TBPN Live - OpenAI to Support Adult Content, CoreWeave’s AI Ranch, Apple's M5 Vision Pro | Zachary Perret, Panos Panay, Eric Wittman, Brian Baumgartner, Adam Ryan, Adit Abraham, Dan Shipper & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, October 15th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN, Ultterdam, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital, massive collaboration between our first two sponsors, not the first two sponsors, but two of our sponsors, Ramp and Restream. Ramp is streaming a stunt today. We're going to talk to them. We're going to collab later in the show. But first, we have to debate tech companies, open AI. We have to debate erotic. And why don't you introduce open AI for anybody that's been living under a data center and may not now? Originally, open source, artificial intelligence company.

Starting point is 00:00:46 We haven't spent much time talking about them. Yeah, focused on moving towards AGI. But yesterday, Sam Altman made waves with a post about loosening the content restrictions such that users would be. be able to create text erotica and that put the timeline in turmoil and a lot of people are very upset about it. He didn't specifically say text erotica. Did he just said erotica? Okay. In the text app, he didn't say Sora. That's right. We should pull up the actual thing of what he said. I think you have to assume that on a long enough time horizon if they're allowing erotica in one part of a product of the product. No, it's a fair, it's a fair thing to read into. The

Starting point is 00:01:28 exact, the exact, um, quote from Sam Altman is in December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults. Now, it's so funny, the top comment on this post is about time. Chat Chb-T used to feel like a person you could actually talk to. Then it turned into a compliance spot. If it can be made fun again without losing the guardrails, that's a win. People don't want chaos. Some people are into it. Clearly written by Chatsubuetee.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Some people are into it. But many people are not lots of people having fun on the timeline with some memes you posted one. I guess we're doing porn now and it's AGI, AGI. Porn AGI. It was not that long ago.

Starting point is 00:02:20 The fair criticism of this announcement is that less than a month ago Sam made the point. that there, he said there's possibility in the future that we'd have to choose between free education and curing cancer. Yep. And he implied that he didn't want to have to make that decision so that he would need about a trillion dollars

Starting point is 00:02:41 in order to make sure they had enough compute. And so to immediately fast follow with SORA, very compute-intensive feed of AI media, fast-followed by this announcement, which presumably will drive subscriptions. It will increase retention. it will um i think this will be massively popular with women right i think people generally underestimate how how large the market is for this type of romantic novel if you turn that into a chat-based experience it's probably going to be hyper addictive it's probably going to be something a lot of people will happily pay real dollars for and the question is is like why

Starting point is 00:03:28 why did they have to do this, right? You can see the business reason for it. Clearly, a lot of people want this, but my immediate reaction was like is paid subscription user growth stalling out to the point where they feel like they have to make a decision that's obviously going to be mocked by the entire industry.

Starting point is 00:03:51 It makes it much harder for Open AI as an organization. organization to continue to frame themselves as an AGI company. Or even compute constraint. Yeah. Because if there's unlimited demand on the B-to-B token side or just like the knowledge retrieval side or the agentic commerce side, you start to think about like, well, wouldn't you just deprioritize that?

Starting point is 00:04:19 Like YouTube certainly has. YouTube could have at some point said, hey, you know, we're going to go and, you know, just eat the lunch of every adult content hosting website because we have better infrastructure, we have a better broad network, and we can age-verify people and host all that content and just take 100% of that revenue, basically. They probably could have put all of the adult content hosting sites

Starting point is 00:04:43 out of business if they wanted to, but they made the choice not to, and it felt like that was reasonable because it was just growing, yeah, YouTube was just growing, growing, and yeah, yeah, it lost money for a long time, but then it made a ton of money, and it just seems like it's been, you know, a choice. And I think that my take was that every company has a line where they draw the

Starting point is 00:05:02 line. Yeah, why did they, this, this feels desperate. This is a move that, like, can you, can you imagine the management team over at Open AI, the people that we've spoken to? Yep. Do you think any of those people want to be in the adult entertainment business? Seems odd. I think, yeah. You make, you know, when GROC did this, it's not like they didn't weren't, I don't know if they were directly mocking it, but the industry was broadly embarrassed by XAI leaning so heavily into the sort of AI romantic companions. Yep. They know how people feel about these. They know how the industry feels about these. Totally, totally.

Starting point is 00:05:43 And they still made the decision to come out and say we're, and so what does that say? And our reaction, in our reaction to GROC, you know, going. into adult content was very much, well, it does seem like they're behind on... Yeah, a catch-up strategy. It felt like a desperate move, right? Yeah. And we clocked it as something where, well, who are they going up against? Anthropic, Open AI, Google, in the foundation model, wars, what are those companies never

Starting point is 00:06:12 going to do, adult content? And so if you can be the biggest, you know, the monopolist in that category, you can probably do pretty well. And we were trying to estimate, is it a $20 billion opportunity? Is it $100 billion opportunity? We never thought it was a trillion. Yeah, and the demand, demand has always seemed very obvious. Like, I expect Open AI to have, like, my bull, the bull case for XAI doing, leaning heavily

Starting point is 00:06:38 into romantic companions when the other labs didn't want to touch it was that they could probably get to, if they really went hard on it, and they iterated on the product, they could probably get to a billion dollar run rate on romantic companions. Yeah. I think the market is there. For that, does it support a $200 billion valuation, X-AI's current valuation? No, they're going to have to do a bunch of other stuff. But again, I just, you get the sense that Open AI has wanted to be thought of as the Apple of AI.

Starting point is 00:07:09 You saw their Super Bowl campaign. You're definitely not the Apple of AI now. Do you know this Steve Jobs quote? In 2010, he went on stage talking about the iOS App Store, and he said, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone. That is such an aggressive quote. And I don't think of Google as some X-rated organization.

Starting point is 00:07:34 I think of Google's brand is extremely clean. I think of YouTube as they've had little issues and pockets of content moderation issues. But in general, I feel like Google has been pretty squeaky clean. Yes, you can go and search for adult content, and you can find that on Google's search. But in general, I feel like the vibe of Google, is, hey, we want to be a family-friendly company.

Starting point is 00:07:55 Think of us as like a PG-13 brand generally. And there might be some, you know, there might be some R-rated content on YouTube, but we are going to, you know, coordinate off. But we're definitely not playing in the adult content world. We're not making any money off of that. We're not really running ads against that. We're not going to try and figure out how to, like, fix that,

Starting point is 00:08:16 fit that into YouTube overall. Like, it is definitely off in its own world. and Google's been happy to just say, hey, we're not a participant in that, in that category at all. Yeah. Apple certainly. You go back to the Super Bowl ad,

Starting point is 00:08:30 that felt like a crack at, you know, trying to bring that sort of Apple energy and be labeled and get people to think of, okay. Even that euphoria ad with, that had a very like premier prestige brand. And so, it's not, okay, I'm going to be an adult content. And so my framework, again, is that, you know,

Starting point is 00:08:51 know, I now, I just view OpenAI as an emergent hyperscaler. They're going to compete in all the categories that the hyperscalers do. Yeah. But the aura for me, this is like, you know, minus 10,000 on the aura meter for me of making this move. And I think that broadly, many people feel the exact same way. The aura fields are fallow. They're not farming very well. Yeah, I mean, Anthropic comes out of this, you know, the last.

Starting point is 00:09:21 couple weeks looking like very counterpositioned to open AI right now they're getting into a bunch of BS around regulatory sides so they're getting in the mud over there but but they are running a clean operation at least so far uh I want to run through the other big tech companies give them MPAA ratings and then you can tell me if you agree with my rating or you think you'd give a different rating so for Apple they have explicitly said we don't put adult content on the iOS App Store. There will never be an adult website with an app on the iOS store. I think of Apple as a PG company. Like if I gave my phone to a kid, yeah, they could download Candy Crush or something. There's probably some rules. But in general, I think of them as very PG. Do you agree with that?

Starting point is 00:10:07 I agree. Microsoft, I call them a G rating because LinkedIn basically has no adult content. Yeah, they own Xbox and Call of Duty. But in general, they're so professional that Uh, if, you know, if your, if your kid is on a Microsoft property, I feel like it's, it's extremely safe. It's basically G rated. What do you think? I agree. Um, Google might earn a PG-13 rating because of Google or because of YouTube.

Starting point is 00:10:34 There are some videos that aren't appropriate for kids out there. Like, you can't show off a gun on YouTube, but you can't monetize that content and you can't show how to assemble it, actually. Uh, the gun YouTubers will cut in between, um, like, if they're like, I'm going to put the gun together now. They will cut that out of the video. So it doesn't show you how to, assemble a gun and there is some there's some like mature content obviously you can see an

Starting point is 00:10:56 r-rated you know a movie trailer or an R-rated edit from a movie but in general I think of Google is like a PG-13 company what yeah I think that's right I think that you maybe don't want you know a 13-year-old watching like some schizo conspiracy theory content totally because maybe they're just not yeah at a point in their life where they can kind of really process they can be full schizo they're already you get out the red string. Yeah, maybe they won't clean in. The wild card that I want to debate with you.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Amazon. Amazon is just a, it's a Walmart online. You know, it's a store and a cloud hosting company. It feels very clean. They have Twitch, which they've been going back and forth with. There was the whole, like, you remember the hot tub era? People have been electrocuting dogs on Twitter. Yes, there's been crazy stuff on Twitch.

Starting point is 00:11:41 But in general, Twitch has been very aggressive about, like, banning content that's objectionable, and they've kept adult content off of there. The weird thing is in Kindle direct. publishing, they do publish a lot of erotica that is actually NC17 rated. It is adult content. Now they do limit anything that's illegal. The key difference is that that is not Andy Jassy writing, you know, rating the product. It is, I think it is wildly different to say, you know, again, we've seen this with streaming platforms like HBO. I knew as a kid, don't look at age. My parents were like, just don't, we're not an HBO family, right? I didn't want me to see, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:20 the more adult-leaning, like, you know, whatever, the R-rated content on... But if you were to package up all of Amazon's views on how they view adult content, kid content and stuff, would you... I think of them as more R-rated than Google. I would be less disappointed in OpenAI if they let the erotic content be, like, as part of an app store that were, like, other developers. were building on top of it, but this is effectively them creating porn bots. Yeah, it's a little different.

Starting point is 00:13:00 So Bobby in the chat asked, you guys think we should really, quote, treat adult users like adults. I think that's like a good framework. The issue is like they're clearly going to start with like text-based erotica and then at what point. And then once you're going, it's a slipper slope. And then it's like maybe they're doing image generation and then maybe they're doing like they have stuff happening on SORA and it's like you just decide as a company like we are going to create porn bots and then you're that that is the path that you choose and it's hard to pull back from that because they're going to have a ton of revenue there's clearly demand for it

Starting point is 00:13:35 and then like you can open up MS paint and draw a naked person but it just feels well you don't you don't put that on Microsoft you know right it's like a different thing so for for Amazon what's your final rating I put them at NC17, but would you put them at R? Or would you put them at PG-13? Do you think that they go further than Google in terms of like rating overall, just what is the most aggressive piece of their empire? I feel like the Kindle direct publishing stuff does put them in a different category than Google, a little bit more edgy, let's say. Doesn't feel that much different to me because they're just platforms that serve content, but they're not.

Starting point is 00:14:20 in the content creation business. Either of them. Okay, so you give them a little bit of pass from that. Open AI will be in the business of creating adult content. Sure, sure. Let's go to X, the everything app. Everything.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Does that really mean everything? It certainly has, even back in the day of Twitter, there was always adult content on Twitter. It was cordoned off and not surfaced in the algorithm. And it also has content warnings, even when you just go to a profile that's an adult content. The content warning feature, by the way, we don't use that enough.

Starting point is 00:14:52 It's like the best meme. It gets, yeah, it gets highly abused. But I do think that to the credit of the ex-engineers and the Twitter engineers before them, I have not seen a lot of adult content just randomly pop into my feed. I get much more slop of like,

Starting point is 00:15:08 have you ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg? That's the type of like junk that I get in my feed. They're not interested. Yeah, I don't get a lot of just like, wow, that's just actually adult content. And so, but still, I think, like, as a platform, Twitter for years has always been more aggressive than YouTube in terms of the type of content that they allow.

Starting point is 00:15:31 And I would put it in the NC17 category. The change that's happening now is with Gen A.I. Platforms are going from being placed distributors to creators. Distributors. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Like, your product is creating explicit content. Yeah, it's a big question because it's like. Like, are they creating it or is the prompter creating it? Because if no one prompts it, it won't create it, right?

Starting point is 00:15:58 If no one uploads it. Yeah, it's a creative tool. It's a creative tool. Yeah. You can make that. It's a new technology. And so we need to have like another discussion about it. What about meta?

Starting point is 00:16:10 What about Instagram? But here's a question. Is erotica aligned with open AI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity? Not particularly. There is a steel man from this from Dean Ball. Put the hat on. Dean Ball says if you agreed AGI was around the corner and was going to be an extremely capital intensive race defined by infrastructure, you would want to pump your revenue. You would want to pump your revenue and other relevant KPIs rapidly. This is terrible. To keep the CapEx train rolling. So, yeah, I mean, if you want the max, the max revenue to underwrite the max capax until you hit AGI, maybe you want every possible dollar.

Starting point is 00:17:01 You want the max revenue. Because every dollar that you get in revenue is 10 in valuation and 100 in, you know, debt covenants, right? Like, actual capital accessibility. No, and I think that I imagine that is their internal. justification. You can still tell the team, we need to do this. Get every dollar possible. We need to do this so that we can achieve our mission. Yeah. And there's going to be some collateral damage. There's going to be a generation of women that are in love with their phones. Yeah. I mean, I think the real economic question is the hit to vibes, the negative 10,000

Starting point is 00:17:44 aura points, is that worth paying for the increased revenue that you can fundraise against, right? Like, that's the economic calculus that you should be making if you're, like, a purely economically rational actor. And Sagar and Jetty has a really, really good take. He quoted your post and said, chat GPT turning to porn is proof AGI is never coming. They are simply recreating the addictive degenerate centers of the internet. Soon, it will be ads, porn, gambling odds, the everything app to deracinate you.

Starting point is 00:18:14 deracinate you. That's a good word. I don't know that one. Nate Silver also. Yeah, so I would say it's very easy for Google to make a decision of like, we don't allow you to generate adult content in any of our platforms because they have 70-ish billion of free cash flow that they can finance everything with. All the billed out and continue to stay in the rest.

Starting point is 00:18:34 Google, while they need to play the next five years, like, very well in order to continue to be dominant. they're not in a position of desperation, which like getting and doing this feels, it just feels a little desperate. Yeah, Nate Silver broke this down. He said, Open AI's recent actions

Starting point is 00:18:56 don't seem to be consistent with a company that believes AGI is right around the corner. If you think the singularity is happening in six to 24 months, you preserve brand prestige to draw a more sympathetic reaction from regulators and attract slash retain the best talent, rather than getting into erotica

Starting point is 00:19:12 for verified adults, Instead, they're loosening guardrails in a way that will probably raise more revenues and might attract more capital or justify current valuations. They might still be an extremely valuable company as the new meta, Google, et cetera, but it feels more like AI as normal technology. That's a good point. Arnond Bertrand said, someone asked an AI founder two months ago, what's an example of a decision you've made that is best for the world, but not best for winning? the founders reply, well, we haven't put a sex bot in our product yet. The name of that founder, Sam Altman, which means that according to himself, he just did something that is worse for the world, but best for winning, which is largely the story of the human race. But it's going to be

Starting point is 00:19:56 better for the world in the long run. Much harder when it becomes costly. And ironically, this is exactly how AI itself works. Reinforcement learning optimizes for a reward and avoids what the environment makes expensive. So AI does share our deep human value, do whatever wins. Same poster, our nods, also said, I don't buy into most of the AI hype, but I think a mass her scenario is unfortunately a very high probability.

Starting point is 00:20:25 It wouldn't surprise me of a very big proportion of my children's generation to have AI companions, maybe even embodied in humanoid robots at some point. In fact, that might be one of the single biggest threats AI poses, not these far-fetched Terminator-like nightmares, but the irony of us getting extinct because we get, quote, unquote, perfect, frictionless love, honey trapping ourselves. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:49 It's an odd tradeoff. I mean, there's Panasha in the chat says the porn industry is at $1 billion in revenue per year. The reputational risk is not worth the revenue in the industry. The only thing here, yeah, if you're just understanding the opportunity as the existing industry. You have to add in only fans and stuff, right? Yeah, that, but it's more so it's possible the AI companion market will be a thousand times. Yeah, and this is the story of like every technology is like when you have a new technology, you can actually make it. Like the ads market got bigger when Google and Facebook were invented.

Starting point is 00:21:23 Like just the overall advertising dollars grew. Tyler, what's your take on this? I mean, I definitely agree like with Jordi. Like I think it's pretty bad. But if you look at Jordy's post, it's like the meme of the conveyor belt. And if you look at it, it's like AGI, AGI porn. But then it goes back to AGI. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:41 So, Jordy's implicitly saying that this is on the way to AGI. Oh, interesting. Yeah, okay, okay. It'd be, right? Maybe if you have a good understanding of kind of anatomy, it can be better for, like, your world models. Oh, yeah. We're going to train robots on this, right? That's your take on this?

Starting point is 00:21:56 My big question is, are we going to, we have Mark Benioff on the show tomorrow. I feel like we got to ask him, are we going to see erotica for verified adults within agent force? We have Zach Bray from Plaid on the show and just a few moments. minutes, and I want to know, is he going to be doing something in erotica, helping financial institutions integrate more efficiently? Erotica might be on the path. If there's just a couple dollars sitting there, just go get those, it'll help you build your core business, potentially.

Starting point is 00:22:25 Who knows? So Trini said, recently learned from speaking with an AI engineer that the AI boyfriend market is currently much larger than the AI girlfriend market. I was talking to Brandon about this. He said that he did some deep dives and did find some men who have. had like harems of AI girlfriends. It does happen, but I still think that your assessment is right that the AI boyfriend market is much bigger than the AI girlfriend market. I would love to know how XAI is doing here. They've been live with a product in that category for months now. Does it

Starting point is 00:22:56 have traction? Does it have retention? Is it making money? Is it profitable on a per token basis? I have no idea. Here's why Open AI has an edge here. People love the personality of 4-0. Like, you saw the day that they deprecated 4-0, the release of 5. If you looked on Reddit that day, there were people that were, I've never seen people more mad at a product update, like, ever. Like, people were in love with 4-0, personality matters. And so if they take a personality that people love already and they make it, like, more explicit, it's probably, you know, there was people that were posting on Reddit, I just propose. opposed to chat GPT. They said yes. You know. So, anyways. Well, before we go into the latest Open AI numbers from the Financial Times, let me tell you about Privy, the wallet infrastructure

Starting point is 00:23:51 for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. The throwback studio said Erotic is back on the menu, boys. Wasteland Capital is breaking it down. Open AI has 800 million users, five, are paying. That's 40 million paying users. 13 billion in ARR implies a $325 annual ARPU or 27 per month per paying user. 70% of revenue from subscriptions. The rest is API. Eight billion dollar loss in the first half of the year, probably 20 billion run rate loss now. So basically spending $3 for each $1 in revenue. This comment from Daniel, they lose money on every token, but they make

Starting point is 00:24:36 it up with volume. What is that from? They lose money. I've heard that, like, phrase before. I don't, I can't place it, but, uh, yeah, it is, it is, uh, it is rough. I mean, um, I mean, the bull case for the, uh, for the, uh, erotica stuff is, you don't need a lot of reasoning tokens to generate it. You can totally just one shot it with, uh, with a base model. What do you think? You need, I don't know, I think Elon has said, um, he wants his, his, his, his, his Hifus to have, you know, they want them to be the best reasoning models, yeah, the highest. It needs to be able to do IMO-level math.

Starting point is 00:25:10 Yeah. Yes, your AI girlfriend should be able to do the International Math Olympiad and hopefully solve RKGI one day. We'll see. Meanwhile, Anthropic was at $5 billion of ARR in August. This month they're approaching $7 billion, projecting $9 billion, $1,000 AR by the end of the year.

Starting point is 00:25:33 I think this is just annualized run rate because obviously it's, you know, token-based. But they are projecting between 20 and 26 billion of A.R. Of sort of 2026 revenue. Well, if you want to refocus your AI efforts on something valuable, like building software, head over to cognition, they're the makers of Devin. Devin is the AI software engineer.

Starting point is 00:25:56 Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. and you will live to fight another day. It's official. Apple just upgraded the Vision Pro with the M5 chip and dual knit band. This is huge. It's a pretty minor bump, but it shows that I mean

Starting point is 00:26:16 they haven't completely shelved the project. I'm still waiting for the Vision Pro Air, vision air, something that's lighter, something with the second screen. We don't need a second screen, people. Let's take that away. So the Vision Pro now runs on the M5 chip, 10 core CPU. It is interesting to announce these updates and like did you solve any of the reasons

Starting point is 00:26:36 that people return the product? No, they didn't because they need to make it lighter and they need to make it smaller and they didn't do that. Media for it. Yes. They did, they did announce a couple like partnerships. It's like no one was critiquing the performance. Yeah. It is truly an incredible piece of hardware. Yeah. An incredible face computer. It is. like the way in which, like, the cost of using it. They are doing new apps, contents, and games. There's over a million apps now. 3,000 are built for the Vision OS.

Starting point is 00:27:13 Wait, what? Oh, wow. So out of a million apps that have been, so if you have a, like, an iPad app, you can check a box when you distribute that app and say, yeah, put it on Apple Vision Pro, and it will just appear in the Vision Pro as an iPad app. And you can use it the same way that you use. use the iPad app, which is fine. But the hope was that there would be this flywheel where people would build apps specifically for Vision OS. I cannot believe it's only 3,000. That's so few apps

Starting point is 00:27:40 for Vision Pro, like specifically, only 3,000. Like, the developers really did not show up this time. And that is crazy because like anytime there's a new Apple platform, like watch, everyone's like, I got to do a special app because if I'm the first running app on the watch, I will have a new flywheel and I'll just get new customers and they're going to push these things and the install base is going to be huge, it's Apple. A buddy of mine used to work at Apple. He was so excited when the Apple Vision Pro released. I was like, okay, you're going to start like a product studio.

Starting point is 00:28:10 Totally. Just make a bunch of apps and hopefully one of them hits. Yeah, the beer. It started too, and then he realized like, okay, there's actually nothing here. It's crazy, crazy, how slow that takeoff has been. One of the things that they're highlighting here is a couple games that you can play on the Vision Pro. One of them is Sniper Elite 4.

Starting point is 00:28:27 It's a great game if you haven't played it. And, but what's, what's interesting is that it, it actually is just a 2D screen that is in the Applevision Pro. So you need to, like, mirror it in from a Mac or a console. But, uh, you'll love this. The folks behind Sniper Leaf Fork, do you know their website, Jordy? Sniper.com. Whoa. That's a great domain.

Starting point is 00:28:51 So let's hear from the domain. They sniped, they sniped the best domain for a sniping based video game. Wait, this is funny. sniper.com just redirects to sniperelite.com. They don't even use it. Elite. Elite behavior. Well, if you want to design something for the Applevision Pro or maybe for a more popular

Starting point is 00:29:09 platform, like the new MacBook Pro that has the M5 in it, get on Figma. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Dime Square Holdings has a funny little post here. Right now, a lot of these skilled engineers are laborers. They're literally working 12 to 15-hour days to get data centers, built quickly. As fast as they finish one, they're on the next. If I told you the story,

Starting point is 00:29:35 you're not going to believe it. They're being flown around on PJs to get to the next site. Literally, they're packing these guys into PJs and saying, one was in North Dakota and he needed to be back in Texas the following week. They flew him down there on Sunday in PJs. There were probably 10 guys on the plane. Some of these stories right now are just wild. And the interviewer asks, when you say PJs, you mean pajamas? And the data center national solutions broker says, no, private jets. His comment, bro, is so broke. The T's, you're on TIGS. And you don't know. Mogging the allocator who thinks PJ stands

Starting point is 00:30:15 for pajamas. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work how their security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. You already talked about the mass horror scenario. Matt Turk says some VC firm should rebrand associate stocking founders at events to forward-deployed capitalists. It might be good. It's happening today. It's happening this week.

Starting point is 00:30:40 It's L.A. Tech Week. What's that? It is a technology celebration, a celebration of technology and business. It's right up our wheelhouse. Have you seen driving around L.A.? Have you seen any of it going on? I saw one technologist. business enthusiast indulging a little self-driving today? That was pretty cool. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:31:02 Like driving themselves? Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing a lot about self-driving generally. Yeah. So it was cool to see someone driving themselves. Yeah. Because that's how we think about it. I'm pretty bullish on on self-driving broadly. I could see one of the cheekier, smaller VC firms giving everyone the four deployed capitalist title. I think it'd be funny. I've seen those before. Anthropic projects as much as $26 billion in annualized revenue in 2026 sources. That's a lot. That's good, right? How are they doing?

Starting point is 00:31:34 How are they projecting that without entering the incredibly lucrative erotica market? What will they be doing? The code must be generated. The code, their API must be really on fire. That's a lot. I wonder what Open AI is projecting for next year. year. Do we have any insight into that? Because there are 13 billion run rate, right? That was the stat that was shared. So 13 billion in ARR. I wonder what Open AI is projecting for next year.

Starting point is 00:32:05 I mean, if the Agenda Commerce stuff comes online in a big way, if the ads product comes online in a big way, like you could definitely see them hitting 30, 40, something like that. But these numbers are getting big at this point. Yeah, the other thing with the Open AI announcement is there, didn't they say it's December 1st? Yeah, they're kind of like letting the chaos cycle like, you know, work its way out, letting everyone have their anger and takeout before the products actually updated to allow. Yeah, because the, the, the, they need to lose the 10,000 aura points so then they can start farming up extra aura points with like some math competition. Yeah, and the good thing is that, the good thing is that people are going to use this

Starting point is 00:32:50 product in private, right? They're not going to be sharing. They're not going to be like, yeah, I had a 7,000 prompt conversation with 4-0. I'm actually in love. It's amazing. If they cure cancer on November 30th, you are going to feel so stupid, Jordy. If they cure cancer on November 30th. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like a real, you'll look like a real. You'll look like a bozo. A real bozo. That's probably the strategy. That might be it. It's like, let's take the aura hit to get into adult entertainment. We'll make it all back in one trade. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:23 It really is setting the expectations low. And then they can just build back up from here. I don't know. Well, in some much lighter news, Wander is giving away a $10,000 wander trip for the craziest vacation rental horror story. You can head over to their ex account. All you need to do is reply or quote that post

Starting point is 00:33:44 with your spooky tale. I love that spooky is happening during October. Spooky is an amazing word. And they'll create ghostly videos of the best ones and choose one winner. And so they put out a promotional video and I highly recommend you enter this because why not try and get a $10,000 wander trip for free. Of course you can also go over to wander.com, find your happy place, book of wander with

Starting point is 00:34:07 inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning 24-7 concierge service. We're very happy to be supported by Wander. George Hatz is blackpilling. Mad. He is. what do you say read a blog post from today it's titled pathetic losers i will read it i want money i have high tc i get big comp i advance in my career i have many business opportunity i am senior employee i have many reports i have big package i am important i fly on private jet i

Starting point is 00:34:41 party with model i go to prestigious school i have piece of paper with school logo you can see i am You can see I have big package. LOL, you got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men. You sought status instead of skill. You are a loser. Get the F out.

Starting point is 00:35:05 And he references... I'm going to pull up this. It's a good message. Yeah, he's basically calling out the... Is this like a direct sub-tweet of something that just happened? It feels like it's just a general vibe of, like, anti-status-seeking behavior. I immediately think of that post where it's where somebody said,

Starting point is 00:35:29 wow, I went to a dinner last night in San Francisco. Everyone had gone to Stanford or Harvard. And obviously, that post got dunked on. So I think that he's a little bit of that. I think there's already kind of push back against this sort of status-seeking culture and tech. He references a post on September 13th that he made. You heard there was money in tech. You heard there was status in tech.

Starting point is 00:35:51 You showed up. You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself. You are an entrious piece of SHIT, and it's time for you to leave. But you won't leave willingly. We need to take action. Give it all away to everyone for free. Then you'll have no reason to be here.

Starting point is 00:36:07 So, G.O. Hots is operating on another level. And he's pissed off. And he's probably going to create free versions of, He's created free versions of a lot of stuff. It's going to keep doing it. It's great. I'm a huge supporter. Easily the most baller email signature I've ever seen.

Starting point is 00:36:29 European curator? Like art curator? I check emails on Tuesdays at 4 to 6 p.m. and Wednesdays at 1 to 6 p.m. If your matter is time sensitive, please resend your email with urgent in the subject line. So the only thing that, the only thing that doesn't make sense here is like, okay, so you have no.

Starting point is 00:36:48 notifications on. Yeah. You're just getting email, you're getting email notification. You're actually checking them constantly. You're watching them all roll in. What this person's saying is more like, more like I actually go into my email inbox and respond to random emails, like, that aren't urgent at this time. But I'm not going to open your email if it doesn't say urgent.

Starting point is 00:37:08 Sure, sure. We should try to figure out, hey, Tyler, try to figure out this person's email, see if they say it in the comment. and let's send them to today's newsletter and just say urgent. Urgent. Alex Stapp

Starting point is 00:37:22 says it reminds me of this line from Tyler Cowan. People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person

Starting point is 00:37:30 who works in Brussels. It's very impressive. They're cultured. They have wonderful taste. They understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain.

Starting point is 00:37:38 And if you live in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%. That's hilarious. Anyway, if you want to grow your company at more than 1%.

Starting point is 00:37:48 Get on graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. Speaking of free, Blake Scholl,

Starting point is 00:37:59 founder of Boom Supersonic, is saying he's living rent-free in the Oval Office. We really should get POTUS a bigger model. I'm thinking life size. Talk about the ultimate drop. You know, people say,

Starting point is 00:38:11 oh, I'm going to make a drop. I'm going to send something interesting. How about you make a plane? How about you make a plane, make a model of that plane and send it to the one? No, just make, just... Oh, just make the actual plane.

Starting point is 00:38:19 Just make the plane. Yeah, just make the plane. But yeah, wow, really, I mean... Supersonic Air Force One would be insane. I mean, imagine trying to underwrite this as the boom team. They're like, yeah, it's like kind of a hassle to make these models and it's kind of expensive. Who should we send them to?

Starting point is 00:38:35 Like, is it ever going to come back to us? Is it just like for cloud? And then like, it winds up in the, in the Oval Office, like, directly inspiring better legislation around a supersonic aircraft, which is very exciting. Oh, massive news. Ken Griffin. Ken Griffin, born today, October 15th, 1968. Let's hit the gong for Ken.

Starting point is 00:38:59 He, trying to figure out what magazine. There's another, there's a cover story of Ken. He looks like maybe in his early 30s at this point. Do you know what magazine is from? I have no idea. This is a wild. Anyways, folks, this is who you're trading against. and he is older today and certainly wiser every day.

Starting point is 00:39:22 So good luck out there. And in other breaking news, we, I don't know if we didn't technically break the story. I think the Financial Times broke the story this morning. But Aribor, the new bank from Palmer Lucky and Joe Lonsdale, has been approved. They got there. This is, I have it in my notes, the fastest conditional approval for a depository institution de novo application in 25 years. They recently raised $275 million, led by 8VC, with participation from many top VCs and strategics. This is largely for regulatory capital purposes, as they intend to hold 12% of the regulatory capital against deposits.

Starting point is 00:40:13 The origin stories of Erebor is that you don't want the bank for your industry to be risk on, or at least be lending super aggressively against deposits. We saw this with the SVB collapse in 2023. Those few days were some of the worst in my life. They will be fixated in my mind forever. have some more notes here. Most tech companies that had deposits with SVB, remember the pain and uncertainty around that weekend. If the government doesn't step in, how many companies collapse as well? Arabor aims to be one of the most conservative banks in the country when it

Starting point is 00:40:57 comes to lending to deposit ratio. Most banks lend up to 90% of their customer deposits, and Aibor is going to start at around 50% in trend downwards as the bank scales. It should be a huge surprised, but going to be focused on reindustrialization, American dynamism, working with a lot of companies that many banks have historically said, you know, we don't even really want your business, right? So I'm very excited for this to get off the ground in the new year. It's been so interesting watching the narrative around like what it takes to build a bank shift, because years ago it was like, you need to operate at like seven levels of abstraction away from any legacy financial institution. because there's just no hope of actually playing at, like, the base layer.

Starting point is 00:41:45 Then it became, well, if you're doing crypto, you can buy a regional bank and maybe layer some technology on top, but, like, don't even think about trying to get a new charter. Definitely partner with someone who already has one. It's impossible to start from scratch. And there are a bunch of crypto platforms that are looking to set up a slightly different type of financial institution. I'm blanking on the name, but it's something trust company.

Starting point is 00:42:16 I'm going to botch it if I try to remember. But the speed here is because they are being hyper-conservative, and that's what we want out of what will, I'm sure, very quickly become one of the most important financial institutions in the industry. Amjad is quoting apparently Larry Fink. Larry Fink. Larry Fink says talking about, he went on CNBC yesterday and says, this is only at the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway.

Starting point is 00:42:53 Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form. I'm sure that the conspiracy theorist will love this one. But Amjad says, whatever your crypto, Web3, NFT, monkey, Digen, trader friend is saying today, Larry Fink will be saying in five years. Of course, many of the people in the crypto community have been saying this for, I don't know, as far back as 2015. Yeah. I have an update on the 100% tariff on China that went into effect last Friday, put the market in turmoil.

Starting point is 00:43:30 Polymarket has a 16% chance that that 100% tariff is in effect on November 1st. And so everyone's kind of pricing. some sort of renegotiation in the trade war coming soon, and hopefully, I mean, things are already starting to stabilize. What is the market actually doing today? We're up half a percent in the NASDAQ. Bitcoin's down one and a half percent. But overall, half a point, a modest increase. Yes. So we'll take it. The bubble popped. We're re-inflating now. It's great. and he says this guy I know

Starting point is 00:44:06 funded his wife's Etsy sticker business by buying her one of these and like $500 in social media ads to give her something to do and now he's quit his job entirely because she's making them so much money wow

Starting point is 00:44:19 that's amazing Etsy Etsy feels like an underrated story right now especially with the sort of like chat GPT like long tail commerce like Ben Thompson told some well the reason that

Starting point is 00:44:31 integration is actually cool is I can imagine a future where you can generate like a mock up for an object and then find an Etsy seller that makes something like it and just ask them to make it totally it'll be like one click to go like you generate an image of something or video and you can just find the right vendor that can actually physically make it for you yeah and in one click you know purchase this is the real like like 3D printing boom like there was this whole vision about a decade ago of like 3D printers now work everyone's going to have a 3D printer and in their home and they'll be able to print whatever they wanted.

Starting point is 00:45:05 That didn't quite happen, but there are a lot of Etsy sellers that have figured out specific 3D printed objects. We just got one at home for taking the wheel off a stroller more efficiently, and it's just a 3D printed little key that takes that off. Ben Thompson was talking about some 3D printed device, I forget what it was, but it holds an HDMI cable into a specific device, like, in a perfect angle, or it adapts a rack-mounted thing in some way. And it was just something where, like,

Starting point is 00:45:34 there's no real market to fully productionize, like the mass produce it, but a 3D printer can go on Etsy and find the right customer. And so you're seeing this, like, super long tail emerge, which is honestly fascinating, exciting. Well, before we have our next guest join,

Starting point is 00:45:50 our first guest, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And we have Zach Paray from Plath in the Restream waiting room. He's back. He's back.

Starting point is 00:46:06 He's back. You guys, nice to see you. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. Looking sharp. Are you in D.C. today or is it just, you're just dressed for the occasion of, of, uh, TBPN? TbPN.

Starting point is 00:46:20 I mean, you all dress so nicely when you're, you're doing the news. I figured I had to dress up too. No, I'm in D.C. It's D.C. I knew it. I knew it. If you couldn't tell, we, we borrowed a bunker to, to, to, to, to, you're, to, to, you're to film this from.

Starting point is 00:46:32 It looks great. It looks great. Yeah, very, very sound padded. Yeah, give us the update. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the company, but what's the latest and greatest in your world? So today's a big day for us. We do two big product releases each year.

Starting point is 00:46:47 This is our fall product release. Lots of new, exciting stuff that just came out. Probably chief among it is a product that we call LendScore. It is a new credit score. I've been working on a bunch of credit analytics products for me. many years. And this lens score gives a really robust picture of a potential borrower. Let's say that you got a new job. Your income went up a lot. We could actually recognize that kind of thing in real time. Let's say that you sign up for seven loans all in the last 24 hours. It's probably

Starting point is 00:47:17 pretty sketchy. We can recognize that kind of thing in real time. So a big upgrade to the credit scores. Also launched a bunch of stuff around risk and fraud analytics, payments, so on and so forth. So big day for us today. How do legacy fraud scores work? Like I'm familiar. with, you know, it's out of 800 and you get a random number. And if you pay off, but there's all these weird, like, there's these weird things and you hear recommendations like, oh, don't pay off this loan early because that'll actually hurt your score. It always feels very, very indecipherable. But like, what did you not like about the current system? What's currently broken? Well, the way that you feel is the way that everybody feels about credit scores in the past.

Starting point is 00:47:58 they're kind of a 350 to 850 score it's largely based on your your history of payments and the amount of loans that you've taken out in the past and it's not responsive to the changes in your life in real time it also skips a lot of important data inputs now the the lending industry has been built on these credit scores for for decades and they work okay but when you think about an average lender they want more information because today the fundamentals of lending have changed. There's a lot more attempted fraud in lending. There's a lot more new insights that you could be gathering. And frankly, consumers change their patterns a lot more. So the seven year look back doesn't make a ton of sense. I myself, I had gone to an optometrist and that automatist sent the bill to an old address for me. And my credit score was hit because I never got that bill for years. And then I finally figured it out. I had the same thing happen. So our new version. Yeah, my first company, we had a whole bunch of like Wi-Fi hotspots on Verizon contracts.

Starting point is 00:48:58 Dude, this happened to me, this exact same thing happened to me, too. My credit got dinged because I sent the router back and they were like, we never got it. Yeah. I was like, so you lost it and you have my card on file and you didn't just charge me for it. And then just deal with it. Yeah, it's very, very frustrating. I'm sure there's so much frustration. I have a bunch more questions, but sorry, I cut you off.

Starting point is 00:49:17 Yeah, I guess my main question is like, okay, obviously the industry and consumers deserve like a more modern credit score, but it feels like these the existing scores are heavily entrenched and it's like you can make a better product but how do you actually get it to mass adoption among, you know, lenders broadly? It's a great question. The new product that we launched

Starting point is 00:49:44 is focused on looking at consumers in real time. So how do we look at your income? How do we look at your expenses? You can do the math to figure out free cash flow and that should be the amount that a consumer can pay back in a given month or a year. And the way that we're launching it originally is actually in partnership with a lot of folks.

Starting point is 00:50:01 So we'll partner with the existing bureaus, with a lot of the existing lenders, to add this alongside FICO or alongside FICO. You can look at a FICO and then you can say, oh, but this user said that they just changed jobs. Let me get the data from that new job. So we can add that in. And then there's this interesting insight that we have, which only we have because we work with all of the lenders. And we can see the velocity of loans applied for. We call this Network Insights. there's a bunch of other data points that we can see just based on the traffic that you're doing

Starting point is 00:50:28 across the entire Plaid network. So it's kind of a unique vector that people can now lend against. The net effect is we're seeing, you know, call it oftentimes 20% lift in the quality of outcomes from this new one. And we're seeing a lot more people actually be eligible for loans because, let's say they have a really high income and good rent payment in history. That actually should indicate that they're a better loan. How do you think about, I imagine that there's a very complex algorithm to actually decide the score.

Starting point is 00:51:00 There's probably some machine learning or AI in there. But you also want to deliver something that's like a human readable insight so you can tell someone of why their score dropped or what they can do to make their score better. Maybe I have a friend who works in, it's not high frequency trading. It's like out like it's quantitative trading. So it's like a couple days out. And he was like, we'll crunch all these numbers. will come up with some, like, thesis for buying a billion dollars of some company in a day and we'll be selling in, like, three days.

Starting point is 00:51:30 And I was like, is there any way that you could say, oh, well, it's because, like, if gold goes up, like, could you put it in business logic or, like, if statements that a human could understand? He was like, it's impossible. Like, there's so many different parameters that go into finding, like, alpha in the financial markets. And I feel like there's a world where a consumer would be very disappointed if you're like, yeah, your score went up one point, but we have no idea why.

Starting point is 00:51:52 can't tell you the first thing about why it went up. Just these tensors, these weights activated in this massive model, and your score went down. Sorry. So how do you think about actually educating the consumer on how their score goes up or down? So we do a bunch of machine learning and AI to obviously like clean up the data and make it structured in a way that can build our models on top of it. But ultimately, our models are representative roughly of the financial health of a consumer. So almost everything that a consumer would do to better manage their money will end up with a better credit score. Almost everything they would do to more poorly manage their money will end up with a worst credit score. And so the nice thing is when we build it,

Starting point is 00:52:36 we're actually able to show it to the consumer first. They're able to review it if they want to, click submit, and then it goes to the lender so the lender can then subsequently make the decision on the back of it. That's cool. So it's very lender friendly and that they're opting in if they want to just run with their experience score or whatever else what other options they have they can they can do that or they can add this on as a way to kind of improve their application exactly yeah so the idea is over time though over the over time though the lender would realize hey we're getting actually much better insight here we want to just you know roll with this i imagine that's what we hope but the goal at first is that consumers feel like they can get

Starting point is 00:53:18 more in better loans. The lenders feel like can make more in better loans. So it's kind of opening the market initially. And then over time, you know, we hope that this becomes one of the most important, if not the most important way that a lender makes their decisions. How does Buy Now Pay Later fit into the ecosystem at this point? I imagine that they all have like their own systems, but then they would love to just have more data because that probably enables better underwriting. How do they fit into this ecosystem? So Buy Now Pay Later are sophisticated lenders. There's a scale of sophistication of all lenders. There are some lenders that will just use an out-of-the-box FICO score

Starting point is 00:53:56 or an out-of-the-box lend score score to make a lending decision. The highly sophisticated lenders, they'll want a zillion inputs. Yes, they'll still get maybe a FICO. They'll get a plodll score. But they want to look at the underlying inputs, the underlying raw data, and then they'll build their own models on top of it. I would say the BNPL lenders are quite sophisticated in the way that they lend. and so they're pulling a ton of data into the picture

Starting point is 00:54:18 and then building kind of their own custom models on top of it. Now, our inputs are, yes, still inputs to their model, but they're not looking at our score as the sole determining factor. Yeah. Is the business model for the Lens score the same as the previous credit scores or different in some way?

Starting point is 00:54:34 How do you think about it actually? Pretty similar. We sell it on a kind of per loan application basis. Our customers are the lenders, they pay us for it. There's a handful of things that we can do to actually help them track creditworthiness on an ongoing basis. So whereas FICO or Vantage oftentimes is a one-time snapshot, sometimes a lender will want to maybe make offers to a consumer

Starting point is 00:54:56 if they realize they want to increase their credit line, or maybe they want to kind of give better preferential payment terms to a consumer if they think they can pay a loan down faster. And so ours is an ongoing credit score. That's maybe the only big difference. How do you think about what the consumer's interface is to the credit scores. I remember, like, years ago,

Starting point is 00:55:19 you used to have to actually go to the three credit... Go to the credit store. Yeah, you had to go to the credit store and, like, check out and pay like $30. And then you'd get that, and then you'd take that to a loan application. Sometimes, sometimes they'd just do it on the back end. They'd pay.

Starting point is 00:55:32 But then over time, I feel like the credit scores just became almost commoditized or free. Like, it just shows up in my, you know, banking app a lot. And there were also, like, credit karma and different companies that figured out ways to basically pay that as a, like, a customer acquisition cost for free, and then they'd give you a bunch of products on top that they would monetize.

Starting point is 00:55:54 How do you think the, what do you think the long-term consumer adoption of the Lens score looks like? Well, we hope it's pretty similar, actually. We want consumers to be able to get a clear view of their credit profile for free. We're working on building ways that a consumer can come in and look at that. And, you know, ultimately the customer then would be the lender. Like, it's to our benefit to have consumers that understand this more. It's to our benefit to have consumers that trust this score and that trust the things that we build. And so we want to be as direct and open with the consumers as you can.

Starting point is 00:56:30 So a lot of that stuff is to come, and you'll see some launches from us kind of over the coming quarters on that front. What else besides Lenz was the focus today? So a big upgrade to our anti-fraud model, and we launched a, kind of broader suite of products called Protect. So, again, Protect for us, it's a set of products that looks at consumers' underlying actions that they take across almost any financial product, and we can back it into an overall score of riskiness for the consumer, and then a bunch of attributes. So some of the attributes are very easily explainable, such as this person just signed up

Starting point is 00:57:07 for three crypto apps in the last 30 minutes. Some of the attributes are less easily explainable, more on the machine learning side. but this stuff will feed into the models for a lot of our customers, and then they can build kind of this really fascinating step-up, step-down requirement for users based on their relative levels of riskiness. This has been a huge unlock for a lot of the fintech companies that are trying to sign up more users faster. We can create a fast lane effectively.

Starting point is 00:57:35 So we've seen you before. We recognize your device. We've seen your phone number. You just do a two-factor code, and you're good to go. And then we can also create a slow lane. So, hey, we've never seen you before. Your device doesn't seem to match the IP address that you're dialing in from. What's going on with all this stuff?

Starting point is 00:57:50 Let's add a bunch of step-ups and be really, really certain that you are who you say you are. So that's lane for financial services. That's what we're trying to build. This sounds like the worst nightmare of somebody doing large-scale financial fraud on the Internet. What's the shape of AI adoption at Plaid right now? I feel like, obviously, there's probably a ton of AI that you're doing. on just like software development stuff. But at the same time, I feel like if I was offing with Plaid

Starting point is 00:58:18 and it was like, hey, do you want to chat with me right now? I'd be like, no, thanks. I'm actually good to just click a couple buttons. So like, are you seeing a lot of like LLM token consumption or more just focused on the machine learning, the custom models for underwriting where you train a specific model for that and you're not just leaning on a big like token factory for a lot of work? I'd say our use of,

Starting point is 00:58:42 tokens, I would call it, like, medium. Sure. We do build kind of a custom training data set and then run a ton of the data through that model on the training data set. A lot of it is around just cleaning up transactions, identifying what kind of thing is happening. The textual analysis is very, very helpful for that. So that's the input into a lot of our models.

Starting point is 00:59:04 Yeah. But you're right. We don't build like an active chat app for any consumer. A lot of the AI that we're doing is. used to fight AI, meaning there's a lot of attempted AI fraud, and then we have a lot of AI on the other side to try to fight AI fraud. And then it's kind of building the foundational kind of data set upon which we build a lot of the models. Yeah. So whenever you have a big pile of text in kind of behind the scenes and the back end, you can run LLMs over that and get

Starting point is 00:59:33 a lot finer-grained data, categorize, understand what's actually going on with those large text dumps. But you don't necessarily even need to surface that to the customer. the end user, which is great. Generally, not directly. Generally, we'll serve to the consumer indirectly saying, hey, you had elevated bank fees. And we won't even sell that to the consumer. We'll send that to our customer. Our customer will then say, in your budgeting app, you had elevated bank fees and look at all these different things of bank fees. That makes a ton of sense. Well, congrats on the launch. Thanks so much for stopping by. Always great to see you. Have fun in D.C. Have a good one.

Starting point is 01:00:03 Cheers, Zach. Before we hop on with our second guest of the show, let me tell you about fall, the generative media app for developers, the world's best generative image. video and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tune, models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. And our next guest is about to be in the Restream waiting room. We can go back to the timeline. BlackRock and NVIDIA are participating in a $40 billion data center takeover. Also including XAI and Microsoft. This is in the Financial Times this morning. an investment consortium that includes Black Rock, Global Infrastructure Partners,

Starting point is 01:00:46 and that's a great name for a fund that does global infrastructure investing. And, of course, Abu Dhabi Fund, MGX, has struck a $40 billion takeover of one of the world's largest data center operators as it launches an initiative to underwrite the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Starting point is 01:01:04 And I believe we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. So let's bring him in. Pan us from Amazon. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you. Thanks so much for hopping on.

Starting point is 01:01:19 Congratulations on the launch. Sorry for the delay, but very excited to catch up with you. Would love to start with just an introduction on yourself, kind of where you sit within the organization, and then we can go into some of the news and some of the updates. Sure. I'm the senior vice president, device and services. So what that means is if I frame it around brands,

Starting point is 01:01:40 it probably helps a little bit. But think about devices across Amazon. You'd start with Project Kuiper, which are the satellites for Leo Constellation that we're building right now. And on the other end, you would think about Zooks, which are the self-driving cars

Starting point is 01:01:54 that you might have seen in Las Vegas. But in between, kind of the consumer brands, Alexa, Ring, fire TV, fire tablets, Kindle, Echo devices, you know,

Starting point is 01:02:06 just an array of all the kind of consumer front devices that we build here at Amazon. Yeah. And what's the latest update across the hardware ecosystem? What was announced most recently? We just launched a set of new echo devices. Super cool. Kind of built for Alexa Plus. This is our new, Alexa Plus is our new AI interface using Alexa. Just more conversational. It's a really fun product. It helps you get stuff done. two screen-based devices an 8-inch and 11-inch and two new speakers, killer sound. They're absolutely beautiful, by the way.

Starting point is 01:02:42 They're just gorgeous. We can talk about it if you want. Three new Kindles. It's called the Kindles Scribe. And one of them's in color, which is gorgeous color writing. A whole array of 4K cameras with ring, including doorbells.

Starting point is 01:02:57 4K. Bringing that clarity. Quite cool. These are your cool products. And some new fire TVs, just quite literally. TVs from, you know, 40 inches up to 75 inches, including, you know, what you call fire TV stick.

Starting point is 01:03:14 Yeah. How are you thinking about Alexa? I mean, we've been following, like, Siri launched a long time ago, and it feels, I just activated Siri. And it feels like they are at a point where the current, the previous system was very much like business logic with a bunch of different routes that the, that the Siri app could go down. And now they're kind of in the LLM era, in the completely AI generative AI era. And maybe that necessitates a rethink or a rebuild or a partnership. How is Amazon grappled with

Starting point is 01:03:48 this idea that the architecture of what an AI assistant is might be changing? Yeah. If you, there's a couple ways to think about it. First, I think the way you framed it is, you know, previously a lot of this was deterministic. If you said the right thing, you kind of got the right answer or, you know, call it point and shoot where question answer, question, answer. It's flipping on its head now because when LLMs come into play, you have to re-architect the whole problem. You move from this deterministic model where if you say the right thing, you get the right answer. It kind of feels limited, you know?

Starting point is 01:04:23 It's like a different type of speak that you have towards some of these, what, in the previous agents, if you will. But now you're in this conversational world, anything you ask, unlimited knowledge, specifically to elect. Alexa, you found there's personality that comes into play. There's empathy that comes into play. There's, so you get this personalization, but you also get memory. And so the more you talk to her, the more it knows about you. So you've gone from this, what you would say, just give and take moment to a conversation in depth, understanding, and then actually getting some stuff done.

Starting point is 01:04:59 The power of it, though, not only do you have all that, you have this. kind of ambient world around you. If you have a few Alexa devices plugged in, they'll all update with the new Alexa Plus AI baseline. And now you can just have a conversation from anywhere, ask anything you want, keep your phone in your pocket and those like critical moments

Starting point is 01:05:20 where you don't have to go do the research that way, just have the conversation. It's pretty powerful. Do you think there's a risk of, or some sort of tension between like the Alexa developers, the app store, I know some folks who have built specific apps, that do specific things.

Starting point is 01:05:36 But if you drop a more generalized LLM system on top of it, that might actually be competitive. You're kind of competing with your customers. Like, how have you messaged to the developer community around that? Developers are pretty pumped about it right now because, you know, these skills we're still calling, you know, these basically you're calling these APIs that are routing to a skill.

Starting point is 01:05:58 So while it's not deterministic point and shoot, it still is kind of think of it as different agents, on the system that you can call on. So you're seeing these developers write apps where the LLM makes, you know, the product Alexa makes the decision kind of orchestrates and says that you're trying to order a car, let me, we'll call Uber.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Yeah. And then Uber makes the car happen. Yeah. And I think as you see that as an example or you wanted to order food print grubhub, whatever the answer was, you just asked for the food. And then, you know, that service,

Starting point is 01:06:35 makes its move and you know delivers it I think there's this fundamental of it's actually better for developers because as you're serving your customer they're sitting here they're trying to tell you what they want

Starting point is 01:06:48 they don't have to be as explicit anymore they can almost be general in their asks and at that point if it's calling on an app or a skill or an add-on as we call it developers are pretty pumped about it right now we have a pretty long list of developers right now

Starting point is 01:07:04 probably the largest group of, if you will, agents attached to any LLM out there. And so it is a pretty rare situation as it's just not being done anywhere else. How do you think about the future of smart glasses and wearables? Amazon's done so many smart devices from the TV you mentioned in the Kindle. Alexa, it feels like an obvious thing. You have a number of products that have been announced or already live, but where do you think that goes? What formats do you like most, and where are you seeing the most adoption, really? So we see a ton.

Starting point is 01:07:39 We see our usage kind of just spiking with Alexa Plus on the current device lineup that we have today. We have frames, go frames at people where we see the usage go up, the buds are going up. Because when you take an agent that's smart with you, it's quite powerful. So we already see it happening in different form factors. I mean, it's down to user preference. I will say this. I mean, you're hitting a point that I think is. Just worth noting, I think there are plenty of jobs moving to what you would call AI devices.

Starting point is 01:08:11 It's just kind of changing. And if you think about kind of the evolution of different portions of tech over time, let me take you back. When I was developing, I think 14 years ago, I was making a laptop and somebody had come to me and said, what are you doing the laptop is dead i can't see you guys right now but assuming you have laptops in front of you yeah yeah like just think about that for a minute like that's 14 years ago guys like literally i was we were creating this product we're gonna make this laptop it's gonna create you know i have this vision and you're getting all after it you're like it's this beautiful

Starting point is 01:08:50 look what it can do in every detail and you're going and the first thing is like why would you build a laptop that thing is dead yeah the phone has replaced it it's over for the laptop for the 14 years ago. Yeah, these things stick around. Long time. What really was happening, you know, wasn't that the laptop was dying. It was just getting stronger

Starting point is 01:09:07 at what it did great. Jobs had kind of moved to the phone and the things that mattered to you on a phone came to live, communications, then, you know, the advent of social media, shopping probably,

Starting point is 01:09:18 like things that were easier there. But the things that mattered, like right now, your notes or your other things that mattered for the laptop, they just got stronger. I think we're kind of in that same era. I think AI devices

Starting point is 01:09:29 are coming down the pipe. Yeah. They're going to be great for certain things. And to your point, a lot of them will be on the go, whether it's glasses or something on your wrist or, you know, something in your pocket. I don't talk about, you know, what's in the lab. But for sure, you would imagine that as the jobs move, there's going to be form factors that evolve that are going to be more important. I think it just strengthens the form factors that exist today, just like the laptop got stronger, in my opinion, because when the phone came, you know, you got better at the jobs on your laptop, just like when the laptop came, the desktop got stronger for gaming and developers. And you just see that evolution where it's not that these form factors go away, but they get better at what they are meant to be, and then new form factors show up. I think that's happening right now.

Starting point is 01:10:12 How do you think about the personality and brand of individual models? I feel like there's a world where I would love an Alexa that I can just say it's Claude. And I'm talking to an Alexa hardware device, but I like the personality and functionality

Starting point is 01:10:28 of Claude, and so I want to just kind of run that piece of software by default in the same way that I can select like a default browser. I have a MacBook, but I run Chrome as my default browser. Is there a world where I could be able to do that? It's an interesting thought. It's not how it works for Alexa right now, but it's pretty, it's interesting. I don't think for like, if I, if I think about the customer, you know, kind of a, I don't know what you would call it, but just the base, the baseline customer What I'm trying to do is just be marked. I'm extremely online.

Starting point is 01:11:03 I have opinions about the individual models. I don't even know what to tell you. But many people don't care. You hit the extreme in the question. But here's how I think about it. I think like Alexa is basically model agnostic. Like what's the right model for the job? Sure.

Starting point is 01:11:16 And of course we have fine two models specifically that are built specifically for Alexa to do the jobs that you're looking for. The thing that matters most, I think, to our customers is that it personalizes to you. And so the more I talk to it about the things that I love, the more it understands me. I think you see that today and other products. But then as you're in natural conversations or you're asking for the next thing,

Starting point is 01:11:37 you don't have to go all the way. Alexa can be proactive for you. I give you a simple example. Maybe it's a silly one, but it is simple, just kind of being practical. If I ask Alexa, I have a camera, I have a ring camera right now. You have it in the, where my dogs eat in the dog bowls.

Starting point is 01:11:56 And if I can ask Alexa now, it's a pretty cool feature. or it's just AI and it's, you know, simple sense, although kind of fun, did anyone feed the dogs today? That's a classic question at my house. I get in trouble every night when I get home. Have you fed the dogs? I'm like, I just walked in, you know, that sort of thing. And then there's that moment where I can just turn and ask Alexa and Alexis says, no, nobody fed the dogs today.

Starting point is 01:12:21 So it's got that important. Yeah, it's just very cool because it knows. Nobody fed the dogs. You know, we use ring video description. we understand there's a dog, we understand that somebody fed the food, or fed the dog to food. So if the dog's not fed, I can ask. But in three days or four days later, it can be proactive and just say, hey, nobody's fed the dogs today. And like you just take that.

Starting point is 01:12:44 It didn't matter which LLMs or which agents kind of created that scenario to the customer. What mattered was it had the personalization, it knows I care about it, and then kind of proactively gave me that information back. I think that's the essence of just staying agnostic to it. But we do use different models. How are you thinking about the way that advertising should integrate into AI assistance? Because there's a lot of debate happening right now. People are going to assistance for product recommendations and advice on things to buy. And I think there's a very real and important debate around when should this assistant, that's like a trusted advisor,

Starting point is 01:13:25 how should ad-based recommendations, you know, show up? When is it appropriate? When should it just recommend? Like, you know, there's usually no objectively best product in a category because every consumer is different. But what's your framework for that? Because obviously Amazon's very pro-ad. When do you think you should recommend or what should it recommend?

Starting point is 01:13:49 The way you framed it is right. I think the, like any assistant, the better. it knows you, the better the recommendations can be. And so where I think ads do work is when you're actually helping the customer, you know, find what they're looking for. And then it just comes down to that personalization aspect and some of that history. If you, if there's something you use quite often and you're having, you know, and there's an ad that actually helps you if it's raised to you, that's when I get excited because I think

Starting point is 01:14:20 it's like a holistic approach to, you know, that kind of sort of. circle. When it's just random and you're like, what is this? It really, that's painful. It's where it gets painful. People really have no problem with the idea of going to your Alexa and then Amazon taking a cut of the commerce transaction that happens because you see the Amazon truck and you see the delivery network and you see how fast things arrive. And so there's clear value pervade there. And so I I think most customers are happy to have Amazon take essentially like an affiliate fee almost on that or cut. Yeah, the issue is how agnostic. Yeah, is there a world where Alexa would be getting effectively be an affiliate on the platform like it was an external, like, you know, source that was sending traffic?

Starting point is 01:15:15 Because what I would want is to arrive on, is basically say, hey, Alexa, and sorry to anybody at home. I'm setting off your Alexa device if you're listening to this. But hey Alexa, I want to buy, I use the example of a paper towel holder because I've had a and I want it to be from a brand that is over 50 years old. And like that is the kind of product I want to buy from a reputable brand that has been operating and that isn't just importing the cheapest possible product from overseas. And so that is like a very valuable recommendation to me. And as a consumer, I don't care if Alexa takes a cut,

Starting point is 01:15:58 but that's different than me just searching in, you know, in a search bar. I agree. I mean, I don't know about, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by Alexa taking a cut there, but what I would like to see happen in that scenario, and I think is what happens today is because we're so conversational, we can do that search for you, we can bring it up. We can also just look at your shopping history. choose to enable that and then say look here this is the size of paper towels you've been buying

Starting point is 01:16:27 and fundamentally you know if you just go to that next level of beyond just i'm going to i heard what you said and here's the answer maybe just do a little bit of logic flow for you and bring back a few options i think that's when it does get like these are those emotional connection points i know it sounds silly we're talking about paper towels but if you're asking for something indirectly and you don't know exactly what you're pointing and shooting for and you get something that's close and you can have a conversation. Just think about any assistant kind of mode. I'm just talking to somebody.

Starting point is 01:16:54 I'm just going to have this conversation and we're going to brainstorm it together. You're starting to see that happen on Alexa. It's more so about refining what it is you're getting after. And you can see that in kind of most aspects. On the Kindle side, are you getting like feature requests from users that want more AI integrated into products?

Starting point is 01:17:16 I can imagine I pick up a book I haven't read in a while. and it'd be nice to be able to say, can you summarize the first three chapters? Summarize the entire book in one sentence. I'm done. Okay, I'm done. We're getting a bunch of it. And, you know, this is a fine,

Starting point is 01:17:32 I'm going to answer your, we have a thing called books so far, so I'm going to tell you about that. That was the exact feature you just asked for. And it's AI-based. And it's basically continue watching for books. Do you know what I mean? Like you watch the first three episodes of whatever it is,

Starting point is 01:17:45 you know, brings of power. And you're like, just keep me up to date or, you know, whatever it did what show it is and you just see the recap and then you go into your the next episode this happens to me all the time because i don't watch enough tv yeah we have books so far which is that you know hey summarize how far i am to this book remind me you also can ask the book anything you want yeah you can ask kindle anything you want about the book and that was a big feature request like just want to talk about the character i want to know more about what really happened here and now that's happening so that's where ai enhances it but you have to be

Starting point is 01:18:15 really careful because there's something pure about kindle yeah that customers love. And this is like near and dear to my heart. You get to be a super fine line. We do have like on the Kindle scribes that we just launched. We do have AI search for any of your notes. So if you have hundreds of pages of notes now, you just search for or it. And then you can say summarize all the notes that I wrote about John or whatever. And you know, you'd get them all summarized and it would do a smart summary for you. And then you can put them in, you can do all that. But here's, here's the risk that we're very cautious of. Like, Kindle's like a sanctuary. It's like this. You you get into it and then you just want to disappear into it. Our users, like, they love their

Starting point is 01:18:54 books. You know what they hate when they're reading books is distractions. I don't even use that word lightly, but it is like if you popped them an ad or put a link up or I've infiltrated you with a text coming in, if you will, from Jordy, you'd be like, God damn, I'm just trying to read, man. This is my one place to disappear. And it's crazy because readers are popping up everywhere at new readers, I think like 60% of our new purchases are from totally new readers right now, just so you know. So there's a bit of a spike happening because it's a growing category again. The trick is to hold that as like that sanctuary where when you do pick up to read, that's what it becomes. The more tech you put in there beyond a book, you know, you have to

Starting point is 01:19:38 be careful. I think I know where that line is. The team knows where that line is. We have an amazing Kindle team. They've been doing it for, you know, years and years. And they are, they understand the customer so well, but to your point, the customer is starting to ask, can I get to what we call books so far or continue watching? It is the best way to say it in analogous. And so we created that or summarization. We have that. And also in your writing, you can search your notes. But we're being very selective not to over-techify it, if that makes sense. You've got to be careful because at the end of the day, it is a book or it is a notepad that you want to write on. And you have plenty of other devices to let your distractions kick in, but this is the one that we kind of

Starting point is 01:20:20 hold coveted and protect quite a bit. I have one last question, but maybe it's just a technical one, but on, on Kindle and AI, I think of Kindle as, I don't want to say underpowered, but like, it's designed for long battery life, you know, not the craziest screen. It's supposed to be something you can, you know, throw on your backpack and pull out on a trip and know that it's still charge, right? So I imagine that there's... You should be a product manager for Kindle. Okay. Yeah. And so hold that line. If you hold, if you hold that frame, man, you're perfect. Like, just religiously hold on to those statements. Fantastic. And so I imagine that the, the AI workloads need to be done in the cloud. And you're not thinking about on-device AI,

Starting point is 01:21:06 and that's generally the right trade-off because the summaries can be processed asynchronously, or or they can be cued up and kind of gone back and forth over the, over the Wi-Fi network or 4G. I'm just kind of interested in like what the median connectivity versus on-device compute trade-off looks like for Kindle going forward. Yeah, it's tricky. We're doing a lot of work on the edge right now as you put it on device. Sure.

Starting point is 01:21:35 I think you have to because it just can envelope speed and sometimes. yeah um specifically though uh you basically we serve the customer transparently yeah wherever it's right but we are doing work to when it's time and when it's time to use on device so let's call it like if you're trying to reduce latency on writing and you're doing some beautification it's an example yeah you're going to want to do it on device if you want to do book so far, like, it's a cloud-based thing. I mean, what if you started reading on your, is a good example, you started reading on your iPhone, you came over to your Kindle, and you picked it up, you want that to be a cloud-based

Starting point is 01:22:17 experience. That's not something you wanted on device. So, like, there's just, there's trade-offs, but we do both. It's a good question. I think that's true, by the way, across every single device we talked about today. Yeah, totally. Like, where is the edge workload more important if I did want to, you know, depending on if we were doing, whether it was for security or speed, you're.

Starting point is 01:22:37 or cost, whatever it might have been, you're always trying to find the right balance for the customer. By the way, when you say it, can I show you this? You may not be able to see it on the screen. This is the new color, Kendall. Can you see it? Wow.

Starting point is 01:22:52 Isn't that rad? So is that color? Look how thin it is. Like the thing is 5.4 millimeters thin. Like, it's crazy. It's so fun. And it has the same battery life to talk about, same latency, same speed.

Starting point is 01:23:02 And I have it here taking notes as I'm talking to you guys. but it's like a, it's a powerhouse now. So the processor there is going to double the power. Yeah, is that, uh, is that like E ink screen? Like it works outside and it's sun too. It almost feels like when you look at it, it's so soft on the eyes, right? It has a front light and the front light.

Starting point is 01:23:20 Sure. Basically, it's across the screen, so it's not blasting you. Yeah, yeah. So it still has that subtlety. You don't feel as tired as you're looking at it. You can do it in the dark and the light. There's nothing that you lose this screen. It's a matte screen.

Starting point is 01:23:31 It's perfect for writing. Wow. And you're, so you get, get all those. pieces, the refinement was color. So there's always this battle, like, but it's not an LCD with the beautification of, you know, OLED and so forth. But I mean, there's something beautiful and subtle about this, almost like colored pencils on the screen. And so even when you're writing in color, it feels that way, it's quite, it's pretty, uh, it's one of my favorites. We got to get one. We got to figure out how to jail break it, side load, the Sora, Slop

Starting point is 01:24:01 feed. I want brain rot on that thing, ASAP. Don't tell me. Don't tell the any of it. that stuff, man. I don't want to hear you. Last thing, do you think Amazon's AI opportunities broadly underappreciated? I mean, it feels like there's so much service area. Everything from retail opportunity, Anthropic. You guys already have a suite of devices that people use and love that are in people's homes. It feels like in many ways other, you know. You guys also have data centers too. A few of those. A few of them. You got a few racks. They invented the data center. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how else to say it, like, hands down, you know, every part, every part of Amazon is, like, entrenched and driving through AI.

Starting point is 01:24:49 Whether it's bedrock, AWS, what's happening, like cloud-wise, all the models we run, we make available to our customers, all the way through stores and what they're doing fundamentally to help your shopping experience better, prime video and what they're doing. jumped to scene with Fire TV. Did you guys know that? It's very cool. Well, that's very cool. Just pick your written movie scene. I mean, also the largest deployment of robots, I believe, in the world is correct. Well, I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's accurate. Maybe in the U.S. I saw some chart where you guys were passing a million robots. Yeah, it's pretty massive. And then like, you know, controlled by, and then you have the other side of it. All the Alexa devices now are about to be powered by Alexa Plus. This is like

Starting point is 01:25:30 core foundation of like consumer AI in its most practical sense. you're in this place now where you know I'm at the dinner table with the family and instead of somebody pulling out their phone to get the answer or research something we just have a conversation with Alex and you got the full depth of what you would have expected from an

Starting point is 01:25:49 LLM based product but it's just very practical and ready for you and so like I think the whole gamut is you're right it's quite underappreciated right now I don't know what the right way to frame it is on the other side without sounding to like you know but I do think there's I agree so I think

Starting point is 01:26:05 and I think the market will realize eventually. I do, too. I think, you know, first thing, serve the customer, serve the customer, serve the customer, and do it in the right way. I think, you know, that's our focus, and we'll kind of continue to do that, but you're right. I think it'll get notice, seen, understood. I'm pretty proud of it right now. And when you see what's coming with Alexa Plus with ring video search or ring story

Starting point is 01:26:32 descriptions and, like, summarizing your day, it really starts making it. something, it takes AI to the next level in my mind because it just makes it practical for people. Like it just puts it right there. Don't get me wrong. You can actually use Alexa.com too to do all the things that people are associating with traditional LOM, which is quite cool as well, or the app. But at the end of the day, there's just a whole new set of practical ways to use it that I think are going to be pretty delightful for our customers. When's the new Scribe actually releasing? I just tried to buy it while we were talking and it says coming soon. I'm not allowed to give you the date on here, but it's, yeah, you have to get on the wait list.

Starting point is 01:27:08 Our demand is a little bit higher than we expected it to be right now. We're in, we're in production. So you put it on, you guys couldn't get the demand planning, right? I want a scrub. It wasn't demand planning, man. Two days, Panos. You'll have it before the holiday. I want it in two days.

Starting point is 01:27:24 By the way, people are pretty bumped about it. I'll make sure you get it. I'll make sure you guys get it. Thank you. That'd be awesome. Put your name down and I'll make sure. We will. Awesome.

Starting point is 01:27:31 Well, it's great to hang out. Congrats on all the progress. Yeah, really, really fascinating tour of the ecosystem. I appreciate you breaking it down for us. Thanks so much. It's been fun, guys. You take care. Wait, also, I think, obviously, it's too late now, but is Pano's the first, are you, I think

Starting point is 01:27:46 you're the first person from Amazon ever on our show? I think so. I've had over a thousand interviews this year. Here we go. There we go. It's great to have you. Thank you. We'll see you soon.

Starting point is 01:28:00 We'll see you soon. Have a good one. We have some breaking news that we got to cover. Sam Altman has replied to his post about erotic content. And Chatsy-P-T says, okay, this tweet about upcoming changes to Chach-U-P-T blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to. You didn't think posting E-R-O-T-I-C-A was going to... There are so many other words that you could have used to kind of like, you know, get there without saying that word.

Starting point is 01:28:34 Exactly. We have said that. The entire time we were discussing, Grock, we like that this is a clean show. We like that we don't. I never wanted to say that word on the show. Exactly. So when we talk about this, we say adult content, adult romantic companion. We don't go to the other words.

Starting point is 01:28:49 But yes, he went there. He said E-R-O-T-I-C-A. He typed it out into his ex-app, sent the tweet. And he said, it was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults, here is an effort to better communicate it. I'm going to read it and you tell me, is this better communication, Jordie? He says, as we have said earlier, we are making a decision to prioritize safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers, and we are not loosening any policies related to mental health. This is a new and powerful technology, and we believe

Starting point is 01:29:24 minors need significant protection. I love that point. We also care very much about the principle of treating adult users like adults as AI becomes more important in people's lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission. It doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not. Without being paternalistic, we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals. But we are not the elected moral, of the world in the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries, R-rated

Starting point is 01:30:08 movies, for example, we want to do the same thing here. Let's hear it for the MPA rating system that's gaining popularity. Yes, I want this so badly. I just want to, in the app store, it should say R-rated. R-rated. But that is not NC-17 rated, which is a different thing. And so we were debating this. So you're a movie buff. Is, no, no, I mean, is, is, is Amazon. Amazon's erotic content on the Kindle is that, is that X-rated? Is that the same as only fans? Is that the same as an adult content video site? Like, it does feel somewhat different. And so, I don't know, maybe this is a nod to staying in the R-rated category, not going further. I don't know. We'll see. What's your reaction, Jordi, to this post? Is it effective comms? Put on your Lulu hat. I mean, the problem is that 14, almost 14 million people, saw yesterday's posts, you add that up with, you know, thousands of other posts. And, you know, this really did blow up 14.

Starting point is 01:31:07 This post is going to get, certainly get plenty of, plenty of views. But I think the community has already taken it. I don't know. I think the December timeline, there's a lot of days between now and December. AGI might hit before then. But there's so much that could happen to tweak that policy before it. goes out, really silo it. I don't know. We'll have to see. I can almost guarantee that when it rolls out, there will be crazy screenshots on the timeline that day of people getting it to do

Starting point is 01:31:41 crazy stuff because people love jailbreaking this stuff. They've already been doing it. Anyway, let me tell you about turbopuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search, build from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. You can load all your erotic content into turbopuffer. Search it 10 times cheaper. And we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got Adam Ryan from Workweek. The legend. It's the platform for professional networks.

Starting point is 01:32:13 Welcome to the show, Adam. Second time, third time. I've lost track, but thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to be talking about your strategy to bring erotica to professional networking. I've been waiting for this moment. That's exactly what it's all about. Actually, kick us back off with... This is the thesis of the whole company,

Starting point is 01:32:35 is that people wanted erotica in their work and the workplace. Kick us back off with like the actual overview of the company, how you introduce yourself these days. And the quick history, too, for anybody that missed the last interview. Yeah, started the company four years ago. And this guy was part of the founding story of that. And today, you know, one of the things, things that we learned along the way that everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of,

Starting point is 01:33:06 hey, I trust individuals over institutions and beauty, fashion, gaming. There's a Kylie Jenner out there. There's nobody in work. If you're a VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? If you're into beauty of Kylie, you don't have anyone else in that space. So that was the first problem we wanted to go solve. And then we thought it was potentially because of money, bandwidth, Like these people are busy, they already make a lot of money.

Starting point is 01:33:32 That's why they don't create content. We realize that there's an actual just platform missing. People aren't going on LinkedIn being like, hey, I'm prepping for a riff. Can someone help me? And all these platforms are open networks. You can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analog. So putting it in my terms, you're building effectively a professional.

Starting point is 01:34:00 professional network, but hyper-specific to people, like, within basically certain, I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you're a VP of marketing and you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing, like, Workweek is the platform that you can do that on. Yeah, so we've built the horizontal platform, and then we've verticalized it by the profession. So we have one for, in healthcare, marketing, HR, e-commerce, et cetera. And so if you're in, if you're kind of senior leader in one of those spaces, we verify you so that prevents the bots, the erotica, as well as make sure that you can kind of have those trusted discussions. I mean, I imagine that with the erotica discussion, the HR group, support group is probably going wild. All the HR leaders across the Fortune 500.

Starting point is 01:34:51 Yeah, that's a big question. What are we going to do about this? Because we've given chat GPT to everyone. and then they're going to be able to use it forever. Yeah, and I'm assuming on business plans, you can just turn off that? Yeah. This is a-

Starting point is 01:35:03 Can you? Can you? Yeah, so it's worth. That's the 40 chess. You got to upgrade to the enterprise solution now because you've got to be able to fine-tune your entire organization so we can keep intern Tyler off of the adult version. Tyler's been grinning this whole series.

Starting point is 01:35:20 He's just cracking up. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, I've heard, I've heard there's like, I've heard crazy stories of value in these, like, niches. There's some phrase, like, there's riches in the niches. There's reches in the niches, something like that. I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communities. So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups,

Starting point is 01:35:42 put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of. But then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to, you know, fix up the HVAC system. They would be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey, who, who, who, who else is, you know, managing an office and needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of filtered water or, you know, a better Wi-Fi provider or something like that. And that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff. Hey, we're talking. How do you think about the, like, if there's this continuum between like LinkedIn's, this super broad category, you have someone like, you know, a Lenny, a substack creator with a show that's like, you know,

Starting point is 01:36:22 this individual off in this world versus like these like curated communities like where do you see like the water cooler existing for the for the average user i think there's there's the traditional social networks which are all free to join yeah and then you have the chief of staff one silver owns that one that's a subscription okay uh most of those you know it's the yPO but for x sure they've all created those but subscription yep there's really only been one company that's done verification with making it free, which is Doximity, professional network for doctors. They're like a $10-ish. $14 billion company today produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting,

Starting point is 01:37:03 and only raised $50 million. Wow. Hell of a company. Go buy the stock. That's good. Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial. And we're really following a lot of that blueprint.

Starting point is 01:37:15 Sure. How do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops, a social network, but you still have the verification. Got it. Because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing on a network, the impressions against that audience are worth thousands of times, potentially the average impression on a LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:36 Well, and I think it's to the Alexis on the show yesterday, I talked about the dead internet theory. It's like the perfect time for trying to solve that is like, how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit. I love Reddit, but I used to be able to tell are you smart by your reply? And now with Chatsubitia, I'm like, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:37:54 Or like, have you put effort into the reply? And if you did it, I'm like, all right, now I'm like, I have no idea who this is. And so the kind of whole trust of the Internet is, I think, shifting, particularly when it comes to work, you like, really care about who's giving you advice. Yeah, Isaac, a friend of the show, posted a couple days ago, do what Raya did, but for a social network, humans only, human verification, hard to get into, no idea how to do it, but feels intuitively like it could work. and I love seeing this

Starting point is 01:38:20 because this has been work week's thesis for years now you guys been building towards it so people are finally realizing what do you think about some of the recent changes on X they're adding functionality

Starting point is 01:38:36 that shows where the user is based there's probably a lot of reasons for this and then some bad reasons I think some of the concerns for people that are in areas like the UK that don't tolerate free speech you could be targeted or authorities there could be trying to come after accounts. But it's like such an interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional

Starting point is 01:39:00 network in a place to talk about the industry or various industries broadly. But at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar. It's like people are getting in fights all the time. There's like, you know. That shady guy. in the corner that, you know, it's got a history. It's got history. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:39:23 But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's what Nikita's doing. If you're an open network, that's free. You're going to get bots. And then you also are going to get, you know, people abusing them. We love on Twitter all the time. But the Twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots and then also the blue check market changed the verification process a little bit, where you could

Starting point is 01:39:46 buy your own verification, but Russian bots still have credit cards. I remember I got verified, and then six weeks later, they did the, they did the, spent years. Me too. It's like, text the grandma, like I got it. I finally went through the file I found, like old, you used to just have to link, news articles or something about here. So I found some old news articles and I went to the process, got approved, and then a week

Starting point is 01:40:11 later, it was like, oh, everyone thinks what is, uh, give us your take on the current state of independent media. You were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying, I want to build a morning brew for X or the hustle for X. There was some great businesses built off of that. Are many of them still thriving? What is the current state of the, maybe you start with like the newsletter media business? Yeah, I mean, I think what democratized access. I think, like, ultimately what people always come down in media is you need to, like, help people make money, help people get eyeballs, or help people make content faster. And, like, you solve one of those things. You have a decent business, solve all three of a good one.

Starting point is 01:40:59 And what's happening is, you know, I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Behive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case. I think we're starting to make our own case there for more specific kind of verticals. But I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the, telling the truth. There's, like, Lenny is getting more, more money on a subscription basis than most publishers in B2B trade publication that have been around for, like, 50 years. Yeah. So consumers, wallets always end up.

Starting point is 01:41:31 Walk me through Trung fans' existence, his business. The most interesting man in the world. He writes on business with Workweek, not at Workweek. Is he an employee? Is he on the network? Like, he has a newsletter. He's just Trung, man. How does that work? He's just strung.

Starting point is 01:41:47 Strung was one of the first creators that work we. Yeah, well, so we signed him at The Hustle and had known him for a while. Yeah. And he actually was a big part of like our stick is because when we brought him on at the hustle, he was so funny and so much better than everyone else. He changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1.5 million people. Like overnight. I mean, it was like everyone just started like reading more and opening more.

Starting point is 01:42:14 ads went up and so we actually that was like a big part of is like one person could totally you have like the 100x creator which everyone talks about developers today one he's like the best dad in the world you can't mention trung and not talk about tj trung junior and i don't think he's ever been on an all-hands call for any company i've ever been a part of with him but you know that's just kind of his vibe of what he does and he comes with comes with it all but Yeah, I think he's funny. True rock star. But is he an example of someone who's stewarding a smaller community of professionals

Starting point is 01:42:52 that could be given some sort of moniker? He works more on the workweek side of helping us. So what we have a lot is we have people like Blake Madden who covers health care. If you're in health care, you know who Blake is. Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche health care. Trung's the guy to help us do that. Okay, so he's a little bit more like Tidal Funnel. He's a halo.

Starting point is 01:43:14 Got it. Okay. And then there are specific niches. Is there a power, I imagine there's some sort of power law to those, to the various communities that you have. Like, what's at the top? Like, where are you really like dominating? About like 30% of revenue is HR, 9%'s healthcare. But if we look at like Tam, it's actually pretty indexed pretty equally of like how many people we think we can get per network. And then within HR, for example, are there multiple communities, multiple creators? Or is it all just one big pool? How do you think about that? So we think about it more like a network. Sure. So safe space is the HR network. And I think this is part of it. You have to use the lexicona kind of lingo. Like Blake uses very different language than HR. Yeah, okay. And so each one's developed to match that.

Starting point is 01:43:57 And then within the network, we have creators. And so we believe if you want to write for HR leaders, where the best place get the eyeballs, and then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that they can get money off of. Are there other, are there other kind of services or activities that are kind of, I don't know, amortized or shared across the entire platform? Obviously, ad sales seems like one of them, but actual software? Or do you say, hey, Trung, like, there's no better product than just posting on X, so we're not going to try and build our own short form text app? Yeah, we just let them do their own thing.

Starting point is 01:44:36 Yeah, use whatever tool is best for the job if you want to be on substack or a Slack. We use our own newsletters. So newsletters particularly is that, and that's our way that we use content to drive people into the networks. Yep, and then you can shuffle people around through the different networks. Not that different than how substack's now doing it for theirs, but ours is more vertical. Yeah, yeah, and there's more like news-driven. Yeah, it makes sense. Political and-

Starting point is 01:44:57 Wanted your take on David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Skydance, a lot of people thought that the price they paid for the free press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it. when you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience, but I wanted to hear how you thought about it. The merger itself, I mean, it allows them to compete, I think, like taking a big step out, everyone wants to win streaming. I mean, that's like the name of the game.

Starting point is 01:45:30 And so it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney Plus and Netflix. While they're all, and Netflix just announced, I think today a partnership with Spotify to start bringing, and more podcasts on, like, is an IP race of the streaming, and Paramount was losing, and I think this allows them to do that. So that's, I think the bigger picture is actually that. Yeah, the screen press is like a rounding error as part of this. It's $150 million total, and they're buying, you know, 12 revenue of that. It's not the end of the world. I think that

Starting point is 01:46:00 was also, if you're going to- Was that the revenue number? 12 to 15, I think, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it was higher than 20, but I don't know. It was around like 10x multiple. I think, or 10 to 12. But they, I also think when you're starting your own company, which basically David Ellison is, like, you want your own people. Sure. And that's, you're going to, you're going to make sure you build the right foundation.

Starting point is 01:46:24 And that's, that's, that's, yeah, everybody's focus on what is, what, what did they pay for the free press? You should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make CBS. This is no different, like, in a totally different world and very different numbers, but then Zuck saying, like, I need an AI team. I'm going to go get the people that I want to get. He's saying, I want to have the best editorial team. I'm going to go get the people I want to have.

Starting point is 01:46:45 Do you think the bigger platforms, the public platforms, have kind of become less relevant in those niche professional networks? I feel like if I went back like 10 years on Twitter, there would be like hashtag like Marketing Tuesday. And I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing that. On Tuesday. Yeah, basically. It was like that.

Starting point is 01:47:07 What a crazy concept. Maybe it was Marketing Monday or something. Manifestation Mondays, that was a thing as well. There was a thing around like hashtags and like chats around certain things. And you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific. But now X feels like teapot political news.

Starting point is 01:47:24 Like there's, there's, it's at a much higher level than any sort of niche one prevention. The irony I think was like when they went all algorithms first, they lost the sense of communities. And when you used to follow people and that's who you did, it was like your people. Yeah. And when it was the algorithm,

Starting point is 01:47:38 it totally changed the dynamic of the product, but because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them differently. It happens slowly. It's still, I think it makes the feed more interesting, but we definitely lost something. And they make more money. I mean, like, you're there for engagement,

Starting point is 01:47:52 and your DaMau goes up as Nikita makes that algorithm better. So, like, that's all he cares about. And I think that's, like, ultimately what their incentives are. I do think, like, LinkedIn, you know, I know you guys are huge there and really rely on the sport center of LinkedIn. Sports center of LinkedIn. So, hey, to hate to say this, but, you know, I think like 10 years ago, someone would be like, hey,

Starting point is 01:48:12 I see your connect on LinkedIn. Can you make that introduction? I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know. Today I'm like, I have no clue that is. I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. The more people added, the worse it gets. Yeah, no, that makes it sense. We were talking off air about how OnlyFans hasn't been able to sell itself. They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday, obviously, you know, other companies leaning into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting, which OnlyFans has done better than probably any company in the world. When XAI was leaning into romantic companions earlier this year, we were like, it made sense for them to do. They needed a strategy to drive, you know, new user signups,

Starting point is 01:49:00 engagement, subscriptions, et cetera. But why do you think, have you been surprised that there's no buyer for OnlyFans. Yeah, it's like the, on a cash flow per head count, I think it's the best company in the world. Until, what is it, Tether? $1.9 billion, I think OnlyFlein does in cash flow a year with like 70 employees or something. It's like absurd.

Starting point is 01:49:22 I know the owner takes like a, he pays himself a $500 million dividend check a year. And they leave like plenty in the bank. But they've never, they can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content. And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they've created the tooling. The old CEO of OnlyFans, former colleague of mine,

Starting point is 01:49:42 she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better. And now they've advanced further to where it's a chat bot. They essentially not even having real conversation anymore. It's not that different

Starting point is 01:49:58 than what we're talking about for OpenAI. And it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, X being the everything app. You're like, I can kind of see That's, I think, your point earlier about the Apple comparison. This is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for Open AI. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:15 Well, we have some breaking news. We've got to cover before our next guest hoffs on. But thank you so much for stopping by it. What's the breaking news? I got to know it. There's a ton of these. Mr. Beast has filed a trademark launching his own bank. Hang out for a second.

Starting point is 01:50:27 It will be called Mr. Beast Financial. He clearly saw our post about Arabor and was like, I got to get it on the action. Just kidding. the application was filed two days ago. Oh, but it's real. It's real. It happened this morning. No, this is real.

Starting point is 01:50:40 What's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that. It's kind of like. I guess. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that. I think like there's like a lane of trust sooner or later that like you're just going to screw. Like, you're like, why do I want a Mr. Beast bank?

Starting point is 01:51:04 I don't know. I mean, the lesson from the Mr. Beast bar or the hamburgers, the hamburgers, is that it has zero price discrimination. And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like, you're only going to be able to charge them a $5 for a candy bar. Okay, but let's break it down. A bank you can actually get. It's not that different than drop shipping, basically.

Starting point is 01:51:24 But yeah, but think about, like, wealthy people are not going to see this bank launch and decide, I need this, I'm going to move a bunch of deposits over. Think in decades. Think in decades. A kid watches Mr. Beast is like, yeah, I need my first checking account. I'll set up Mr. Beast checking. And then 20 years later, they're like, yeah, I should probably switch to something more serious. It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on Beast Financial. But like, here I am. I make a million dollars. So yeah, if he's actually a bank charter, it means he can get into mortgages and like hardcore lending. I mean, I think like that all, it always sounds good in like a board meeting. Yeah. And then you like don't care about

Starting point is 01:52:01 product and you don't actually make it differentiated. And then you're like, cool. When distributions like you're only moat, it's not a moat. Yeah. So I guess, I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person of my audience is like 16, how much money did they spend a month? I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will want to use it. And you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like, okay, the average teenager spends their parents are going to send their allowance or maybe they have a job. They send it into the, the account. Maybe they spend a couple hundred dollars a month. I don't know what teenagers spend these days. I remember back in my day, it was like, you know, allowance was like $20.

Starting point is 01:52:42 And so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool and cash back and he can monetize some of that. The rewards I don't, I don't really believe, like, I became an adult and I was like, I want to use a real bank. I'm an adult, You know, like, I just remember I migrated from like a credit union in my hometown to like, I want to, you're using a card all the time. It's coming up. Like, you think you're like a kid that goes into college is like, yeah, I'm still using my Mr. Beast like debit card. I do think it's like a lunchebles competitor and a bank. Like know your audience a little bit. Yeah, but so I guess like from the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to just. be using Beast Financial as there as there. I mean, as a piggy bank? It's technically called Mr. Beast Financial, which is I think I like Beast Financial more than Mr. Beast Financial. The filing was submitted on an intent to use basis, which under trademark law means there are

Starting point is 01:53:45 genuine plans to bring this to life. I think he should have went with Jimmy. His like a grown-up version of the bench. Well, it clearly got, it clearly got Will Monitis up in arms. He's thinking about it because He says he's calling the top on incubations, sub-tweeting Mr. Beast. Just kidding, he's probably not sub-tweeting Mr. Bees, but Wilman Nyes did call the top on incubations. He says, every guy I've talked to in the past six months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies. Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go all in? They just want to clip 20%.

Starting point is 01:54:22 And so, yeah. Acubations are incredibly hard. He says, there are amazing. There are way more work, way more work than just investing. Jordan and I spent some time trying to that. It's tough. It's a tough game. He says, there are amazing incubation individuals.

Starting point is 01:54:35 I cannot say their names here, or they will blow my car up. You are not incubating anything if what you are doing is clipping 20% for an idea. And some intros, you are not the tax man, the real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in. What's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill? Like, that's a real incubation? I guess, like, you could kind of-

Starting point is 01:54:55 Thrive. Drive Oscar. There's a healthcare one that's done really well that they only focus on like certain health care one. But their like model was like they had no capital risk. Yeah. And they're also like a platform that's done this for it.

Starting point is 01:55:08 And they take it very seriously. We did talk to somebody who incubated like what, 200 companies in a year or something. Yeah. There was a there was a there was a studio that made so many companies and were so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announced. It's like we will never fund these companies.

Starting point is 01:55:27 Because when a CEO walks in, there's like, how much do you own, CEO founder? They're like 10%. 10%. And you're like, who owns the rest? And also like, are you the like 199th of the 200 CEOs? Or like number five? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:40 And I think that's actually the problem. I'm coming around to the Mr. Beast financial. You like it. You're bullish. I'm not. What's the terminal value? I think that they can, so this idea came up in 20, 2021, 2022 during the fintech craze. It was like, it's not that hard to start a software product that can take deposits as, I mean, in this case, it sounds like he's maybe trying to be a chartered bank.

Starting point is 01:56:11 He's trying to go to the like base layer. But who knows? It's literally just a true. But still, it's like if you just run the numbers on like how many million accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're going to be spending on a recurring base. and then even the partnerships that he'd be able to drive around like being becoming a referral partner for Netflix and you know to be clear I don't think it's I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank it could be Mr. Bees financial get some financial advice it would be like a clever idea and like I would be supportive of this like you buy one of his feastable lunchebles you get like a nickel yeah in a savings account yeah you keep going or something like that it around, you pay for the lunchable with $1. If you don't pay for the rest of the lunchable,

Starting point is 01:57:01 Mr. Bees comes and personally breaks your legs. It becomes a loan shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see. In other news, on the way back to the United States from NATO's Defense Ministers meeting, the Secretary of War, Hegseth's plane

Starting point is 01:57:15 made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standards of procedures and everyone is on board is safe. Thank God. What a crazy story. Crack in the windshield. That is a very crazy moment.

Starting point is 01:57:31 In other news, an exciting milestone in AI from science. Sundar Pachai was probably holding this in his back pocket for when OpenAI does something that's negative aura. Sundar busted this out and said, our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells with more pre-clinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer.

Starting point is 01:58:10 He dropped it. Oh, just a coincidence. Just a coincidence, Senator. They're doing that. We're doing this. Tyler, tell me more about this. What is actually going on? Have you dug into this at all?

Starting point is 01:58:20 I haven't read the full paper, but I mean it is there is like a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about especially with all the Gemini three rumors going on oh yeah it's like this is the most cracked model of all time interesting so I don't maybe it's just like this is just maybe maybe it's just like a vague post as a blog post this is interesting vague paper we're thinking we're doing bank papers now I mean you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like oh we have this new way of doing oral that's way better but we're not going to really get into the details sure sure we don't want to share well we are sponsored by Google AI

Starting point is 01:58:51 studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini, chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You're going to hang out for all the... You're going to hang out. You can interview the next person. I'm having fun. I love to hang with that. This is an interesting post from Brendan Buck. He says, here's a telling sign of where we are. On day 15, there are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall Street journals. What is blank? I have no idea. The government is shut down. Oh, the government's shutdown. Yeah, that's right. I'm getting a new passport, and I have no idea if I'm going to get it in time. I paid for it to be expedited because I have to go to Europe, unfortunately.

Starting point is 01:59:30 I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic event, but I never like leaving America. But it did rise to the occasion, and I need a new passport, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No news? It does feel a lot less like newsworthy than it was last time. I think a lot of people just don't like the government. And so they're like, yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government.

Starting point is 01:59:55 See you. See you. I do think most of those, it will get, I heard this, most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees. Okay, so they can hang out for a while. So basically for like four-ish weeks, no one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves. Once that happens, I think it starts to get noisy.

Starting point is 02:00:14 Okay, well, we do have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting the Ultrador Dome. We have Eric Whitman from Visco coming on the show next. He's in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TBP and Ultrudeau. How are you doing? What's going on?

Starting point is 02:00:31 Good to see you. Doing great. How you doing, guys? Good to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Great to have you. Give us a state of the union with Visco. I think a lot of people are familiar with the product.

Starting point is 02:00:41 They know the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, look, Visco, it's been a minute, right? Visco has been around for 14 years now. Overnight success. That's what we love to see. I know overnight success. I love it. Yeah. So, you know, and we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and creators overall for, you know, well over a decade and what, you know, we love our jobs. I mean, we love building for creatives. And, you know, we've seen various moments in time come about for Visco, but I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI, you know, right now people, especially photographers and creatives, are looking for a company that has their back as building tools

Starting point is 02:01:34 for them, and it's really helping them find ways to be successful, whether it's just doing things on the side or making a full-time living as a creative. So that's really what we've been up to. Cool. Take us through the most recent updates. And then I have a bunch of ideas to pitch you, get feedback on, understand more about, I mean, basically how I can level up my photography workflow. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So, you know, obviously, AI is impacting the whole industry and a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives. And, you know, our perspective has always been, how do we preserve the craft? How do we preserve the artistry? But also bringing some of those. benefits that AI can provide to support, you know, the creative process. So the last couple of years we've been releasing tools like, for example, Visco Hub, which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content. We earlier this year launched a product called Visco Canvas.

Starting point is 02:02:43 And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase. And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific mood boarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on Visco and their content, and then bring your own content to the four. So really a hybrid way. And then today, big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools.

Starting point is 02:03:16 we call it AI Lab, because we know a lot of this technology, as we hear about on your show almost daily, continues to evolve at this massively rapid clip, and I see the gong getting ready. There we go. Thank you. I was wondering if I was going to get a gong. We love product launches here. Okay, here's a workflow that I struggle with regularly, and I want you to walk me through how I could level it up. So I'll often go out and shoot photos, and I shoot raws, and then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the raws, and I hate that process.

Starting point is 02:03:57 And if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button, and it never gets it right. And I feel like there's room for AI to fine tune on what it takes to actually take a raw image and then make it look great in color correction. that's not generative AI. I don't want to re-generate the image. I want the actual pixels there. I just want to understand, you know, the different looks, kind of like AI filters.

Starting point is 02:04:24 I've tried different apps, and a lot of the apps, they kind of like hit everything with a different colored hammer, and they all get really extreme. And then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack, and it looks great,

Starting point is 02:04:36 but then you apply it, and it's not right on your photos because you shot slightly differently. So what do you think the future of like just, you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just want to speed up that workflow of the post process once you have a great raw.

Starting point is 02:04:52 I love it. I love this example because actually the future is here now. So actually with Visco today, you can import those raw images in, and we actually have some ML built into the product today that we will look at that image that you have, and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets. Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful.

Starting point is 02:05:19 I mean, a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our work that's been around, like I said, for 10 plus years. And there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company in Cupertino. And they are still using our color grading presets as their default starting point. so that they can just get that great look much more quickly. So the future is here already today, John. It starts with Visco into our Visco studio. You can import your Raws, use for this photo to automatically pick the right preset. And then you take your creative process from there.

Starting point is 02:05:57 Again, we're not trying to get in the way from an AI perspective. We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process. What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today? around AI. We had one shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI. He was hoping that the government would regulate it so that certain products could only be, like, legally had to be authentically photographed because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them. Meanwhile, we have like an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things.

Starting point is 02:06:41 even I think in my home I could go and generate hundreds of images of my family and yet I still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos and so I

Starting point is 02:06:53 even if the models get a hundred times better which I don't even know if they can get a hundred times better because they're already so photo real I just think that photographers that are craft driven that like that genuinely enjoy

Starting point is 02:07:07 photography and that want to capture moments will always have a job that may that might be naive but that's my current feeling today and I'm curious how the broad community on visco is thinking about it I think that's right I mean look I think we all shall recognize there's tension today right and and I think back like look I've been in this industry for 30 plus years I've seen a lot of hype and you know where it ends up you know resolving to itself like e-commerce right when it first started happening everyone thought, oh, brick-and-mortar stores are going to go away.

Starting point is 02:07:42 The reality is 16% of overall commerce happens through e-commerce today. The rest is still very much brick-and-mortar. So I do think, you know, when AI and especially genera of AI came out, you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat. And there are certain categories where, realistically, it is a threat. Stock photography is a perfect example. I think this is why you see companies like Shutterstock and Getty are coming together because, you know, there is going to be, there already is duress.

Starting point is 02:08:09 in the stock photography market. But as you're saying, like, there are different segments of photography. I mean, the photography services market is $105 billion a year. It's going to grow to $160, $150 billion a year by 2030. So it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize. So I think the question's always been, well, how is AI going to affect me and my specific line of work? I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to

Starting point is 02:08:39 realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process. There are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10,000 photos, how do I quickly call through that? Today, it's very much a manual process and it does not give photographers energy. But there are more and more companies that are coming out with calling tools that will automatically apply your look and also, because they've learned

Starting point is 02:09:12 what your look has become over years and years of editing, and they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really, you know, like you see an airplane in the background, okay, take that one out, right? It's just AI is supportive of that. I think another area that I think is very emerging

Starting point is 02:09:28 and you're going to see a lot more from Visco on this front. I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with you all, but is that, you know, a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft. They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business. And so they're just mundane task around managing customer relationships and responding back to people and making sure that your edit list is appropriately organized.

Starting point is 02:09:56 Qualifying clients. Qualifying clients is another great example. So we actually announced a product. called Visco Workspace, that is the whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business. And we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can, again, take a lot of those mundane tasks out. So that's where, as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very human-centric from a photography creator standpoint. But AI is going to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers.

Starting point is 02:10:33 Did you always know you were going to come in and build SaaS at Visco? Was that the plan? I mean, B-to-B SaaS, specifically. Obviously, you were at Atlassian, then you were at Figma. You're kind of a SaaS demigod, you know, in shorts. I do love it, man. I can't look at a business and not think SaaS. I'm not going to lie.

Starting point is 02:10:58 Us, too. There's a few things better in the world. I have a question about AI and the trajectory of smartphone photography. So I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras, and I saw a video where they were, it was on MKBHD, and he was testing, I think it was Lyca versus iPhone, can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard. But they really made it harder by only doing extreme, you know, you.

Starting point is 02:11:31 know, no shallow depth of field, landscape photography, super bright. They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with, you know, controlled lighting or something like that. And so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone is, it got amazing, superhuman level or super, you know, like a level at a certain niche in photography, but it really has not replaced like moody portrait lighting where you want. shallow depth of the field, like, just because of the physics of the lens. And I'm wondering if you think AI, generative AI will do the same thing, because I'm just thinking about, like,

Starting point is 02:12:11 even in the stock photography example, like, if I'm buying a stock photo of Yosemite, like, even if it looks photo real, like I want half dome in the right place. I don't want a half dome. I don't want something that looks like half dome. Like, the reason I'm buying that stock image is because I can see exactly the shape of half dome perfectly, not, you know, something that feels right and looks photo real, but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things. We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street, and the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever

Starting point is 02:12:47 versus the ones that are, like, going a layer deeper on that. Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think composition is arguably one of these most important things for you to learn in photography. You know, most people will say that Ansel Adams wasn't a great photographer. He was amazing at composition and editing. I mean, he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop, like back in the day, you know, a little known fact.

Starting point is 02:13:11 But, you know, it is about that editing process. So, yes, you've got to get that composition, right. But oftentimes, you know, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head. And I do think, you know, where AI is interesting is it starting to help people sort of, hey, you have this vision. Lighting is another classic example, right? Lighting is something that most photographers, even the best of them, like, mess up. And being able to use AI to help augment, right, and correct some of the lighting issues or composition issues, I think that's another area that's really, there's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a

Starting point is 02:13:53 look at some of that as well. But I think that's where it can aid, right? And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone or if you've got a very expensive LICA, love LACA's great products, but from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachful for the average person. And when people are just getting started into photography, right, like I think even, not even the latest iPhone, but like old iPhones, pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just build your craft, build your look. That's why people love coming to Visco because they get to see what other people are doing.

Starting point is 02:14:29 like authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there, right? And then they get to learn from other people. And I think that's also very important, right? Don't, you know, being a photographer, especially a professional photographer, is a lonely place, right? I mean, being a creative is a lonely place. And so if you can find communities of people, you know, we sponsor a lot of photo walks, just meet up with these folks, get to learn from each other and, you know, learn about the tools that they're using, learn about the techniques, see the gear and the camera.

Starting point is 02:14:59 ultimately it's about bringing people together and to help support and elevate their work and their craft and whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing in-person stuff, I mean, we're all here for that. You spent 15 years at Adobe. Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity? Because from my view, it's like you have some of the most advanced tools,

Starting point is 02:15:27 the most advanced tools for creating media across, you know, different categories. And if AI makes it better, you know, if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible, I would think that creates an amazing opportunity. But the stock's down 34% in the last year, they haven't found a way to get people to understand the opportunity. But I'm curious, like, what your framework is for Adobe in the year 2025. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came through the MacaMedia acquisition. And, you know, I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things. I think what people realize is that,

Starting point is 02:16:20 you know, Adobe used to be this unassailable, you know, company, right? And it was very, very dominant in the market. And then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like, oh, there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else. Canva, same thing, right? Canva is also looking at another part of the market that was underserved. And so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress in the Adobe stock. It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big. But there's a lot of players there right now. And who knows? I mean, right now, this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting. They're coming out with different tools. Just look at

Starting point is 02:17:03 how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. It's almost impossible to underwrite the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess. People are just trying to pick what they think is going to be the winner of these respective categories. So me personally, very long on the AI opportunity, for the creative community. I think you alluded to this earlier. Like, there's just a thirst. Forget a thirst, like a massive hunger for really high quality content

Starting point is 02:17:35 out of volume that we've never seen before. And we know that generative AI isn't cutting it. Even if generated continues to get better over the next three to five years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human created. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, especially when it comes to what brands want and need. And, you know, humans are very instinctual creatures, too. So even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's real AI and what's not?

Starting point is 02:18:02 You know, I think humans understand, like, what is real still. And I think that's something that we're going to continue to see more and more content being created by real people for a long, long time. So I'm long on that bet, but also I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI is going to present in support. supporting the human creatives out there. I agree. Totally agree. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 02:18:30 Yeah, so great to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. Cheers. Cheers. Before we bring out our next guest, let me tell you about profound, get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe, didn't want to talk trash about

Starting point is 02:18:45 Adobe, but I'm happy to. I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe, and I'm so mad at the company. 30% should be 100%. Because, and I'll tell you why it's so simple. So I use, you want that John is calling for the stock to drop 100%. It's not that serious, but I am very annoyed with Adobe because for a long time, I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix. And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image, you could cut it out, put it in another one. Eventually, they put ads in front of every single, you had to, you had to click an X. to get out of an ad every time you open the app fine i'm already paying for adobe i don't know why i also get these ads for the other app very annoying i finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely it's not working at all i get a new app Photoshop express this is their new app for the iPhone they fixed it you don't need Photoshop mix anymore you're on Photoshop Express and so i get Photoshop Express and i learn all the

Starting point is 02:19:45 new tools all their new UI and i figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app Photoshop Express. Then I get a new iPhone. Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express. They literally took the feature out of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop the actual layers in this country. You can't even do layers in this country anymore. And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset. And maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple months. But I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just, I guess I'm just a weird power user of like niche. Like I want to do everything on my phone that I'm just

Starting point is 02:20:25 demanding a niche set of products and features that just don't exist anywhere else. But I've been very, very upset with my Adobe experience. So anyway, that's my rant for today against Adobe. But hopefully they can turn it around. They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully they get some sharp people who start building great products and apps because I would love to be using them. Well, fortunately, I believe the president of Adobe is coming on later this month. Really? Fantastic. I can take it up with that.

Starting point is 02:20:56 Talk to them about it. I could talk about the wrongful death of Photoshop Mix, P.S. Express, two apps that I've created endless memes in. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest from Reducto. Welcome to the stream. Thank you for hanging out. Sorry to keep you waiting for the rant. Congratulations on the news. Please, kick us off. an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, so I'm a D. Abraham, co-founder and CEO here at Reducto.

Starting point is 02:21:22 We help people get data out of all of their most complex documents and spreadsheets for all sorts of LM use cases. So plenty of thoughts here on Adobe as well, so we can go into it. Fantastic. I like that when you're in the stream waiting room, you can kind of hear me ranting before you hop on. Give us the news. Give us the news. Give me that hammer, too. News, news, news, news, news. What do you got? Yeah, so yesterday we announced So we raised a $75 million series B in the floodmone. This is five months after we announced her series A from Benchmark. Wow.

Starting point is 02:21:55 Wow. And a $100 million in total funding. Congratulations. On an absolute, on an absolute tear. I missed who led the new round. I missed that part. Andrescent. Andrescent.

Starting point is 02:22:04 Let's go. There you go. Congratulations. So, I mean, we got to go a lot deeper on the actual product. Who's the key customer? What are the key use cases? Obviously, you know, understanding document. broadly like there's a lot of products for that so what was your landing zone what was your

Starting point is 02:22:20 go-to-market what's the target customer like like take me one love yeah how old were you when you realized you wanted to turn documents into data I guess from day one day one day one day one day one yeah no I think look the thing is like PDF processing is of course not a new thing people have worked on it probably longer than I've been live I've met the people that worked on the original drivers for printers to print PDFs but the context here is very different right like we're not far from a point where language models are going to reason on pretty much any points of human data. Like before you say hi to your doctor, there's going to be some sort of summary of your medical records. When you apply for a loan, there's going to be some agents that goes through

Starting point is 02:22:57 and understands all of your financial statements. If you're going to have all of those human points of data with real human processes, you need human level accuracy. And that's what we came in with. So two years ago, we released what at that time was the first parsing API that used VLMs and tried to really set a new standard for what accuracy could look like on anything. We looked at it as this problem of how can you read documents the way that a human would. And since then, obviously the product's gotten a lot broader, but today a lot of the newer AI companies like in the Harvies of the world, the Rogos, the Lagoras and so on, people building really great AI applications, use reducto for that sort of digestion.

Starting point is 02:23:36 But also some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Fortune 10 enterprises in tech, some of the largest hedge funds in the world private equity firms, insurance companies and so on. Talk about the decision to use VLMs, what are those, break that down? Yeah, so for a while you would have some sort of, you know, IDP vendor

Starting point is 02:23:54 that is using traditional OCR. But you can really go a step further. There's a lot of things that weren't possible two years ago. Like, if you try to read East Asian languages, there are just so many more characters, and so it would be really hard to get every little mark correct. If you're dealing with something

Starting point is 02:24:10 like healthcare documents, you have all sorts of handwriting, you have checkboxes, you know, you have a doctor annotating it on the side, and they just assume that somebody would be reading that, but when you read that programmatically, you make a lot of mistakes. And so what we do is we're really good at the traditional CV side. A lot of our team is former self-driving car researchers, so we tried to apply a lot of frontier techniques there, but also we have this agentic flow where I almost liken it's a human loop. We're making corrections to last mile of mistakes. Like maybe we made a mistake on a period versus a comma, or a zero was mistaken as an O.

Starting point is 02:24:43 And we'll iteratively go through correct all of those, so that no matter what you're uploading, you can get to good, reliable outputs. Thank you for waiting until we had self-driving cars to hire all the self-driving car engineers, so we're not turning PDFs into structured data. Thank you. It's really different use case, but similarly important. Yeah, yeah, no, it is. I mean, what are people demanding on, like, the output side?

Starting point is 02:25:11 Is it just, like, dump a bunch of JSON files in S3 buckets? Like, what, like, how far do you go from, like, okay, I have a stack of PDFs or maybe papers, and you're going to scan and turn that into text and data? But, like, are people actually coming to you and saying, like, no, I want it loaded into this relational database, or I want it in MongoDB? Like, how far do you go? We see all of those. So in some cases, these are real-time applications.

Starting point is 02:25:38 Like, the user is uploading a file and they want to be able to talk to it. And so there, like, we're actually just extracting the data and making it easier for models to reason on. But we also have cases where one of the biggest hedge funds in the world wanted to digitize two decades worth of historical data. This is things that an analyst would have combed through, you know, extracted individual data points. And they want signals off of that. And so in their case, we can actually structure it into the exact representation that they want. And so actually recently, we started going beyond just the initial parsing and extract. like we take care of everything.

Starting point is 02:26:10 You want to split your documents. You want to classify them. You might even want to edit data in. A lot of human work is you get information from some set of documents and you put it into some net new PDF or spreadsheets. People can do that end-to-end and we offer different endpoints for them to be able to do that. How hard is it to get from 85% accuracy to 90 to 95 to 99 to 99.99. I imagine it's like critically.

Starting point is 02:26:38 important if people are working on, you know, legal cases or you have medical records that you can't really mess these things up? Yeah. I mean, the long tail is really long. And when you're looking at like a financial documents, a period versus a comma is not, you know, like a, oops, it's millions of dollars. Like, you've just changed the order of magnitude. You can't have something like a patient's medical record and have it say, is the patient vaccinated and guess at what the checkbox says. Right? Like, you need to get these things right. And that's why I think even for that last mile difference, people are really excited about reductable and locks for them

Starting point is 02:27:17 because there are use cases where they didn't think they couldn't digitize it before. Like, it just wasn't reliable enough to put in production. And we're trying to not just get really good initial extracted results and not just get, you know, that layer of redundancy to correct those in cases we might have messed up, but also give them all of the last mile things that they would need. Like if they want to have a human in the loop, We're really good at citing where we got answers from. We're really good at catching our own mistakes and pointing to things that we're not sure that we can extract.

Starting point is 02:27:45 So they can feel confidence that in production, they're not going to have issues. Do you actually have a hot take about Adobe? I am getting dinner with the CEO tonight. Play back your clip. Because I have another. I have another ax to. I have another ax to. It's down 35% it should be down 100.

Starting point is 02:28:02 That was maybe hyperbole for the comedic effect. But I do have another axe to grind with them. Because every day I make a PDF, and every day I open Adobe Acrobat to make that PDF. And there are seven different pop-ups asking me to use their AI assistant that just says, do you want to summarize this document? Do you want to summarize this document? Do you want to summarize this document? And I always have to say, no, close this. He says, ask AI assistant up here, AI assistant over there.

Starting point is 02:28:27 And it's too much, and it should be more intelligent to know that I don't need a document summary for my workflow because I do the same thing every single day. It's unacceptable. Honestly, we need the AI for that. Yeah, I think people aren't really looking at PDFs in and of themselves. Like, it's not the file format that you care about. It's what's in there. Like, you want to be able to do the things that you want to do.

Starting point is 02:28:47 And hopefully we end up in a place where people can just interact with the underlying data. That's what we want to help with. I'd love that. Well, thank you for helping make data more interactable. Thank you for everything that you do. And thank you for joining the show. Yeah, great to get the update. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

Starting point is 02:29:01 We'll talk to you soon. Have a rest of your day. Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building on linear today. There are a bunch of more, there are a bunch more stories.

Starting point is 02:29:20 Where should we know? What's the story? A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America's fracking, boom. That makes sense. Core. Go where the energy is. Poolside. Poolside.

Starting point is 02:29:30 Is this poolside the foundation? It's a different poolside. Poolside. Wait. Yeah. There's. Poolside was a. viral meme about the product managers who were at, who are poolside talking about the day

Starting point is 02:29:43 and the life. And it was seen as a top-side FM. Poolside FM. That is a cursor and windsurf competitor, I believe. Something like that. It's a coding IDE. It's a fork of a VS code. But that is not this. This is a different thing. Poolside AI. Poolside is joining the cloud infrastructure provider. That's the one I was talking about. Poolside is in core we've aimed to take advantage of the natural gas produced in the Parmian basin, the epicenter of the U.S. drilling facility. I believe the CEO of Poolside is coming on the show, by the way, so we can get to the bottom of this. Okay, but in this article, Poolside, it's a, okay, I've found it.

Starting point is 02:30:20 Okay, figure it out. Poolside is in the midst of a $2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion. Whoops, and a preemptive gong. Preemptive gong. It's not announced, but we're still ringing the gong for you, Poolside. according to people familiar with the matter, it raised 500 million

Starting point is 02:30:37 just a year ago at a $3 billion valuation, the coding focused startup. So it is the same pool site. Yes, it is. It is. Which counts the chip giant Nvidia among its investors

Starting point is 02:30:47 in one of several technology companies seeking to build AI systems with human-like intelligence. While many operators move quickly to secure continued access to the chips, America doesn't have enough data centers. It is far from certain whether many data centers

Starting point is 02:30:59 will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain and local resources. It's not about your headline numbers of gigawatts. It's about your ability to deliver data centers, says the co-founder of Pooleyside. The real physical bottleneck in our industry. Interesting.

Starting point is 02:31:15 Poolside and Corweave declined to provide details about the cost of leasing the land from the Mitchell family in Texas who own it. But they said that the overall expected cost. It's very interesting that Poolside, they say we build the models, you build the future, AGI for the enterprise starting with software agents.

Starting point is 02:31:34 Just interesting that they're actually getting into the physical infrastructure side when you have cognition, you have cursor, a bunch of other players that have just said, hey, we're happy to just be at the application layer, we'll build some models. But ultimately, we want to just get kind of off the shelf. Totally. This is fascinating. We've seen this vertical integration happen in the previous era, but mostly because the cloud platforms just weren't mature.

Starting point is 02:32:05 But, like, when Facebook started, they at some point could have said, hey, let's just host on AWS, but they became a hyperscaler, right? But then so did Cloudflare. So did, I believe Netflix has their own infrastructure. I mean, 37 signals, famously moved. You were going to say that, right? 37 signals moved off of AWS. Yeah, thank you, Jack Cohen.

Starting point is 02:32:23 In the show in the chat says it's with Jason Warner, who was, he was the CEO of GitHub. Yeah, that's right. An absolute legend, an absolute dog. Absolute dog. But this is another interesting fact in here. We've been talking about building these two gigawatt data centers. They clock the industry's standard cost of building a two gigawatt data center at $16 billion. But in this case, pool site expects its cost to be lower due to its use of offsite modular construction techniques.

Starting point is 02:32:58 And that total cost doesn't include the cost of the chips. And so what percentage of the, is the actual, like, physical structure? Like, what percentage of the cost of a data center is the, because we've seen, like, people you're just using tents, right? So it can't be, could it be double digits of the actual cost of a data center? We need a pie chart. We need semi-analysis to break down exactly what goes where. Tyler, find a pie chart of data center cost.

Starting point is 02:33:26 Can you figure out, because it feels like, it feels like I'd be shocked if it was higher than 10% of it. If I'm spending $16 billion on a two gigawatt data center, how is that, like, what percentage of that money is going towards chips, you know, concrete, like, you know, what are the different buckets because you're going to build all sorts of stuff? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to, I'm on some analysis site right now, trying to, like, find news about this. Yeah. And I'm not really seeing anything, which is surprising because, like, I mean, two gigawatts is, like, super huge. That's, like, bigger than Colossus 2, which is one gigawatt.

Starting point is 02:33:59 Well, I mean, this is breaking news. And semi-analysis publishes, like, on a weekly cadence. Yeah, that's true. It's very surprising to see, I mean, this is not a major LLM provider. Totally, yeah. I feel like when semi-analysis does something, it's more like, okay, they actually fully understand Amazon strategy, and they're going to take you through all the different pieces with tons of new gain points.

Starting point is 02:34:19 But, I mean, this is, like, extremely ambitious. This is extremely ambitious. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk to the founder. That will be a lot of fun. In other news, the frothiest AI bubble is. in energy stocks, says the Wall Street Journal, concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. Forget about the froth and tech valuations. The real excess might be building

Starting point is 02:34:41 up in energy stocks for all the fears about stretched technology shares. Again, we've seen that the big tech companies, the multiples aren't that high. And so a lot of people are saying, well, it can't be a bubble if you're still able to buy Apple and Google at, I don't know, 30x earnings, well, that's not the case in the energy market. Not so in the energy sector. A group of non-revenue generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than $45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet to be built power. Oklo is a good example of this. Their shares have risen eightfold to date. The company is now worth 26 billion. I've actually met the founders. Apparently, Oklo is like a

Starting point is 02:35:26 an obsession for of Korean retail traders interesting Korean retail trailers Korean retail army that's fun I wonder if they have a name for the for the for the like the thought the retail army sometimes they name themselves it's the biggest US publicly incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the last 12 months I mean yeah it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor oklo is developing small modular reactors that use a non-water coolant liquid metal sodium and an rich type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply. It doesn't yet have a license from the U.S.

Starting point is 02:36:02 Nuclear Regulatory Commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall Street analysts don't expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028. Of course, the, like the bull case is that, you know, the, the U.S. government has said, hey, we want to advance this very aggressively. We want, what was it, the new, we want a new reactor online next year, something like that. And so there's certainly a lot of energy around, let's speed up what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission does. The NRC has been moving too slow. I believe they've, in the history of the NRC, they've never approved a new nuclear reactor

Starting point is 02:36:41 design, right, Tyler? I believe that's true. Yeah. And I think they've only approved a few, like, existing designs build it again. And so people that are kind of like, that's not the goal. like it was never designed as like the the nuclear banning commission it was just regulatory and so you should regulate but not stop all progress completely also i think the headline just about energy stocks yeah ripping is like kind of misleading like you're still like i'll believe it when i see

Starting point is 02:37:10 natural gas stocks like ripping that's when we're actually let that's like real energy that's massive energy that we need to if we're going to keep accelerating if we want like 10 100 gigawatt data centers, that's basically the only path unless we have some insane buildout that's like partially government funded of like clean of like solar or like if it's going to take selling to build. I mean, those are probably way harder to meme, right? Because they're way bigger companies. And they have revenue. Revenue. But seriously, I mean like like we're in this like frothy time and there are companies that are scaling valuations very fast. The private markets and the public markets and Nvidia's way up. But Nvidia's way up at like not really on like a revenue multiple.

Starting point is 02:37:48 They've grown revenue significantly in line with their market cap. Whereas on like the retail armies have been searching around for pockets of like quantum computing, like the next trend because there's this, there's this idea that like if you missed Nvidia, what are you going to go out and find? And like a nuclear thing, it feels like nuclear will be a thing in a decade. And so you can get it on the action now. Get it on the ground floor. That's the narrative. Much harder to say, yeah, there's going to be more demand from this like, you know, legacy oil and gas company, but it's already easy. Right now, right now you can own Oaklo at a $25 billion market cap with $0 of revenue.

Starting point is 02:38:31 Or you can own EQT, which is a big natural gas company that had $5 billion of revenue last year. And you can, and they're currently trading a $34.6 billion market cap. So, but stock's up over almost 11% over the last month. Here's my recommendation. If you're a massive company with no revenue, as soon as you start generating revenue, get on numeralhq.com because you've got to pay your sales tax once you make revenue. Numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Another zero revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly $19 billion upon its public market debut earlier this month.

Starting point is 02:39:11 Only two other no revenue companies had large. market caps than Fermi on the first day of trading after an IPO adjusted for inflation. There was Rivian, which went public in 2021 in Corvus, an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot-com bubble. I mean, Rivian's definitely like shipped and like I see the cars around. Like, you know, it's not, it's not that much of a bear signal to be like, yeah, you went out as a public company with no revenue. But it has historically been like you only go public when you are cash flow positive and like, and it's kind of like the end of you fundraising constantly and instead now now we've just pulled all that forward and in some in some

Starting point is 02:39:48 sub markets a lot of companies stay private much longer so lots of different ways to grow your company what else is going on in the tech world in the army world in the world of the army the secretary of the army former tppn guest is on the timeline happy captain says i was debating whether or not to tell this story but it feels like it's worth telling yes Yesterday at AUSA, the Secretary of Armory gave a powerful speech where he talked about a soldier's right to repair. Essentially, soldiers should be able to repair their own equipment without having to rely on a contractor. In 2010, we were in a remote part of Afghanistan on a combat outpost with roughly 70 to 90 soldiers. We had two robots and used them a lot to work on IEDs.

Starting point is 02:40:37 Their service was under contract. we weren't allowed to fix them. After a lot of use, they both broke, and a field service representative couldn't get to us in a timely manner. So what do you do? Do you force your team leader to put on the bomb suit and risk their life for every call, or do you fix it yourself? We went with option B. We completely took apart two broken robots to create one working one that we used on the mission. That's amazing. Did we get yelled at? Yes. Would I do it all over again, knowing it kept my team leader safe, absolutely. Absolutely. What a remarkable story. Yeah, this is one of those, like, little tweaks to how the army works, how the military works, that was probably pretty low on the agenda of most other secretaries of the Army, but I'm glad that he, you know, raised the, raised awareness here in his... He's locked in. Yeah. And Aaron Slodoff has a clip here, and he shares, I'm glad that Secretary of Army is going on a crusade against the insane source. spend in blatant waste in sustainment parts the Army deals with. Let's get it back on the show. We should.

Starting point is 02:41:46 Rune says it is so effing cold. Summer is over. It's all over. If you haven't secured a mate for the winter, it's time to commit to Monkhood. Yeah, cuffing season really snuck up on everyone. It got yeah, it got absolutely frigid in L.A. We had to turn on the fire here. Yeah, we had to turn

Starting point is 02:42:03 on the fire. That's so much today. But I'm excited to keep the cozy maxing going. It's hard to really lean. into that L'October spirit when it's still warm and sunny. Exactly. Much easier to locktober in the winter when it's cold, when it's cold. Let me tell you about Finn. com, A.I, the number one AI agent for customer service,

Starting point is 02:42:22 number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive backoffs, number one ranking on G2. Keith Rabeau put the timeline in turmoil. He said, if Anthropic actually believe the rhetoric about safety. Oh, look who we have here. Here he is. Brian, how are you doing?

Starting point is 02:42:36 Hello, hello. Oh. I mean, I'm good. How are you guys doing? We are doing fantastic. You must be exhausted. Long day at the office so far. Yeah, I have, I've had some people allegedly helping me. I took, I took like 25 minutes during this entire day, and now it looks like a bomb went off in here. I felt like I was in a good place before I left, but anyway. It's hard to compete with the super intelligence. for the for the finance suite that yes is uh but it's great to have you on the show as a as a as a as a leader i felt like it was uh well it was incumbent upon me i'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase but i to show my own value and and and how i could contribute and and and and process like like ramp does yes uh what has been harder playing kevin or trying to be the

Starting point is 02:43:36 CEO of the CFO of Ramp? This has been much more difficult. There's also a fly in here now that looks like the size of a hummingbird. So, I mean, there's a lot of adversity here being on the street. There's also, by the way, I don't know. I'm used to working in front of an audience, but usually they're not live and in person here. they're waving there there's lots there's lots going on here lots to distract me but look I'm I'm doing the best I can how many what's what's the tracker out right now how many receipts is that

Starting point is 02:44:18 does that say 80 well it says 84 84 okay but to be fair I felt like I was I was almost at 100 before I left for a few minutes so basically I got no help from the people who were supposed to help me So what am I supposed to do? And you're racing against ramp. What's the counter up to now on that side? 225,229, 50, 60, 70, 80, it's going very fast. I don't, I guess that's accurate. I guess they process a lot.

Starting point is 02:44:57 Yeah, it's a tough showing for you so far. How are you feeling? Are you optimistic that you can catch up? What's the strategy? Yeah, you got 15 minutes left in the work day. I don't know if you're getting out at 5 o'clock. I'm working. I'm working overtime, for sure.

Starting point is 02:45:13 I think I'm working until 7. I think for a C-suite. By the way, that's a new phrase I learned C-suite. I'm a C-suite guy. And so I think, yeah. I think I'm a big C-suite guy. So I think we work till 7 here. Maybe you have 500,000 tag receipts.

Starting point is 02:45:34 Yeah, yeah. Who's been the biggest distraction? Yeah, who's the biggest distraction? Was it Eric trying to throw you off the game to prove that his software is more effective than human labor? Well, I mean, to be clear, you guys are a distraction. I mean, I'm trying to do inputting here, and now I'm suddenly doing a press interview. But again, that's what C-suite guys do, I think. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:58 Yeah, you got to make time. for media yeah uh do you think that uh dunder mifflin would still be around if they had ramp i'm sorry could you say that again uh do you a question from the chat do you think that dunder mifflin would still be around if they used ramp uh you know i when i was there i wasn't really uh I wasn't really a part of those C-suite-type decisions. Yeah. I'm not, but listen, I thought we did a pretty good job in the accounting department there at Dunder Mifflin. So remember, I got fired or my character got fired.

Starting point is 02:46:43 So things went downhill after that, clearly. Yeah. Yeah, I guess, I guess kind of zooming out a little bit. Obviously, uh, obviously, um, zooming out. That's another great program. Zooming out. We use that a lot in the C-suite. We're, we're just podcasters, but we talk to people in the C-suite. Um, okay. What, uh, yeah, I guess like, what, what is your, what, like, there's thousands of people surrounding your office here. We don't have a view, but, but people are looking at the stream. What is, uh, what, what is your experience like walking on the street in New York

Starting point is 02:47:24 day to day. Do you cover up and wear a hat? Are you getting Are you getting... I do. I do. Today might be the first day that I've been that I've been on the streets of New York without a hat on and sunglasses. And, you know, look,

Starting point is 02:47:41 what I've learned as a leader here is you've got to be a people person. So I'm really, it's all about it's all about doing people for me. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I know what I'm saying. but it's it's about that connection that is important when you're when you know when you're when you're a cfo i mean that in finance but that's secondary in a way do you prefer finance or finance how do you

Starting point is 02:48:08 say it am i saying it wrong i mean you can say it either way the really fancy people on wall street often they call it finance not finance finance yes do they spell it with an e No. Finance. It's spelled the same way, but they say finance. Finance. Hold on. I've been taking some notes today about things that I need to work on.

Starting point is 02:48:34 I've got another question. How's your golf game, as your golf game improved since you became a CFO? Well, it's one day, to be clear. You know, I still talk about golf. That's sort of a different job. I'm kind of trying to transition in a new direction. But look, what I've learned is if you're a CFO, you have to work much harder than other people think you do.

Starting point is 02:49:04 Yeah, but I feel like the best CFOs figure out a way to combine, combine their love of golf and, you know, their role at their company. So I would say once they let you out of the cage at 7 p.m., hopefully you can at least hit the range and get some movement in. They need a putting green in there. Here's the thing that I'm thinking is I think I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue, meaning I need to be more efficient with finance. So maybe I'll get to golf after I decide that this is not working for me.

Starting point is 02:49:48 Well, you're giving it. I mean to stay high level. I think you're right. Yeah, stay high level. level, zoom out, you know, bring strategy into the C-suite, start, yeah, focus on strategy. Yeah. You know, another thing that occurs to me is probably working on the street with people watching is probably not the best idea. Maybe that was the problem all along.

Starting point is 02:50:12 I mean, it's a high-pressure role. You've got to be, I mean, if you're going to perform in the boardroom on earnings calls, you've got to be able to perform, you know, in flat iron. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a cheering crowd of thousands. This is similar. In a way. In a way, it is. In a way, it's very, very different. Yes.

Starting point is 02:50:36 Yeah, you've got to be able to perform under pressure, perform in front of thousands as they walk by. It's all important in business. Potato potato, potato, as we say on the C-suite floor. Potato potato. guys pause one second say again is that Taipei you should probably got to get on with Taipei yeah well we do

Starting point is 02:51:01 listen I I would I thought you guys were ESPN I'm gonna be honest with you so I think it's time for me to go yeah let's call it you got a lot of work to do we appreciate you're calling in

Starting point is 02:51:19 and good luck catching out. I've got some Yeager here in the office. If you guys ever want to stop by, we'll see you. Fantastic. We'd love that. Okay. Great having you on, Brian. Bye.

Starting point is 02:51:29 Bye. All right. Cheers. Bye, bye. He, uh, truly, truly, uh, truly, uh, truly an incredible actor. Indeed. I kept trying to throw him off. He stayed fully in character.

Starting point is 02:51:43 Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I was seeing some of these videos like the crowd outside, uh, we obviously couldn't see it on the, that camera angle, but, uh, meanwhile, on X, the crowd outside of the office, uh, is absolutely, yeah, we should share some of the videos to the timeline. I saw, uh, Jeff Bush was, uh, coming out in support, was coming out in support as he does, as he does. Um, but, uh, that was super fun. I, were you, were you big into the office back in the day? Yeah, I watched a few seasons of it at some point. One of the few, like, work-focused shows that's actually still relaxing to watch is it can turn your brain off, right? Silicon Valley is on the opposite end. It just reminds you

Starting point is 02:52:29 of, like, emails you need to respond to and things that you need to do, whereas the office is just great. Nothing matters. It's just, all of our problems are made up. It's all, it's all fake politics. Yeah, it was very odd being so young and still extremely into, like, workplace, white, collar comedies as a kid. It's like not what you'd expect, but I was obsessed with office space. That was like one of my favorite movies as a kid. I enjoyed the office. And I don't know, even though like I'd never worked in an office, I still found it funny at like age 12 for some reason. It was very, very fun. Evergreen. Anyway, we have our next guest joining from the Restream Waiting Room. We have Colin. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm not actually going after the

Starting point is 02:53:16 ramp event, am I? Yeah, you are. Fast follow. Welcome to the stream. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company. Any news? Awesome. Yeah, hey guys. Thanks for having me. So Colin Lewis, co-founder and CEO here at Basis Theory. I think the simplest way to think about what we do is we help merchants, platforms, fintechs, not have to face the decision of working with Stripe or Adin or checkout, but rather be able to seamlessly work with Stripe and ad yen and checkout. There's a myriad of different reasons why that's important. I think first and foremost, these platforms today are just global by default, right?

Starting point is 02:53:57 Like I was thinking about it the other day, the fact that, like, I think the latest number is say 10% of the world's population uses chat GPT, like less than three years in. Facebook was still moving from like Ivy Leagues to like state schools in the U.S., right? And then I think the other side of it is payments has kind of moved from being a cost center to a growth driver. And I think that's forcing companies to think about it less from a cost perspective and more from a performance perspective. And look, each of these individual PSPs has their own secret sauce and areas where they specialize. And so it's just increasingly important that you can work with multiple of them as opposed to one. Explain Shield's take. Explain Shiel's hot take and then debunk it.

Starting point is 02:54:45 I had a note to call out Sheal and I love Sheal. I went to Sheal's first fish concert with him. So like, Sheel and I are homies. But yeah, like he took this like victory laugh last week, you know, saying like Stripe's one agent at commerce, it's over. And like that just couldn't be further from the truth, right? Even if you look at Stripe's core business, I think people sometimes forget

Starting point is 02:55:11 Like, Stripe and Adion together are still less than 10% market share in the U.S. Right. That means 90% of the U.S. acquiring volume is still sitting out on these legacy platforms. And so as much as we talk about Stripe, like I'd argue Stripe hasn't even won U.S. acquiring yet. There's a lot of volume to port over. And we're saying the same thing play out on the agentic side. Stripe can do a magical demo for merchants within the Stripe ecosystem. I think the second you eject out of that, there's a lot of complex. Sorry, I'm just adding dramatic sound effects to...

Starting point is 02:55:44 Where's the shots fired? These are a bunch of great lines. I wanted you to explain basis theory like I'm a venture capital associate, right? So like explain it in really simple terms. No, no, no, no. I'm trying to understand where you guys... It's explaining it like the killer GP is completely checked out. Yeah, like two years from retirement.

Starting point is 02:56:05 But I'm trying to understand customer comes in, they want to buy something. Are you guys sitting before that? Yeah, we sit at the front. Yeah, that's right. So we sit at the very front. We provide some real-time data to the merchants about the payment credential, the actual credit card. Hey, this is a visa signature card issued by a U.S. bank, or this is a master card issued by a European bank. Based on that real-time insight, where do you want to route this transaction?

Starting point is 02:56:34 Do you want to route it off to Adian? Do you want to route it off to Stripe? And oh, by the way, if you get an immediate decline from one of those, why don't you turn around and reroute it elsewhere and see if you can get that customer through, right? I think that's the other side of it, right? Like these modern merchants who are selling these like ridiculously high gross margin digital products, like they just want to get more stuff out the door, right? They're actually okay taking on more fraud and risk if they can just sell more 90% gross margin goods, right? So it's all, from the merchant side, merchants want to have multiple payment providers so that they have some leverage in these conversations. Is that right?

Starting point is 02:57:14 Yeah, I mean, that was, I was going to answer your question about explain it to the GP, but then I thought about the GP doesn't have this problem. But maybe like, you know, the GP's nephew, right? I always talk about in the terms of Comcast here, you know, in California, right? Like, every time you call Comcast and you say, hey, I'm switching to YouTube TV. they magically have a 50% discount that they can get you on right same thing applies here the problem is your data's locked away with these processors today so the minute you take back that control and start storing it yourself you have immediate leverage to make that call interesting give us the fundraising news yeah so we just announced we raised $33 million it was a pretty cool there we go it was a cool event because our lead investor Costa Noah. We actually met at the seed and ended up going in a different direction. Our A came together quickly with Bessemer. This was 2021. And then when I reached out to Amy at Costa Noah and told her

Starting point is 02:58:16 we were going to kick off a B earlier this year, I was like, who should I talk to? So is this, is this round mean that you guys are officially back? Because a lot of fintech companies, you know, went into the valley of despair and they're still down there. Fintech's back. You know, look, I wish I was an ERP, a native AI, ERP company now. Maybe I'll get another round tomorrow. Yeah. The chat says, the chat says this guy looks like he surfs. This guy surfs.

Starting point is 02:58:45 Do you surf? Such a disappointment. I don't. No, it's okay. That's okay. Surfing is wildly distracting from creating enterprise value. I always struggled. I grew up, you're in Mill Valley?

Starting point is 02:59:00 Yeah. I grew up just north of you, and I always struggled. Surfing in the morning, you get so cold, and then your body is suspending all day long trying to heat up, and it's taking energy away from spreadsheets. That's pretty counter to Silicon Valley Wisdom and ice baths and stuff, though. Yeah, but getting, like, cold for a few minutes, and then heating up is, you know, different than, you know, 90 minutes in, like, 45-degree water, whatever gets down. to in the winter.

Starting point is 02:59:32 But what was I going to say? Are you guys actually building the company in Mill Valley or do you have an office in SF? Yeah, look, we're a COVID baby, so we're fully remote. But it was definitely pretty funny when we announced our Series A, the news headlines were like, Mill Valley-based payment infrastructure company raises $17 million. I mean, it sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty cool.

Starting point is 02:59:56 Yeah, I'm here a block away from our friend, Nate, and offline ventures. Oh, nice. And then we squat in our investors' offices for free in San Francisco once a week. Nice. Smart. Smart. Awesome, man.

Starting point is 03:00:10 Well, congratulations on the milestone. Yeah, excited to follow the journey. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks for having me guys. Cheers, Colin. Quickly, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

Starting point is 03:00:21 Adio's the A&ACRM, the build scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the re-stream waiting room. We'll bring him in, now to the TVP and Ultradom. Sorry for keeping you waiting, John.

Starting point is 03:00:33 How are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Here he is. How are you guys? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today. Of course. Congrats on the massive news. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company,

Starting point is 03:00:47 and then we'll go into the news. Yeah. Well, it's wild. I was on three months ago. We were talking about our series A. Yeah. I was not planning on reaching out to you guys for a year or two. And I went to bed, a series A founder, woke up a series B founder.

Starting point is 03:01:02 And so today, we're announced $65 million series B bringing $100 million. Thank you. Thank you. We have a smaller one of those in the office. Let's go. But yeah, well, series B up the gong size. Yes, yes. You could have a gong for every stage.

Starting point is 03:01:21 Yeah. Well, look, I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the Seed Stage hotel rooms here. But we've come a long way. So, yeah, that $100 million was all in the last 12 weeks. So it's exciting times. It's an AI-Native ERP, if you're not familiar with Campfire, taking on the mid-market incumbents.

Starting point is 03:01:40 And the incredible demand we've seen has just led to us to go out to market again on the round. Yeah, what was the key accelerants? It's a huge category, a bunch of different ways that you could attack a bunch of different kind of verticals within it. why have VCs come around to, like, funding a bunch of ERPs again? Because there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well and something's different this time. But why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a great question.

Starting point is 03:02:13 Going through a white combinator, they call them Purpit ideas, ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die. And for like 10 or 20 years, this category has just had a lot of, there's a lot of gravestones in this category. This is the personal CRM. That's the, that's a great tarpid idea. The personal CRM. Every VC says, I need a personal CRM.

Starting point is 03:02:33 It's like, no, you just need a real CRM. You're doing business. Yeah. Yeah. But it's what they're a lot on, a lot on the social media side. Yeah. And so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting. And then we had an incredible demand.

Starting point is 03:02:48 And then going into the A, they're like, wow, this category is on fire. And since the A, just had an overwhelming demand, I think there, there's, There's a couple themes. Certainly, the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. You guys were talking about zero revenue IPOs earlier. I mean, literally these companies were founded when pets.com, web van, were public companies. And so it's come a long way in terms of like, it's time for something new. You know, one of your sponsors, Ramp has really, like, ironier, like, consumer-grade software within the finance stack.

Starting point is 03:03:21 And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for, I just want the Ramp. for GL. And then we're also seeing huge demand for we need to buy AI. There's literally no AI ERP out there. With today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model. And so we've trained this rich accounting data set. And so accounts are finally like, I hate doing bank rack. And that's always been true. But now there's actually someone, you know, an AI model that can take on bank rack for me for those who don't know bank reconciliations as like accrual, like some of these just very transactional accounting tasks, they're allowed, they can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model.

Starting point is 03:04:02 They can just like allow them to focus on higher value work, strategic work, things as a former finance exec, I really enjoyed doing. And so there's this big mindset shift that we are really driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers. You guys work with Decagon, Replit, and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new, like entirely new need surface that people want out of their ERP, that legacy ERPs besides just speed, usability, just, yeah, ease of use, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, this big shift, and I know you just had a reducto on, like, the sheer volume of transaction data, the legacy ERPs are, we've just heard from customers, are just unable to physically handle. And so, like, being on a modern stack,

Starting point is 03:04:51 these AI usage-based companies have, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily adjust and allow them to scale on the platform. And then we can apply our AI layer to this rich data set and allow them to operate in ways they just fundamentally were not able to before. So the shift in, you know, you think of, if you have 10 million rows of accounting data,

Starting point is 03:05:14 you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet, right? It just physically tap. out. And so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when they have that much transaction data. And so we've been really helpful in allowing them to not become engineers and focus on what they do best at accounts. That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again? Are you announced? I'm assuming I'll call you next week. We're doing our series C. Let's go. Yeah. I'm sure it'll be nice to take a breather and just build and build the team and all that stuff.

Starting point is 03:05:48 For two days. Yeah, for at least two days. For at least one we're out. If you guys got a saw on Monday. Just to schedule it now. Congratulations. I'll be there. Yeah, that's actually good.

Starting point is 03:06:02 We should start. Yeah, yeah, please come by. We'd love to, we'd love to hang out. We can go way deeper. I'll bring the biggest gong you've ever seen. Love it. We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want.

Starting point is 03:06:13 Let's do it. Let's roll it out. We've done 20. 24-hour, you know, Netsweet to campfires. We've done SEP to campfire in weeks, you know, and the world's shifting fast. But yeah, to your point,

Starting point is 03:06:26 we'll do one live on the show showbiz. We'll do it live. That's showbiz. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Great progress. Thanks, guys.

Starting point is 03:06:35 Cheers. You're off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a bold move. I like it. It's very aggressive. It's a hot. He's distracted. He's focused on the AI boom.

Starting point is 03:06:45 He is. He's going to forget about his. Maybe. He's going to, he needs to step up. I mean, the story of NetSuite was, was an acquisition. Next up, our guest's nominative determinism is absolutely insane. We have Dan Shipper, who is shipping another product. Is he shipping something?

Starting point is 03:07:04 The Shipper himself. What are you shipping today? Did you people ask you about that? Does he ever ship? He does. I have gotten that. I have gotten that. And I don't know if my ancestors were nautical or not, but certainly it works for the startup world.

Starting point is 03:07:21 So, yeah, shipped a couple new things today. What did you show? Give us the news. Okay. First, first big thing is we shipped a new incubation. We incubated a company. We spun it out. It raised $3.6 million from General Catalyst and Inovia.

Starting point is 03:07:41 We got the gong, the first ever gong for me. I'm excited. And it's called Good Start Labs. It's run by Alex Duffy, who was previously our head of AI training. And the idea of Good Start is it teaches AI models to play games. And by playing games, they're able to generate high-quality reinforcement learn data and pre-training data that helps make models better. It started as a project inside of every that we launched as AI diplomacy, where we taught, AI models to

Starting point is 03:08:16 battle each other for world domination it went super viral it had like 50,000 people watch it on Twitch and it taught us a lot about how models work so for example Claude never lies in diplomacy the whole point of diplomacy is to backstab your opponents and Cloud never lies

Starting point is 03:08:31 it's really interesting and Alex the response to that was really incredible and Alex has a vision for how not just diplomacy but all sorts of games can be used as dynamic environments to help models learn to be smarter in all sorts of different ways from long horizon task planning to writing to humor to training them to not be not be as deceptive all that kind of stuff

Starting point is 03:08:55 i'm mostly hearing ai that lies though so it can win diplomacy but no no i i completely take your point god has to launch liar mode i mean yeah there's absolutely right like there's so many examples we could go into about alignment by default like resulting in like not what you actually want hallucination sometimes a feature there's a million different areas there how how concentrated will the customer base be for this is the kind of thing you're going to work with hopefully all the big labs really quickly what does that look like yeah i mean i think i think the idea for the company is um is being a vendor to all the big labs um and anyone who is who wants to be a big lab um so yes the the the customer base at least in

Starting point is 03:09:42 is going to be pretty concentrated. Rebut Will Minitis. He said he's calling the top on incubations. You're still doing them. Put him in the truth zone. Break it down for me. Why are incubations still a good idea? This feels like, you know,

Starting point is 03:09:59 to come to Dan's defense on this one, having an employee at your company who's proven themselves internally and discovers a good idea and then decides to launch a spin-out company is very different than like, I have an idea, let me go find a random person, which is really hard, right? I agree.

Starting point is 03:10:16 Because you have this adverse selection bias. Yeah. I agree, but we also do that, and it works. And so this is our second venture-backed incubation. Collectively, so Good Start Labs and our first one is called Lex. And collectively, they've raised like $6 million, which is more than, like, about more than three times or four times what we've raised for every itself. Yeah. And we also run four apps internally to Every, many of which are ideas that I or someone else inside of Every has come up with.

Starting point is 03:10:51 And then we've recruited someone from our audience to take it and lead it. And that works really well, too. So we've got four apps in market, and we grew collectively for Every, for all the subscriptions we sell. We grew MRR 50% in Q3. So it's just growing super fast. You can really, you actually can do this, and I think you can uniquely do it in AI because you can have these products be run by one person, which is really hard to you before. Help me synthesize this.

Starting point is 03:11:26 There's like this general mood on the timeline today that like a lot of the foundation model companies might be like plateauing and so they're going into other. Yeah, what's your erotic of play? No, no, it's not, that's not my question. My question is... Every. We're going to do every. I mean, you're already a writing platform.

Starting point is 03:11:44 Why not spice it up a little bit? No, my question is, is there was a moment where the mood was, like, don't build a new company because you're going to get steamrolled by AGI. It's just going to be able to do exactly what you do, but better. And so, like, it's super risky to build anything that's in front of the steamroller that is the big model companies. Now we've seen that a lot of companies have popped up and done very well in, you know, other areas. But now it also feels like the, the foundation model companies might be going after social media, going after erotic content or adult content. So is it, is it more or less

Starting point is 03:12:22 dangerous to build a startup that is in the wake of the, of the AI, like, you know, new hyperscalers? So, I mean, I think of every, if you're a satiosexual, we're already doing erotica for you. there you go um so that's that's one thing got to get that out of the way yeah um but you know when we first incubated lex that was like in 2020 2021 inch and that was right in the in the very beginning it was right before chat jvt came out and so it was in the very beginning of you know rapper uh anti rapper hype and that was a dumb take then and i think it's a dumb take now um incumbents always manage to fuck things up and um and and need to also uh you know if you're if you're if you're PM at Open AI, and they're super talented.

Starting point is 03:13:07 They're doing amazing stuff. And they also have to look for opportunities that look like they're going to be a billion or 10 billion or 50 billion dollars in value. And there's just many, many, many different corners of the market that they just can't see. And I think and founders are incredible at finding those corners of the market. And because of what these foundation model companies are building like Open AI, founders have never been in a better position to serve the needs that they find. And so I think it's the best time in the world to be starting companies. And I think doing it in an incubation model, like the way that we're doing it is kind of, it's like one of those things that shouldn't work, but it's sort of uniquely interesting because we have distributions.

Starting point is 03:13:47 So in a world where anything can be vibe coded, we can give founders a like a stamp of approval, like, hey, this thing is like actually good. It's going to be supported. And there's a lot of interesting things you can do if you have a network of apps that are all in the same ecosystem. I'm super excited about it and I you know I think every time we've called oh it's the end of this startup or this startup because opening I was doing it that's never happened yeah makes sense what's your take on the regulatory debate in Anthropics recent moves a lot of people are pissed off about it from Keith Rabeau to David Sacks to Mark Andreessen I okay I agree to some extent. Like, actually looking at what, you know, the kinds of things that Dario says, for example,

Starting point is 03:14:37 I'm like, how can you be building this stuff and then go on the news and be like, it's going to replace all white collar workers the next 18 months? I can't remember the exact quote, but, like, I just, I don't like that. And also, I think Sacks is wrong. Like, you're watching nerds who have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility grapple with that publicly. And I think that they are being earnest. I think they're doing it in a sort of ham-handed way. And I don't, you know, I think that they could clean that up and they should get smarter about it. But I don't think it's some, like, sophisticated regulatory capture scheme. And I imagine Sachs is sort of telling on himself there.

Starting point is 03:15:10 Like, that's what he might do. But I don't think that's what, like, anthropic people are doing. Yeah. Genuine believers. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, I was going to ask. I did want to push you.

Starting point is 03:15:24 We do have somebody in the restream waiting. We have one person in the waiting room. But what was your immediate reaction? Like, where do you stand? the debate on the adult kind of content entertainment debate with chat gbt i think anything they do they're damned if they do damn if they don't um if they allow it they're damned because people are like you know you're going to turn this into a wifu platform and if they don't allow it then it's a freedom of speech issue seems like they're they're trying to be thoughtful about it and uh restricting it to

Starting point is 03:15:59 over 18 people and not doing it by default like only doing it if you if you select it that seems like a reasonable first pass at it i'm sure there are i'm sure there are ways so so opening i's mission is to ensure that aGI benefits all of humanity is it do you think that it's hard to argue that that uh adult content porn bots benefit humanity i'm sure that somebody can make a justification that. Do you think their justification is like this is a necessary step to generate the revenue that gets us to the scale that we need in order to deliver the ultimate goal? I mean, I think the caricature of, you know, adult porn bots is obviously bad and

Starting point is 03:16:49 there are there are places that you can take this that are obviously bad for people and also people choose to engage with adult content. And I, you know, It's hard if you're trying to build something for everyone, which is what they're trying to do, to completely say, hey, like, that's off limits. Like, that's a, that's a particular moral stance that I think you can have smart defaults. But I also think it's within bounds for them to say, in certain circumstances for certain kinds of people, this is what they want. And they should be allowed to do the thing they want to do. Yeah, it just feels like, it feels like YouTube did, YouTube has never gotten a ton of flack for not allowing adult content on the platform and being like YouTube's anti-free speech. YouTube has gotten a lot of your anti-free speech criticism, but never because there's not enough adult content on the platform.

Starting point is 03:17:36 It's always been because of deprioritizing particular political thinking or something else that is like more in the wheelhouse of free speech. Everyone, at least in the tech zeitgeist, has kind of been like, yeah, it's fine that YouTube doesn't have adult content. That's their choice and they just chose not to do it, I guess. I don't know. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage as it always does, and we will continue to monitor it. And thank you for coming on the show. Indeed. Congratulations on the launch. Excited to see it play up.

Starting point is 03:18:04 We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, entrusted by millions. Our next guest is the founder of Finch. We will bring him in from the re-stream waiting room. It's time to Finch.

Starting point is 03:18:24 It's time to Finch. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? So to be here. Thank you folks for having me. How are we? Happy Wednesday. Happy Wednesday. What are you got going on today? Do you raise any money? We announced the raise. Let me do it. Let me do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm wrong. Please do it. I'm so pumped for this. Give me the news. Give us the details. What happened?

Starting point is 03:18:47 We raised a $20 million series day led by Red Point. Congratulations. Amazing. This, this, the reason I was so, excited for this. I worked in DoorDash for eight years for a while before starting Finch. And one of the, like, company values was being really thrifty with money and everyone should be an owner of the budget the way that like the founders were. So we have that here, which means when we decided to get a gong, someone spent like $25 on a gong from Amazon that is tiny and fits in like the size of my palm. And so you all getting to hit that was really a big I'm going to give you something. We'll give you three gong, remote gong hits if you need,

Starting point is 03:19:26 if something big happens in the company, just email us. We'll record. a video of us hitting the gong, we'll send it to you and the team. You can drop it in the slack. Extremely economical. Yeah. So where is the business today? Are you live? What is the business?

Starting point is 03:19:40 Sorry. Yeah. Break down to the business and give us the progress. Yeah, yeah. I heard you're early. Should I do it like as if you were five version of what Finches? Yes. Please.

Starting point is 03:19:49 Great. I'll start with. Have you seen personal injury billboards? Yes. Great. What are your reaction when you see them? Need to call immediately. I pull out my phone and I cause they call now that's mostly it's usually I assume a phone bank

Starting point is 03:20:05 that then routes to a lawyer at some point but I imagine that I'm like seven seven layers away from a real lawyer yes and and look the I think they're hilarious some of them are why there's one in San Francisco they're like Ann Fong is on every bus ad I love her her head of intake out the something wrong call in Fong is one of the better jingles I've ever heard we we go we have one in L.A. that's Sweet James. We like Sweet James.com. And I always, it always kind of had a creepy. It felt a little bit creepy. It is a little bit odd names. The other thing that I always think about. But it's certainly memorable. Whenever I see a personal injury attorney billboard, I always think about adquick.com. Out of home advertising

Starting point is 03:20:49 made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I'm sorry for doing an ad read in the middle of your segment, but we are running behind today. I need to catch up. No, but okay, so we understand that that's, that's the, and that's like one of the many, these injury law firms spend more on out of home than pretty much any other group, right? Correct. With like the highest cost per click on Google out of anything else that you could search is like, I've been injured in an accident. And like the, the, what I was going to say about

Starting point is 03:21:22 is I think it like has one perception from the advertising, the field itself. Yeah. is genuinely noble. It is a like I, if you are someone who's in an accident, America's system of handling injuries and accidents is for profit insurance companies, which means if you try to represent yourself in a claim, you will never get what you wrote. And having an advocate, on average means you get three to four X higher of an outcome, just because the EB calculation changes for DACO or all state, whoever the insurance is on the other side. So incredibly valuable members of this society is you will otherwise be victims and injured people, 80% of you will never have an ad advocate and don't realize what you're owed. Problem today to solve that gap is

Starting point is 03:22:00 the amount of admin work at pretty much any law firm, but especially in personal injury law, is massive. And so we've built a called the first AI-driven pre-litigation team, but our solution really is a bunch of really experienced paralegals that we pair with enough AI agents to handle the admin work that we take over half of what a firm does, which is pre-litigation. So intake through demand, letting them say yes to more cases. So specifically, like, someone makes that phone call, they see the billboard, they call. Are you transcribing that? Is there still a human in the loop? Like, what else is happening? You said there's a human in the loop. It's an actual paralegal in the loop, but they're just immensely more efficient. I'm assuming this is like white, fully white

Starting point is 03:22:44 labeled, so somebody doesn't necessarily know they're working, they're onboarding to a firm through Finch, they're just experiencing it as like a fast, seamless onboarding experience? Correct. Our goal is we'll have a real paralegal who's 100% dedicated to that firm and their name at the email address will be the one emailing you. They'll have a local phone number that they message from. So a very white-labeled experience. But if you're to roughly think about it, the average paralegal or case manager takes on somewhere

Starting point is 03:23:14 around 100 cases at most. At a typical firm, for us, they're doing somewhere between 300 and 400 just with the augmentation of agents that help with a lot of the busy worker. How quickly is a company scaling? I'm going to say quickly, but that's part of my job is to highlight how quickly we're going I mean, it feels like it seems like these firms want to take on, they want to take on work cases because it's all success-based so that there's a real incentive there. They're already drowning.

Starting point is 03:23:42 And if you give them a solution that they can turn on and start. My bigger question there is like, what's the driver? because we've seen with the Fortune 500, like, there's, like, this mandate from the shareholders and the board to, like, develop an AI story. But that's not true for, like, your average, you know, plaintiff law firm, right? Like, it has to be a little bit more ground up.

Starting point is 03:24:02 So, like, what are they actually focused on? Is it, like, a strict ROI? Are they focused just on efficiency or all sorts of things? They're mostly focused on growth. Like, everyone cares about efficiency and service of growth. But I'll give you the example is my, our first customer was a friend of a friend named Ryan. who operated his own firm out of Austin.

Starting point is 03:24:20 He started the firm three months before we started, Finch. And he had actually built up more litigation experience than most other attorneys his age. He was like 31 starting this firm. And had a bunch of great connections in town, which meant he got a bunch of referrals of cases in. So he hit 50 cases in his first 30 days, which a solo practitioner might hit over the course of a year on average.

Starting point is 03:24:40 After 50, though, he had to start saying no to cases because he just didn't have the same back office he used to have at a big firm. And I will draw a Dorash comparison. But at DoorDash, one of the ways Tony talked about that starting as a business was seeing restaurateurs say no to delivery orders that were coming in each day because it didn't make sense for them to staff and fulfill them. And his solution was not, let me build software to make delivery drivers faster, but let me go be

Starting point is 03:25:02 the delivery service. And so we're kind of taking the same model here. But for him, it is all about growth. It is a Sweet James or Morgan or Morgan or a big name will come advertise on the street corner tomorrow. And he wants to develop enough of a strong relationship with clients that he's going to build a massive firm over time. And I think there's a, that's what we help folks say yes to is I, yeah. Are you seeing lawyers at firm see the capability of Finch and just decide I actually

Starting point is 03:25:32 want to start my own practice now because this thing that was a huge headache of like building out back office support. I can now outsource to Finch. Are you seeing that already? Earlyish. So I'll give the, I didn't answer your actual question of how fast we're on, but we launched officially in April. We've been around for 14 months as a business. We grew about 10X in the last six months. And so the poll from the market, fun numbers, relative numbers, but fun numbers. Yeah. But the pull from the market to give a real why to it, I think you thought about shareholders pushing on like bigger law firms or enterprises. There's two largely branches of consumer law that operate on contingency. Which means they make

Starting point is 03:26:16 a percentage of the case, they don't do hourly billing. And that changes the economics entirely. If it's, I now, if I try to go sell efficiency software to someone who bills by the hour, there's no good rational reason to you to care about adopting it until your clients demand it. Whereas anyone who's taking a percentage of cases, you get them the ability to take on Forex the cases tomorrow. They say yes to that. They punt that money into advertising and then they go grow. Yeah, if you're billing by the hours. Well, whoa, well, I think AI is cool, but I don't want too much of it. I like billing three hours. I like billing three grand. Let me repitch you the benefits of having an expert lawyer, spend hours combing over every document. It's worth it.

Starting point is 03:26:58 What was your number one learning from working with Tony? He's also an investor in Finch, so he must be a big believer in you. You mentioned the frugality, which is, which is... Frugality is a good one. Fragal. Scaling ownership, I think, like, how to build an org where you scale decision-making while still keeping the founder being close to the wheel. I do think the biggest one that vary in the DNA of Finch is do the hard work. I mentioned this. We started as a software model, to be honest. We raised our first round from Sequoia and the idea of we're going to go build this intake

Starting point is 03:27:37 software that transcribes and then goes and does a bunch of stuff after. but trying to train a large team of paralegals and case managers, many of whom are 60 plus on how to use that tech and get the most out of it, is just very different than we will be the paralegal who goes and does it A to Z. We guarantee you're going to be able to take on Forex the cases tomorrow. And I think the real TAM expansion comes from doing the work. And so I would say that was the meta lesson. Well, if you ever overdose on frugality, I'd encourage you to head over to get Bezell

Starting point is 03:28:10 dot com. Take up a protect Philippe Nautilus annual calendar. It's $126,000. It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch and I think you'll love it.

Starting point is 03:28:22 And I've loved this segment. Thank you so much. Where are you based, by the way? We're a whole team is based in, I would say that the whole product engineering ops team is based in New York. But we have fair legals around the country.

Starting point is 03:28:34 I'm flying out to a lawyer festival called Laudie gras tonight. So that'll be in San Diego. Well, Dude, be sure to book a wander. Be sure to book a wander. And you can find your happy place. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 03:28:51 When you go public someday, I look forward to playing this clip back where John read three ads to you on the day of your fundraise. Though public? No, John. It's awesome having you on. I appreciate your point. I appreciate the point of view on basically. saying, like, no, this is noble work. This is everyday Americans

Starting point is 03:29:14 getting support from the legal system in an aligned way. So keep it up. Thank you both. Appreciate it. Have a great rest of your job. Cheers. The last average. Gabe in the chat said Jordy must be on the cap table. I am

Starting point is 03:29:28 not on the cap table. I wish I was. Seems like a great business. But I can get fired up even if I'm not directly financially invested. But that was great. I'm invested in having some fun on the show. I'm certainly invested in having some fun.

Starting point is 03:29:45 I'm also invested in a good night's sleep. Yep. 8Sleep.com. Get a Pod 5 Ultra. How'd you sleep last night? I got absolutely roasted because I fell asleep while I was watching a show called Last Frontier on, it's an Apple TV production. I was watching it on Apple TV on my Apple TV.

Starting point is 03:30:02 And it's a pretty good show, but it put me to sleep. So I fell asleep. So I spent like maybe an extra hour of sleeping on the couch, I think. And that doesn't count because I don't have eight sleep. a light, just blared. Yeah, probably not the best sleep. But I still get into 86. How'd I do compared to you?

Starting point is 03:30:16 You beat me. I got a 78, only six hours. Step it up. Bruegel. I got a sound cue for a moment. Thank you. Six and a half hours of sleep death. Absolutely brutal.

Starting point is 03:30:30 Hopefully can catch up tonight. Did you see this post from levels that said from concept car to production car? Oh, yes. This thing is crazy progress going from, this is. is the original Mercedes-Benz electric car concept looks insane and then there's like still pretty cool lights contrast and then the final even just like even even the way it just sits on the road yeah the second image the second image looks great big wheels and then the third image looks like a honda civic and as a Mercedes enthusiast a three arrows enthusiast this is one of my least

Starting point is 03:31:06 favorite cars on the road. You know, I saw one outside of our breakfast spot and I was just starting to think, maybe it's growing on me. Because when I saw the EQS launch, the new electric Mercedes, I was like, I don't like that design. I think it's too

Starting point is 03:31:22 bulbous and rounded in the front. It's not for me. But then I saw one in person and I was like, maybe I'm just, you know, maybe it's coming around on it, but then I saw this picture and the progression and I say, never, never. But maybe we'll stick to the new

Starting point is 03:31:38 the new SL goaling. This post is hilarious. Variety says exclusive. CBS has indicated that staffers at CBS News will not be disciplined if they don't respond to a much scrutinized message sent last week by Barry Weiss. It was scrutinized?

Starting point is 03:31:54 She literally said, hey, what do you do at the company? What do you think we could do better? This is the perfect reaction. And the perfect memes stop giving me your toughest battles. Barry's just, I'm literally just asked for an email about what you're up to. Ridiculous. Yes, this is the Mercedes-Benz vision iconic concept car.

Starting point is 03:32:13 This is something that I can't wait for it to get completely watered down and look like absolute garbage by the time it ships. But you didn't like it. I think this concept car looks pretty cool. It looks weird. It looks weird. It looks different. Concept cars always look cool, and then they never make it to production.

Starting point is 03:32:32 And there's another question on the timeline, a couple slides back of 41. Cynthia says, is there a good reason that car companies don't just re-release old models like this is so beautiful, and it's Mercedes from probably the 80s, right? Can you clock this? Do you know vintage Mercedes models? I mean, that's an SL convertible, two doors. But it looks fantastic. And unfortunately, the reason that car companies don't just re-release old models is because there's new regulations. And some of those are for good reasons. They need more crumple zones so that pedestrians, if they get hit by the car, they They are safer. 280 SL. And so, but of course you can always go and buy one of the older ones, fix it up, and continue to drive it. At least the new regulations don't take the old cars off the road. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:33:19 But also, I don't understand how pedestrian safety regulations work at all because the cyber truck exists. And like, if I had to pick between getting hit between a Mercedes SL going 30 floor pedal to the metal and a cyber truck doing, you know, 90 and zero to 60 in two seconds. I feel like I would pick the two 80s. So I don't know how those pedestrian rules work because the cyber truck seemed to just completely get through all of those. Everyone was what was calling for sort of panic when the original cyber truck design was announced. I remember Matt Farah, the smoking tire podcast, great podcast on Rogan saying like he does he was

Starting point is 03:33:59 like, I don't believe that Elon will ship the cyber truck. Like it's just impossible. He will never ship this because you can't make a truck out of metal it's not just that I mean the angles are crazy like the angles on the cyber truck it looks dangerous people wanted to fail so bad 100% it was like the rust gate people were like oh yeah I mean people are always rooting against Elon stuff but but the the the cyber truck in particular looked like like if I've been told for years that like the reason the cars got round was for pedestrian safety I was like okay well if that's true and the rules do state that you can't make a Mercedes SL anymore because it's too angular or something

Starting point is 03:34:35 and you need to make a, like, how can you make a cyber truck? And so lots to unpack there. There must be some like workaround or something like that. But anyway, anything else, any other breaking news you want to cover before we wrap up for the day. Tenebress says, a great place to end the show.

Starting point is 03:34:52 Life is so much easier and better when you have a number to make go up. That's true. Well, we want to make the number of reviews go up on this show. So please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review. We'd love to read it on the show.

Starting point is 03:35:08 And thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you have a wonderful evening. We will see you back here tomorrow. Bye.

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