okay. Anyway, continue. And then Microsoft, of course, it was a headache for Bill Gates for his
entire career until you retired. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. American Telephone and
Telegraph. Oh, that's so good. When you pick a name like that and you actually, you understand the job
and you're just like, yeah, standard oil. I'm going to standardize oil. I need a name for my
telephone and telegraph company. What about American Telephone and Telegraph Company?
Okay. Okay. Anyway, sorry.
Okay, so basically the claim is that they're legally monopolizing the search engine and the advertising markets, like, in search.
Yep.
So they're locking up distribution.
They're self-reinforcing barriers to entry.
And the evidence is that they pay billions to Apple and other vendors.
Exactly.
Probably hundreds of billions at this point, because it's been like $10 billion for decades.
Yeah, yeah.
So, wow, they're up.
So that is, they filed the case, DOJ, in 2020.
Wait, should we start with the history of Google Search and Safari and then run through this?
So that might be better.
So, yeah.
Okay, so Google Search and Safari.
So 2002.
2002.
This is pre-Iphone.
Yeah, this is pre-Iphone.
This is just on Safari on the, I guess, the Mac or whatever it was.
So Google is the default there.
It's just like.
They just, Apple just picked that because it's the best one.
It's just the best thing.
They just put it in.
Yeah, there's no like deal or anything.
So Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices since 2002.
Yep.
and we don't know specifics most recently is $20 billion annually,
but it's been an over 20-year partnership.
I mean, that's a crazy, it's crazy to go.
I mean, Google's founded late September 1998.
And then by 2002, you're the default on Apple, like the previous era,
biggest computing company.
I mean, I guess Apple wasn't like what it is today back in 2002,
kind of pre-Iphone.
It was certainly not like the biggest company in the world.
But still, like, pre- Tyler, too.
Tyler's true.
I mean...
Three years?
2005.
Wow.
Hey, if you want to feel old, born in 2005.
Born in 2005.
Okay, so anyway, Sergey Brin, what does he do?
So 2005, Sergey Brin suggests some kind of revenue share.
They always call it a revenue share.
Just out of the goodness of his heart?
What is he thinking?
That's crazy.
I have to assume there's like there's some competition he's seeing it on the horizon.
Okay, yeah.
But yeah, I like that he, they always call it a revenue share.
They don't, they're not paying.
be the default they're just helping a brother out you know and then um 2007 well yeah 2007
2009 these are like the real negotiations they're like it's like circuit brent says like oh yeah
we need a revenue share but then when it comes down to it he's like well you know let's slow
down let's push the brakes a little bit the numbers are getting a little high um and then basically
the actual like numbers are not public yeah um they really only show up uh as a result of this case like
Sure.
Oh, after the fact.
So we learned this through the case.
We didn't know for years.
Wow.
So it's not really until 2021.
So there was like a full decade where people were like, yeah, like Google's probably
paying Apple something.
Yeah, but hiding, hiding a $30 million.
$20 billion line item and you're.
You can do it if I believe the disclosure rules in SEC filings or something like if it's a,
if it's a division of the company that reports the CEO, then you have to break out the
financials. This is like YouTube. This is the story of like AWS when we first got the
AWS financials. So if it's just something like like you know is some deal it's just one
deal like it's not even a it's not even like a whole division of the company. It's a deal I did
with Steve. Yeah it's just like other other income or something like I don't know. Yeah so yeah so
yeah so 2021 it's kind of revealed or estimated at least that payments are around 20 billion a year
And then, 2023, this is also a result of the case.
Apple is, like, confirmed to be taking 36% of the revenue from Safari that Google makes.
Okay.
So it's similar to their app store revenue, a little bit higher, 36%.
Yeah.
And that's probably how they got to the number.
No way.
That's pretty crazy that Google's making $6 billion off of.
I never knew they got where they were getting 36% for the big man.
For the big man.
That's crazy.
Yeah, and then 2025.
We're like, we know you.
paid to be here but I'm gonna need a cut too yeah wow yeah okay so let's go
through the full case the case so September 2023 this is really the first like
actual like trial it's the bench trial I don't really know what that is but
August 24 is the actual like initial judgment so this is Google is in fact violating
antitrust yeah like something needs to be done we don't know what is to be done
But we're going to do, but then we will eventually decide what the punishment is.
Yeah.
But they are guilty.
They are guilty.
They were found guilty.
There's no, you know, results like, what are they going to do?
Yes.
Yeah, they're guilty.
And then it's not until April of 2025.
So this is five years after the, you know, it was actually filed.
There's the remedies trial.
I think that's what it's.
Yeah.
So this is like what is actually to be done.
Sure.
Now, like we know that they're a monopoly.
What do we do about it?
And then it wasn't until.
I guess yesterday that it was actually the verdict was.
Yeah, I got it.
So I think we already went through some of the verdict,
but it's the judge denied the DOJ's request
for forest divestiture of Chrome and Android.
They ordered Google to end exclusive distribution agreements.
So that's like, I think we talked about this too with Apple.
You can't like just, it can't be exclusive to Apple
the like payments or whatever.
Yeah, what does that mean in practice?
It can't be exclusive, so they have to pay, like,
Xiaomi or something?
Are we talking about other phone manufacturers?
Are we talking about other search engines?
Like, I know that, like, it's not like if I go into my safari settings,
I can't pick bang.
Like, I can still pick other things.
It's just the default that they're paying for.
Yeah.
To dig into that.
Jordi, do you want to look that up or something?
I'm asking Gemini.
Okay, cool.
I don't, yeah, it's kind of like legalese.
And then there's mandating Google to share search index and user.
Basically sharing data with competitors.
I don't understand the exclusive.
So Google pays Mozilla.
Mozilla basically wouldn't survive without Google, apparently.
It's like a very significant amount of their revenue, which is funny because Google obviously competes with Chrome.
With Chrome.
And then they do this with device manufacturers like Samsung.
that just make, you know, continue to make Chrome
and Google search pre-installed.
Sure, sure.
Okay, and then what's the last one?
Search index, sharing of the search index
and user interaction data with rivals.
So was that, bang, I guess?
Yeah, so I guess this means,
these are all basically direct quotes
from the actual, like, file.
But I assume it means that they have to just share
some of the actual, like, index data
from like whatever page rank is.
they have to like put out publicly.
So we got to hammer the chief product officer of Microsoft today about Bing and what this means.
Because yeah, I mean, there's got to be a way to make money off this if you're Microsoft.
This is the way to do it.
Okay, anyway, anything else from the history?
Okay, so just to be clear, they prevent exclusive contracts.
So Google is barred from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts that give it search engine,
Chrome, Google Assistant or Gemini app a monopoly position.
on a device.
So basically they can't go to a smartphone manufacturer
and say you just can't host any other.
Sure, sure.
In the chat, Paracletes says Google's only going to share
their search data with, like, other top three companies.
It's still remaining a monopoly.
Interesting.
And people enjoy the VHS.
So thank you for tuning in.
Also, so these rules also apply to like Gen.
All this also applies to like Gemini,
if they want to do the same, you know,
if they want to lease it to Apple or whatever,
all the same rules apply about
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Let's run through Ben Thompson's take.
So he kicks it off with Google's remedy decision,
Alphabet Inc. will be required to share
online search data with rivals
while avoiding harsher penalties,
including the forced sale.
we know this. Google's statement was short and sweet. Earlier today, U.S. Court overseeing the DOJ's
lawsuit over how we distribute search, issued a decision on next steps. Google closes,
says, as always, we're continuing to focus on what matters, building innovative products
that people choose to love, choose and love. That's a statement of a company that lost some battles
but won the war, in my estimation, says Ben Thompson in Stratory, which you should go subscribe to.
There are some cursory objections to Judge Metta's decision, but by and large, that statement
exudes relief and rightfully so. The company that is truly breathing, the company is truly
breathing easier today, however, is Apple. Apple's actually breathing easier because they're
getting that sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet 20, 36% off the top. 99% margin 20 billion a year.
The first set of remedies were the ones that Google proposed and has already implemented
namely ending the exclusive agreements that were the foundation of Judge Mehta's original finding of liability.
So let's see.
I want to know what these actual remedies are.
Here we go.
Again, this is literally illegal behavior.
What?
We should just highlight again.
So Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contractor relating to the distribution of search, Chrome, Assistant, and Gemini.
Google shall not enter or maintain any agreement that conditions, the license,
of the Play Store or any other Google application on the distribution preloading or placement
of Google search Chrome.
This is the bundling thing.
So a lot of the antitrust cases hinge on bundling.
You say, oh, you can't have the Play Store on your Android phone unless you're defaulting to
search or you have to have Chrome pre-installed if you want access to search.
Like all of that stuff is seen as anti-connected.
And so Ben says, again, this is literally illegal behavior.
so ending it was the bare minimum.
Anti-trust precedent, however, dictates that Judge Meta go further, again, from the opinion.
This is from Meta.
Yeah.
Oh, this is good too.
So they cannot enter or maintain an agreement that prohibits any partner, either Apple or Samsung,
from simultaneously distributing any other search engine, browser, or GenAI product.
So Google can't go to someone and say,
and say, hey, you, in order to have search as your default or Google search or whatever
deal we're doing or whatever we're paying you, you can't have Anthropic pre-installed or you
can't have Mozilla pre-installed.
Like, you can't be in the contract.
Yeah, can't be in the contract.
And that is illegal behavior.
And so ending it is the bare minimum, says Ben Thompson.
Antitrust precedent, however, dictates that Judge Mehta go further.
Again, from the opinion, the question now is,
what to do about Google's violations precedent requires fashioning antitrust remedies that
effectively pry open to competition, a market that has been closed by a monopolist's illegal
restraints.
Denying the fruits of the violation is a valid objective, and so, too, is ensuring that
anti-competitive behavior will not recur in the same or related ways.
The court has broad discretion to impose remedies to accomplish those aims.
Judge Meta laid out four, fruits of the violation.
The court found that the agreements had four main anti-competitive effects.
They, one, foreclosed a substantial portion of the relevant markets, thus impairing rivals' opportunities to compete.
Two, denied rivals access to user queries or scale needed to effectively compete.
Three, reduce the incentive to invest or innovate in search.
And four, enabled Google to increase text ad prices without any meaningful competitive restraint,
thereby allowing Google to earn monopoly profits to secure the next iteration of exclusive deals
through higher revenue share payments.
These effects did not persist.
Independently together, they enabled Google
to widen the moats and pull up draw bridges
to ward off competition.
Great analogy.
Judge Meta attempts to address number two necessary scale
by forcing Google to share various types of data,
including Google's search index,
but not the actual data from the web pages
and the index of the output of Google's page rank algorithm.
Competitors, which explicitly include GenAI providers,
will get a one-time snapshot, not an ongoing one.
and only need to pay Google's marginal cost
for providing the information.
User click and query data showing what results users clicked on.
Competitors will get this data at least twice,
but the final number will be determined
by the technical committee.
The court will set up and ever see.
Do you fully understand, like,
yeah, that's a very, very odd, odd, like,
change and remedy.
Like, I guess it, like, lets people catch up
to where things are.
It feels like the remedy is,
like there has been this unfair advantage for Google for years.
We're letting everyone catch up and then we're creating like a fair race,
but we're restarting the race and then everyone can go out and do whatever they want.
But we're not permanently making Google share everything,
but we're making a one-time catch-up of like data, I guess.
Is that what's going on?
I don't know.
Tossin some scraps of some data.
That's what it seems like.
So we'll continue with Ben Thompson.
In addition, Google needs to make its web search results available via syndication
at ordinary commercial terms for five years.
years, capped at 40% of an alternative search engine's annual queries. These are all worthwhile remedies.
The problem, however, is that it is that that that's it, the Google patronage network.
So there is a lot here. And he does talk about Bing. I'm going to work through the remaining
fruits, three fruits backwards. First or fourth, Judge Meta decided that Google sharing user click
data for ads was both a request too broad and also the court didn't know what data needed to be
disclosed, so that one was discarded. The third fruit, meanwhile, is getting a lot of attention
because Judge Meta said that basically no longer existed. Generative AI products are now a
competitor to search and are getting plenty of funding. This is what we talked about earlier.
Very interesting to see that there is a lot of competition there. In early 2023, when the new Bing
with generative AI search, OpenAI, Sam Altman told Ben Thompson's an strategic interview,
I think it's fabulous for both of us. I think there's so much upside for
both of us here, we're going to discover what these new models can do. But if we're sitting on
a lethargic search monopoly and had to think about a world where this was going to be a real
challenge to the way that monetization of this works and new ad units and maybe even temporary
downward pressure, I would not feel great about that. Do you know what that lethargic search
monopoly does feel great about? Being able to keep the fruits of its anti-competitive actions because
OpenAI exists. That's crazy. Anyway, that leaves one point and the Apple cannot
action, Judge Meta admits that a ban on Google payments for search placement would have an
impact on the market, the rationale for a payment plan, payment ban is straightforward, it would
pry open the market to competition, and we talked about this a little bit earlier. And yet, Judge
Meta declined because of the harm-ending payments would cause to recipients of those payments,
leading to a list of downstream effects, quotes from the opinion, lost competition and innovation
from small developers in the browser market, fewer products, and less product innovation from
Apple, apparently they don't have enough money.
Otherwise, that is a funny, funny conclusion.
Higher mobile phone prices and less innovative phone features.
Judge Meta further argued that the ultimate outcome would harm consumer welfare,
and that was that.
The entire section was, in fact, a total endorsement of the Google approach.
Ben described in friendly Google and enemy remedies.
Yeah, this is great.
The cleverness from Ben, the cleverness of Google strategy was their focus on making friends
instead of enemies, thus motivating Apple in particular to not even try.
Tech company, particularly advertising-based ones, famously generate huge amounts of consumer
surplus. Yes, Google makes a lot of money showing you ads, but even at a $300 billion-plus run
rate, the company is surely generating far more value for consumers than it is capturing.
That is, in itself, some degree of defense for the company. I should note much as standard oil
brought light to every level of society. What is notable about these contractual agreements, though,
is how Google has been generating surplus for everyone else in the tech industry.
Maybe this is a good thing.
It's certainly good for Mozilla, which gets around 80% of its revenue from its Google deal.
It has been good for device makers commoditized by Android, who have an opportunity for scraps of profit.
It has certainly been profitable for Apple, which has seen its high margin services revenue skyrocket,
thanks in part to the $20 billion per year of pure profit it gets from Google without needing to make any level of commensurate investment.
So what Ben actually recommended...
And one more line here from an old, from Judge Meta, he says,
the revenue share payments shape the market for general search services in Google's favor.
They provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything.
They effectively make the ecosystem resistant to change.
And their net effect is to basically freeze the ecosystem in place.
Apple's like, why would, like, we could compete in search,
but why would we if we can get $20 billion a year?
And the device manufacturers, they say, like, I mean, technically they could create a new search engine or new intelligence, but we could just get a revenue share from Google.
There was a, I feel like there was a dust up back in the Steve Jobs era over Siri and whether Siri counted as a search engine and where the Siri project would go, because at a certain point, search had become so well defined in terms of the technology that you need to actually.
build a search engine that Apple could do it similar to training a foundation model now like
it's something that if you have the money and you have the talent you can just do it and there are a
number of companies that have done it the problem is the distribution like there are other
search engines out there duck duck go but the the problem is actually getting the aggregation of
everyone actually showing up and getting the flywheel and getting the uh and making it making it
a default and Apple has the ability to make something a default but uh you're basically paying them
off to not go and build their own search engine.
And yeah, it's this like, there's, there's this tension.
Anyway, Ben Thompson recommended that Judge Rueh Meta do the following back when he was
writing about this case earlier.
Ben said, this is why, ultimately, I am comfortable with the implications of my framework and
why I think the answer to the remedy question is an injunction against Google making any
sort of payments or revenue share for search. If you're a monopoly, you don't get to extend your
advantage with contracts, period. Now do most favored nation clauses. More broadly, we tend to think
of monopolies as being mean. The problem with aggregators is that they have the temptation to
be too nice. It has been very profitable to be Google's friend. I think consumers and Google are better
off if the company has a few more enemies. So basically, don't pay Apple at all. What will happen,
Apple becomes an enemy. Apple partners up with a different search engine, builds their own,
creates more competition, maybe add prices on Google go down, maybe there's more consumer
surplus. I think that's kind of what Ben's initial take was. But Judge Meta disagreed.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because if you take away, you make it so that Google can
pay for search placements, and Mozilla dies, and then browsers become less competitive.
Yeah, yeah, that is the flip side of the coin, which is very interesting.
Usually you would assume that it's the opposite.
You would assume that they're maintaining this monopoly, but in fact, they're kind of, at least
they're maintaining their search monopoly, but then they're propping up an oligopoly in browsing
because they're like, oh, it's okay, because the browsers are just a window into the actual
high profitable, highly profitable search results.
So, Judge Meta disagreed because Google strategy is sharing.
its monopoly profits was deemed too important to undo.
Note the paradox.
Judge Meta is implicitly admitting that as long as Google is able to pay for search placement,
they will in fact continue to dominate search placement.
After all, continued Google dominance is a prerequisite to Google money continuing to flow,
thus avoiding the downstream effects Judge Meta is concerned about.
So he did allow for the fact that not banning payments might be a mistake.
So he says, so for now Google will be a pay.
permitted to pay distributors for default placement.
There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work.
Still, judges must be open to clarifying and reconsidering their decrees in light of changing
or unchanging market realities.
The court is thus prepared to revisit a payment ban or a lesser remedy if competition is not
substantially restored through the remedies the court does impose.
Anyway, let's move on.
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Annie says,
B. Nestle, hire a French CEO.
Act surprised that the Frenchman is having
taboo, debauchous relations on the job.
Their president literally married to his child.
Oh, you haven't heard about this?
So this was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
And we didn't get to it.
And then it was also in the Wall Street Journal today.
Pull it up.
And we've got to pull it up.
So Nestle has fired their CEO following a probe of a romantic relationship with a subordinate.
You can't even marry your childhood teacher in this country?
No, you can.
You can't have a romantic relationship with a subordinate if you are running Nestle.
So Laurent frishe.
I don't know how to pronounce the X in that name, but Laurent is out after just a
a year at the top job of the food giant, which is trying to sell a number of underperforming
businesses, they dismissed the CEO with immediate effect following an investigation into an
undisclosed romantic relationship with the direct subordinate that breached the group's code
of conduct.
The Swiss maker of Nescafe coffee, Purina Petfood, said Monday that his board had ordered
the probe overseen by Chairman Paul Bulk and lead independent director, Pablo Isla,
Isla,
with support of an independent
outside counsel.
This was a necessary decision.
Decision, they said.
Nestle's values and governance
are strong foundations of our company,
and I thank Laurent for his years of service
at Nestle.
They didn't identify the employee
in the relationship,
but it's a dramatic shift
in the top echelons of Nestle
in little more than a year.
He, this CEO, Laurent,
had replaced CEO Mark Schneider
in a bid to revive,
growth is the company grappled with sluggish sales. He was the first outsider to run Nestle
since 1922. He was dismissed because he wasn't seen by his board of directors as a cultural
fit. The new guy, Laurent, who just got fired, who had previously run businesses at Nestle in
Europe and Latin America, took the helm of the company in September of 2024, so less than
a year or exactly a year. In July, they were reviewing some
some underperforming brands, but let's see, where is it?
The company has been, so he isn't, so basically the, he gets fired, and then today he's in,
he's in the news again, where is it, it's here, I think.
Not again.
He's in again, with a detail.
So an anonymous tip led to the fall of Nestle's CEO.
Nestle's chief executive Laurent Frischet, his downfall started with an anonymous tip.
to an internal hotline called Speak Up.
Laurent was having an intimate relationship.
I guess this tip initially came through
like last year or something,
so it had been bubbling up.
Yeah.
So he was having an intimate relationship
with a marketing executive who reported to him,
the tipster reported.
The couple initially denied any relationship.
It took two investigations,
more hotline reports,
and a letter to the Nestle chairman
before the food company acted.
He didn't respond to request for,
He didn't respond to requests for comment.
Shocking.
Gabe sent a unhinged message in the chat.
He says, who cares about this nonsense?
The divorce rate is like 50%.
Makes your brand more personable if your CEO is cheating on his wife.
The real question that we need to dig into is how is Nestle going to come back from this?
They got to get Gwyneth Paltrow or something to do some viral video.
Yeah, there's a playbook now.
So the executive's downfall throws Nestle into disarray after the company
abruptly ousted its previous chief
for underperformance. Mark says it's
Loron. Lorone.
Lorone. It's not
Laurent. Laurent. Larent. Oh,
La Roan. La Roan. Thank you.
La Roan. Wait, how do you pronounce
Fras Shea? Is that? Am I close on that?
I don't know. He was nest quickly
he was nest quickly escorted out of the
office. That's really good.
Absolutely great chatter.
So Loron
was 63 years old and was Nestle since 1986.
He'd refocused the company on Corbyn.
86.
A 40-year run.
Almost.
40-year run.
20 years before.
He was like 24 when he joined the company.
20 years before Tyler was born.
Yes.
Put everything in the context.
I mean, it's important.
Wow.
So you're telling me that America was founded 220 years before Tyler was born.
Wow.
Wow.
So the French CEO slashed cost to reinvest in more promising products, such as cold coffee and shored up Nestle's executive team at the company's headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva in Veve Switzerland.
I guess I'm probably mispronouncing that too.
His Swiss successor, Philip Navratil, faces the task of arresting a year-long slide in the company shares and restoring calm after scandals, snafus, and executive departures.
Anyway, there's more.
Well, speaking of corporate
controversy, the
Los Angeles Clippers and owner
Steve Balmer are accused of paying
star Kauai Leonard $28
million for a no-show job
as a way to circumvent
the NBA salary cap,
according to a report by
Pablo Tori.
Tori laid out the alleged scandal
on his program, Pablo Tori finds
out earlier today,
the show, which features plenty of
direct quotes from legal documents, made the argument that Leonard was paid $28 million through a company
owned by Balmer to essentially do nothing.
Balmer is accused of using this agreement as a way to pay Leonard more than his contract,
which, if true, is a violation of NBA rules.
The entire situation revolves-
I thought there was no tax on tips.
I thought you could just tip a player if you really like them.
And wouldn't that not count on the salary cap?
Should have just been tipping.
I feel like you should have just been tipping.
And that tip-28-mill, do your favorite?
player on the team. Why not?
The entire situation revolves around a now bankrupt company called Aspiration, which is a tree
planting service funded by Balmer. So I think tree planting feels like a little bit disingenuous.
This was, I think it was a fintech company that had sort of an eco angle to it.
It would plant a tree every time you like saved a dollar on the app.
Yeah, every time you spend, you know, something like that.
And so, yeah, Balmer had invested a lot of money in this company, and, yeah, they were effectively paying him as a spokesperson, but in the contract with Kauai's, one of Kauai's entities, stated that Leonard could decline to proceed with any action desired by the company.
So they could say like, hey, you want to do this?
And he could say, nah, no thanks.
And his contract was still valid.
He wasn't violating anything.
It is an odd choice.
I feel like if you're Balmer and you're a multi-billion,
I mean, he's one of the richest people in the world, right?
And your goal is to get someone who you're effectively doing business with on the court.
He's a basketball player.
Your goal is to get him an extra $28 million.
isn't there a better way to do that?
Like, isn't there a way to, like, set up some fund that's, you know, you cut him in on
and then you're actually, like, doing something economically valuable, like...
Go invests, get into Founders Fund, growth fund.
I mean, that's one option.
But honestly, it's like, couldn't you just make some calls and get him more Super Bowl ads
and get him more, like, ad deals?
Like, just make some calls and get some, like, legitimate business.
It doesn't seem like that crazy of a number to try and pull together, like somewhat,
like much more legitimately, you know, like there are probably advertisers out there who would
say, oh, yeah, like, we'll, we'll pay them a couple million dollars to be like our, you know,
the face of our brand.
28 million is a lot, though, for a company that had only raised a couple hundred million dollars.
No, what I'm saying is that, like, is it like, I mean, the question, the question to me is
power at Microsoft to say, hey, we're rolling out a new version of Excel and you're going to
be the face of the campaign. A new clipie is going to be Kauai. A little Kauai hanging out.
I love it. Hanging out. Helping you. There's got to be some other way to help. The way is
to actually make him an ambassador for the company. I don't think there's anything illegal about
a basketball player getting a major endorsement deal outside of their team. But I think that
the thing that ticks it off is, you know, really big number. And then, uh, not doing any,
not doing, they, they, they, they, they weren't able to find any content that Kauai was in related
to aspiration. So signing this big sort of like, if you sign a deal with a company to promote them,
you have to run ads for them. You have to tell the audience about graphite.
Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub chip higher quality software
faster get started for free. We're not. Always tell you.
They're not paying us to get around the podcast or salary cap.
No way.
Yeah.
I mean,
I read this and I just,
I was feeling so grateful that we don't have any salary caps in business.
Yes.
Yes.
100%.
We wouldn't have been able to retain.
We wouldn't have been able to retain title.
I also don't know if I,
I don't know that I feel that this story is finished.
It feels like it's viral and there's some allegations.
But I will be reserving my judgment until I hear.
Steve Balmer.
Yeah, the Clippers already responded.
They said neither Mr. Balmer nor the Clippers
circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to aspiration.
Any contrary assertion is provably false.
Yeah, it's like an anonymous inside source from Pablo Torre founds out.
I mean, I do think if you care about basketball and you care about this,
if you're another team, are you not like deeply frustrated?
If it's true, it might not be true.
True. He might have been like, yeah, I had a deal. We signed the deal. It was $28 million. They did not, they were not very good at planting trees. And so they didn't pay me anything. And I didn't do any promotion for them. So yes, there's technically a contract. Or there could not be a contract. It could be this anonymous source just saying like whatever. I mean, this is not an anonymous source. It's as an inside source. I mean, but he's like a capital J. J. Jerno. Pablo Torre? Yeah. Oh, okay. I don't know. Yeah. He seems. Is he at the, he seems.
Athletic or something?
Doing pretty legit journalism.
Okay.
But the funny thing is, so Leonard,
it's not anonymous?
Leonard joined the Clippers on a three-year,
$104 million deal in 2019,
re-upped in 2021 for $176 million,
and then re-upped again in 2024 for a three-year,
$149 million extension.
And so the $28 million is like almost like a rounding error in all of this.
I mean, it's a big number,
but at the same time, like would he not have joined the Clippers?
Yeah.
Like, would he have gone?
somewhere else if he hadn't gotten this.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe the nature of the salary cap is,
like there is more cap space
at another team. NBA fans in the chat.
Yeah, let me know.
Does this piss you off or is this fair game
for Kauai Leonard to be the face of,
the faceless face of aspiration?
Yeah.
Aspiration isn't even around anymore.
They're chapter 11.
There are plenty of sports with no
salary caps right where they can just spend as much as possible isn't f1 kind of like that maybe maybe kawai
just hates trees and wanted to put this company in the dirt who knows who knows um anyway we have
massive news from one of our sponsors shane copeland over at polymarket polymarket has been given
the green light to go live in the united states of america by the cfd let's go congratulations to
Shane. He has the eagle
in his bio, or in
his name tag, and that
is the most appropriate sound effect
for today. Credit to the commission
and staff for their impressive work. The process
has been accomplished in record timing.
Fantastic
turn of events. What a story,
what Mike Wenger's there
in the reply saying ban to approval
in three and a half years is an absolute
speed run. Very, very
difficult to to get new things done in the government generally. It's very tricky and
they figured it out. So congrats to everyone over there. And if you're tracking, if you're tracking
any news, head over to Polymarket to check it out. We, of course, have Polymarket powering our
ticker down there. Anyway, I want your review of the new Aston Martin Vanquish, particularly this one.
This is your favorite color way, right? Green over tan? Yes. So it's green over tan. It's finished
in historic California sage over 21-inch liquid silver wheels.
It features a 5.2-liter V-12 twin turbo with 835 horsepower and 1,001 newton meters of torque.
I absolutely love the vanquish.
I think I want to pick one up when they're half off in two years.
You think there'll be a depreciation?
I think this is like a half a million dollar car right now.
It feels like it's going to be a quarter million dollar car in a couple years.
Why do you think Aston Martin's depreciate so much faster than Ferraris?
Is it just the limited run nature?
What's driving?
One big issue over the last few years has been the
lack of James Bond movies.
Internal electronics.
Oh, yeah.
So until the last two years, they were extremely dated.
Is that not true for Ferrari?
Is Ferrari known for like amazing car play integrations?
I mean, not to the same.
agree. I mean, if you buy a 2021
Asson Martin, it feels like
sitting in a car from like 15 years
ago, and people just don't like that, right?
Like, I've looked at them and I'm like, if I'm
driving this around L.A. Can you just rip all
that out and get one of those aftermarket things with like
20, 12, 12 inch
subwifers in the back?
It's kind of janky. I think you'd put it on
spinners and take it to the Pimp My Ride
shop with Exhibit and
throw a TV in the front.
I don't know. Or you can pull off the
you know what the cops do, where they put the full lap
next to them. Have you seen that?
Or you pull up next to a police officer?
Oh, yeah. And they have the full laptop. And you're like, wait, you're pulling somebody over
for using their phone. And you're on your laptop.
You're watching TBPN.
A little hypocritical, don't you think?
Oh, well.
But, uh, yes, why?
Yeah, why do you think this will change? I think this will change. Do they just make too
many of them or something? Or they're living? Lawrence Stroll is out to win in the category.
He's taking very seriously. They've, they've, um,
their manufacturers like guarantees now they've made it a much easier decision we'll see we'll see
how these do I still think they lack the kind of like cult the scale of the cult
following that that obviously Portia has but I think in this case I like this color
way I think green on tan the meta it's timeless but I think the meta is fading and
brown on brown
Yeah, you saw Brown on Brown on Brown Porsche at the gym yesterday.
And I tried to buy it.
Jumped out of the car and I go shake the person down and tried it.
Made it made a bid.
Well, I just said, would you sell me your car?
You said that?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't realize that's why you went out.
Woman said no.
That's hilarious.
But Brown on Brown.
The most bullish catalyst for this vanquish going asymptotic and going into the stratosphere
in terms of price, Aston Martin is, of course, partnered with public.com.
That's right.
And so all the public.com fans, the investors who take it seriously, because they have multi-asset investing industry leading yields, trusted by millions, all the public.
All the public.com fans will buy Aston Martins now.
And public is a sponsor of the U.S. Open and some tennis players.
So they send us some balls.
Is Aston Martin paying public?
Whoa, that's a good sound.
Smell it.
I don't think, I don't think you're supposed to smell it.
That's the rule number one of opening a ball of tennis and tennis ball.
Trying to kill me, John.
Anyways, these are fantastic.
This is really cool.
We got to get it.
I mean, we almost have room for court here.
Now, are those actually tennis balls or could those be used for some of the less popular sports, the Padel and the pickle ball?
Oh, I think it would be wrong to use these for anything but tennis.
Does Padel or pickle have like this different ball?
Pickle ball does.
Pickle ball has a phone ball.
What does Padel use?
I don't know.
Anyway, thank you to the public.
No, Padel have higher pressure, thicker, felt, slightly larger size.
Okay, interesting.
Well.
Standard tennis balls are, Padel is smaller, I guess.
Anyways.
Yes.
Well, Clarna is going public.
And Eli says,
Friendly IPO, Inda.
Ooh, that's a good one.
It says, interest in this IPO, but $35 seems like a lot to pay all at once.
would it be possible to split
up into four interest-free payments.
Of course, there is.
This is what that company is what basic capital is doing.
They're basically bringing leverage to the people for your 401K.
Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah, I mean, we talked to Max Levchen in a firm.
We've talked to Sebastian at Klarna and a firm's doing very well.
So that probably bodes well for Klarna going out at the same time.
it's oddly competitive.
It's kind of shocking to me that there's such a duopoly here
and one company hasn't run away with it.
Like Shopify has really compounded and compounded
and really defeated a lot of the other e-commerce platforms.
But in terms of the payment processors,
it's been much more oligopolistic.
Maybe it's just because the dynamic of the buyer wants to bid the two against each other.
So like the stripe ad yen dynamic kind of comes to Klarna and a firm.
But both really big companies, we'll get to see the financials and dig into Klarna as they go out.
Klarna's total revenue in 2024 was $2.8 billion.
I'm like John and I right now.
The firm's 2024 revenue was $2.3 billion.
Wow, they're really.
Clark's, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
It made a very narrow profit in 2024, $21 million.
21 million?
Like that?
That's good.
I'll have to see it.
And so, yeah, they've been cutting.
But, uh, I mean,
credit to Clarna for getting the scale while competing against Max Leibchen.
It is crazy.
That is like a nightmare competitor.
There's also something very, very odd about the,
Clarna and Adyan are both European companies, correct?
And they both compete with like Stripe and and affirm these like sort of PayPal Mafia-ask
Silicon Valley firms that have been doing it the very Silicon Valley way.
There's this odd dynamic that's in both companies.
Yeah.
Yeah, so one of the things cutting into Klarna's profitability is their just like credit losses.
They lost half a billion dollars last year, which is more than they spent on sales and marketing.
Interesting.
And is that just because people sign up for Klarna, they do the buy now, pay later, and they just bail?
Like they buy a burrito and they say, so yeah.
Does that make it sense of collections?
I imagine it does, but eventually it doesn't get collected.
Well, I think part of their value, wasn't there part of their value?
value prop is that it's not tied to your...
Okay. It's just like completely optional to pay it.
Like, it has to hurt your credit score, right? I imagine.
Like, I mean, maybe it goes into some sort of database, but
the idea that you could just go around and use buy now, pay later,
willy-nilly and never pay your later, BART, does not seem sustainable.
Anyway, if you're looking to slice up a bunch of financial data, do it on Julius.
What analysis do you want to run?
chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.
It's the AI data and analyst that works for you used by Princeton, BCG, and Zapier.
Clarna, get on Julius before you go public.
For sure.
Thank us later.
For sure.
Let's go to this tier list by Mertheelius.dev.
He's been on the show, good friend.
He says a city tier list that will trigger everyone but is true.
S tier is Moscow and Tokyo.
A tier is NYC.
B tier is Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, and Austin.
C tier is Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, Chicago, and Rome.
D tier is Los Angeles.
Come on, Mert, you're doing us dirty here.
Of course, I am triggered.
I think that L.A. is definitely a D-tier city.
I love living in Los Angeles County, but the city, the city itself is mid.
Yeah. We should do our own tier list.
Can you wipe that down, Tyler?
Yeah, start working on a tier list.
Just draw up the S, A, B, C, D, F, and we'll fill in them.
We'll throw them out.
This is so funny because one of the first replies,
SF not even on the list is accurate, and SF is on the list in B-tier.
Reading Combranchion, not quite there, Sam.
But good job.
I like the other than American-
Putting Austin above places like Paris and Berlin.
It's a good mug.
He did a really good job of like...
No, this is the perfect post.
It is a great post.
Like, you'll get people that agree and people that disagree,
and it's perfectly controversial.
Yep.
Anyways, I got a text from a financial technology expert that says,
most BNPL providers don't report to bureaus
because a bureau systems haven't been able to use the data intelligently.
tried to fix, but they're a cluster F. So that's interesting. Clarn is like, hey, we got a lot of,
I mean, the thing that Clarna can obviously do is say, like, if somebody buys a burrito and doesn't
pay for it, they can just, like, not work with that. Yeah. So when you try and hit it the second
time, you don't get a chance. Yeah. And I'd say most consumers would be like, I want to keep having
options. Options, yeah. Probably pay it back. Yeah. Well, there was a timeline was in turmoil, a little
battle between the Scroat Goat and Nikita Beer. Very interesting. Nikita's having a hilarious time
on X. I feel like... He's found an absolute role. I'm so happy that he took a...
It's really the best. It's just the best, like, narrative arc for him. It's basically poster and
residence. Yeah. But then gets to mold the platform. Totally. And I mean, I think I've been having a good
time. I haven't noticed any, like, really negative changes. It seems like there's some
intractable problems. Dude, it's great. Did you notice the change?
they made on video like they totally updated the UI oh really oh yeah yeah yeah with the
buttons down at the bottom yeah yeah yeah that's great yeah that's great um uh let's do the tier
list now like got this this account though is rocket it you know actually adding followers now
for getting in this war yeah and this is nikita's advice remember he said if you're a tiny
account on twitter yeah the best thing you can do is go and pick a fight with the biggest account
you can find and that's exactly what this guy is doing it's so good so yeah
Scroat Goat says, like, I have eight followers, and they're all bots, and the algorithms keeping my reach from being, like, you know, like, I'm not getting enough reach.
The only way to get reach is via comments.
Nine followers is a byproduct of no reach.
And Nikita says, maybe the Scroat Goat is not the best name for your account.
It's, nah, man.
Like, if anything, it's an all-timer.
People should follow it just for the name.
And it worked.
The Scroat Goat said, The Truth Always Wins.
And Nikita Beer, got 600 likes.
And I checked the account, I had a couple hundred followers.
So we might be looking at a future Hall of Fame poster.
Okay, Tyler, let's do the tier list.
I want to go first, and then you can do your tier list.
Maybe we can just do a little line down the center?
Can you do a line down the center, like after the city tier list?
Like, a little bit farther, a little bit farther.
so that we can put mine.
Okay, so, yeah, that's fine.
So I'll start with F tier.
I'll agree with Mert.
I'll put London in F tier, just like Mert did.
And Mert also has Toronto and Brussels.
He has it in D tier.
I'll leave Toronto and Brussels in F tier as well.
So for me, I think we're good, yeah.
So put Toronto and Brussels in F tier.
Then for L.A.
Have you been to Toronto?
Yeah, terrible.
Then Los Angeles, he put it in D tier.
I'll actually go S-tier.
I love L.A.
It's fantastic.
I'll put L.A. there.
Then in C-tier, he has Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Sol, and Rome.
I would, as a little controversial, I would put those in F-tier.
So I'd put Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul.
So Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul, and Rome, all in F-tier.
then for in B tier
in B tier he put San Francisco and Austin
I put those in S tier so put those up there
and then he put Dubai in B tier
this is going to be a little controversial
but I would put Dubai in F tier yeah
he also put Hong Kong in B tier
sensing a pattern I think that's F tier
let's put Hong Kong down there
and then also Istanbul I put that in F tier
and then New York City
He put it in A tier.
I'd put it in S tier.
And then also I'd also add Phoenix in S tier and Philadelphia.
Just put Philly.
And then San Diego, I mean, have you been to San Diego?
I'd absolutely put an S tier.
And then Dallas, let's put Dallas in S tier.
And you got Chicago?
Oh, you missed Chicago.
Chicago's obviously S tier.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, we're good.
And then Moscow and Tokyo, he had them in S tier.
let's go D tier
let's go D tier
no no no no Tyler what are you doing
what are you doing D tier Moscow and
Tokyo we'll give him a bone
and so this is kind of like how I think of the city's
tier list but
your view of the world
this is kind of my world view
right now
and so yeah I mean you can see some patterns
you're probably the next time your passport
expires you probably won't even renew it
right what do I need a passport for
why would I have a long list of
S-tier city.
I could be in Philly.
I could be in Philly right now.
Why would I go to...
Why would I go to London,
Paris, Rome.
And I could be in Baltimore.
The London of Pennsylvania.
The London of the East.
Baltimore, Maryland.
Anyway, what about you, Jordy?
Do you want to take a crack at it?
I don't think I can...
You know that you can outdo my dear list?
I don't think I can...
I don't think...
My only controversial
I mean, I don't know.
Oh, we got some questions in the chat.
How are we feeling about Charlotte, North Carolina?
Ast-tier, for sure.
I think it's S-tier.
Yeah, Charlotte is probably S-tier.
It's part of the, isn't it part of the research triangle?
It's one of the greatest places to New Orleans.
How do we miss Nola?
Pr out of Nola in the S-tier.
New Orleans is definitely S-tier.
Oh, Mark says it's not S-tier.
Maybe we've got to move it down to A-tier.
I don't know.
Nola is not that good.
The lonely, lonely A-tier city.
Yeah, no, okay, anyway.
Oh, good stuff.
Yeah, and then, I also.
You can admit that L.A. is S-tier in that it's sunny.
We're here.
Hundreds, hundreds of days a year.
And it's absolutely stunning.
But functionally, it's a terrible city.
Here's a tough one.
Where would you put Pyongyang?
People love Pygian.
I love PIF.
The Pyeongyang.
investment fund yeah highly authoritarian some people are into that these days limited food
I don't think you put Pyongyang in Est here but I think it's definitely within the in the top
do you remember when when 4chan tried to send Justin Bieber to Pyongyang do you see this
oh this is amazing this is like one of the greatest like the internet does something funny so
Justin Bieber put up a poll online saying I will pick my next tour date I'm going on a world tour
I'll let the fans vote.
And if the fans vote for a particular city,
I'll go to that city.
And so, of course, the fans voted for North Korea.
So you've got to go to North Korea.
And it was like a classic lesson in like,
do not let the internet decide anything.
You could pick any, you could.
Yeah, you could pick any city.
Suggest the city.
And he was like, I'll go where the fans want me to go.
Where do I have the most fans?
Of course, the fans were like, go to North Korea.
I need to be like, I'm not going to North Korea.
anyway thank you for doing the city tier list now let me tell you about turbo puffer search every byte serverless
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Yeah, go check out Turbo Puffer.
Anyway, let's move on to another Nikita post.
Yep.
Nikita says.
Nikita's apparently gets a lot of DMs from people that gets their accounts suspended for spam.
They say, I wasn't spamming.
I was just commenting the same thing on every post, regardless of the context.
Elizabeth Holmes says,
Dear Nikita, rumors swirl that my account's been hijacked for a crypto rugpole.
Not true. It hasn't. Please don't suspend me unless I start chilling a coin for then it's surely
compromised. Thank you for your attention to this matter. We got to know. I mean, she's mixing a lot
of stuff in here. So my theory is that it's the husband. I don't think that, I think it's hard
to get access to a phone and post from prison. We should have Martin Screly on again to discuss
like the theories behind what's going on here.
Could she get a printed out, like, you know, could she get a hundred posts a day delivered
to her that are just like basically letters?
You can get fan mail, letters.
And then she could write back.
Replies, absolutely.
Letters one by one.
What are the timestamps on here?
Two hours ago, 845 a.m.
It feels like it's too quick of a turnaround.
At the same time, there have been reports of like mob bosses, gang members in prison who get access to cell phones that get small phones that get small.
smuggled in. I mean, all sorts of stuff gets smuggled into prisons. They're not the most secure
places. They're designed to keep people in, not necessarily keep everything out. So they
bribe someone, they get something in. And there was a case where, I believe in L.A., there was
a gang member who was calling hits on people from prison, like organizing crimes from inside
the clink. So not very good. And yes, SBF did do the pod from prison. I'm not sure how they did
that. It might have been over the prison. No, but he was, he got in trouble at the prison for
doing. Yeah, but I don't actually know the rules. Like, are you allowed to do pods in prison over the
cell phone? Like, I don't, can you record that? It feels like building, I know that after you go to
prison, you can't sell your life rights. Like, you can't make a bunch of money off of selling the rights
to your movie or your book. Like, I think it just doesn't work like that. I actually don't know
enough about it. We should, we should dig in much more and do a whole deep dive. Tyler, did you have
something else? Do you want to share on Peter Elizabeth Holmes? I was just going to bring up the SBF thing.
Because, I mean, he had a laptop. So I don't know.
laptop. But was he posting too? Is he still posting? I don't know. If he was,
the novelty kind of like wore off for sure. Either way, Elizabeth Holmes got to clean up her
SEO results. She's got to get her brand mentioned in chat GPT. No, she doesn't. But serious businesses
do and serious businesses need to use profound. You need to get your brand mentioned in chat GPT.
Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands more important than ever
in the age of agentic commerce. What's coming is a lot of consumers buying a lot of things through
discovering, learning, through LLMs. You need to know how you're showing up and profound helps you
do that. So, you know, this was, this is crazy. Morning Brew has some, a highlight from the
athletic. Stream East, the world's largest illegal sports streaming platform shut down in a sting.
they had 80 unauthorized domains, 136 million average monthly visits, and 1.6 billion total visits in the last year, the digital equivalent of catching black beer.
Whoever writes for Morning Brew, fantastic, fantastic post. So stream east was the bane of Dana White's existence.
UFC, I'm sure. Yeah, so a lot of the paper views were streamed over here. And this, I would assume that this platform alone,
account, you know, accounted for a billion plus of, like, lost revenue for the UFC.
It's been operating for years.
Anybody from anywhere in the world could just tune in and watch a pay-per-view.
And I think that this was, like, a game of whackamol.
Like, they had all these different domains.
They'd be buying every time they spin up a new domain, they have one getting shut down,
and people are just, like, you know.
I wonder if they're, this is, this is oddly timed.
Because if you think about it, like, what's coming in the next couple weeks that would be illegally streamed?
That's not going to be publicly streamed that everyone's going to want to watch.
It's obviously the Antichrist lectures in San Francisco, Peter Thiel's hosting it.
So they shut that down.
They shut down this because people were going to go there with a phone and live stream it.
But you know everything's off the record, right?
What do you think, Tyler?
Would you be tuning in on streamies, breaking the rules?
Yeah.
So, like, I personally have a, I have a couple guys there who are going, I have a plug.
know my personal streaming but yeah oh so they're gonna like FaceTime you and you can just watch
well it'll just be sitting in their pocket okay okay okay yeah yeah um I was trying to think of like
like why am I not familiar with this why am I this is the first time I'm hearing about stream east
it's because like well I don't watch sports at all and I and I don't and I can't think of anything
that I would want to watch that's behind I've never bought a pay-per-view in my life I did
You just freeload off of Rob and David.
Yep, I free love off of you for sure.
Nice, dude. Nice.
For sure.
And other than that, I mean, are there other, are there, was their entire business just, like, UFC, piracy?
Like, what else is?
No, no, all sports.
Because there's people that don't have cable.
Oh, so you want to go to the NFL game.
Yeah, Tyler, what you say?
Yes.
So, like, I also don't really watch sports, but at school in college, streamiest is like, I mean,
everyone knows streamiest.
Like, that's, like, basically the default, rather than.
than, I mean, some people have, like, the cable equivalent or something.
Yeah. But, yeah, every UFC, every football game.
Yeah. And they were monetizing, like, crazy, right? Because they have 136 million visits.
Imagine how much sports betting sign-up.
Can you pull a list of all your friends who are using streamies so we can contact the authorities and make sure that they...
Let's include them in the sting.
Yeah, let's get... They owe Dana White money and we're going to collect. Okay?
Or Uncle Dana.
You know, I have a funny story. I have a funny story. I have a buddy in college who was,
very much into watching football, did not have cable.
And he, and I go over to his, like, Harvard dorm room and he pulls up a website and he's like,
I can watch sports on here.
I can watch my Raiders, even though they're not even like, like the Raiders game is so local
to, I guess they were in Oakland at the time, that like even if you paid, you'd have to be
on like the highest tier of NFL Sunday ticket to get access to a cross-country game.
Like, you could, like, if you were, if you were at school in Boston, you could get, like, Nesson, the local regional sports network, New England Sports Network, and you could see the Patriots games, and then the local news channel, or the local sports channel would show you, like, the local games.
Like, you'd probably see, like, the, I don't know, the New York, what is it, the Giants, like they'd play, and, like, they'd be local, so they'd be played.
But you couldn't just go see the Raiders, unless you paid the highest tier, it was really expensive, no one wanted to pay.
And so he gets on his laptop, he pulls up this website, and he's like,
I can watch the Raiders on this website.
Do you know what website it was?
Justin.tv.
No way.
Yeah.
And it was the funniest thing because he explains it to me.
He's like, yeah, anyone can go on Justin TV.
This is pre-Twitch.
They're saying we should citizens arrest Tyler's friends for using streamies.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, guys, no show tomorrow.
We're going to be citizens-arresting.
Tell them we're hiring like tons of interns and they pay really high and like they've got to get out here.
It's a one-week interview.
We'll arrest.
We'll do citizens-arrests.
on the stream in support of Dana White.
But so my buddy pulls up Justin TV and is like, yeah.
Apparently, Mark in the chat says LeBron uses streamies.
What?
I guess he was, was he like, I feel like I remember this.
Was he like caught?
Oh, I've seen this.
Well, a lot of people do this.
Oh, F1 was big on streamies.
Yeah, that makes sense.
A lot of people do it just because it's a hassle to figure out how to do the pay,
how to pay.
Ray says I would never watch streamies because then I wouldn't see the local ads.
That's an affront to the advertising industry.
Thank you.
Thank you, Trey.
Thank you, Trey.
Thank you for importing big television advertising.
So my buddy is watching Justin TV.
Justin TV had all sorts of crazy, because anyone could spin up a stream so people
would do all sorts of crazy stuff.
The gaming thing was the first intersection of like, oh, wow, this is legal and growing,
and it's a niche that no one else is catering to.
Like G4 TV existed, which was a TV channel just for video games.
And it was like scripted content and talk shows and interview shows.
They had a whole bunch of stuff.
But there wasn't.
that much video game content.
So, like, they eventually pivoted into Twitch and figured out that that was the right thing.
But before they pivoted, Justin TV was playing whack-a-mole with all the scammers, all the
illegal streams.
And it was, like, a huge hassle.
And, of course, you get adult content and all sorts of stuff.
But the funniest thing.
And it's an interesting challenge for a platform like that that's trying to bootstrap itself
and get a lot of content and users because that's some of the most in-demand content
is like an NFL game.
Look at the visits on this.
Stream East had 136 million average.
They're like, we got to.
We got to take, we got to knock out these illegal streams, but at the same time, isn't that more than all of F1 combined or something like that, right?
Yeah, I think they get, isn't F1 at like a hundred million or something like that?
No, they get like a few million live viewers in the U.S.
And then an incremental 100 million on stream East.
And so, yeah, they should be selling those ads.
Hey, if you're putting your logo on a F1 car, it's going to be seen on stream East, so you've got to pay up.
Anyway.
Wait, this, should we, should we pull the?
this video, this hot mic moment?
Yes, but I want to close that.
So my buddy is like, Justin TV is explaining to me.
And he's like, he describes it to me as like, there's just a guy named Justin and he
has a website where you can watch this stuff and didn't have this conception.
And it kind of was that way.
But really it's like there was a team behind it and Emmett Shear was there and a bunch of other.
It probably wasn't Justin and Emmett.
No, at that point they probably had 10 or 20 people.
But there was this, there was this moment in like 2007, 2008 where like people didn't
realized that websites were companies that had organizations and stocks and could become
like massive like Facebook like like the in 2005 when people were first introduced to
Facebook they were like oh it's like some kid at Harvard like put up a website Justin was so
early yeah well if you're trying to build the next great streaming platform do it legally
and do it using linear linear as a purpose built tool for planning and building products
meet the system for modern software development streamline issues projects and product
roadmaps, start building on linear. Let's pull up the hot mic moment on CTTV. First,
truth zone, is this real or is this dubbed and faked? Like this says this was picked up by Bloomberg.
This seems crazy. I would like to know if this is real, but let's play it and then we'll decide
it's real. Yep, Bloomberg. Confirmed. Okay, so this is Seizant Ping talking about it.
We can't see the subtitles.
Okay, start it over.
Yeah, what are the subtitles?
No, they're here.
That.
What's he saying?
These days, 70 years old.
Earlier people rarely lived, but these days, 70 years, you're still a child.
You're still a child.
That's amazing.
Putin speaks inaudible.
How are they picking this up on this microphone?
This is so rough.
With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted,
and people can live younger and younger and even achieve immortality.
Mortality.
Wow.
Predictions are this century, there's a chance of living to 150 years old.
That is crazy.
She is, he's like, I'm just getting started, actually.
I'm down.
Extremely bullish for a new limit.
Jacob Kimmel.
True.
True.
Extremely bullish.
speaking of old people
guess who
the oldest billionaire
in America is
his names
or guess how old he is
the oldest billionaire
in America
94
you're 10 years short
104
in September
he founded
the insurer
Mercury General
in 1961
his name is George Joseph
we got to get a founder's episode
on this guy
if there isn't already won.
That is an incredible run.
61.
That's what,
50 years before Tyler was born.
The chat's calling it BT before Tyler.
B.T.
B.T.
The journal has a fun article.
Deep diving.
All the biggest billionaires in America.
He also has non-traditional background.
He actually got his bachelor's degree at Harvard.
The youngest to oldest anonymous.
mostly. The Coke and Coke Jr. are under 30. They're billionaires. Selina Gomez and Taylor Swift are
under 40. While 86% of the billionaires are men, more than 150 out of the thousand that the
Wall Street Journal collected are women, including Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. Mark Zuckerberg's
in his 40s. Has a huge circle here on this graphic. Musk, Paige, Brin, these guys are all
top in the charts. Elon Musk is at $423 billion. The next richest person, Jeff Bezos, is worth
$283 billion. Of course, $423 billion. There's only 300 million Americans, so that's enough to make
every American a millionaire if he just gave his money away. But it's way better for him to
keep it because he gets to do all the cool stuff with it. Yeah. Sick. Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker and
President Trump are among more than 360 billionaires who started with some inherited wealth.
Just a bit.
Jensen Wong's on here.
Steve Ballmer's on here.
He's almost 70.
The Waltons are on here, and they're in their 70s.
Milken's on here.
He's almost 80.
What a run to go to jail, come out, still hold on to a billion.
Not bad.
Larry Ellison's in his 80s.
Gaffin's on here.
George Lucas is on here.
It's a murderer's row.
You love it.
Rockefeller? There's still a Rockefeller? Who's alive? Who's Rockefeller?
So, did you cover this? Collectively, these people, you were joking, but these people are worth
5.7 trillion. That's enough wealth to buy a Corvette Stingray convertible for every 65 plus
U.S. driver. Wait, did you actually do this, Matt? The journal did this? Yeah. That's hilarious.
So that's 4.7 trillion. A four-year Harvard tuition, room and board for one million students,
plus $10,000 annual stipend, only 388 building.
How much are they worth in total?
5.7 trillion.
I am deaf.
Congratulations.
All the stock in McDonald's, Delta Airlines, Ford, and Lulu Lemon.
There we go.
And every residential property in Chicago, $245 billion with $8 billion to spare.
That was not that impressive.
This is a weird stat from the journal.
So they collected, what, $1,000?
1,135 billionaires.
So I got to put their stats in the true zone
because if you tried to buy a Corvette Stingray
for every 65 plus U.S. driver,
Oh, it's going to drive the market.
The price is going to go way, way, way out.
You're going to get to, you're going to hit real scarcity
real quick.
You might be able to lease a Model 3 for everyone.
But is this not like an incredibly,
like you could get a Corvette for every American
65 plus, a four-year degree for one million students, you could buy McDonald's, Delta, Ford,
and Lou Lemon, and some property in Chicago. And that's the journal saying, like, look how much
they have to spare. I mean, that would... Can you imagine how long it would take to calculate
all the sales tax for all those Corvette Stingray purchases? I don't even want to think about it.
I'd rather spend five minutes. I'd rather spend five minutes with numeral sales tax and autopilot,
spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax supplies. In fact, it's the only way you could actually
execute that deal to buy 300 million Corvette Stingrace.
But this is a funny stat.
So billionaires are everywhere.
So they track 1,000 billionaires, right?
In the U.S., they own more than 3,000 homes.
That's only three per person?
I feel like that's not that many.
Like, if you're a billionaire and a house is like 10, 20 million.
Yeah, these must be residential properties, but still that seems extremely low.
300 homes.
Yeah, it seems like the data was not, like, widely available.
I feel like they must have like, oh, that's only what they could, like, pull together.
But there's a lot more homes.
A lot of these billionaires are not.
A lot of these, only a third of them inherited wealth,
meaning that the other 700 or so are not beating the American Dream allegations.
This is the real headline here.
700 billionaires in America are not beating the American Dream allegation.
They were born, they didn't inherit anything.
And they created billions of dollars of wealth.
They're not beating the allegations.
They're not beating the allegation.
So they're living the American dream.
They can't deny it.
Started without inherited wealth.
Nothing.
And now they own,
not one,
not two,
but three homes on average.
What's funny is,
I feel like I heard this story
about like Bill Gates owns like a thousand homes
or something like that,
or like all the land or whatever.
I know,
I know,
I know a BNair.
Can we were just talking about Ken Griffithy owns 50 homes?
You don't even have to be a BNair
to be to be just collecting homes on the fly,
just browsing.
I feel like I see a guy on Instagram every day,
Buy a fourplex, buy seven homes, rent them out, make a billion dollars.
I'm assuming this is like residential, so it's not like units.
It's like what they actually, yeah, like one real estate developer billionaire would
own more than 300 homes you think.
Isn't BlackRock counted?
Doesn't BlackRock own like a bigillion homes or something like that?
Isn't that the conspiracy?
They own 105% of all the homes in America.
But that's just because they're counting the tents at Burning Man in Black Rock City as individual
homes if you take those out i mean like you can't count a black rock tent as a black rock owned
home because it's not really a permanent home it doesn't make any sense i don't get it uh uh also
underrated alpha if you're trying to be the only billionaire in a state you got to go to wyoming
in alaska because there's no billionaires with primary businesses in wyoming and alaska primary
business primary businesses so like you know so just move your business there yeah
I mean, Alaska, it's just sitting there waiting.
It is crazy that Wyoming, I feel like they're super, like, crypto-friendly.
You'd think there'd be somebody who, like, went and built some massive thing there,
but it hasn't happened to, at least not yet.
Jack on X said, Costco should get into web services.
Kirkland Cloud would clean up.
It really would.
I would be rep in Kirkland Cloud.
We would build on Kirkland Cloud.
This is interesting.
Sheel highlights German discount grocer Lytle.
LIDL.
Okay.
Little,
sure.
Lytle.
Built their own cloud infrastructure
because of German data laws
and now has a $2 billion revenue business
selling it to other law at the U.S.
It actually worked.
If you're a retailer, get into cloud.
Neo cloud.
Get into cloud.
Costco should do neocloud.
Buy GPUs, by the bulk.
By Iraq.
Do you get this meme,
the Dr. Strange tweet,
or how I learned to love the RT,
just after the,
just after the Siegeng and Vladimir Putin
were caught on a hot mite,
week there's this meme of this woman looking at this screen and this is the this is the
what would no I don't I miss I missed the original meme Tyler you were born
do you understand this meme do you understand this meme you know what it's the woman
looking yeah yeah yeah it's from some Netflix documentary or Apple TV yeah I never
watched the show either yeah I think it's like it's just like a boomer meme it's like
oh what it like the old woman is like doesn't understand that wow okay we are
are boomers because we don't understand
the boomer meme. Yeah, it's kind of
a meta-boomer take. I don't know.
It's a boomerang.
It comes right back at you. It's always like her
looking at the screen is like, oh, what do they mean by this?
I'm curious to know what the actual show is
because the original
photo of that meme, it looked
cinematic, it looked interesting
and of course I have to watch
100% of the movies around here since
Jordy isn't lifting his weight.
Anyway,
do you see this
interaction between Daniel Tenriro and Rune.
Do you think this is real?
So Daniel says hedge fund guys are so much more fun to spend time with than tech guys,
rigorous, irreverent, and don't have their heads up, their own butts.
And Roon says, bro, tweeted this five minutes after we got done hanging out.
And do you think it's real?
Do you think this actually happening?
He's a trolling Roon, or do you think this is just completely random?
It's just like taking the opportunity.
I think Roon is in SF, and I think Daniel's in New York City.
Roon's been on a little trip.
He was in L.A. briefly.
I didn't get a chance to meet up with him,
but I do want to hang out with him soon.
Hedge fund guys are serious guys.
Serious?
That's what I'm saying.
He's a reverent.
That's the opposite of serious.
No, they're serious about making money.
More serious than venture capital.
This is what, Jeremy Giffon take,
the investors are more interesting than founders.
The Fox and the Hedgehog thing, right?
Is that a public take?
Yeah, it was at the founders event with David Center.
Which I don't know if that was ever streamed or released, so maybe it's not, but you're leaked. Sorry, bro.
I mean, yeah, founders that are, the average founder that is incredibly locked in knows a lot about their business and their market, not a lot about other things.
And it's more difficult to be a generational investor, you know, only knowing about it super narrow.
It's like the Fox and the Hedgehog, right? That's the analogy. The Fox knows a little bit about a lot of different things.
and the Hedgehog knows one big thing.
That's like the mind, what's it called?
Like the mindset, the, what is they called?
Like the, I don't know, framework, the mental model.
The mental model that's people talk about.
He's got like sort of spiky intelligence.
The hedgehog?
That completely blows up the metaphor.
Because the metaphor is that the hedgehog only knows one thing.
And in fact, does not have spiky intelligence.
Oh, I guess it does.
You know, you're right.
Spiky intelligence because it's actually better now.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we need to expand on the Fox and the Hedgehog metaphor, for sure.
Anyway, Finn.A.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks,
number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking in G2.
You want some spiky intelligence, spike that intelligence right into your customer service organization.
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Vitorio says incredible white pill, scientists.
just mapped how aging rewires
our genes. They found universal
switches that control decline.
Basically, aging is a coordinated
epigenetic drift of which we now
have the Atlas. We will solve aging
in our life. Maybe
Putin and Xi Jinping were
reading Vitorio. They said, okay, just
help. Yeah, just, yeah. They probably follow Vitorio.
And like, right before that clip
started, they were like, oh, did you see
what Vittorio posted? And they're
like, yeah, we're going to live to 150.
Yeah, Vittoria is like the best.
and that's where I get my news from.
Yeah, just a couple 72-year bros following Vitorial.
I like to think that they both Putin and Sijan Ping have a nons on X through VPNs
that they just scroll the timeline like the rest of us.
I can see it.
It is funny if you assume that organ trans, you know,
if they assume that organ transplants are the solution to immortality,
why are they assuming like 150 is the cap?
Yeah.
Is by that point you're so, such a mix of different parts.
not really you anymore.
Well, you're a Shepathias.
Yeah.
It's the ship of theseus.
You have no original parts anymore, so you're like entirely...
I mean, that's the classic, classic question.
If you, if you swap out everything but your brain, it feels like it's still you...
Isn't there crazy stories around, like, heart transplants, like, changing...
Your soul?
Yeah, your personality.
Really?
No way.
I had no idea.
I haven't seen that.
What do you think, Tyler?
I mean, you're already a spithesis because, like, your cells die.
Oh, true.
But I think it's more likely that
Xi Jinping Putin have been watching Dorkesh
and saw the Jacob Kimlop's
That's probably true. That's probably true.
Yeah, so...
I mean, I would be surprised since
Dworkesh is like the foremost
interview scholar on China right now.
I'm being serious. Yeah, no, 100%.
That makes sense. And apparently podcasts are booming there.
Did you see that post about how
like China seems to be going through some sort
of like boom of translated
American podcast content that's doing very well there?
so stay tuned i'm on i'm on jemini the idea the idea that a heart transplant can change a person's
personality is fascinating controversial the medical community broadly says uh that that personality
these sort of psychological changes that happen after heart surgery are due to trauma and side
effects from the medication but there's more speculative um uh ideas around how
potentially memories are stored in places other than the brain and so and what happens there's
There's people that report, like, personality changes that mirror the donors, the person that, the original person's heart gets transferred into the new host, and then the new host starts being and acting more like the original donor, which is crazy.
That is actually crazy.
So anybody in the chat, if you've had a heart transplant.
Maybe we should get our hearts swapped, like face off, which a movie you haven't seen, I know.
But in the movie Face Off, Nicholas Cage and John Travolta take their faces off and swap faces because of some convoluted thing where one of them is a criminal and one of them's a hardened criminal who has some information about where, like, a bomb will go off or something like that.
And then the special agent needs to go undercover as the criminal.
And so they swap faces.
And then they, of course, the actors just play each other and then they go on a...
I don't know what our, if we did a heart swap, it would just be,
it'd just be more golden retriever mode activation.
I don't know if, I don't know, I don't know how much it would do.
Do you want to, do you want to kick off this article about opening I?
I would, I would rather tell you the full plot of face off, actually.
Okay.
Tell it to me.
I'll be listening.
Okay, perfect.
So FBI special agent, Sean Archer, survives an assassination attempt by Castor Troy, a terrorist for hire.
But the bullet kills his son.
Michael, Archer then engages in an extended vendetta against Troy.
It culminates six years later in his team ambushing Troy, who is with his younger brother
an accomplice.
Polu, Poloks.
On a remote desert airstrip, Troy goads Archer by saying he knows of a bomb that is
located somewhere in Los Angeles and is set to explode in a few days.
I was correct about the bomb.
Before Archer can learn more, Troy is knocked unconscious and falls into a coma.
Palo-Pelux? I need to figure out how to pronounce that. The guy in custody affirms that the bomb is real but refuses to reveal its location. In secret, Archer reluctantly undergoes a highly experimental face transplant procedure by Dr. Malcolm Walsh to take on Castor Troy's face, voice, and appearance. Archer as Troy is taken to the same high-security prison where Paloo is being held in order to obtain information on the bombs,
location. Troy.
We've got some visuals for you, John.
Oh, you got it? Yeah, this is great.
Troy unexpectedly awakens from his coma and discovers that his face is missing.
He calls his gang and they force Dr. Walsh to transplant Archer's face onto him.
Meanwhile, Archer successfully learns the bomb's location from Paloo before being informed
that he has a visitor.
Anticipating a reunion with his colleague and return to his normal life, Archer instead finds
Troy wearing his face upon revealing he has murdered everyone.
else who knows about the face transplant. Troy gleefully informs Archer that he looks forward to running
his FBI career and ravishing his wife. That's a great film. It's a classic 90s. Is it 90s? When did
this come out? 1997. Thriller. You got to watch it. It's the best. I'll add it to my list.
You should. You should for when the singularity hits. Do we have the singularity tracker up and
running yet or is it working, Tyler? What do we got? How many days until? Right now it's at 344.
344 days?
344 days until what?
What are we saying?
Until AGI?
Until AGI.
Until AGI.
Yeah, she...
You need a light on it.
We can't really see it.
Yeah, you need a light.
You need a light on that.
But we got a ticker.
We got an analog date tracker.
We will be tracking the amount of days until the singularity.
Sam Altman said that the singularity is just a few things.
thousand days away. Wasn't that what he said? How did Sam Altman exactly describe the few thousand
days? He said, superintelligence is a few thousand days away, super intelligent AI. So that's ASI. So
AGI is here, essentially. Let's see, thousand days. So super intelligence is a few thousand days
away. According to Sam Altman, Tyler Cosgrove has a much shorter timeline, apparently, just
300 days. We're booting up for ASI in 300 days. Yeah, we've got to do better on the lighting here.
We're getting some crazy reflections in that thing. Maybe we need to take off the front,
you know, take off the glass so we can just see it fully. But anyway, what realistically,
how many days do you think should go on there, Tyler?
Timeline to ASI.
It's super intelligent.
Sam Altman puts it in a few thousand days.
I count a few as three.
A few is three.
A couple is two.
What's a few is three?
What do you think a few means?
Do you think a few could be four?
How many is a few?
I would maybe put more than a handful.
More than two, but less than a significant amount.
A couple often implies two.
A few usually starts.
a three or more, which can extend
to small indetermined quality that is
not many, the exact number
depends heavily on the context in what is being
discussed. So, could a few be six?
Max is saying it feels pretty
gentle. Yeah, yeah, it is
a gentle singularity for sure.
I was going to say
3,000 days, which is 10 years, right?
3,000, 365.
Yeah, I've updated my
Oh, wow.
Ultra bearish.
Short, everything.
I don't think it's how many years is that 99999 divided by 365 that is 273 years away you got to be more optimistic than that Tyler
do we do the OLLIG somebody asked OLLEG how many days until the singularity 999 99999 I I'm at I'm at 6,000 days I'm on Kurzweil timelines
Kurzweil timelines put us at maybe even more honestly maybe maybe seven thousand days uh you put
in gta terms like is that i'm gta seven or eight gta seven probably so so i'm on 2045 asi
kurswile timelines i remain unchanged by any developments essentially so uh 2045 asi arrives
it's the singularity and so i'm around 7000 days sam allman said a few thousand is seven a few i don't
know. We'll decide, but Tyler, feel free to, feel free to update that to whatever you think
is the correct estimate for when ASI arrives. Jordie, you've gone from not AGI-pilled to
extremely AGI-pilled, back to, you know, top signal, Maxer, extremely A-G-I-not-pilled.
How are you feeling about the progress towards superintelligence? I think we're a few thousand
days away. I think there's only, I think there's only, it feels like there's, there's very small
number of people that, that have any, like, a real sense of, of the truth, and they're all
extremely conflicted. They all have no incentive to tell you that it's, yeah, they have an
incentive to be, like, try to be a little realistic about it, but they have no incentive to,
say, you know, we're, we're 10 years away or, or it just all feels like, but you specifically don't have,
foundation model lab bags you have adio.com or adio bags customer relationship magic adio is
the ai native CRM that builds scales and grows your company in the next level uh obviously adio has
their own timelines but what are your timelines my i don't even know if it's the right
are you over under my estimate of seven thousand days until super intelligence and a singularity
me and Ray Kurzweil riding together
are you earlier
this is self-reinforcing
full-on super intelligent
smarter than everyone can do any job
can do anything
can make it self smarter
yes and it's just like it's a thing
that just runs you know
one-shots anything
full self-reinforcing
who knows maybe it
maybe it goes to war maybe it just leaves
you know but it is it is fully
definitely more than a decade out
yep so over 3,000
days for sure. That's the low end of Sam Altman's prediction. Yeah, I just, I still find it
hard to believe entirely. So maybe never, maybe infinite days. You could be in the 9-99-99-9-9-9-9-9-9-days can.
Okay. But if it happens, so this is the update to take, actually, from some of the AI-pilled
people, they will say, they will say it either happens,
very sooner doesn't happen at all, which is kind of a funny way to frame it. But if you put
it in those terms, if it happens, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, what do you feel? I just feel like
it'll end up being, I think we're going to continue to get more and more advanced capabilities,
but I don't, I just believe that even the, even the smartest people in the room, like,
clearly we're getting machines that are just more intelligent and capable in many ways than humans.
Yeah.
But you can take, you can take an, and, I just sort of disagree with like the ramp that will come from that, right?
Because if you took, if you took, you know, a thousand of the smartest people in the world and put them in a room and you say, like, solve world hunger or like get us to Mars, it's like, they're not going to do it.
And it doesn't work.
It's not going to happen in a year.
Like, if you take a really smart group of people, like with SpaceX and you say, get to Mars,
say, like, great, well, we're going to work on this for decades, right?
And so I just, I disagree with, or I don't believe in this, I don't believe in the fast takeoff.
For sure.
I believe that, like, machines will continue to get smarter and smarter and more capable and more valuable to humanity, but I don't believe in a fast takeoff.
It is somewhat of an abstraction of that philosophical question of, like, can God?
create a rock so heavy he can't lift it like can can a human create something that's
smarter than a human in every way like how would that work there is an there is sort of like a
fundamental philosophical yeah and also like raw intelligence is rarely the bottleneck for
yeah progress that's a very good point yeah i don't know i i still i still am rooting for the
Terminator outcome, where superintelligence comes around 2045, we go to war, and the indomitable
human spirit wins out and we kill all the robots and we win. I think that would be the most
exciting outcome. That would be fun. Because it would be so unifying to humanity to have a common
enemy, the clanker. Humanity needs a true common enemy. Exactly. There's so much infighting.
I don't want to manifest like an alien race that wants to destroy us, but it would be
so good for the world.
We could stop...
Fantastic.
We could ignore all politics and just focus on...
Imagine the dream team.
Siegian Ping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin,
all your boys working together to shoot the clankers.
It'd be great.
It'd be amazing.
And the funny thing is that the DOOMers will come to you and they'll say...
A uniform that just says human race.
Haven't you seen the Terminator?
That's what's going to happen if we create AI.
We're going to get the Terminator outcome.
Well, I've seen Terminator.
I know you haven't.
But I've seen Terminator, what happens in Terminator?
Who wins at the end of Terminator?
The humans.
The humans win at the end of Terminator.
That's the conclusion of the movie.
They fight, and the humans win.
And so if we get the Terminator outcome, that means we win.
That means we win.
And that's going to be a lot of fun.
So, tool up, get the guns, get ready to fight the clankers.
We're going to war.
But not for the next two decades.
It's going to be two decades of Enterprise SAS.
It's going to be two decades of...
of shareholder value, cruel.
And it's going to be two years of delightful rest on an eighth sleep.
Get a pod five, five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.
Fantastic sleeps.
I put up an 84.
Not my best.
And I got a 90.
So please play my own a song.
Thank you.
Congratulations, John.
I am on a roll.
And know who else is on a roll.
Microsoft. Microsoft has been on a role, and we have the chief product officer of Microsoft joining us in the TBPN Ultradome.
The final boss of product people. This is the true gatekeeper to our plan to bring back Clippy.
So we will welcome the CPO. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
What's happening?
I think we can hear you. How are you doing? Yes. Fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream.
So just so you know, I said there's many bosses, but Clippy is the ultimate boss.
Yes, Clippy is the ultimate boss.
Has Clippy actually been thrown around as an idea?
It feels like more and more, you know, mega companies.
Like the huge companies are starting to have a little bit more fun every once in a while.
It is a bit of a wild.
I've seen some like throwback Microsoft merch that's gotten out.
Is there any serious discussion internally to think about reviving Clippy?
I feel like it would be so much fun.
Dude, I'm with you.
I feel like, un-ironically, creepy was just, like, early, right?
Totally.
Totally.
The original conversation was early and right.
Interface.
Interface.
Anyway, would you mind introducing yourself and give us a little bit of an overview of, like,
what your day-to-day actually looks like?
It's such a huge organization.
There's so much to do.
But I'd love to have a little bit more context on what you oversee
and what your role actually looks like.
Yeah.
Let me give you the lowdown to me.
I've been at Microsoft for two years of the chief product officer for AI at work.
So, focused on kind of like, how do you make work great again with AI?
And before that, I was at Robin Hood, and before that, I was at Google for many years.
But I think a steel thread through all of this for me has been like the way I think about this,
bringing near future science fiction and putting it in product.
And making sure that billions of people have it.
I cited that with Google Search.
And then I founded this area called Google Lens with, you know, the camera turns into a search engine.
And, of course, Robin Hood for first-time investors.
And at Microsoft, my focus has been, and our team's focus has been, we have hundreds of millions of professionals.
We've got to make work not just about doing more, but about being better.
So, on co-pilot work, what are the agents that you get for work today?
You get a badge and a PC.
Should you get a team of agents?
How are you thinking about the tradeoff of put a chat box, obviously Microsoft has fantastic access, exclusive access to GPT5, the frontier level capabilities, but there's a tradeoff from the product perspective, put the chat box next to it, which is almost just one level away from just having two tabs open next to each other and having GPT5 in chat.com over here versus do the chat box.
the hard work of have the product teams go and dig into how do we add AI functionality into
every sub tool? If you're in Excel, how do you create, you know, smarter functions within
the cells as opposed to just a sidebar, which has kind of been the status quo for a lot of
AI at work projects broadly. Totally. And I think this is the, I mean, the answer is yes and, right?
In some sense, like, look, every shift, and I've been through three of these, I worked at Akamai, like, 20 years ago,
and the Internet was like a thing, was going to be a thing.
And then, you know, I was obviously mobile and cloud at Google and now at Microsoft with AI.
The first wave of all of these things is just at AI, right?
Like, put chat next to it, bring some intelligence to it.
And it's no different from, you know, the first wave of mobile apps were, like, desktop form factors, like, shrunk into the mobile screen.
form factor or the first websites actually were like scanned brochures, which are PDFs, right,
back in the day, folks.
And I think now I feel like one of the, that's why you see across the industry saying,
oh, let's, let's add AI to it.
But I think the yes and comes from two things.
One is you want to make sure that when there's a natural way, because of the natural
language interface, you're actually asking AI to do a lot more higher order things.
things, right? Instead of this fine grain manipulation of like, oh, let's go through 200 menus and
remember the magic incantation. Like you want to kind of say, hey, do it for me. Right. So there's a
bunch of things where chat is the right answer. But then there are other things where if you're
an Excel bro, like you want to be in your ID, right? And get your, you know, get the assistance
right where you are. So meeting you where you are. So if you saw last two weeks ago, we talked about
and we announced the Equals co-pilot.
But that's like the hello world of like what we are thinking of and say,
how do we actually, right now in teams or in your meeting,
how do you have assistance, right?
Along with the chatbot.
Yeah, from a product perspective,
there's something very interesting going on where, I mean,
Microsoft kind of coined the term or the definition of like being a platform
where the companies that built on top of Windows
created more value than Microsoft CAP.
And it was like the classic example of a technology platform driving, like, incredible value.
There's something potentially, at least that we've been tracking, where we've talked to, what,
three or four different companies that are building AI add-ons to Excel.
Or trying to rebuild it entirely.
But a lot of times it's actually integrated into Excel.
And there's one frame where, okay, those companies are going to get steamrolled by Excel and the team there.
There's the other frame, which is...
We said it, not you.
Well, I mean, that's a risk that I'm sure every investor in those companies is discussing.
But then there's another frame where Excel becomes a platform, like Windows became a platform,
and there is a robust ecosystem of apps and services on top.
Some of those that are complementary to co-pilot functionality, some of those that are competitive.
So I guess the question is, like, is Excel becoming a platform?
and do you see, like, how do you message around the openness of the Excel platform?
Are you trying to take learnings from the openness of the Microsoft ecosystem and bring that into the developer communications on top of Excel,
or is there a different strategy at play?
Yeah, and I think, you know, look, a super short point.
And I think in the fullness of time, office as a whole, has always been a platform, right?
If you look at, like, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, actually Outlook plugins, teams, has a very healthy, like, bot ecosystem.
So the platform play is always being kind of at the center of it.
And it's the question, though, is keeping the user in mind, are there things that are much more intuitive and native to be part of the product?
And are there things that are kind of like, let's say you're doing something very specific for accounting.
It is absolutely the right thing for that to be a plug-in and add-in versus doing something horizontal.
that should really be a feature of the product.
So that's the way we're thinking about it.
Have you thought any at all about how AI can supercharge the way people use LinkedIn?
I imagine that there's a lot of, that might be a completely separate world from what you're doing.
But it does seem like something that in the future, people have been out there for so long.
I need a personal CRM.
I need some sort of thing on top of my LinkedIn connections.
to remind me and you get those like on every social app you get the reminder hey it's somebody's
birthday you should write them a note but with AI you can imagine so much more power there to say
I'm trying to sell this particular thing I'm hiring for this particular thing and having GPT5 go and
crawl the profiles put together something for you have you thought about anything that's happening
over in the LinkedIn world or is that just kind of out of your purview you know we Ryan and I talk all
the time and he's actually like much more front and center on the office world now so I think
The thing that's interesting there is that a lot of these ideas were just like unfundable or bad ideas before because it didn't have enough tokens.
So my favorite thing to say is like take all these like ideas people thought were like really bad.
So for example, like I'd have like a whole bunch of people pitch back in Google the whole alerting, oh, wouldn't it be great if you could kind of like ongoing new like event discovery.
I'm into this favorite, like my favorite band is this obscure thing and like, you know, wouldn't it be great if I knew.
something about like the name oh i think we have some yeah i think we're having some technical
difficulties sorry i i think we're having some technical difficulties here um can you hear us okay
i'm i can hear you it's fine okay sorry i think you're cutting out um let let let's move on to uh
i didn't say anything controversial no no it's not that i think it's the uh i think it's the uh
The backbone internet infrastructure in this country that's controversial.
What about...
Yeah, I would...
I guess, like, my biggest thing that I'd be curious to get your insight on
is, is are there, like, how many businesses in the Microsoft ecosystem
have just totally opted out of AI that are not responding to upsells that are just not
interested. Maybe they have employees that are kind of using various AI tools themselves,
but I have to imagine it's like a very, very large percentage of companies within that are
off contrary. I think it's, in fact, we've had like more than 90% of Fortune 500 using
some form of like, you know, co-pilot AI products. There's like 100 million customers that
have just, we've just crossed 100 million, across commercial and consumer on co-pilot usage.
thing that's actually interesting that I see is maybe a variant of what you're asking,
which is, you know, like there's one extreme, there's a set of folks who are just leaning
much, the posture is much more proactive, I would say, and kind of like in the game,
get in the arena, building stuff, it's not just about, oh, like, there's an off-the-shelf thing,
this is a chat board that I'll buy and see who uses it in my company.
So that set of firms, in fact, like we've started calling them frontier firms.
These guys are like out there starting to kind of like invest both build and buy and partner.
And we are starting to see, oh, those folks actually get a lot more out of AI.
So for example, like one example for me is like these guys are using the reasoning models.
So when you, if you step back and think like where we are in AI, the first version of AI,
it's just been more about like next token prediction and like chatbot.
But the next really real big unlock came in January.
in February around that time, and the reasoning models came online.
That's when we saw a very clear shift.
There's certain companies that just jumped in and said, oh, all these things that we
couldn't do six months ago or one year ago, let's try them now.
Has that been affecting?
Including Microsoft, by the way.
Yeah.
Has that been affecting gross margins?
We saw in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the Notion obviously sells a few competitors
to Microsoft products, saw gross margins drop from 90% to something like 80%.
I was talking to Ivan.
And he said it actually wasn't even that bad, but there was some sort of an impact.
Obviously, you can upsell against that.
But how is the economic tradeoff?
How are you thinking about that with, you know, selling, obviously people want frontier-level
intelligence, but it might change the economic equation.
Are you seeing anything that indicates that going forward, the fundamental gravity of the
economic equation might be different?
I mean, look, I think it's going to be proportional.
In a sense, I was joking with someone saying, like, you know, using,
GPD-5 thinking, like, in your product is like taking a flying car to a grocery store,
right, or O3 Pro.
So in some sense, you do have to be...
It's no longer about, like, just being a wrapper on the model.
Yes, the model is eating the product, like, absolutely.
So that's, I think, one thing.
Both these statements seemingly contradictory are true, and we're seeing that.
On one hand, the model is eating the product.
What do I mean by that?
Like, you know, internally, even us, we spent a bunch of time trying to solve what I
the six-finger problem, right?
Like, remember two years ago when Dali 3 came out?
Oh, yeah.
And, like, each other in humans, it would be like six fingers and five, like 18 toes or
what have you.
And there's a whole bunch of startup that said, oh, we'll solve that, right?
And a whole bunch of product teams inside Microsoft, too, saying, oh, we'll just, like,
figure out how to solve the six-finger problem.
Metaphorically speaking, six months later, the model, a GPD photo came out, and, like,
you know, there's no longer a six-finger problem.
Yeah, I mean, hallucinations.
Yeah, hallucinations seem to be at an all-time line.
Like, the models are getting way more.
There's been a lot of reports of consumers developing, like, friend-like relationships with various LLMs.
Do you have – is there any evidence that employees at companies are developing real relationships with AI
in the way that some people on Reddit have developed relationships with models like 4-0?
Yeah, I mean, I think we've made the product choice.
that kind of squarely put AI and Microsoft as tools, right?
Yeah.
And even these tools, they can be agentic tools, meaning they can be working for you in background.
You have a natural language interface to it.
But this is not an accidental thing.
We have to make intentional choices.
In fact, I call the term called neural software, meaning that it's not software as usual.
In fact, Steve Snokke and I had a spat on Twitter about it.
saying like because for me the way I think about this is look yes it is software as engineers
we all know that it's like stochastic models and it's like you know you peel a few layers
it's all software but it is probabilistic and there are three things that are really important
going on here and we like as builders I feel like we got to pay attention to it
number one is the natural language interface right it just has this human-like anthropomorphic
interface. So when Porog gets replaced by five, like, you're like, you're not like, oh,
my cheese or this menu item moved. They're like, who fired my, you know, like chefs, right? So I
think that is a point, whether it work or in personal life. But I think the second thing that
we are underestimating, and we certainly see that inside is the way we are building products and
releasing them is changing. Like previously we'd say, oh, yeah, like 2.1 to 2.2, right, like the
software is updated, release notes and change lots.
But now it's just like you're, you have to kind of flow all out.
You have to kind of do evalves and benchmarks on how the interaction works,
not just the accuracy of things, right?
And then the third thing I'm seeing at least like, and this one's a hard one to kind
of like crack.
You're still trying to figure out what that means is the composition of the team.
Like in the past, it'd be like, oh, you had engineers, you know, your desk, your tests,
your product your ux it's all a blur right it's so much and like you have a bunch of generalists
and you have the model whispers right and then you go to market like that's the new triangle that
we're seeing well it's a fun puzzle to solve thank you for hopping on the stream this is great we
will talk to you soon have a great rest of your day just a lot everybody know internally that
we're riding with the excel bros and clipy we're riding with clipy for sure thank you we would
love to help relaunch Clippy, given the opportunity.
No way.
Thank you so much.
Great to meet you.
We'll talk to you soon.
Have a great rest of your day.
In the meantime, let me tell you about adquick.com.
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Nick, did you see this pose by Nick Dobos,
open AI cackling right now today?
So OpenAI acquired Statsig.
We talked about this yesterday.
But he's sharing a photo of Anthropic and telemetry services for data usage.
ClaudeCode connects from users' machines to the Statsig service to log operational metrics,
is latency, reliability, and usage patterns.
And so is what he's saying, like, they're going to rug Anthropic by buying their telemetry,
like their logging service?
Is this monopolistic, like, market?
Can Anthropic not just use another company?
or product. I don't, this doesn't quite, like, sit with me as like, oh, yeah, it's like
they totally owned Anthropic. It's like, yeah, they bought a company that Anthropic uses.
Like, the Anthropic would probably keep using that. Maybe they'll re-platform. I don't know.
It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Yeah, I mean, I do wonder,
curious if Statsig is going to remain an independent brand or just be rolled under OpenAI.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a bunch of companies that use Statsig.
I'm just looking at the website.
EA, Microsoft, Atlassian, Bloomberg.
Affecting Altruists use it?
You said EAs use it?
Tyler, do you think this is, do you think that opening I really own
Anthropics here?
Tracking shrimp welfare?
Frankly, I don't know what Statsig really does.
So I have no, like, it seems like, yeah, Anthropic can just.
You know what it does.
It's no more complicated than Palantir.
It's equivalent to...
Oh, we got Arfra Rock dropping massive alpha on Mestral.
Mestral is closing $14 billion.
Blue past the initial target of $9 billion.
I assume that's market cap.
The rumors about Apple's acquisition were fake.
That seems right.
That always seemed fake.
I mean, in what world was France going to let their national AI champion be...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Is this real?
This hello, hello?
Apple and Google have reached a deal to have Gemini power a new Siri platform as per Bloomberg.
Let's pull that up because that's literally my prediction today.
Did I just not read Bloomberg?
Well, this was rumored for a while.
Is it actually happening?
Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We got either I'm going to look extremely dumb or extremely smart.
Let's read this.
Okay, so this is.
Okay, Apple plans AI powered search tool for Siri to rival open AI perplexity.
Apple is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence web powered search tool next year.
stepping up competition.
I'm going to put this in the chat, or should I put it in the tab.
The company is working on a new system, world knowledge, answers that will be integrated
into the Siri voice assistant, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
And who are they?
So it's Google.
Okay.
Apple is aiming to release the service described by some executives as an answer engine.
The news breaking right now is crazy.
So American Eagle just beat earnings up another 20%.
after hours.
Also, moment of silence for Figma.
They missed earnings.
Very sad to see that,
but never bet against our boy, Dylan Field.
And the whole team.
Yeah, everyone is ripping.
American Eagle.
Wait, I wonder if they actually beat earnings
because that's Sidney-Sweeney thing.
We were talking about the value
that she brought to that brand,
and it probably was like $100 million in market cap.
She should have gotten like a $50 million payday.
Like, it really did change the trajectory of the business.
Sweeney XA ideal incoming
RigaV is a goaded
poster in the chart
Thank you for what you do RigaV
American
American Eagles
still down 30%
in the last 12 months
20% year to date
so Sweeney really was the turnaround
Sydney bottom ticket
hopefully she got some shares
she basically did
The underlying technology enabling
the new series could come in part
from Alphabet Incs Google
Apple's longtime partner in Internet search, the company's reached a formal agreement this week
for Apple to help evaluate and test a Google developed AI model to help power the voice assistance.
So very interesting.
I would imagine Apple has to pay Google for this version of just an answer engine because the answer engine is not going to be directly monetized,
but Google has to be working on agentic commerce, agentic ads in the LLM results.
It seems so obvious.
I feel like this is going to flip at something.
point, but I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Apple's new search experience will include an interface
that makes use of text photos. Yeah, what do you think? How is, how is Google going to feel about this
giving them? Why? What's wrong with this? They're building something that is, that is a, they're building
an AI-powered web search tool for Siri. Yeah, they're building software, because they're a software
company, and they're selling it to the hardware company or they're partnering with the hardware
company. So you think Apple's saying, you're going to keep paying us $20 billion and we're going to
compete with you? How are they competing?
No, this is them not, this is them saying we're not getting into foundation models. We're not
going to do our own, our own AI model. We're going to use Gemini. Oh, they're saying,
okay, I miss the part. No, so today Siri can answer basic questions. Yeah, we got it, we got to
instead of, the companies reached Apple and alphabet reached a formal agreement for Apple to evaluate
and test a Google developed AI model to help power the voice system. Yes. So, so, um, so
So, like, this is, I mean, it's a formal agreement to evaluate and test it.
So, like, we're still, like, years away from anything happening here.
Like, like, the next iPhone event is, like, next week.
And, like, they're not going to roll out a Google partnership.
I'd imagine they don't roll out a Google partnership.
This feels like something that they're going to be working in over time.
I don't know.
Maybe they will.
But either way, it's-
So Apple is rebuilding Syria around three core components, a planner, the search systems for
the web and devices, and a summary.
the planner interprets voice or text input and decides how to respond the search system scans a web or user data and the summarizer pulls it all together into an answer and Apple has recently leaning toward a custom built Google Gemini model for the summarizer it would run on Apple's own private cloud computer computing servers and that's going to be important search giant already delivered the technology to Apple and both companies are now collaborating on fine tuning and testing it so yep um
It does say that Apple considered acquiring perplexity to enhance the search features in Siri.
Perplexity is the big loser here.
Yeah, but perplexity sits on top of other foundation models.
So it doesn't fully solve Apple's problem all the way to the root of the stack, in my opinion.
So somewhat makes sense that they would, the secret sauce that perplexity builds is something that Apple's like,
capable of instantiating.
Yeah.
So I'm reading the article.
It says Google was not initially
the frontrunner for the series project.
Anthropic had been in the lead for the deal.
But then their price was too high.
Interesting.
Anthropic demanded a high price for using its technology
more than $1.5 billion a year.
And Google was open to more favorable financial terms.
So the end result
is that we should expect that
Apple pays Google
less than $1.5 billion per year.
to vend Gemini models into Siri, essentially.
And I feel like as soon as Gemini has ads in the results
or monetized commerce in the results.
And Apple can take a cut of that.
Apple should want to take a cut of that.
And so it feels like this, this, this, this economic flow
is going to reverse at some point.
I don't know.
Maybe it doesn't.
Maybe inference is really,
remains really expensive
and the monetization
never really pencils out or something
but this feels like something
that would flow the other direction at some point.
They're gatekeeper.
They're going to take the cut.
Yeah, I mean, Open AI is now
in the league of actually
like they are, they're very much
in the Mag7 league
in terms of competing
competing. I mean this
in a world where Apple
device users are just
pushed into using new effectively this is a google product right that will be powered by
still powered by google search and and theoretically built into the existing google ads engine
which is just going to be i would i would not bet against open ai in any way but it's certainly
uh this is some real competition more so than than just in that new jemini app that people are
I guess the question is, what is the value of this particular knowledge engine, right?
Isn't that how they're characterizing it?
Like the, the, what's it called?
They.
World knowledge answers.
So to me, this is starting with something that's just like, hey, what are some things I can do for fun when in New York?
And it's like, you should.
World knowledge answers.
Is that related to world liberty financial?
world coin, the orb scanner.
Potentially both.
Potentially both.
Kretzu. Put them all together.
No, world knowledge answers,
that feels like
something that has cost. Not the most high value
searches. Yes, not highly
monetizable. Yeah. And so
maybe there's some bifurcation where
the user activity, when they want
world knowledge answers,
that is a cost center.
And when you want to do agentic
commerce and shopping, that's
monetizable. But apps want both. Companies want both types of searches because I would
assume. I would assume. I would assume that what like the world knowledge answer, what headphones
should I buy? That's a question that I would want the new Siri to answer. And then I would want it to
buy them for me. Why not? More data. Hello in the chat says more data for Google. Let's give it up for
Google. They are just data world champions. It is, it is wild. People, yeah, this is, this is not.
many people's biggo cards early earlier of course it was probably on mark germans up everyone's
everyone's ripping the mag seven remains undefeated um anyway uh speaking of mag seven let's go to lulu
uh missurvy's breakdown of the tesla master plans v she's highlighting v2 and v4 and she calls it
founder writing versus committee writing and if you look and we touched on this yesterday if you look
at the way the first two master plans were written, it really does feel like Elon just tapped it out
on the phone almost. Like a couple bullet points here and there. There's one chart in there.
Then when Master Plan V3 comes out, it's this 40-page PDF with a bunch of charts. Maybe he was involved,
but the latest version does feel very dry. And Christian Kyle had a very good reply. He just replied
with the M-Dash because, of course, the Tesla master plan V4 had 14 M-dashes in it.
It's a lot of M-dashes at a time when the M-Dash is highly controversial.
I was thinking about the M-Dash.
I don't know how to create an M-Dash.
Like, I don't have the button on my keyboard.
I have a minus sign and I have an underscore.
All you have to do is hit the dash button twice and hit space.
Minus-minus, and then space and it turns into it.
and it turns it into it.
I never learned how to use that.
Really?
You were too poor and then you were too rich.
I was too poor and then I was too rich to use the MDash.
I'm not kidding.
I've never,
like you can look at any of my writing
and any of the scripts I've written or blog posts.
Like,
I just have never used the MDash.
I don't know why.
I was pretty devastated by by Chad ChapT
just stealing it.
Stealing it.
You were a big MDash guy before?
It's just,
it's very functional.
I'm just all about the comma.
Like,
why do you ever need an M dash when you can just use a comma?
You know,
like, so in the Tesla thing,
how we develop and use autonomy.
It's more than M-Dash.
John, it's a statement.
Why, just use a comma?
I don't know.
I don't understand.
Do you, Tyler, do you understand why the M-Dash is valuable at all?
We should just destroy it.
We should just get rid of it.
I don't think it makes any sense.
Yeah, I mean, there's some, like, stylistic value.
What is the stylistic value?
Just looks nice or something?
Looks maxing.
You're writing.
ORA farming, the M-Dash.
I just don't like it.
It doesn't have spaces around it.
The comma is just so much cleaner.
Use a comma, use a period, use a space.
It just, like, did Shakespeare write M-Dashes?
Let's figure that out.
I think so.
Who is the first person to really dominate the M-Dash?
I see it in, I see it all over the place now.
I see it, I see it in the, I mean, it's in, is it in the journal usually?
I don't know.
I don't see a lot of it in the journal.
No.
Okay.
If it's not in the journal, it shouldn't be in your...
It should get out of the training data.
Some of the most well-known users of the M-Dash.
I asked Gemini because I just feel like that you have to be.
who is biased.
James Joyce.
Oh, okay.
Emily Dickinson.
Vladimir Nobukov.
A master of style.
Nobukov used the M-Dash
to create a specific kind of voice and pacing.
No.
Shakespeare did not use the M-Dash.
Does the Bible...
Does the Bible use...
J.K. Rowling has been a notable user of the M-Dash.
Maybe she is an AI that travels...
traveled back in time to bring Harry Potter forward to bring the chosen one does does does does does the
endash occur in the Bible no the Bible at least in its early printings and manuscripts did not use
m dashes ancient text the Hebrew Bible in the Greek New Testament were originally written without
punctuation at all in the Bible this is hilarious so chat GPC says no m dash the Bible at least
did not use m dash the the the Greek New Testament were originally
written without punctuation at all. M-Dash, just continue a script. Breaks, pauses, and emphasis
were conveyed by spacing, rhythm, or oral tradition. Modern editions, some 19th and 20th century
English Bibles, especially in America, started using dashes to mark sudden breaks or interruptions
and thought, but this is a modern editorial choice, not a part of the original text or the earliest
print traditions. So the M-Dash is relatively recent punctuation invention. I think we've got to return.
get rid of the m-dash destroy the m-dash i'm sick of hearing it take it out of your writing instead
get on bezel your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet seriously
any watch go to get bezzled alice conrad went viral yesterday he shared a screenshot from bloomberg
erwin the colt los angeles grocery chain is opening its first new york city tonic bar inside a private
west village pedal club okay he said none of these words appear in the bible oh there we go related to the bible
this is the this is the aeron thing in new york that emily sunberg broke very excited very excited
um uh did you see that um josh kushner was at the u.s open and he's so he's so recognizable
they didn't need to give him a little kairon a little lower third they had to explain who
adam silver was a man that needs no introduction who is who is adam silver again he's like
a sports guy adam i don't know if you're serious
He's the commissioner of the NBA.
What's the NBA?
That's the guy that's that, uh, get ready to learn Chinese.
The NBA is the National Basketball Association.
Um, so what is, is that a sport?
What is basketball?
Basketball is a dynamic team sport where two teams of five players try to score
by shooting a ball through an opponent's hoop.
Okay.
So, so, so the guy on the left,
apparently he
I guess he runs a
company that where people
they have teams where they
have five players each and they
try and throw a ball through a hoop
okay so there's
there's Adam Silver that the basketball guy
then there's Josh Kushner everyone knows Josh Kushner
then there's Bob Iger who is Bob
Iger who is Bob
Iger okay
Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney
what is Disney what is
Disney is Disney is a
global American mass media and entertainment conglomerate known for its family-friendly content
and content and services, including theme parks.
What is a theme park?
A theme park is an amusement park.
Oh, oh, it's an amusement park, but it has a unifying setting or idea.
So it has a theme to it.
It's somewhat of a theme to it.
Yeah.
Okay, the themed amusement park.
Okay, got it.
Okay, so anyway, I think we cracked it.
So obviously, everyone knows Josh Kushner, Thrive Capital,
but Adam Silver.
It's good to know about these guys, too.
With some game where you throw basketball through the hoop,
and then Bob Iger does, he's a media guy, I guess.
Yeah.
Cool.
Well, I'm glad that they put their names there because otherwise, I'd be lost.
I'd be lost.
Anyway.
Robin Hood, former guest.
on the show. Vlad Tenev said investing for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world. Will Brown
quote posts it gets a 1.3K likes. Says Roblox CEO, David Bazuki, has said that gaming for a living
could replace labor in a post-AI world. Podcast host John Kugan and Jordie Hayes say that
podcasting for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world. You know what I would hope
replaces labor in a post-AI world? Pull-ups and push it.
Wondering. Just going from wander to wander.
Finding your happy place. Finding your happy place.
Booking Wonders with inspiring views. Hotel Great a many's dreamy veds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.
It's a vacation home, but better.
But better.
And in just 6,000 days, you'll be able to just spend all of your time wandering around.
Hopefully, hopefully.
Last post, before we go into our next guest, they're in the stream waiting room.
They're about to come into the TV-Pen Ultram.
Get that gong ready.
Would you buy Ilya Sutskiver merch?
Alps has printed Ilya's head on a hat and also on a mouse.
Went megaviral with 2.6K likes.
People are excited.
I mean, the mouse looks clean.
Ilia, you, Tyler, you've said that Ilya is like the best aura farmer of all time,
something like that?
He's a goaded or a farmer, yeah.
But I feel like in terms of his aura farming strategy.
Like, like I'm a hundred years old.
Yeah, I would argue, I would argue that his aura farming strategy is do nothing win.
I think that is an example of war farming.
It's like, it's kind of like a nonchalance, you know?
Yeah.
He has a certain genesis quo.
We have a, yeah.
Don't nonchalant for nonchalant with Elia.
That's my.
You don't nonchalant.
Don't do it, dude.
Don't do it.
He will not, he will out nonchalant you for sure, for sure.
You'll get roasted.
Don't even try it.
Also, don't go fundraise with our next guest.
Ilya or a farm.
Richard from you.com.
Oh, he did?
No.
Oh, I thought that was news.
Anyway, we got our next guest in the Restream waiting room coming into the TBPN Ultradome.
Welcome.
We got Richard from you.
How are you doing?
Very well.
How are you guys doing?
We're doing fantastic.
It's a wonderful day.
We're having a great time.
What's new in your world?
Give us the news.
Any big numbers?
Yeah, we just raised $100 million at a $1.25 billion.
Boom.
When did you start the company again?
In 2020.
Nothing like a five-year overnight success.
Love it.
Give us an update.
You were on the show.
Was it, I'm forgetting, was it maybe three months ago at this point?
Yeah, yeah.
main thing since then is we kept growing more and more aggressively like we have over a billion
API calls a month now there are not many other startups in fact I can't think of any other startup at
that scale now and these API calls give search results for both people directly but also for
LMs like the way we search is going to change right so you have this whole Google thing that's
unfolding now but that's kind of the the last you know sort of
past of searching. Now people are going to search more and more through the LMs and LMs can
search hundreds of times and then summarize all that content for you, right? So it's a whole new
world and we're building composable infrastructure layers for companies and startups, massive consumer
companies like Dr. Go and also enterprise companies like Harvey and Windsurf, the NIH is a customer
of U.com, Telegraph, like lots of different organizations, both for the
APIs, but also we built end-to-end solutions because not every company is ready to just like take in an API and may have an epic AI transformation. So we're doing both of those together.
Yeah, when did you realize that it made sense to combine those efforts? I'm sure early on companies, like maybe that maybe that, you know, actually building out these, uh, that this infrastructure for companies was not something that you were selling. And then you realize like, hey, we, in order to actually unlock the value of our product, we need it. We need to kind of like hand deliver.
some of these features that's right yeah for the last couple of years we were the most accurate
answer engine uh in the world but normal consumers they care more about marketing and and fun ads
and stuff like that and the designs but companies kept coming to us and be like we did a benchmark
you are the most accurate we need that you know there are hedge funds the NIH like journalists
like that really care about accuracy and so they are like we want the technology but we don't
necessarily want it on you dot com we want it inside our own products and our
own websites, in our own apps, and so on. And so at some point, there's so much market pull
there for the technology that we said, let's build out a proper sales team that's really
go to market with those APIs in an enterprise context. Give us your reaction to the Google
news today. They beat the charges almost. I mean, they were found guilty, but then the remediation
was pretty minor. You're obviously an expert in this category. Walk us through how you process
the news? Yeah, I mean, I think overall it goes in the right direction in terms of giving some more
access to certain companies for the index and some of their data. At the same time, you know,
we're a startup still. And by the time this gets really implemented, you know, they're probably
going to try to appeal it. And so on this guy, take another. We were really struggling to understand
what giving the search index one time and then on an ongoing basis means. It's only like some
percentage of the query data based yeah they're giving you data based on some percentage of your
query yeah can you explain like what exactly is available can i just go get this data can you dot com
go get this data can anyone get this data like what does it actually take are is this just like
microsoft bing and the other like duck duck go like the big competitors are they named like
how does this actually work yeah so no one fully knows yet right there's like recommendations
from judge and then like so there's like a ton of meta within eH not yeah yeah but inside
wheeling if it was METM but like my hunch is the one the most extreme scenario here would be like
they have a full-on API the way u.com right now sells it right which could be good for some people
my hunches they're going to try to drag your feet as much as possible on that for as long as
possible because that is very much core IP for them.
And then they're also going to realize that the index, the way it used to be built,
was for people to decide which of 10 blue links to click on.
Our index now is looking very different.
It can go deeper.
It can crawl more.
It has these decomposable components.
And it actually gives you much more content per link back rather than just a short snippet
the way like the Google search results would.
And so by the time this all comes out and it's,
might become available maybe as an API, it'll probably be somewhat outdated for the use cases
LOM's need.
Do we need an API here?
I feel like if I have an AI agent that has a browser, the browser can go to Google and search
for me and then scrape the results.
Like, is not the front end the API?
Like, does Google have like a blocker on this?
Like, can open AI not just Google?
like they certain their employees can Google things, I imagine, but can they not like resell that to me in their chat app?
Like, what's the dynamic there?
Yeah, it's in a really interesting world, actually.
You know, there are not many real web indices out there.
And you have a lot of startups, including some of our competitors, who essentially just do what you described.
Yeah.
Who so-called SERP APIs and proxy networks where you have your phone, you have your smart TV, and you install some app.
And that app then has some SDK installed somewhere where if you're not using your phone or your TV, it becomes an IP address.
And then pretends to be a user, goes to, so scrapes the content from a search query in that, sends it back to centralized IP.
And then folks sell search results, but they're really just Google results.
Like literally the biggest competitors in the consumer space are just really fast at scraping Google results and then connecting it to an LM and doing all of that.
it's hilarious. Now, the problem of that is that, A, if you're a bigger company, like Open AI or Facebook meta, like, they wouldn't want to send all of their data and all their queries to Google, right? They're literally trying to compete with them. So that's not an ideal setting. Two, it doesn't really scale. Like, because Google can and does shut down these proxy networks all the time and they try to block it and have CAPTCHAs and all of that. And in three, as it, you know, as you go through someone's random phone and maybe they did click on some.
something, now it's really slow. And there's slow response times. And so where we actually have
benchmarks that we can, you know, back up, we can go on you.com and find them. Like, we are super
fast and we're more accurate than Google SERP APIs. And that is really unique in the market.
What about this news? It just broke that Apple will be potentially partnering with Google to
have Siri powered by some sort of version of Gemini. Was that,
on your bingo card, was that expected? Does that seem like a reasonable kind of end state of
the market dynamic? I was talking about this earlier. Feels very something that feels like it'd be
on your, on your forecast given that you guys are helping a lot of companies build these sort of like
knowledge. Yeah, like if you're in like business 101 going to Silicon Valley, you would say that like
the ability to search and get great results is valuable. Therefore,
Apple would be paying Google for search results. But in fact, the money flows the other direction
because Google's making $60 billion a year or whatever off of Safari search results. And so
how do you see the relationship and the economic flow changing there? I think the news report
was that Anthropic wanted $1.5 billion and Apple said that's too much. We're going with Google
and Google will be getting less than $1.5 billion maybe from Apple for the rights to use the
LLMs. But yeah, what's your take on all that? Yeah, so a couple different angles here. So one,
it's surprising that Apple cannot do it themselves still. Like, it's kind of crazy and surprising.
They're like, you know, trillions of dollars worth and somehow are not able to execute on this
themselves. The second thing, and, you know, they have great privacy at Apple, but then, you know,
they partner with companies that have a different stance on privacy.
So there's like interesting complexities there.
The second thing is that indeed, you know, one of the biggest changes also of the ruling today
was that Apple will continue to be allowed to take the $20 billion to not build their own search index, right?
So that's a really interesting part of the ruling too.
Google is allowed to still pay Apple $20 billion a year to stay the default.
So that is a really important piece of this whole situation because defaults are very strong.
I don't know where I read this, but like 80% of all iPhone users never change a single setting.
Maybe not your viewers, but many normal iPhone users, they don't change any setting ever.
So if you're the default, you'll be on there forever.
I wonder how, I mean, I imagine.
No settings for me.
I don't need to adjust the volume.
I'll never adjust the brightness of my screen.
Not a single setting.
No, I imagine that it's like deeper in the settings, of course.
Yeah.
That is hilarious.
Anyway, do you have anything else?
No, I have a couple other people on the restrine.
Very happy to hear about your progress.
Yeah, congratulations.
This is awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's my favorite new pun.
Unicorn.
Yeah, there we go.
There we go.
Yeah, tremendous. Thanks for joining.
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
Have a great rest of your day.
Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room.
We got Pablo from Happy Robot, and I think we got some more news.
Let me put my pack in here so I can get ready.
Let's bring in.
Pablo.
Pablo, how you doing?
Welcome to the show.
How are things?
Can you hear us?
Are the robots happy?
Are they sad?
Are they going to turn into Terminators?
What's the plan?
Can you hear us?
Sorry, guys.
No worries.
We're good.
Probably watching live.
We're going to work on this.
You're like, oh, that's me.
Back to you.
But thanks so much for hopping on.
Give us the update.
Give us the news.
What's latest?
We just raised our CIRS V, 44 mil.
Let's go.
Let's go.
44.
Great number.
Great number.
Take us through the story of the company.
What unlocked this fundraising round?
What are the biggest drivers of growth for the business?
Yeah.
To set the scene a little bit for the audience, we're building the AI workforce for an entire industry for supply chain.
Okay.
There's a lot of work that is very repetitive and manually in that industry.
Kutas and take my hat off to all of those folks who are running those operations every day
so that you guys can have that very cool ramp, DPP, hat on your doorstep every time you order on Amazon or any other platform.
So we are powering those operations so that we take away the work out of work.
We're trying to lift off the mundane and repetitive tasks from those folks running operations and supply.
and logistics so that they can focus on the more strategic and higher value tasks.
We started over a year and a half ago, raised our series A last summer, announced December
last year, raised 15 meal from, from Andresden Horwich.
Now we announced our B with B-D-D-N and follow-on from other folks like Y-C-N-A-C-N-E-S-N.
Very excited to be here, yes.
Is it fair to characterize this as like AI-E-R-P, like how much of this is like, like,
you know, some sort of like point solution within the supply chain and operation stack versus
like system of record.
Really building that system of record data, a layer of interaction, we call it.
So we define it as a layer of interaction, later of connectivity, if you will, that sits
on top of the actual data that already exists today.
You can have a transportation management system, a warehouse management system, an ERP.
If you were talking about the shippers and distributors, today we serve multiple verticals
within supply chain, shippers is one, freight brokers is another one, ocean carriers is another
one, right? But right on, right? Like, this is exactly what we're doing. We're building that
layer of interaction so that users don't have to go and look for that little detail on the TMS.
Where the hell is my load, right? Where is my truck today? Oh, let me just look it up on these
messy UI from the 80s, you know what I mean? Instead, they just go and chat with their data.
And not only that, an AI also is exposed to the customers, to the vendors,
that are calling in every day.
We're automating over a million phone calls every week
with our customers.
We serve eight of the top 10.
Million phone calls.
A lot of, a lot of emails as well.
Ultimately, our customers come to us.
Customers like DHL are Uber Freight come to us
to automate what their team doesn't want to do.
Yeah.
What's the split?
Yeah, so how, yeah, have you guys had a more,
you know, working with Uber Freight, DHLs?
Are you taking more enterprise focus?
Because I know there's a long tail.
of players in logistics and supply chain broadly. But are you focusing there or going upmarket?
Fully focused on enterprise. We're very lucky to have been able to cater to these enterprises
from very early on. Thing AI has unlocked that capability in startups. Maybe 10 years ago it was
harder to tap into the enterprises. Today, they just understand that they don't have the AI
capabilities themselves. So they're just looking at it at whoever is tempted or willing to go into
that space. We were early on in the space of supply chain and logistics, and we've kind of
defined that category for AI agents in this space. So they really don't have anyone else to go to.
They just come to us as a trusted partner. And that's really what our customers are looking
for. They're looking for an AI partner, really. You're based in San Francisco?
Yeah. Fantastic. Because there's this big German company that's been in the space
forever and I can't wait to just like fully put them out of business and just
make America dominant in enterprise resource planning let's make it happen
Jordy anything else no this what were you doing before this out of curiosity I was
doing my PhD in actually Germany I was in no all three founders are one of my
co-founders is my brother for a while and the other one is my best buddy from
college from Spain. We studied out in Madrid. But yeah, no, the company is based out of
SF. We have offices in Madrid as well, opening up in Chicago and office now because of all
the freight and logistics that helps for that. Maybe you've got to take the fight to Germany.
You got to invade Germany. I mean, we're up to the big boys, the big boys. I love a couple
brothers armed with with $44 million, ready to do some international business. I love it.
It's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. Congrats on all the progress.
Congratulations. I'm sure you'll be back on soon, given the past couple raises. I'm sure you'll be. I'm excited. Let's do that. Let's respond for that. Appreciate you guys. We will talk to you soon. Have a good one. Great chat. Thank you. Our next guest is in the re-stream waiting room. All right. We'll bring in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream waiting room. How's your day? Hello. How you doing? How's your day? How you doing? What's you got? What are you got?
Where are you sitting right now?
Looks like you're on a train.
I'm in a phone booth within our office.
Okay, okay, cool.
It looked like it was like some type of tractor or something.
This is the physical instantiation of the lock, the great lock-in of September to December.
Yes, yes.
Locked in.
Fantastic.
You've clearly been locked in.
What's the news?
Yeah, the big day today.
We just announced our series B.
85
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you,
couldn't hear you.
Oh yeah,
Peter Fenton, that's exciting.
What's it like working with him?
Yeah, I mean, he's a legend.
He's super experienced.
He's taken seven companies to IPO.
He just, honestly, his vision for Exha
was just like matched or exceeded hours.
And so that was really exciting to work with a VC
who just like saw what we saw
and saw how big this company could get.
Yeah, so he's joined the board.
Had you worked with him before, or is this new?
No, no.
I met him like a month ago, a month and a half ago.
Nice.
Fast friends and partner.
So, yeah, take us through the story of the business.
I mean, only a couple years old, well on your way to an overnight success.
I think we check in with you any decade.
It would be pretty clear that you're an overnight success.
But take us through the history of the company, where you are now, kind of what's been the key growth driver?
Yeah, so we actually started 2021, so summer 2021.
This is way before ChatsbyT.
And the idea was like, you know, at the time GV3 had recently come out,
and it was like this magical thing that could understand like a whole paragraph of text.
And then at the same time, there was Google, which felt like it hadn't changed in a decade.
So the idea was, what if it could build a search engine that was as smart as GV3?
Something like fully understand, understood the web and fully understand your query and get you like way better results in Google.
And that's how we started.
So not necessarily a search engine for AI.
It was more like a search engine for nerds because we were building it for ourselves.
And then when Chatsyotee came out a couple years later, it turned out that, like, the search engine we were building for ourselves for nerds is actually perfect for AIs because AI's the nerds are very similar.
But yeah, I mean, basically we had to go build a search engine from scratch for years, which is really hard.
So we did, you know, we bought a million dollar GPU cluster after YC.
We trained, you know, a ton of different models, try to, a ton of different transform architectures until we had like a new type of search engine.
So the, so the GPUs are trained to actually, so you're not doing, you're not doing crawling on.
GPUs, right? That's like traditional CPU workloads, right?
That's right. We have our CPU batch processing, and then we train models on our
computers. Okay. And, yeah, there's been a ton of news today in the search engine world
with the Google news. Like, what's been your interpretation of it?
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much, like, what's crazy, like, AI is very exciting, but then
search for AI is, like, now the most exciting space is really cool. I think everyone's realizing
that, like, sure, like we want smarter and smarter LMs, but really we want. We want
more knowledgeable LMs.
Like we want to connect our LMs to like the best data in the world.
And search is like basically the most important tool to connect your LLM to.
And so yeah, I mean it's pretty exciting that there's Google News like for example like
yeah I mean they're sharing their data has one thing about the search space is everything
is very counterintuitive.
So for example like if everyone now has access to Google's data, people are less incentivized
to build new search engines which is interesting.
So there's all sorts of counterintuitive like things in the search space.
Yeah.
Yeah, how does that shape like your strategy?
Because it feels like right now Google's not only like the, they have the search monopoly.
They were kind of like, you know, found guilty of that.
The remedies are not exactly putting them on the back foot.
The stock's up 8% today.
And it feels like they're partnering even, they're going even deeper with Apple, potentially.
The Bloomberg reporting that just came out is that there are rumors that Apple will be partnering with Gemini to test out.
can be powered by Gemini, which is obviously built on top of the Google crawler and Google's
search index.
And so is the future for you look like a really long tail of, you know, tons of businesses
that need to use some sort of like best in class search and they can't go to Google for
a particular reason at like an API level because Google doesn't want to sell that as a product
and you're there to sell that?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Like a big difference between us and Google is that Google is not trying to be.
search infrastructure. They're trying to be a platform. They want people to go to Google.
Yeah. But we are uniquely trying to be search infrastructure. So we want a long tail of
companies, like every company to be able to have the highest quality search inside their
applications. And so that makes us very unique. Like when we said we were a search engine for
AI's like a couple years ago. No one really got what that means, but I think that world has
really played out where now we have thousands of companies using Exa powering all sorts
of applications, whether internal or external with high quality search. And like you said,
Google doesn't, like, is not doing that.
Like, they're not going to have an API because...
Well, there's a lot of searches that are valuable
in the context of specific applications
that are actually not even that valuable to Google, right?
Like, when you're trying to retrieve information
that you can then take action on,
that's not necessarily something that Google is, like,
you know, able to run a bunch of great ads against.
Yeah, is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
And the business model determines, well, you're saying,
business model determines, like, how the search feels
or how the algorithm works.
And so, for example, like, Google's really bad at recruiting.
Like, you can't use Google to find, like, give me all the engineers in San Francisco
who have, like, a PhD in machine learning and get a list of those things.
Like, why isn't Google good at that?
Well, it doesn't make them more ad revenue.
Whereas we're very good at that because all sorts of customers, AI applications,
want that high quality knowledge.
And so, like, the end user you're selling to, like, really determines the search
algorithm, which also makes us very unique.
Yeah.
What is the value of actually training a model?
I feel like there's enough of a business.
I don't know if now's the,
best time for this for that particular business but but like just being the best web scraper index you
have all the every single web page perfectly indexed in a database that people can query that
feels like a valuable product in and of itself and then someone else brings their foundation model
to bear on top of your search index and you're a partner to the big labs that train the big models
why are you training your own model yeah I mean well the easy part is actually gathering all the
data. I mean, it's hard that you need like crazy scale infrastructure, but it's an engineering
problem. Once you gather all that, you know, trillions of pages, the hard part is how do you
filter those trillion pages to the right 10 or 100 pages in real time? And that's where all the
secret sauce is. And so like we train our own and we train embedding models because we see that
as the way to get the highest quality search. Like how do you get like perfect search over the
world's information? You need to train all these like crazy neural models, which is in contrast to
the old world, which is like Google, for example, mostly uses a keyword based method. Obviously they
use a mix of things, but like we're very bitter lesson-pilled at Exa, and so we believe if you have
the right, you know, a training data set and like a feedback signal, you can get an extremely
good search engine for the thing you're training for. Yeah. When you say you're bitter
lesson-pilled, I feel like that's rough because, like, who's more bitter lesson-pilled than
Google? Like they have the most data, the most compute, deep-mind, all this other stuff. Like, what is
the, can walk me through like the counter-positioning against, like, Google's, like, business here?
The whole, like, Google will do it is like a complete trite over, I don't believe in it.
I'm bullish on you, you know, but like there is something weird about what you just said
and that I would expect Google to be able to move off of keyword pretty quickly, at least
from a technology perspective.
Yeah, well, there are two things.
So one, it actually is kind of hard for a giant shift to switch to a different algorithm.
That's like they have that works really well.
It's very reliable.
And there are a lot of benefits to the keywords for talking.
Sure.
And so it's hard.
You know, you have a lot of people at the organization.
who are in there for decades, who have a certain thing.
You have all sorts of, like, advertisements that are connected to the keywords, actually.
Sure, sure.
But I think the more important thing is that it comes back to the way the revenue model.
So they are serving humans with ads.
And so to serve, like, and by the way, Google is fantastic at that.
Like, Google has built an amazing consumer search engine for humans to make money from ads
and optimize for what humans click on.
But that's not what AI applications want.
So a critical point of XA is that, like, we are optimizing for a different thing than Google.
Google is optimized for humans and clicks and ads.
We are optimizing for AIs and AI applications and all these complex searches that this new AI world makes.
And so that explains, even if we both have a ton of compute, we'll build very different search algorithms.
Yeah, it does seem like with the, what does it, AI search overviews, like those have at least anecdotally been hallucinating like crazy.
So they definitely have some gaps to bridge between like some phenomenal stuff going on in Gemini and some frontier level like reasoning models.
and then some very reliable Google search results
and then the AI search overviews still
they haven't fully solved the hallucination problem
and some grounding in truth there
obviously a problem that they're working.
You guys compete with with you.com
we just had Richard on, Richard on.
Is that or is it, it's not a lot of relapse?
If I see him, it's on site.
Well, it's funny if you both announcing fundraisers today.
I don't know if that was random.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they mentioned
that they do search, and they also do AI agents.
So, like, we are definitely, like, in a similar space.
I would say, like, the space is very hot.
Like, the market, everyone realizing the market is massive.
Sure.
And so, like, you know, I welcome other players there.
I think, you know, we've been doing this for many years.
You welcome them, but you encourage them to take the full memorial
for Labor Day weekend off.
You said, yeah, you guys should be.
It's a hot space.
It's going to be a long road.
Just take the full three-day vacation.
Yeah.
We grind.
Okay.
Sorry, last question for me.
You bought a GPU cluster.
That can mean a million different things.
What does that mean?
Do you own the land?
Do you own the data center?
Do you own the cards?
Do you own a space within Azure?
Like there's so many different, are you partnered with the neocloud?
Like, what can you tell me about what it means to actually own or manage a GPU cluster?
What are the best practices?
Like, what actually works?
You're down dealing with depreciation.
There's so much going on.
I love to just learn more about like owning and managing a GPU cluster as a startup,
up not as some hyperscaler.
Yeah, sure.
So in terms of like getting GPUs, like there are a couple options.
Like you could spin up on demand clusters, which is more expensive.
But if your workloads are like very like spiky, then that makes sense.
But for us, we're good, doing constant research.
So we want something that we're like constantly using gets like, you know, 80% utilization.
When you start to have that kind of utilization, then you want to get like either reserved
or your own cluster.
And you know, do the math and like, you know, it often makes sense to buy your own cluster
if you're crazy enough to like set it up.
If you have the, you know, if you have the expertise to set it up and and you could
customized in all different ways.
And so, yeah, we kind of went that route.
Also, it's just freaking badass, and, like, we know we're going to get bigger,
and we want to have experience, like, building clusters.
I would say, like, we're not.
So you have servers, like, in your office?
Like, the cluster exists physically?
Okay.
He's, like, George Hots literally has, like, server racks in his comma AI spot in San Diego.
And it's, like, the craziest thing you've ever seen.
Then, Nat Friedman, when he was doing NFDG, he spun up the Andromata cluster.
And that was more, like, in partnership with,
someone else which made a lot more sense because like why do you have to learn how power routes
necessarily like that's not necessarily the differentiator yeah so we don't well we're not big enough
yet our previous one was big enough we had to buy the land or buy the data center yeah we have a
part of data center but you know as we expand at some point we'll have our own data i see land
on your horizon will yeah i think you got to vertically integrate you got to buy a oil and gas
tracked you got to buy the the natural gas resources in the ground buy the sand that you can
turn into silicon. Fab your own chips, design your own chips. You've got to be vertically
integrated. It's the only way to win. From Santa Search. Exactly. From Santa Search. That's a great.
That's a great line. Printing. Put it on a t-shirt. Give them, I've seen enough. Give them 10 billion.
Give them 10 billion. Thank you so much for wrapping on. Jordi, you got anything else?
No, this is great. Awesome progress. Thanks for breaking it down for us. We will talk to you
soon. Congrats to the whole team. Have a great one.
Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Bye. Our next guest, Charlie from Orchard Robotics, is in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring in
Charlie from Orchard.a.
Charlie Charlie, Charlie.
Orchard, Orchard.
A teal fellow Cornell dropout.
Wow.
Well, flush.
How you doing, Charlie, it's great to have you in the Ultradem.
Great to be on the Temple of Technology, the capital of capital.
Welcome.
There we go.
What else can we do?
Can we play a soundboy for you?
Can we ring this gong for you?
Do you have anything for us?
It would be an honor to us.
Give us something.
Yeah.
So today, we,
announced our $22 million series A, led by quiet capital and shine.
Let's go.
So excited to finally have a success out there.
We've been growing the team a bunch.
We've been scaling up our technology into a bunch of new farms.
It's really been an exciting time these last couple of months.
Thank you for making cool-looking robots.
We've got to pull this.
We'll have a team.
Yes, yes.
Pull up the landing page.
I want to look through this.
Also, thank you for making a company with a name that directly translates to what you do.
Orchard.A.I. It's a farming company. That's fantastic. And I love your background, by the way. How did you get into this? Did you just do a market map and figure out there's opportunity in farming? Or did you have some background? How did you learn on that? My grandparents were actually apple farmers. And my parents had the agriculture before they immigrated to the U.S. I grew up in Virginia, gone to robotics early on, built my first robot when I was like seven years old, trained my first ML model in middle school. I ended up going to school to study CS and mechanical engineering. And this was kind of during the COVID use.
And people love people to know this, but Cornell is actually the number one agriculture school in the nation.
And we have anchors of...
Look at this robot, John.
Yeah, it's a beautiful robot.
You made a beautiful robot.
Yeah, thank you.
Our amazing team made that.
But it's been a pretty long journey in the past three years to get to this point, actually.
And, you know, the first iteration of this was actually this huge six-foot-tall autonomous rover that I built my dorm room.
And then we realized, wait a minute, you know, you don't really need a rover.
You can just have a camera because you have tractors that go through the farms all day already.
But really, it was talking to, I think, you know, when I first started the company, I talked to like 100 different farmers, just drove around upstate New York, talked to everyone I could, and basically learned that, you know, here in the U.S., even on the largest commercial farms, like, these farmers are relying on very, very small amounts of data to make every decision.
So, you know, say an Apple farmer is going to send their 10 best workers out to the fields for entire week to count and size fruit on trees.
And maybe, you know, 400 man hours, they get to 500 trees.
seems like a lot until you realize there's five million trees in the farm.
And that sample size is what they use to make every decision across their entire company,
which is kind of insane to think about.
But, you know, we're helping them get doing that.
So you started, are you starting with counting, which sounds simple, but...
So we can do a lot of things.
We started with things.
Now we can count and size, measure color, measure gray, detect disease, measure growth rate,
do inventories of plants, basically tell a farmer everything they want to know that can be, you know,
glean from visual information out in the fields, which is, you know, pretty much all of the
important information that they've, you know, been lacking for these last couple of decades.
Get nerd out with me for a second on the hardware. I see a bunch of different lenses and cameras
on here. I imagine that, that you're driving right by a tree. There's going to be apples that
are obscured by leaves. You need high definition, some 4K, 8K, some zoomed in, some zoomed out.
like, what's the optic stack that gets you enough resolution or data to actually determine,
you know, is this an apple or is this Apple healthy?
Like, walk me through that decision.
Yeah, we have four lenses on each of our cameras, and they're basically two stereo pairs.
We use stereo vision.
They're RGB cameras.
They're pretty much off-the-shelf cameras.
Camera technology is really good in the last couple of years.
The real magic is in the machine learning models that we run on the edge.
So we have some state-of-the-art multi-object detection.
tracking models that we run on different cameras.
We have Nvidia, Jets, and Orrin set every single one of them
that run these models at the edge.
And we can basically do things like of the 100 images
we take every single second.
We can tell, even through occlusion,
through things like leaves, blocking fruit or fruit
that are as small as 5 millimeters we can actually size.
You actually hit the nail on the head.
We have a really wide angle lens and a really narrow angle lens.
And that lets do things like zoom in to see very, very small things,
but also things like a 12-foot tall tree from three or four feet away.
Being a farmer and just refreshing your dashboard and seeing that you have a bountiful harvest
must hit extremely hard. How do you sell robots? Are you like, I imagine if this is replacing
the need to send hundreds of people or a bunch of people into the field to like physically count
fruit. It can pay itself back fairly quickly. But what's the, what's the business model?
Yeah, so we actually charge a per acre per year subscription fee. So it's similar to
SaaS pricing where it scales on the number of acres they use it on.
Since the hardware is so, you know, relatively inexpensive, we actually don't even charge
for the hardware.
It's, it's, you know, boxed in with the subscription fee.
So it's really easy and not capital intensive for a farmer to, you know, try on a couple
hundred acres and scale onto thousands or tens of thousands of acres.
Are those LED lights on the sides of the robot?
They are.
Yeah, they're LED strobe lights.
So even at night, we can operate.
Oh, and you only strobe them when you're taking a picture with the cameras to save energy?
Yep.
Makes a ton of sense.
All of the cameras are powered.
So we actually can power them off of any 12-volt power source.
So we have farmers that actually plug them into like the, the 12-volt sockets, like the carjacks, like on your car.
We have, you know, like, people who use external batteries, you know, you can wire it into like, you know, the car battery of any tractor or ATV.
It's really version.
What's the, what's the refresh rate on the flashing, on the strobes?
Are you doing like one for a second or something?
It's more, it depends.
It's more than 15 times a second to Peter's.
15 times a second, you're flashing LED lights.
Is this going to make squirrels go insane?
Hopefully the squirrels aren't awake and night.
Yeah, go to sleep squirrels.
Yeah, close your eyes.
We're farming out here.
We're farming.
Get out of here.
Yeah, I mean, maybe there's a pest control.
We talked to the laser weeder guy, and maybe there's a pest control angle.
Maybe you have a lot of VCs early on to tell you to pick a different category.
Oh, yeah.
actually it's it's a good point that you brought up because you know we started this company back in
march of 2022 and it was actually i think it was around the time that like the whole american dynamism
yeah they were like please make weapons i'll give you a hundred million put a gun on it
i i remember actually when i when i met my first like vc ever they were like oh you should pivot
into crypto like that that was the because this was march of 2022 it was before everything came you know
tumbling down. And we were like, ah, no, I don't really want to get crypto. I think, you know,
this is my life's work. I'm going to do this for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know,
I think over the last year or so, there's been kind of this rise in, you know, robotics and
American dynamism and, you know, like manufacturing, all these like industry things. And,
you know, suddenly, you know, agriculture and ag tech is sexy now. And, you know, it's been, you know,
when we went out to raise this last round, it was, I'd say, a bit, I don't say easy.
nothing's ever easy.
But, you know, it was, it was a lot better than, you know, when we were raising our first two rounds.
You could have gone into beans.
Do you remember beans?
Hey, you know, I've actually heard that coffee beans are a pretty big market at Hawaii.
I'm talking about the Crypto Project Beans.
I don't know if you're familiar this, but it was popular on Twitter for like, you know,
right around that time, right about when you would have been pivoting from agriculture-themed robotics
into agriculture-themed crypto.
It was a very popular crypto app where you would put your, the whole thing was like staking
coins, but the metaphor was like you stake your beans and your beans harvest and they yield
and stuff.
And then there were tons of people that all of a sudden they put in like a thousand dollars
and then they like the harvest came and they were worth like a million dollars on paper.
But then the thing got hacked and so they lost all their money.
It was a wild.
I'm glad you tripled down.
Seems like you did something much more value creative thing.
And it feels like I have to imagine this is like already helping solve labor shortages with farms.
And the same thing that, you know, when people sell in AI to the enterprise, they're saying we're freeing up people's time to do higher leverage work and like counting and doing doing this stuff, you know, you're just sort of like getting the state of things by understanding like crop yields and things like that.
And then I imagine this is freeing up labor to, like, actually take action to increase yields and fight off pests and things like that that actually impact the bottom line.
Yeah, you know, the big thing is, you know, not only is it freeing up labor from, you know, having to go out and do this counting and sampling work, but perhaps the more important thing that's actually being, you know, done in the immediate ROI a lot of our farmers can see is actually a reduction in labor costs and crop inputs.
Because right now, what, you know, this is a bit of a simplification, but what happens across a lot of these farms is that, you know, a farmer who's managing millions of trees and thousands of acres might go out and say, hey, you know, this is like one, you know, 50 acre plot of land, I'm going to do the exact same thing to every one of the 50,000 trees in this 50 acre pot of land.
When in reality, half the trees might only need half the amount of, you know, pests, they're pruning or, you know, fertilizers, you know, whatever it is, they might be applying or doing to those truths.
So it's very one size fits all. And we can tell these farmers things like, hey, wait a minute, in this half of this block, it only needs, you know, half the amount of pruning. You only need to send half the amount of workers into that half. And suddenly you're saving 25% of labor costs in that block. So, you know, that's probably one of the first big things that a lot of our customers notice when they use their technology is just this, you know, ability to see where you need more of something and where you need less of something else. And you can see pretty immediate labor and cost savings just from that alone. But, you know, in the long run, we have this.
this, I guess, this conception of what we call like an AI farmer, which is that if we can see,
you know, tens or hundreds or, you know, like billions of trees across their entire life cycles,
across multiple seasons, we can start trading large embedding models in all of this data that can
basically farm or know how to farm better than any human ever could because it has so much
experience. And, you know, from there, it's like, what could we do with that, right? We get down
to the tree level and, like, prescribe, you know, individual recommendations to what every single plant
to farm needs. And that's super exciting. I mean, I think that's ultimately where a lot of this
technology is going to go over the next couple of years. It's amazing. I'm incredibly bullish on
you and orchard. Extremely bullish for Airwant, too. Very exciting. Thank you so much for
hopping on. Congrats, Charlie. It's great to get the story and I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.
We're excited for me. Thank you guys. And send me, send me your address too.
Well, yeah. I'll send you an orchard hat, yeah, in exchange. Well, yeah, we're going to need a robot to
count and make sure nobody's overdosing
on caffeine in this studio.
That's a problem we have.
We'll talk to you soon.
Great talking.
Happy rest of your day.
What a legend.
His product's called Fruit Scope.
And we've got to talk about no scopes.
360, no scopes.
A Call of Duty movie is officially in the works.
This could be the second movie
the Jordy season, his entire life after Borat.
Borat will be the first one.
Thank you.
Would you see the Call of Duty movie?
So Paramount also has the rights to expand Call of Duty into a universe of multiple films and TV shows.
I wouldn't just watch it. I would study it.
Sit down and listen. I would sit down and listen to the Call of Duty movie.
The Call of Duty movie seems like a no-brainer. Seems awesome. Dodford, a great YouTube creator,
says, the sensible thing to do would be adapting black ops or modern warfare. Instead, I fear they'll do a Minecraft movie-esque.
comedy with trick shots and noob tubes.
What do you think?
Do you think they're going to go slapstick, comedy, lighter, PG-13, joky for kids,
or do you think they will actually try to make it like Black Hawk down, gritty, serious?
Like, you know.
Brain rot or?
I think, I don't think they're going to go comedy.
I think they're going to go.
Oh, we, Jordie saw Mountainhead.
Daniels crafting me.
That's true.
I did.
So this would be the third movie.
I felt like I needed to give a review.
I'll watch
Yeah
Well we'll have to
Have a review of the
Call of Duty movie
Obviously
Everyone will demand it
And listen
Well we have to get over
On to Substack
We gotta hop on with Philadelphia
That's right
No but we actually are going to do
live over on Substack
Yeah you can go watch us on Substack
You might already be watching on Substack
We're going to be live with Emily Sundberg
TBPNXB
We'll see tomorrow
Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow
Have a great evening
Goodbye
Cheers
Thank you.