TBPN - Apple Tax is Dead, OpenAI Ends Vesting Cliff, Anthropic’s Massive TPU Order | Diet TBPN
Episode Date: December 16, 2025Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in under 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, w...ith each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive
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Discussion (0)
Tim Sweeney was taking a victory lap. I kind of missed this. This was last Thursday. Basically, the Ninth Circuit
struck down, you know, Apple trying to do something else in the Apple tax battle with the epic
game. So a quick, quick refresher on this. Tim Sweeney says the Apple tax is dead in the United States.
This particular nail in the coffin comes from the Ninth Circuit. These things are never fully over. I've
learned. Like, it's just, it's just, there's a class action lawsuit and there's another lawsuit.
and there's this one, then there's appeals,
then they go to the Supreme Court,
then they go back to the Supreme Court.
It's always up and down,
like that's just the nature of these things
because the stakes are so, so high.
Exposure seems a little hot on that.
What's going on there?
Basically, the court had said
that Apple could not charge 30%
if a developer routed an app customer
to their own payment page.
And so Apple was like, yeah, totally, we're cool with that.
How about 27% plus 3% for payments?
and 27% for like IP licensing.
And so like the end result was exactly the same.
It was literally 30%.
It was just like structured slightly differently.
They just changed the language.
You know, this was contempt.
Like, you know, it's like, we told you not to do this,
and you're still doing it at Apple.
And so now they're not supposed to.
Of course, like the weird takeaway here is like these big momentous things happen.
And then the stock moves like not at all.
My conclusion from digging into this was that the fundamentally like consumer behavior has built up over
almost two decades now. I mean, the App Store would launch, I believe, in 2007. This whole saga
starts in 2011. This guy, Robert Pepper, he sues Apple, along with three other plaintiffs.
Mr. Pepper. Mr. Pepper, alleging that he was overcharged for iOS apps. It's funny to imagine
a guy just saying, I'm coming for you, Apple. You know what? Flappy Bird, I was charged $2 for it.
Should have been $1.70 or something like that, $1.20.
and taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.
I mean, if he's a flounder of whale,
and he spent millions, tens of millions of dollars in the app.
But yeah, yeah, the economics are a bit,
you would normally see somebody like that suing Apple
because they're like, you overcharge me by $2,000 across the lifetime,
and I'm suing you for damages,
and it's like a lawsuit that will, you know.
With the class action lawsuit, obviously you get a couple plaintiffs
who are exemplary of the problem,
and then when the settlement,
happens, it's like billions of dollars paid to everyone who ever purchased an app.
And you see these things before, like, did you use Facebook between 2016, 2017?
You may be entitled to like five cents.
Obviously massive economic incentives for the lawyers who fight them.
Anyway, the court ruled that Apple can't do that anymore.
They can only collect fees that are in line with actual costs of facilitating lengths.
the process so cost for one link yeah no it's crazy and the associate intellectual
property we need to use AI for this yeah we need to no no no that's actually what's gonna happen
so basically right now it's like the like if if i'm i'm the app store i'm apple i have the app
you have your own app and you have your own you know stripe account and you want to pay you
want to accept payments your way apple says well you know even
though we're yes you are checking out on your payment rails and it's your app like i created the link
and the technology that creates links within ios and that is helping you so you got to pay me an IP
licensing fee typically it was like 27% of whatever you make which doesn't make any sense because
obviously my as apple my my cost don't scale proportionally to your revenue it's linear with regard to
my cost so like yes if apple probably these are pricey links john these are
Like you're laughing, but like like like to realistically like the iOS team that has been working on just just links like
They get paid a lot. It's probably in the millions if you're a successful mobile developer
You've been paying millions of dollars to Apple forever and you're talking about millions like
Relatively fixed OPEX for Apple that again doesn't and they make 30 billion a year or something
The idea is like justifiable costs should be like 10 bucks maybe like a hundred bucks for a reviewing an app and just saying
okay, we ran our software, we understand, you know, is this violating any rules?
We maybe had a human pop by and look at it for, you know, a couple minutes, make sure that this
is compliant with the App Store.
And then there are obviously other costs, but, you know, should it be millions of dollars,
should it be proportional to revenue, should be 30% of revenue?
A lot of people have been arguing, no.
But, of course, this will go back and forth and Apple will probably try and make the fee as high
as possible, of course, because they have every incentive to.
Oh, the other interesting thing is in Pepper versus Apple, there was this question of, you know, like, where in the chain is the monopoly pricing having an effect? Like, where is it increasing the price of the good? This Illinois Brick Company versus Illinois, the state of Illinois. This was in 1977, and the Supreme Court held that only direct purchases of, direct purchasers of illegally priced goods had standing to sue.
So the Illinois brick case, this is pretty interesting, he says the value chain was very straightforward.
Concrete block makers, including the eponymous Illinois Brick Company, great name for a company that makes concrete blocks.
Illinois.
They were accused of colluding to fixed prices of concrete blocks, which were bought by masonry contractors.
Masonry contractors, in turn, submitted bids to general contractors for construction projects,
which were ultimately paid for by the state of Illinois.
And so the state of Illinois sued for damages, alleging that the higher prices resulting from the price fixing
had been passed through to the state of Illinois.
So even though the masonry contractors were like, okay, yeah, like the Illinois brick company is with all the other brick companies, they're jacking up prices.
It doesn't really matter because they just passed that through.
And so there's a question about like, well, you didn't actually pay the higher price directly, state of Illinois, but it was passed through.
And so that harm gets passed through.
And so, you know, he says in this value chain is obvious who the direct purchasers were,
masonry contractors to the extent the state of Illinois suffered harm.
It was indirect pass-through harm.
Thus, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Illinois did not have standing.
So the state of Illinois could not sue then.
If every party in the value chain were to sue, the infringing party could be the subject of duplicative recovery for damages
and parsing out the share of damages would be extremely difficult.
In Apple versus Pepper, there's this question of who is harmed by Apple's alleged monopolistic practices,
according to the plaintiffs, the value chain, looks the same as the concrete block manufacturers.
Basically, there's developers who sell their apps to Apple, who sell those apps to consumers.
But Apple said, whoa, whoa, no, we're not a retail store, even though it's called the App Store.
It's not a real store.
We don't buy apps.
We don't buy inventory.
And sell them.
Yeah, exactly.
We're more, we're an agent.
The developer agreement confirms that Apple acts as an agent for app providers in providing the app store and is not a party to the sales contract or user agreement between the user and the app provider.
Thus, respondents concede that the direct sale is actually between developers and consumers facilitated by Apple as an agent and conduit.
And that sort of makes sense.
You know, you go to a grocery store, they buy the apples from the farmer, they sell them to the customer.
They take possession.
A real estate agent facilitates a transaction.
Take a fee.
takes a piece. If Apple was actually going and like buying licenses and then reselling them,
you know they'd be negotiating like crazy too and be like, we'll give you a dollar and then
we're going to sell it for $10. You could argue it'd be even worse for developers in that situation.
The interesting thing about this, just how much the reality of the shape of the App Store and the
business of the services narrative changed the entire financial story of Apple over the last, I guess,
decade and a half.
the price to earnings ratio.
Because back in 2011, it was 9.7, let's call it 10x price to earnings.
Today it's 37x.
So obviously the business has grown, but the value of the earnings is so much higher.
Why is that?
It's because it's so much stickier.
And it's because they've developed this services monopoly, essentially.
It's a toll road for your life.
It's not a toll road.
That's a great thing.
There is a difference between a toll and a tax.
And a toll is something that you pay that is directly linked to the service that you're getting.
Okay, so a toll road.
You're saying it would be more like a toll road now.
Now, yes, now it will be a toll road.
And we should celebrate that, or developers should celebrate that.
Tim Sweeney should be celebrating that because a toll road is something where it's like,
it's like, I'm paying $5 to drive down this road.
That money goes directly towards this road.
Yeah, the tax structure applied to a toll road is like, what economic value are you creating by driving on a road?
Exactly. We're going to charge the 30% of that.
Exactly. Oh, you're, oh, you're, you're transporting a shipment of televisions on this road?
Those are high margin. Or, oh, you're, you know, oh, you're a rich person driving.
You have some GPUs. You're hiding GPUs on your truck. Are you not?
Yeah, yeah. Oh, you can certainly break us off more.
As opposed to saying, you know, every time someone drives on this road, it takes a dollar of depreciation.
We need a million dollars to repave it every year. And so we need to link the, link the
cost of using the service with the actual underlying cost of operating that service.
My question with these changes is what is the what is the consumer experience going to be when
trying to cancel subscriptions because the one aspect of the app store that I've always appreciated
is the ability to one-click cancel from within the app store and so I do wonder as soon as you
let payments live outside of the app store everyone has experienced any type of software
a retailer making it hard to figure out how to cancel a subscription. Will Apple keep that kind of one-click
cancellation ability within the app or will they actually have to let? I mean, this already exists
because like you can go put your credit card down in Fortnite. The thing is that I think the
subscription revenue is not as much as you think. It's not as much of a driver. Like the in-app payments,
the one-off clicks, like those are much bigger driver of overall economic activity.
But I don't know.
On the subscription side, it would be interesting
if there's some sort of re-aggregation
at like the stripe level or something like that.
The interesting thing is that like,
so Apple's price to earnings
goes from 10 to 40, basically, like massive run-up.
And this is all on the back of like the services narrative
that Luca Mastry, the CFO,
sort of outlined in, I think, 2016.
He said each quarter we report for our services category,
which includes revenue from iTunes,
the App Store, AppleCare, ICloud, Apple Pay, licensing, and some other items.
Today, we would like to highlight the major drivers of growth in this category,
which we have summarized on page three of our supplemental materials.
The vast majority of the services that we provide to our customers,
for instance, apps, movies, TV shows are tied to our install base of devices
rather than to current quarter sales.
And so he's saying, like, you need to stop thinking about our financial performance
as driven by how many phones do we sell this quarter.
you need to think about just how many users we have broadly
and start valuing us more like Google, more like Facebook.
So Luca Mastry went on to say,
for some of these services such as content,
we recognize revenue based on transaction value
for some of these services such as App Store.
We share a portion of the value of each transaction
with the app developer,
and we only recognize revenue on the portion that we keep
to fully comprehend the scale of the services
that we are delivering to our installed base
and how fast this business is growing.
We look at purchases in addition to revenue.
When we aggregate the purchase value of all the services tied to our install base during fiscal 2015, it adds up to more than $31 billion.
It's basically what's going on is Lucamastry is the CFO of Apple.
And he's having trouble in the market because it's 2015 and what's happening?
You're eight years into the iPhone.
2007, the iPhone comes out.
It's expensive.
It doesn't have 3G.
It's got a lot of rough edges.
Doesn't have copy and paste.
But it's cool and it's interesting.
and there's lines out the door for them.
And people at the higher end,
like a cell phone back then was like $100 or you'd get it for free.
You'd get it as part of a, you know, every...
Cellular bundle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Every two years, you'd get a new phone.
And it was free, basically.
Then the iPhone comes in.
It's $600, very expensive, very upmarket.
Then a year or two in, they start figuring out
how to bring down the price. It comes down to like 300, 400. There's these incentives for signing up for a year long plan. There's a whole variety of things that make it. The app store comes out. There's like there's just more functionality. You don't you you you no longer are like well my BlackBerry still does this but Apple doesn't it's like no they do the enterprise stuff. They checked all the boxes and so it's growing growing growing but eight years in everyone who has one like they won the game and so device like actual the device install base device sales are starting to find.
flatline. Then they need sort of the new narrative for the stock because it's
getting sort of getting beat up because Apple's basically winning the
You sold everyone an iPhone. But it's over like the trade's over. It's like yeah we get it. Everyone has smartphones now.
iPhone revenue is basically or unit sales are slowing significantly. Of course they're able to raise prices still because people are locked in like it's a good business but it's not this like incredibly high growth thing anymore.
So Luca Maestri needs to come in with a new narrative and that's the services narrative and so
the services narrative is saying, hey, for a long time, you've been looking at this bucket of basically
like other revenue. We have device sales, which you've been obsessed with as the investor, as the Wall Street.
You've been obsessed with, you know, how many iPhones we're selling, how much we're selling them for,
our margins on those iPhones, how many we can make, all of that. And then we've had this other bucket,
which is like iTunes, App Store, AppleCare, ICloud, Apple Pay, license. It's just a bunch of other stuff.
They were kind of treating it like the storage feature on the iPhone where it's like, hey, you have, like, photos and these other things.
things that are taking it in apps and then like don't worry about other yeah don't worry about
other we're just going to throw everything in there don't worry about other because we don't really
know how it's growing is it that high margin we don't know then all of a sudden it became like don't
just not worry about other like in fact focus entirely on it because it is the best revenue that's
super high margin and it's growing really fast and oh by the way if you zoom out and you look at the
economic activity that is driving on top of the app store yes or take rates 30% but on top of it
just in 2015, it's $31 billion of economic activity in that ecosystem.
But Ben Thompson was not a fan of it at the time.
I mean, he was a fan from the stock price perspective, but he had some really, really harsh words.
He said at the time, it seems incredibly worrisome to me.
Anytime a company predicate its growth story on rent-seeking, it's not that the growth
isn't real, but rather the pursuit is corrosive on whatever it was that made the company
great in the first place.
It's like, whoa.
It's sort of like, okay, they're going, like, private equity mode.
Like, the beautiful art, the creativity is gone at this point.
Tim Cook has effectively done exactly that.
Going forward, the growth story of Apple has been someone else innovates.
Someone else creates an app and we'll take 30%.
And we don't need to do the innovation.
That doesn't need to happen here.
And that's a big shift in the narrative.
Whereas before, all through 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, it was like, the innovation comes from math.
They're like, we're going to make the iPhone, 700.
It's going to be newer, lighter, better, faster, stronger, and they're going to buy it.
Then we're going to take our cut from everything on top of it.
Exactly, exactly.
Megan, in the Wall Street Journal has a scoop.
OpenAI ended a policy earlier this week that required employees to work at the company for six months before their equity vested.
A few months ago, XAI shortened their waiting period known as a vesting cliff from 12 months to six.
The change to the vesting cliff announced by Applications Chief Fiji Simo is designed to encourage new
employees to take risks without fear of being let go before accessing the first chunk of equity.
Interesting.
So they had a problem where people would come in and say, okay, I got to just do politics for the
first six months because I don't want to get fired before.
That's like, that's a crazy culture, I feel like.
I think this has to be more reactionary to meta and obviously some of the other.
Open AI has shortened its vesting period for new employees to six months from the industry
standard of 12 months in April. Let's see, Elon Musk's XAI and Open AI competitor made a similar
change in the late summer. People familiar with the matter said, the decision to loosen or do away
with restrictions meant meant to ensure new hires stick around reflects the frenzied competition
for top tier technical talent within AI, within the AI industry. Tech companies typically have a one-year
investing cliff. That's what I'm certainly familiar with for new employees, preventing them from having
to give away stock to hires who leave quickly or don't work out. But with AI companies, including
meta-platforms, Google, Anthropic, wooing top researchers with pay packages that can be worth
$100 million or more, researchers and engineers have been able to hold out for the most attractive
terms, and in many cases have been quick to leave jobs they have found not to their liking.
I also could see at them trying to kind of rehab their employer brand. Do you remember there was a bunch of
this was probably six, eight months ago at this point.
Opening AI had a bunch, there were some articles surrounding,
they had some like really restrictive exit agreements.
That's right, that's right.
A lot of people were pretty frustrated around there.
I feel like that was over a year ago.
Maybe.
If you left and maybe didn't sign a non-disparagement agreement or NDA or something.
Yeah, if you didn't sign it, they could claw back all your equity.
And then they were saying,
that was important during the whole like Ilya ousting thing.
Because a lot of the employees left after that, but then they couldn't talk about it.
I always thought that the bull case for that was, well, if you're going to be whistleblowing on something that's like a true AI doom scenario, well, then money doesn't matter.
So you shouldn't matter about them clawing back your equity.
Company expects to spend $6 billion this year on stock-based comp, almost half of its projected revenue.
A company that creates however many hundreds of billions of dollars in value in a year
and then has $6 billion of a non-cash expense, it doesn't seem that crazy.
The SpaceX IPO, if they raise $30 billion, will be lower than the $40 billion that OpenAI offered.
Yeah.
In the private market.
In the private markets.
And so there's been this great question about, like, are the private markets tapped?
It appears it's the David Goggins thesis in the market.
David Goggins thesis for life.
I mean, if you went back, I don't know,
five years and you were like, yeah,
like, do you think you could raise $40 billion
in the private markets, or would you have to go public for that?
They're like, you know, the Saudi Ramco level funding.
Like, yes, you'd have to be public.
But turns out you don't not have to be public.
Finn Barr says, OK, but seriously, why is everyone leaving
meta?
People are speculating in the comments.
Jane says vest.
Finn says, but if you stay longer, you vest more.
true. Someone else says no direction for the company. Several major unannounced RL project canceled.
The 100 million boys reportedly do zero work because they know that if Zuck fires them,
he'll look foolish. I don't know. I think some of these 100 million dollar men and women,
just that do, they are about that life. They do want to pursue greatness. They do want to do the
biggest run. So who knows. I'm sure there's some instances of that. Zuck, you know,
overpaid for talent is to try to catch up. No PMF on their consumer AI products,
even though they force everyone on Instagram to see it. I think we've got to wait a little bit
for the Christmas season to come and go and see how these things are selling.
It is a tough position to be in because they don't have like a public cloud. They don't
of a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler.
With Google, like, even if they, even if Google gets completely smoked by OpenAI and
ChatGBTGBT, BT, winds up being like, truly like, the, you know, the Facebook of
chat apps and it's like 99% people use, it captures 99% of like the consumer AI value.
It's like having a Gemini API is still extremely valuable because like you have cloud services.
Brett Adcock.
Okay, what's going on with Brad Aycock?
He had a party over the weekend.
Dead Mouse. He posted earlier today that that figure is looking quite cheap.
Yes. In comparison to SpaceX. Okay. Right. Because there's a there's a new biggest line on the private markets charge.
Is he drinking on here? What is he drinking? I think he's having a I think he's crack and open some cold one.
This is my so my theory is that they have done billions of dollars in sales. Okay. And this is kind of their way of signaling.
Signaling if you know you know because of course it would be absolutely.
absolutely insane to have a party like this.
Yeah.
If you still hadn't shipped a product, if you still were kind of a sort of, I don't know
if they're pre-revenue, but certainly being valued on vibes.
So there's no way they would throw a party like this.
Because SpaceX has 30 billion in revenue, right?
Yeah.
So and it's going out at 1.5 trillion.
So it's at like 50x revenue?
He probably trading it like, what, 20x revenue?
Something like that.
That was my theory at least.
And then what's the market?
They're at around 40 billion.
They're at around 40 billion.
So, yeah, they could be doing like two to four billion in revenue potentially.
This is very much a on a price to sales ratio.
A wink, wink, wink moment because seriously, you know, no, I don't think any CEO would throw
this crazy of a party if you weren't, if you weren't really, really printing.
So expect an announcement soon.
I would.
Data centers in space, it might not be economically rational, but it might be physically possible.
I'm trying to bring some quantitative structure to a conversation that's been
mostly big number of vibes.
So we have sort of dueling, dueling math equations at this point.
What is he, this is vibe coded from public, from,
so maybe we need to have a debate,
maybe we need to have them both on.
But he says, TLDR, the analysis is actually
far more favorable than I thought.
It's a close thing.
I desperately want a Kardashev level civilization,
but we've got a lot of work ahead of us.
Delian's been saying like it's impossible.
It is not gonna happen anytime soon.
It's not gonna, it's not gonna be a thing.
But Andrew McAllen says there just might be a chance.
God says, my dealer, I got some straight gas.
This train called Space Data Centers.
You are going to effing fry, L.O.L.
Me. Yeah, whatever.
20 minutes later.
Dude, WTF, we just need to radiate the heat.
And then we can totally bypass terrestrial regulations.
My friend, Pacing, I should buy magnet stocks to get ahead of all the rail guns.
What is it?
They're smoking space data centers, John.
Anthropic has ordered 20.
$21 billion worth of TPUs to train large clawed.
Is that really what they're calling it?
Text is from yesterday's Broadcom's earnings call.
The scale at which we see this happening could be significant.
As you are aware, last quarter, Q3, we received a $10 billion order to sell the latest TPU ironwood racks to Anthropic.
This was our fourth custom that we mentioned.
In this quarter, we received an additional $11 billion order from this same customer for delivery in late 2026.
Kaiju fights are the best kind of fights from October.
This is from Andrew Curran.
He says, Anthropic is in discussions with Alphabets, Google,
about a deal that would provide the artificial intelligence company
with additional competing power valued in the high tens
of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fermi, which is the energy company that went public
at a $20 billion valuation, they talked about getting their kind of facilities online,
I think, in the 2030s.
and people were a little bit bearish about that.
They've traded down almost 75% since their IPO.
So it seems like, yeah, we've basically seen this kind of rolling correction
across every single AI pureplay.
You could even say that we're...
But nobody's done volcano data centers.
No one has done those.
Where are you going to...
The chat's asking, where do you put the heat?
Just shoot it up into the air.
That's what that's...
Yeah.
Volcano data centers is funny because immediately you're like,
But don't you want the chips to be cold?
You need cooling, not heating.
Yeah, the heat dissipates with the lava.
It would be great to just hard light.
But the heat's free.
Heets free.
Data centers are hot.
And in this one, we're getting the heat for free.
What happens after a correction?
You're corrected.
I think we're corrected.
I think it's possible that the market is cracked.
It's perfectly valued.
I saw somebody saying that the BG2 interview with Sam,
they were claiming, like,
it's very possibly helped us avoid a 2000.
2001 style.
Yeah, things could have gotten a lot crazier.
So maybe that was Brad's play the whole time.
He was like, hey, we just need a little reset.
He's a hero.
He's a hero.
I'm going to look like, I'm going to look like,
you know, I'm going to look like maybe a bad guy
for two weeks, but now it looks like a hero.
I mean, even in the moment, he didn't look like a bad guy.
No, no.
He asked the question.
If he didn't ask that question, there would have been,
I think, some rightful criticism.
It was an important.
It was an important question to ask.
Yeah.
Jim Carrey offered to return his $20 million
Grinch salary and was going to quit the movie amid panic attacks over the makeup.
Then a guy who trained the military on enduring torture was hired to help him.
Richard Marcinco was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special ops people
had to endure torture.
Kerry told the vulture.
He gave me a litany of things that I could do when I began to spiral, like punch myself
in the leg as hard as I can.
Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm.
Keep everything in sight.
changing patterns in the room.
If there's a TV on when you start to spiral,
turn it off and turn the radio on.
Smoke cigarettes as much as possible.
There are pictures of me as the Grinch
sitting in a director's chair with a long cigarette holder.
I had to have the holder because the yak hair
would catch on fire if I got too close.
Later on, I found out that gentleman
had trained me to endure the Grinch.
Also founded Steel Team 6.
So my only kind of question here is
I feel like all these things if you were being tortured,
they wouldn't exactly be like,
Let him turn the TV off and on again.
Let him turn the radio on.
Oh, yeah, that is interesting.
So I think these are probably great things to do
if you're not getting tortured
and you're just developing anxiety attack.
Yeah.
I did resonate with this because when we had the Halloween makeup on.
I mean, to be very, it could be like metaphorically being tortured
like in a foxhole as a member of Steel Team 6.
Oh, you're staking out someplace and you're in a muddy pit and it's a hole.
You're not actually being directly.
tortured by like an enemy, but you have to deal with a really hard situation. And so you sit there
chain smoking and I don't know why you have a TV in this scenario. This just resonated because when we
had, when we were three hours into our Halloween episode and I started to realize, it wasn't
resonate for me. I was like, I am fully, it felt like very suffocating having, you know,
I was fine with it. Two centimeters surrounding everywhere. Brown says chat GPT is the only consumer
app with regular pop-ups asking if I want to downgrade my subscription.
hilarious it's a testament to the they're they're running this as an a-b test they're
like we tell people they can pay less and they don't they enjoy giving us money maybe the pro
plan results in more permanent churn and so this is actually lTV a downgrade is actually
lTV positive no way to prove that that's true but it'd be very funny if that was the case
the polish around the product is potentially like the way you win consumer i i really think we're in the
era of like of productization more than the latest model the product the product managers are the
heroes now I want to see a product manager getting a four-year one billion dollar package it's not
it's not completely over for the AI researchers like the models are important they do get better
and and there's functionality under the hood that's that's research driven that's valuable but
if you if you believe in the ilia we're in the age of research then what is the AI researcher doing
like they are doing experiments that you have no idea the timeline.
Like you're not just doing engineering.
You can't just put one foot in front of the other and get easy wins.
It's actually going and doing science and discovering new ideas, new ways to create new capabilities.
And so in the age of research, the researchers should be off doing research and the user experience designers are the heroes basically.
Goodbye.
We love you. See you tomorrow.
See you guys.
