TBPN - 🟡 Evan Spiegel LIVE in the Ultradome | Colin & Samir, RJ Scaringe, Scott Kupor

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

(04:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:21) - Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., best known for creating Snapchat, the camera-driven social platform he helped launch while still a Stanford student, and has since become one of the youngest self-made billionaires in tech while steering Snap’s evolution into an augmented-reality–focused company. (01:43:03) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:49:47) - RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian Automotive, discusses the company's strategic focus on expanding its product lineup with the upcoming R2 SUV, aiming to offer a more affordable electric vehicle option starting at around $45,000. He highlights the importance of vertical integration, including the development of in-house technologies like the Rivian Autonomy Processor, to enhance vehicle capabilities and maintain a competitive edge. Scaringe also emphasizes the significance of creating distinctive vehicle designs, such as the unique headlight configuration, to establish brand identity and appeal to a broader market. (02:29:26) - Scott Kupor, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, discusses the launch of the U.S. Tech Force, a two-year program aiming to recruit 1,000 engineers, product managers, data scientists, and AI specialists into various federal agencies to modernize government infrastructure. This initiative addresses the need for modern technical expertise and aims to attract early-career professionals, who currently constitute only about 7% of the federal workforce, compared to 25-30% in the private sector. In collaboration with 25 tech companies, the program offers participants career development opportunities and a job fair at the end of the term, facilitating transitions to private sector roles if desired. (02:41:00) - Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry are the creators behind Colin & Samir, a media duo known for their in-depth interviews and analysis about the creator economy; through their YouTube channel, podcast, and newsletter, they break down how creators build businesses, spotlight emerging platforms, and offer industry-shaping commentary that has made them leading voices in creator-focused media. 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.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.com/fal - 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

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, December 15th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capitol of Capital. It's Christmas week, baby. And the Christmas decorations continue to grow in the TVPN Ultradome. Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove over there is feeling the holiday spirit.

He's looking fantastic. And if you're wondering if he has shoes and socks and pants, Tom, With the shoes up on the table. He does. It's a full costume. Yes. That is fantastic. Almost as fantastic as ramp.

Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. Bill Paying, accounting a whole lot more all in one place. Get started at ramp.com. So Tim Sweeney was taking a victory lap. I sort of missed this. This was last Thursday.

Basically, the Ninth Circuit struck down, you know, Apple trying to do something else. and the Apple tax battle with Epic games. 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,

then there's another lawsuit, then 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?

But 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 the end result was exactly the same. It was literally 30%. It was just, like, structured slightly differently. They just changed the language. And so they were, they were, you know, this was contempt.

Like, you know, it's like, we told you not to do this, and you're still doing an 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. Because, of course, you know, 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 30% fee. This initial, 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. Imagine, I mean, that's not exactly what happened because it's like a class action lawsuit and it's much bigger stakes. 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 Flacky Bird, Whale, and he spent millions, tens of millions of dollars in the app. But yeah, yeah, the economics are a bit, you know, 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. Right. And you see these things before. like, did you use Facebook between 2016, 2017? You may be entitled to like five cents, right? Class action settlements happen all the time. Obviously, massive economic incentives for the lawyers who fight them.

Anyway, before I continue, let me tell you about linear. Meet the software. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from Roadmap to Release. So, basically, you know, Apple's going to work to... So now 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, links out to other payment processes.

Cloud costs for one link? I know, it's crazy. And the associate intellectual property. Actually, we need to use AI for this. And we need to. No, no, no, that's actually what's going to happen. So basically, right now it's like the, like, If I'm the app store, I'm Apple, I have the app store, 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've got to pay me an IP licensing fee. and, you know, typically it was like 27% of whatever you make, which doesn't make any sense because obviously, as Apple, 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 pricey links. Like, you're laughing, but, like, like, realistically, like the iOS team that has been working on just links, like, there's code there. There's code there. Like, they get paid.

a lot. It's probably in the millions. It might be, you know, across all of the different amateur- I know, but if you're a, if you're a, if you're a, 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 scale. And they make the 30 billion a year or something like that. So it's like, like they have paid for the R&D by, you know, fully. But basically, you know, the, the idea is like justifiable costs should be like 10. maybe like a hundred bucks for reviewing an app and just saying okay we ran our software we understand the you know is this is this violating any rules we maybe had a human

stop by and look at it for you know a couple minutes make sure that this is compliant with the app store and 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 and Apple will probably try and make the fee as high as possible, of course, because they have every incentive to. But what else is interesting about this? So, 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? And so this all goes back. This is Ben Thompson's like the best chronicler of this whole saga, of course. And he goes back to this Illinois brick company versus Illinois, the state of Illinois. And so 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. In 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 resulted, 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. So it's the masonry contractors that have to sue. Now, 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 and sell them. Yeah, exactly.

We're more, we're an agent. And so the company, argued Apple does not buy and resell apps. Instead, Apple acts as an agent for developers and says, as respondents, notes this is from the actual court case. 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 from the farmer, they sell them to the customer. They take possession. A real estate agent

facilitates a transaction. Takes a fee. Takes a fee, takes a fee, takes a fee. If Apple, 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 for $10. Yeah, yeah. You could argue it'd be even worse for developers in that situation. Yeah. And so the interesting thing about about this whole case is 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.

If you want to look at Apple stock, you should head over at public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. But what you should do if you go and you look at Apple is look at 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, where they have aggregated, You know, it's the Ben Thompson aggregation. It's a toll road for your life. It's not a toll road. That's a great, 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. A toll road? Now, yes, now it will be a toll road. And we should celebrate that, or developers should celebrate that. Tim Schweeney should be celebrating that. Because a toll road is something where it's like, it's like, I'm paying.

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 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 on your truck. You're hiding GPUs on your truck. Are you not? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you can certainly break us off more. As opposed to, you know, you're a rich person driving. saying, you know, every time someone drives in 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 cost of using

the service with the actual underlying cost of operating that service. My question with these changes is 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 not having to go to individual apps or services and cancel. And so I do wonder, as soon as you let payments live outside of the app store, everyone has experienced any type of software,

retailer making it hard to figure out how to cancel a subscription. And so 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 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. I don't really know. But in general, the interesting thing is that like, So Apple's price of 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 supplemented 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. start valuing us more like Google, more like Facebook. Like, you know, if you're an iPhone user, it doesn't really matter if you bought a new one this quarter.

Obviously, that's sort of continuing. But the big game is better monetization on top of the user base. We should try to get Justin Kahn on to talk about his company, Stash, because Stash is effectively payments built for game developers. Interesting. Circumavigate the app store. Yeah. And so they're very well positioned here.

Yeah. 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. That's an increase of 23% over 2014. So he's like, and so Ben Thompson has some funny quotes here. He says, like, first off, it's striking that when Apple was facing one of the most challenging years in the stock market, its first response was basically to make the plaintiff's point in Apple versus Pepper. Suddenly, the company wanted to recognize all of the app revenue, a portion of which is shared with developers, sounds like a company in the middle, sounds like a tax. And then, Secondly, though... Wait, repeat that original line.

You said they've grown 34%? 31 billion. They increased 23% over fiscal 2014 was the historical growth. So basically what's going on is Lucca Mastry is the CFO of Apple. And he's having trouble in the market because it's 2015 and what's happening? Well, 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. A cell phone back then was like a hundred bucks 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, you'd get a new phone. And it was free. Basically. Then the iPhone comes in. It's $600. It's 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 know, 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. 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 flatline. Yeah. And so then they need sort of a new narrative for the stock because it's sort of getting beat up because Apple's basically winning the smartphone. You sold everyone an iPhone.

But it's over. Yeah. Like the trade's over. Right? It's like, yeah, we get it. Everyone has smartphones now. So the 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 Mastry 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. There's a bunch of other stuff. Funny, 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 that are taking it in apps. And then like, don't worry about other. Yeah, don't worry about other. 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. In fact, focus entirely on it.

Focus on it exclusively 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, that's, you know, yes, or take rate's 30%. But on top of it, just in 2015, it's $31 billion dollars of actually. economic activity in that ecosystem. And so this is like an admission of like the economic power that they have. But

Ben Thompson was not a fan of it. 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 that 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. And Tim Cook has effectively done exactly that. Yeah, and he says that is a particular, again, this is from 2018, that is a particularly large concern for Apple. The company has always succeeded by being the best. How does the company maintain that edge? when its executives are more concerned with harvesting the profits from other companies' innovations.

So 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 Apple. They're like, we're going to make the iPhone 1700. It's going to be newer, lighter, better, faster, stronger.

and they're going to buy it, and then we're going to take our cut from everything on top of it. Exactly, exactly. Anyways, should we continue? Yeah, we can move on. Let me tell you about Apple's newest partner, Gemini. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. 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. Wait, they only have six-month cliff? Yeah, it was already short. A few months ago, X-AI shortened their waiting period, known as a vesting clip, from 12 months to six. And then there's been, I don't know if you want to start reading through it at all. The change to the vesting cliff announced by Applications Chief Fiji Simo

came on our show last week, 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 a crazy culture, I feel like. I think this has to be more reactionary to meta. Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah. And obviously some of the other public companies. has shortened its vesting period for new employees to six months from the industry standard of 12 months in April.

We have to ask Evan Spiegel about how he thinks about vesting periods and running a public company where your employees can, you know, sell the stock that they get. He's the perfect person to ask about this exact article. Let's see, Elon Musk's X-A-I and Open-A-I competitor made a similar change in late summer. People familiar with the matter said. A.I. didn't respond to a request for comment, of course. 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 the AI industry. Tech companies typically have a one-year vesting 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. Yeah, I think that this is just like a sort of a Red Queen's race, so just a if you give a mouse a cookie sort of situation where competitive market employees end up benefiting. 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. Yeah. A lot of people were pretty frustrated around. I feel like that was over a year ago. Maybe. Maybe a year and a half ago. About a year and a half ago. Yeah, that story broke that if you left and didn't, maybe didn't sign a nondi. disparagement agreement or NDA or something. Yeah, if you didn't sign it, they could claw back your equity. And then they were saying, that was important during the whole like Ilya ousting thing. Yes. A lot of the employees left after that, but then they couldn't talk about it.

Yeah, that's interesting. I always thought that, like, 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. But of course, there are more like mundane reasons why, you know, you might want to talk about your previous competitor. Yeah. There was another line that some people zoomed in on here. Connerson over at Bloomberg opinion says, company expects to spend $6 billion this year on stock-based comp,

almost half of its projected revenue. And I saw this post going viral in a few different areas, but 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. Yeah, no, not at all. It seems like fairly low for,

I mean, it's a $500 billion company, so it's 1% of the market cap that's going out to employees. And also they have to be in like an incredible talent war. They're growing. There's just so much to do there. Yeah. The number that was shocking to me was that, You remember last week how there's the rumored SpaceX IPO.

That is apparently continuing. So SpaceX schedules bank pitches for IPO is in the Wall Street Journal. But the SpaceX IPO, if they raise $30 billion, will be lower than the $40 billion that OpenAI offered. Yeah. 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. The David Goggins thesis for life.

I mean, if you went back, you know, 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 it turns out you don't not have to be public because, in fact, $40 billion is available in the private markets if you're open AI. Let me tell you about numeral.

Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. Let me continue with this. Tech investors have privately complained. They're complaining? What do they have to complain about? We're in a bull market. They privately complained about the ballooning stock-based compensation associated with

fast-growing AI startups, arguing that it eats into shareholder returns. Companies that are needing to be more competitive are dropping the traditional first-year vesting cliff. co-founder of levels. FYI says, in August, after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched that full-scale raid on OpenAI staff and offered giant pay packages, OpenAI gave some of its top researchers and engineers a one-time bonus with some employees receiving millions of dollars the journal previously reported. Yeah, I was thinking about that with Mark Chen when on Ashley Vance, it was like, I don't compete with meta dollar to dollar. Like, I won't match their offers.

You won't go ban for ban. You won't go ban for ban. But it doesn't mean that he won't He'll go cliff for cliff. He'll go cliff or cliff for sure. And also he'll go like one-time bonus during a crazy raid, like if the time calls for it. So it's not like he's not participating in the war at all. He is a little bit, but I think it's the right, I think it's the right move. Yeah, I do think that there's been this, I don't know, is it hedonic treadmill? What is the correct metaphor for what's going on with these offers? But it's very clear that like, you know, whoever, like the details of the packages are leaking, at least through internal, like, back channels. And so the next person that gets hired wants something a little sweeter, like something

a little bit extra, a little cherry on top. And so you go from, you know, four-year vest, one-year cliff to three-year, six months, to no cliff, to, you know, add more zeros on the pay package, more guaranteed, more up front. But at the same time, there is something to, I mean, the reason I would argue in favor of no vesting cliffs here is that it does feel like the value that you can get from a new engineer joining, from a competitor at least, is on day one. Like day one, okay, you were, you just left Anthropa. We're going to plug your brain. You just left open AI. You just left meta. What's going on there? Just take us through it, right?

Like, that's going to be the day one orientation. And so are they adding value on day one? Like, basically, right? I would imagine. So to be capturing a little bit of that value, that seems like a win for the AI researcher. At the same time, it is just another sign of the froth in the AI market. Finn Barr says, okay, 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. Andrew says behind state of the art on their models, of course. That's why 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. They don't even use Lama models internally to code. I mean, that makes sense.

It is a tough position to be in because they don't have a, like, a public cloud. They don't have a cloud service, even though they are a hyperscaler. So, like, with, with Google, like, even if they, even if Google gets completely smoked by OpenAI and chat GPT, and chat GPT winds up being, like, truly, like, the, you know, the Facebook of, of chat apps and it's like 99% people use, it captures 99% of like the consumer AI value. It's like, well, like having a Gemini API is still extremely valuable because like you have cloud services.

It would be odd for meta to wind up like trying to build a public cloud service like around the Lama models. Like I mean even if they went closed stores. Ducks did say at one point though that they would be open to reselling capacity. But then you're going up against Anthropic directly. It feels very, very tricky.

I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. What else is going on? VCs funded OpenAI, and in return, OpenAI automated them. This is GPT 5.2 thinking is able to construct a cap table accurately in spreadsheets. This is what Fiji Simo was talking to us about,

about emerging capabilities. Seems like they might have RLed on some spreadsheets. That's pretty cool. Truly everyone is going after spreadsheets at this point. There's a, everyone from our sponsor, Ramp, to Microsoft, to a number of startups that have been on this show, talking about Excel agents, Excel plugins, Google Docs, plugin. I'm so interested to see how that market actually shapes out.

Who is? Because there's so many AI for Excel plays, some full stack, some. some plugins. Yeah, and it's not that Harvey was pitched as like a Word plugin. Like even though lawyers do a lot of work in Word, that was not the instantiation of that product. It was much more just like, you know,

a full service product. It was interesting. Anyway, there's a clip of Sergei making a joke about automating away VC. Should we play this video? Pull it up. You have the ability to pull this up? Let's do it.

What does he say? No audio on our side yet, folks. Can you look? Well, in the meantime, let me tell you about... Might be replaced? Can do that human majority of jobs in that we know today, like more than 50% might be replaced by machines

that can do that human judgment piece better. Well, we've been working on the venture investment machine learning. I'm just kidding. It's kind of true. As long as I can buy one, I'm good. You think you'll do it? That is kind of what Google Ventures does, no? They started that way.

I don't know if they're actually doing that. They keep hiring partners for whatever reason. This is actually hilarious. Where was this? Extremely candid. It was very fun. Love it. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio.

The AI Native CRM. Adio builds, Gales, and grows your company to the next level. What is up with this The CIA lost a nuclear device in the Himalayas? Did you read this article? Apparently this is not new? It's not a new story, but there's some new reporting in here. Okay.

What happened? How do you lose a nuclear device in the Himalayas? I want to go through this. My only concern is that it's going to potentially take like an hour to read through. Let's do it another day. Yeah, we can do it. Let's do it tomorrow. Let's summarize it and put it.

Let's put a link to it in our newsletter where you can get tech analysis and news. get our daily op-ed, top headlines, and more. sign up at TBPN.com. There was a... Oh, yeah, you want to go to some of us? Take us wherever. I was going to take us to Brett Adcock. Okay, what's going on with Brad Aycock?

He had a party over the weekend with Dead Mouse. Okay. And let's play this video. So I, he posted earlier today that that figure is looking quite cheap. Yes. in comparison to SpaceX. Because there's a new biggest line on the private markets chart. Is he drinking on here?

What is he drinking? I think he's cracking open some cold one. This is crazy. 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 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. And it's going out at $1.5 trillion.

So it's at like 50x revenue. So to be cheap, he probably trading it like, what, 20x revenue, something like that? That was my theory, at least. So they're at around 40. 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. If it's cheap on a dollar per revenue basis.

I think 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. Expect an announcement soon. Look at that. on the revenue side over a figure.

Anyway, that's wild. Astro-compute, Pranav. Are we getting him on the show? Have we tacked him? Yeah, I think he's coming on tomorrow. Okay, fantastic. So Pranav has done the math. He sat down and did the math on the data centers in space.

He said, everyone in their mother has something to say about space compute, but no one has comprehensively broken down the physics, energy, cooling. economics and the real work involved. So I built a first principles model to show you guys myself. Tyler, what was his conclusion? Yeah, so I mean, you can go through it. You can change all the different parameters and stuff. And then you can run the simulation and kind of see where it lands. I think the conclusion was that like there are a lot of scenarios where it does make sense. Like today, right now if we use current technology, probably not.

But if you kind of, you know, use the trend line where things are going, I think it's, like, pretty reasonable to say that, like, there's a scenario where it does work. Okay. Yeah. What do you laugh at that? Fiberglass is clearly an OG. He says, that was some OG dry humor rage baiting, like, from day one TVPN.

That's true. We certainly... A year ago, a year ago, that was certainly, like, 50% of the show's content. For sure. For sure. Fiverr, it's great to have you here. Thank you for being a day one. Andrew McAllen, who's building spacecraft over at Varda Space.

He's going to put data centers on a boat, potentially. He has a boat project that's very fun. He says data centers in space, it might not be economically rational, but it might be physically possible. Was he breaking rank from the co-founder of his company, Varda, Delian? He says, 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. Interesting. So he, so, I mean, Dallian's been saying like it's impossible. It is not going to happen anytime sin. It's not going to, it's not going to be a thing. But Andrew McAulp says there just might be a chance. Who else is talking about this? This post from Goth, 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 regular. my friend pacing. I should buy magnet stocks to get ahead of all the rail guns.

They're smoke and space data centers, John. I don't get it. This is all over the place. Theo was happy about the epic thing. Props to epic for seeing it through the end. This is an incredible win for developers quoting Kim Sweeney. Easy in the chat says data centers in a volcano. That nobody's nobody is nobody of that. Nobody he's talking about that. That does seem like free energy. Isn't that just like geothermal? I feel like that's like I know but that that that doesn't spack. That doesn't spack. Yeah, that doesn't spack. Yeah, that's terrible vibes. Data center in a volcano spacks immediately. For sure. Well, let me tell you about Privy.

Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Anthropic has ordered $21 billion with a TPUs to train to train, to train the 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 the same customer for delivery in late 2026, but that does not mean our other two.

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 computing power valued in the high tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The plan, which has not been finalized, involves Google providing cloud competing services to Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter,

who asked not to be named. Google is a previous investor and cloud provider for Anthropic. Large Claude was just me having fun with words and is not anything official. I also considered fat Claude. I'm saving colossal Claude and gargantuan clod for 2027. Gigga Claude. In other news, Burmie, 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 pure play. You could even say that. 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. Heat's heat's free. Data centers are hot. And in this one, we're getting the hot heat for free. Now, 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 scenario 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 I might 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, yeah. He would have been, it would have, it would have, it would have, there would have been, I think, some rightful criticism. Everyone was wondering. It was an important question to ask.

Yeah. What, uh, I really, I really like young macro. This guy's a great poster. Nick Land proclaims, may coldness be my God. What Normies think he means, you know, techno-accelerationism, techno-capitalism. I like that the circular AI deals made it in here as well, just the stock charge. What he really means, he means Christmas. He means Coca-Cola. He means a nice wintry retreat. Yes, exactly. Play some music.

This is what May Coldness Be My God means. It means cozy up by the fire and get festive. I love it. Did you see this reporting on Jim Carrey and Grinch? No. 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. Eat 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. You found it. You found in Seal Team Six. 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 it. Well, I mean, to be very, it could be like metaphorically being tortured like in a

foxhole as a member of Steel Team 6. Like if you have like, you know, oh, you're you're staking out someplace and you're in a muddy pit and it's a hole. And 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. Again, I didn't land. I didn't land. Yeah. Yeah. This just resonated because when we had, when we were three hours into our Halloween episode and I started to realize, I didn'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 and it was a very weird feeling. I think, I mean, he was doing like nine hours a day of makeup. Can we get the, can we get the giga chat built around Tyler? That makes us look like, you know, wimps compared to him. We were only doing three hours of makeup. Nine hours is really, really heroic. Wow.

Well, totally worth it. If you aren't watching The Grinch this Christmas, go watch something that's being re-streamed. Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream. Go to restream.com. Will Brown says ChatGPT is the only consumer app with regular pop-ups

asking if I want to downgrade my subscription. This was hilarious. 3,000 likes. I mean, it's a testament to the... 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 would be very funny if that was the case. No, the polish around the product

is potentially like the way you win consumer. I really think we're in the era of like productization more than the latest model. The product managers are the heroes now. I want to see a product manager getting a four-year, $1 billion package. It's not completely over for the end. researchers, like the models are important, they do get better, and there's functionality under the hood

that's research-driven, that's valuable, but, you know, if you believe in the Ilya, we're in the age of research, then what is the AI researcher doing? Like, they are doing experiments that for, 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. I mean, the product managers are going to be more important as the apps bite for market share. What do you think, Tyler? You agree with that? Yeah, that makes sense. It's fun to think about like Elon.

in Ilya are like perfectly counterposition, right? Like Elon is like, we don't have any researchers. They're all engineers. They're going to make small improvements. And then you see like what's Brock. Like, GROC is like, it's largely undifferentiated from all the other ELMs. They don't have like anthropic has code.

Open AI has like the actual consumer. GROC is like still kind of undetermined. Yeah, I wouldn't say that they're counterposition. They're actually agree. Like they're consistent. I think they are opposites. But they both embrace the fundamental a fundamental reality about the world, which is that, like, you should either be doing pure

research or pure engineering, and it's sort of hard to mix it, too. Or just that, like, research won't immediately have, won't translate to faster times on the racetrack, which is, like, what's happening right now in the race. Yeah, but I mean, Elon is, like, very AGI-pilled, right? But he still doesn't think about, like, pursuing AGI as, like, a research thing. That's an engineering. Oh, interesting. Okay, okay.

Yeah, maybe they are a little bit more different than I, than I. considered. I don't know. I mean, how do you interpret the fact that the, the Arc AGI scores are going through the roof, and yet qualitatively, like, people are not shocked by the interaction of talking to 5.2, or the latest Claw at 4.5, or even the... Yeah, I think it's just like, it's just about like the spikiness thing. Yeah. They just created a new spike. I mean, the spike just got longer, right? It's like the code, the coding ability of the model, I'm sure, is much better. But the actual, like, ability to write pros is not that much better because it's just, like, not what they're pursuing. But it is bullish. Like, this has been my take

for a while where, like, if they can, even if it's just benchmaxing on RQI. If you can create a spike in any direction, you can solve sort of any economic problem. Yeah, then the real problem. Just create every possible spike, and eventually it no longer looks like spiky intelligence. It looks like smooth. Yeah, like the engineering task is to define the RL environment that makes the model better writing, which is like what they're doing. Like you see all these RL environment startups that basically just make these things that models, that labs train on. That specifically do things.

Disbanded cap says OpenAI could probably save 25% on their compute if they just taught the model to give me the answer and then shut the F up a bit. Wild. This one resonated. Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You get started. Figma.com.

Of course. Jason Freed has a note here. He says, one of the best upgrades to ChatGPT is simply changing the base style and tone to efficient and giving it a simple get right to the point. Be practical above all instruction. No more praise. No more flourishes. Just the answers. Everyone appreciates Tyler Jolly Maxing. He really is in the Christmas spirit. It's fantastic. Hey, are you a minor? No, I'm here to sell shovels. Everyone's selling shovels. 20,000. likes on this just for different shovels. Some people are mining. Some people are mining. Some people are in the trenches. But it is just a few people that are not selling. Big change from a year ago when everyone was just talking about how rappers were cooked and people were talking somewhat negatively about rappers.

Yeah, it's interesting. Are rappers selling shovels? No. No, they're mining. It's actually mining in like a, very small side mine. Not the main mine, but like a smaller side mine, I guess. What do you think?

I would think of mining as being like if you are actually using the models to do like a roll-up or something. I think that's much more money. In the AI shovels mining analogy, the mining, I feel like it's Elon and it's Sam and Demis

that are doing the mining, right? They're doing the core thing. And then everyone else is like, is like, I'm drafting off of them. I'm supporting them with shovels. Like, there's a gold mine that's being mined. And if I'm just like riding the coattails of that, then I'm coming along. I think the of the gold as being the output that you can get with the models when you use the models. The models are the shovels. The models are the shovels. Yeah. So then, so that is, that is actually funny. Like if you're doing a roll-up of some, you know, whatever companies and you're using AI to just, you're not like, it's on AI company, but you're

using AI a lot. Typically, typically the way, typically the way the whole shovel's analogy is levied at startups is, oh, you don't have it in you to create a great mobile app. So you're going to build a developer tool that helps people ship mobile apps. That was the original, like, the shovel's critique. And it's the same thing with AI is the idea of like, like, like, why don't you solve a cool problem with AI actually create some sort of like, you know, system that solves a particular problem versus saying like, we're a platform for running AI

agents on top of it. Like, we don't know what the agents will do, but we know that they need, you know, a database or something like that. That, that critique has never been, it's never hit that hard with me because they're, they're both valuable. We need all of that. Yeah, that being said, though, YC, I think it was a spring YC batch. There was a lot of people. There was a lot of people. people selling shovels. It felt shoveled a lot of like very specific. I am, I'm creating a full stack solution for end customers as I'm creating AI agents to help you manage your AI agent infrastructure company. And it was like, well, what about, I think we need more actual end state agent companies that are selling to everyday consumers. Everyone talks about selling shovels during

a gold rush. No one talks about selling just the wood shaft that goes into the shovel. I don't even sell the shovel. I'm a particular slice of the supply chain in the shovel supply chain. I'm so deep in the shovel supply chain. I sell the screwdriver that makes the screws that go that assemble the shovel. That's my

business. I'm seven layers of abstraction away from the gold. I sell the shovel making machine. Yes, the shovel making machine. That's where you want to be. I wonder I wonder if anybody's building a rapper company to help people

wrap present. I'm assuming that all the different LMs can do this pretty well. You take a picture of an item. They can... But they do that. That's sort of like your Rubik's Cube benchmark. Because it requires shape rotation, which the models have been notoriously bad at.

I wonder, can they actually give you instructions on an arbitrary size present the best way to wrap the present? That would be an excellent demo. We did a snap demo today. I was wearing the specs for... We're proud to have Evanan. Yes. And I asked my specs.

said, can you count the presents under the Christmas tree and nailed it. Yes, fantastic. These are the important problems. I think it's about time. Yes, let's bring in Evan from Snapchat. Welcome to the stream. We're going to walk in. Let me tell you about fall, a genera media platform for developers,

develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Evan, great to see you. No way. Go for the tree? Thank you. Thank you. Great to have you in the table. Yeah.

Put this there. Please have a seat there. And shoot it up. Look at this. You look fantastic. My wife told me to wear a suit. It was like it's part of the... It is, it is.

You know, we put on these suits sort of as a joke. It was sort of a... I mean, you're one of the many tech people who maybe popularized the T-shirt. And I wore the T-shirt for my entire career in technology. And we were like, we want to stand out. Everyone else in tech podcasting wears the T-shirt. Everyone wears the T-shirt, whether you're CEO of a public company

or a podcaster, you wear a T-shirt. We're like, how do we stand out? Let's do the opposite. Let's wear the suit. I feel like it's like instant credibility too. Well, the funny thing, when some of our videos end up going viral in parts of the internet that aren't kind of familiar with what we're doing, there'll be comments of people like, look at these guys in suits.

They don't know. How are they talking about software? They don't know anything about tech. Not getting the bit. Anyways, super, super excited to have you on today. There's so much to talk about. And I don't even necessarily know where we should start. I mean, I'd love to start with a demo that we,

got just an hour or two ago, specs. How are you thinking about hardware these days? What's the state of the organization? How much of your time are you spending on it? Because you have a monster business to manage. You have earnings calls. There's so much going on. How do you, how are you splitting your time? What does that team look like? What are your ambitions for hardware these days? Yeah. I mean, it's a really exciting moment for Snap because in 2026, we're releasing the first consumer version of our glasses. Obviously back, you know, maybe now more than 10 years ago, we released camera glasses, you know, and we kind of stepped our way into building out. What was the actual first release of that, public release?

Must it probably 2016, broadly to the public. Spectacles. Yeah. Weren't they yellow? The original, they had a little yellow accent. Yellow accent. So flagged the camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Back in the day, people were, you know, and I think this is still a concern, people were very, you know, worried about privacy. So big, you know, yellow ring around the camera on a light to let people know. There were a bunch of really cool, like, little touches. Like, I remember. the ability to film, it was basically a square sensor, so you could film horizontal or vertical. And just those little touches. I'm wondering, like, do you think those, like, small little winds are what help us break through to, you know, a world where everyone's daily driving,

some sort of augmented reality device? Is it a game of inches on the product feature side, or is it just like more deeper in the supply chain, once they're 50 bucks, everyone's going to be doing it? What's critical path to getting to bone-level prevalence in face wearables? Yeah, I think they're going to have to be major breakthroughs in terms of the utility people get out of the product. I think the biggest challenge, and we learned this very early on with camera glasses, it's just not that much better than taking a photo with your phone.

Maybe you're rock climbing, you're on a jet ski, you want to make a video hands-free. I think that's a totally reasonable use case, but that's not an everyday all the time use case. And so a lot of what we did, taking those early learnings, we sort of proved out people were willing to wear a camera, they were willing to wear glasses that had a computer inside, but then we just shifted our focus entirely to the platform

and to driving more utility. So I think the latest version we put out in 2024 that you got to try for developers, which is very focused on all those platform components. So the developers could build all sorts of amazing. Now developers have built hundreds of these lenses. You've probably got to try a couple of them. And so I think it's really about driving utility.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's always frustrating when you're in a technology. You're in like a technological platform shift, and I've seen this with virtual reality, where it's like so amazing. And then the demo is like, well, it's really good on a plane. And you're like, I'm just not on the plane that much. It's sort of the same thing where like if the demo is really good if you're watching a movie alone.

Yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, actually, I, I, I want to watch a movie with people, and so the theater does work or the TV works. I'm wondering about how much AI is an accelerant in delivering value in the wearables context. Because I imagine it's useful for developers to write software faster now, but also, do you think that that's going to be like a relevant precursor to, you know, mass adoption is the AI? I'll give you an example. So like the live translation functionality, and what's very cool about specs is like having the basically the heads-up display, like centered, so I can be talking to you and be getting live translation, which to me is like the kind of thing that feels very sci-fi, and to be able to get it in a demo today, that feels like the kind of thing that AI is a real accelerant for.

And you can imagine being in a situation where you actually have multiple, effectively, like, subtitling, happening all the time. But maybe on that note, I guess from my understanding, you guys are not saying we're going to build the hardware platform and we're going to build a foundation model lab. And maybe if you could talk more about that, because I think that's obviously quite a bit different than some other hardware players.

Yeah, so far we just haven't seen a need to build foundational models outside of this image and video and 3D areas where we think we can really differentiate. and where there aren't as compelling open source solutions. So we also are very focused on being able to offer our experiences to our entire community, so nearly a billion people around the world. If you do that with back end inference, it's just too expensive to be able to offer it. So a lot of our innovation starting several years ago was to be able to run models on device

or with a hybrid solution where we can do some on the back end, some on the device. And so that's really where our foundational work has happened. I think as you look at the glasses, near term, I wouldn't, expect AI to be a major accelerant because, again, I don't think it's meaningfully better than your phone, right? And I think that's really the bar that we have to clear. These experiences have to be 10 times better than what's possible on your phone. And I do think over the long-term, though, AI will be very, very meaningful. And less because of the, you know, sort of chatbot-style use cases today, but more in terms of the way that, like, we change how we use computers. So if you

think about today, we're spending, what, on average, seven hours a day in front of screens, we're spending a huge amount of time operating computers to get work done. So, like, physically getting the work done ourselves. And I think what AI enables is a change in the way we relate to computers, where we're going to spend less time operating computers and more time supervising AI. And in that transition, the Glass's form factor, I think, is going to be really compelling because it essentially gets you away from this operational paradigm into the supervisory. Yeah, or another, I mean, potentially more near-term examples,

like you're working on your car and you have this, like, AI assistant, running permanently. And so you have full ability to use your hands and make changes. And it's kind of reasoning on the fly with you in a way that everyone's experience like watching a YouTube video and like pausing it and trying to do something and then playing it again. And I feel like, I feel like there are some very near term. How is that shift like manifesting itself in your daily life as a CEO? Like I found that since the dawn of Chatchip-T, there's been this like urge for folks to like send chat GPT written stuff to me and I've always said like just send me the prompt and I can kind of rework it in my brag like just send me the bullet points I don't need

to turn into a paragraph but I'm wondering if if you can give me some color on how you're seeing like AI change your your workflow or the folks that you work with on a daily basis I think it's a really great thought partner like I love to test ideas or try ideas or like I love to run simulated focus groups with AI which is really fun like what do you think different types of people will say or respond to, you know, in terms of like a product or idea that we're working on. So I love it as a, you know, of course, for all the visual and, you know, the visual stuff, video generation, I can test out ideas really, really quickly. I haven't actually found it yet to be particularly creative, but as a creative thought partner,

it's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about the instantiation of AI features within the core SNAP product? It feels like there's an immense amount of energy all over AI, like super intelligent, it's going to do everything, it's going to make the full video, it's going to make the video and the audio, and then when I see, it's like, yeah, you get like one or two viral videos out of one of those generators, but the much cooler thing is, I think, when there's AI riding alongside the rest of the creative suite, how are you thinking about

setting up creators for unique experiences that are like AI enabled, but there's still a lot of that creativity that's coming from them? Yeah, I mean, I think AI has been a core of the Snapchat experience for such a long time, but we've never described it as that. Yeah, slam. Like the original, like, actual location mapping, the AR stuff. And even all the transformations that are happening in our camera, right? A lot of the real-time on-device, you know, general transformations and these sorts of things. People just laugh and have fun with their friends doing it.

They're not thinking like, oh, this is some, you know, AI. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when did, face tracking has been in there for so long. And that's always been AI, I'm sure. Yeah, and I think there is a lot of opportunity to, you know, rethink the way that people build lenses. So that's been really, really powerful. You know, in the past, you know, developer, it would take a really, really long time. You had to build the 3D assets yourself. I think there's a huge democratization that's happening right now because anyone, you know,

we have a tool called Easy Lens. You can, with a prompt, build all sorts of amazing experiences in AR. Yeah. What is the like the economic flywheel there? How do you think about allowing folks to monetize that, build businesses, like come, like what is your current mental model for the, for the economy that's occurring on the platform. Well, one of the things we've thought a lot about is that there are a ton of models that are being created, but very few people actually have customers. We have a ton of customers, and so what we've done is created a service called Lens Plus. So if you're a developer, you can publish your lens to Lens Plus.

That means it's behind our paywall. People get free generations. They can use some lenses for free for a certain amount of time. And then they convert to paying customers, and we revenue share with those developers. So I think interestingly, Snapchat's become a bit of a, front door, right, for folks who want to deploy their models or deploy a specific lens or, you know, sometimes people are even building more advanced game experiences inside of Snapchat. And with Lens Plus, they get all that monetization for free. Essentially, we do that one for them.

Yeah. How do you process like the whole, like the metaverse boom and, you know, bust and maybe it's going to boom again? Just this idea of like just adding more and more functionality until you're effectively in like a game world unlimited content. Do you, do you, do you, do you, think that, like, is the primary driver of giving people the ability to make games just better AI tools? Are there other things that you are actually thinking about integrating there? Or do you think that, like, just partnering with all the models will eventually give people the ability to build whole game experiences? Well, it's interesting. The reason why we love games, actually the same reasons why we hate VR,

right? Which is games actually bring people together in really interesting ways. And we see that on Snapchat all the time, right? It can be a conversation starter or a way for, you know, away for two friends. You know, I play put putt put with my wife on Snapchat, right? And we just send them back and forth. That's fun, right?

It's a way to connect. And so I think for us games on Snapchat are really about, you know, that like spark of connection between people. We've invested zero dollars into VR, right? Because we essentially think that it takes people out of the real world and away from the places, the people, you know, everything that they love. And so our view is that,

VR has a very, very limited and low-use future because people love the real world. And so our bet, you know, for the last 11 years, has been exclusively on augmented reality on, you know, in trying to enhance the human experience rather than replace it with VR. Yeah, is there any, is there anywhere where you think VR does make sense? Like, are there specific, like, B-to-B use cases or like some sort of, like, I don't know, like, maybe the enterprise is where all the stuff like goes to die, but I'm wondering if there's any, if there's any place. But I guess the question is like, I think people assume that VR eventually will be good enough

that a huge swath of the planet will be engaging in it a lot. Like at least that, at least like that, my personal theory and maybe you believe differently, it sounds like you're even okay with a scenario where even if it does work, you're like other people can kind of play in that and we're happy to kind of exist in this hybrid world. Yeah, just philosophically, like that's not a world that we want to. support in any way, shape or form. I think what's really important is actually trying to create products that foster that human connection, right, and in doing so in person. I think we're in a

moment where people are really valuing that, right, and they want more of that, and they're thinking about how to get more. And I think AR is coming about at a really important time when people are saying, actually, I'm spending a lot of time in front of a screen. I'd like to spend more time together with my friends. I'd love to do that in a way that's more fun or entertaining. Our kids, even, you know, our kids are at least three of them are still pretty little. But like when I see them playing around with those specs, even though they're clunky and heavy or whatever, they're outside running around playing together. And you're like, that's a different vision for computing. Yeah, you mean, you should, you should have seen us doing the demo this morning. I was

running last drawing. I was playing this drawing game that you guys have. I was drawing, and the ability to have this like shared space and have like permanence in the kind of, in the, in the different like visuals that you're creating on, on a scene was, uh, is just really cool. AR specifically means pass-through, or if I'm doing reprojection, I have cameras on the outside of a VR headset, and I'm reprojecting that, and it's indistinguishable for the user, does that count in your mind? Is it a meaningful distinction?

In our mind, it doesn't count. So you're describing pass-through on VR, where, you know, the cameras in very high-fidelity trying to... There was just this quote from Palmer Lucky where he was saying, like, why would you ever try and, like, recycle photons? Just create new photons, take a video of... the outside world, reproject it inside. And the benefit of that is that if you're in a very bright world or you're in a bright space, you can dim that and put something brighter on top

of it. And there's certain, like the additive nature of physics around light make it so that there, it does seem like there's limitations to pass through augmented reality, even though the latency is zero and it's the real world. And there is something that's better. I just know that you might be grappling with it. Yeah, we've definitely seen some real challenges there. So the big difference, obviously, is between pass-through and then see-through, see-through glasses that we're working on. You know, I think Snapchat's actually a really good example of pass-through.

So it's a screen, right? And we do have, I think, the best pass-through AR technology in the world, right? So we are able to real-time render out those experiences through the phone. I think the question is, do people really want to wear a screen on their face in front of their eyes? And then, you know, if you think about the compute that's necessary to reproject the world, right, and the power required to, you know, power all of those pixels, right? And it has to be, like, real time. And it's got to be real time.

You can't have, like, a half second of lag. Otherwise, you're just stumbling around. Exactly. So when you put that all together, you're just stuck in headset lines. And I think it's just very clear that, like, people don't want to wear giant headsets all day long. I think that's, that's, yeah. In terms of stuff that they do want to wear, obviously, like, everyone wants something light, but in a world where field of view is somewhat restricted in the short term,

I'm sure it'll get better, wider and wider. What's the trade-off between center-of-view versus, like, call-of-duty mini-map, like locked in the corner? Well, I think what's really important is that you're actually able to control where objects are showing up in the world around you. So the big problem with the sort of heads-up display style products, I mean, I don't love that if you're looking at the screen, you're looking at somebody's crotch, too. It doesn't make any sense. But the exciting thing about specs, and as it sounds like you saw earlier today, is you can decide where to place things in the world where you want to draw. And I think that's a very big difference from these heads-up display products. That makes sense.

How do you think about, like, when the iPhone came out, there was sort of, I mean, it was a little bit expensive. We were talking about the $700 bucks. You could compare it to the price of a phone. You could compare it to the price of an iPod. you could, Steve Jobs called it internet communicator, right? So you can kind of bundle these few different products together. You're like, well, I'm getting $700 worth of value or later $400 worth of value. Do you think that there's an important sort of anchoring point for augmented reality glasses

where consumers need to underrate it against an external monitor for their computer or a TV at home? Is there some sort of like economic tradeoff point where, hey, I'm going to college, and instead of getting a 42-inch TV and an external, you know, Apple display for my MacBook that I'm going to plug in, I'm just going to go with augmented reality glasses because it just makes more sense economically. Is that an important point? I think that's one way to think about it, for sure. And, you know, the iPhone, when you add in the carrier subscription, was way more than that. So I think, you know, they were able to sort of have a $700 sticker price, but then, you know, I think some of the initial plans were like $50 a month and that kind of

thing, maybe two or three years, I'm not sure. You know, that's, that's a, that's a, that was a really meaningful outlay for that, for that product. To me, I think, you know, the iPhone is maybe not the best reference point here. I think this feels to me a lot more like the Macintosh or like early computers. With the smartphone, you know, Steve essentially said, hey, everyone else is doing the phone wrong, right? You had a BlackBerry already or you had a flip phone or this kind of thing. And Steve was like, hey, you all are doing it wrong. this is like what a phone should look like. And I think glasses are a little bit different

because, you know, we have some similarities in the sense that like on one hand you have these VR headsets, right, that are very capable but that are essentially unwearable. And then you have the, you know, really lightweight glasses that are very wearable but do nothing. And, you know, our vision with specs

is to have a very lightweight pair of glasses that's incredibly capable, right? So VR sort of, you know, level of immersion and capability, but in a see-through lightweight pair of glasses. I think this is a little bit more of a Macintosh style moment where it's a new way to look at computing rather than a better version of something people are already familiar with. And that's a bigger challenge. So I do think to your point, anchoring to, you know, hey, a giant flat screen display costs $2,500, costs $2,500, or a laptop costs, you know, $1,500 or whatever it is, is an interesting way to think about it. But I think actually describing the utility of the product will be the biggest challenge.

Interesting. Yeah, there's something to be said for if you just create a product that is incredibly fun and entertaining, like consumers will find. They're not saying, like, oh, I'm not going to get the laptop anymore because I can type on this thing. It's like, I'm going to, I have a device that is creating value in my life purely through fun and function, and it doesn't need to, like, replace anything. Who do you think the earliest adopters will be?

Do you think young people will drive the ultimate breakthrough adoption of augmented reality? I think the earliest adopters will be our developer community. So we already have hundreds of thousands of developers who are building lenses for our platform. There are already tons of developers using specs today, building all of these sorts of experiences. And so our strategy is actually to start with that core of folks who are super passionate about this product. And I think they'll be able to tell stories about all the amazing things that they're building. which can then help us transition to more like mass market style adoption. So when a developer is building a lens, you can pop these on in Stargays

or hey, you can pop these on and play lawn games with your kids. Or hey, pop them on and watch streaming video on a giant screen while you're playing or whatever you want to do without having to shut out the world. I think those sorts of stories are really important. Yeah, I feel like Snap has been able to be remarkably resilient with young people in a way that a lot of other platforms, they just kind of like, they get their initial bucket of users, then they grow with them forever, and then they're monetizing when they get older.

Is that, do you think that there's some sort of benefit of having a young cohort that potentially could drive just the product being seen as cool? You know, I joke around with my wife all the time. You know, it's cool to be uncool. Like, we're not aiming for cool. We're really aiming for value, right? And I think ultimately, like, that value cuts across all sorts of demographics. So I actually think...

Yeah, look at AirPods, I think are a perfect example of this. They were mocked early on. It was like, oh, look at this guy with his little earbuds in. What a bozo. And then all of a sudden it was like $20 billion a year revenue line. And it just becomes totally normalized. And it was just because the function was there. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think being unapologetic about the values is so important. And so that's why, again, starting with our community that loves it, believes in it, you know, and has wanted a product like this now for decades. I mean, some of the folks on our team have been working on glasses-based augmented reality for 25 years. We've only been working on it for 11 years. So the community of people who have wanted this product for a super long time are going to be the most excited about it. And that's really who we're speaking to.

How do you and the team think about timing out these bets? Because obviously you've been at it for 11 years. And to me, it seems from the outside that it's like trying to pull the future into the present, but at the same time being like patient and not betting. the company on like, hey, we need to make, you know, 10x of progress in the next 12 months, otherwise we're killing this product. Like it feels like more, quite a bit more like steady and being open to, again, like not being, being impatient, but patient at the same time. Is that accurate? I really love that question because I think that is exactly what has killed a lot of

glasses efforts to date. Right. Like we're going to raise $200 million, spend it all in two years. And then you're sitting there and being like, okay, we made progress, but it's not commercial. It feels like we're in an age of research for vision broadly, VR, AR, the entire category. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of experiments that need to be run, and there's no guarantee that it's going to be, oh, next year is the year or five years. We don't know. This is one of the reasons why we thought it was so interesting to play in this space, because we have this huge advantage of being able to invest consistently over the long term, right? And that is a unique advantage, especially when we're talking about this amount of capital, right? We've invested more than $3 billion in glasses over 11 years, and we've been able to do that very, very consistently.

And so at the same time, we've seen companies both large and small, you know, start a glass initiative, shut it down, start a new one, fire the team, hire a new team. And just the whole time we have built a team of incredibly talented folks with a very, very singular and focused vision. And we've done that over the last. Is that part of the pitch? I mean, over the summer, we saw insane talent wars. Snap is in a unique position, like somewhat isolated down here in Southern California, which I think helps. But is part of your pitch to talent, like, hey, this is not a program that we just started up

and we're going to work on for three years? And then the budget might get cut by XYZ. Is like durability and longevity a part of your pitch? I think that's definitely a part of it. but the most talented folks, like they want to create the future, not copy the future, right? And I think, you know, we have a reputation now for leading in terms of innovation in the space. And, you know, the folks who are really deeply in this space and who are experts in this space know that what we're doing is leading. Right.

I mean, what you experience with specs today, there's no other product that you can, that a developer can just sign up for today and have that type of experience doesn't exist. So I think folks who are really deep in this space understand our leadership here, and that's really hell. Yeah, the pure depth of different experiences in the product, too. I mean, we only had, you know, 20 minutes or so, but there were, like, so many different pages that we didn't even get to in experiences, which was very cool. We got to talk about copying because, I mean, we didn't invent this. We didn't invent the interview.

But we've had a lot of success with it this year. You've clearly innovated. You've been part of this, thank you. Yeah, exactly. There's, like, a little bit of innovation here. And then there's been a lot of copying, and it's driven, us various levels of insane. It drives me more insane than it drives me.

But at the same time, like, there's no law that someone's breaking if they want to just, like, you know, do exactly what we do. That's the way it works. So how do you stay sane when people are copying what you're doing? Yeah, well, you know, in the early days, we had no choice but to just innovate as quickly as humanly possible because we were late to the social space, right?

And Snapchat is not social, We literally built the business as a response to social media. So Facebook came first and Instagram came first and Twitter came first and we were using all these products and we were like, these are not very fun, right? Like this is not actually a great way to communicate with your friends. It's awesome if you're into like status and building your profile and collecting followers. It's not a great way to just have fun with your friends. And so we started building Snapchat and I think there was just really a gravitation towards

a service that is actually fun to use with your real friends. But as part of that, because we're competing with such a giant companies, we just had to innovate as fast as we possibly could in a category that is essentially owned by other players, essentially owned by meta. And I think part of that is understanding that one of the most important things you can do in that position is go and build a new category that's outside of the one that you're currently in. And that's what we identified with glasses 11 years ago, that like we wanted to help power this massive transformation in the way that people use computers. and that if we invested over a very long period of time in very, very difficult things and things that are incredibly challenging technically and then built a platform, as you saw with lenses, all those different lens experiences, that those sorts of things are incredibly difficult to replicate.

And so while I think, you know, app features are easy to replicate, the work that we've been doing over the last 11 years and where we're going with glasses is incredible. The example, yeah, the example for us is like people see the overlay, so they'll copy the overlay and not realize that that's not what, you know, overlays have existed for decades, right? So, like, you, I find oftentimes when people copy, they don't actually fully understand what they're copying. So they take an element out of it, not realizing that it's not necessarily that element that makes the other platform successful. How have you thought about partnering with different AI companies and labs? you recently announced a perplexity, partnership, which I thought people were excited about.

And then I feel like all this year people have been, as some of the labs have added hundreds of billions of dollars of value, there's been speculation on, saw people speculating on, you know, you could imagine Sam Altman trying to buy Snapchat because he sees your user base. And I can see a lot of reasons why there's no price that would make that appease. but how have you thought about partnerships with different AI providers broadly? Yeah, well, I think one of the things that's been really interesting, obviously Snapchat is so focused on messaging, and right now the primary way people are interacting with AI is messaging. So we saw a huge opportunity to help bring, you know, more of these AI services into Snapchat, into our messaging platform. Because, you know, as I mentioned, whether it's the foundation companies or tons of businesses have built agents now have built chatbots,

but they don't have any distribution for them. And earlier this year, we launched sponsored snaps, which is a killer ad product for us. It shows up in the chat inbox, highly effective. But the vision is to transition the sponsored snap from being something that you just view to now something you can interact with and chat with. And so part of that was opening up the platform, starting with perplexity, with an exclusive deal with them. But then over time, adding more businesses who are bringing their chat bots and their services

to Snapchat. Can you give me a little bit more of an example of that? Like if I'm Diet Coke and I want to advertise their sponsor snap, but then you can chat with it. And so is it more like Q&A on an FAQ? You could ask questions about the product or is there something more gamified than that? Yeah, if you think about someone like Walmart, they've spent a lot of time building a service called Sparky, right,

that you can use to learn about products or buy products. So what they could do is send you an offer directly to your inbox, ideally highly relevant to something you've already been looking for at Walmart or based on how you've been engaging with Walmart. And then you can follow up, have a conversation, you know, potentially even convert in the chat. Oh, and that's like uniquely good in a chat app, like because you're in, you're used to that functionality, I suppose, as opposed to just kicking you out to some web page where the UI is a little bit more foreign or like abstract to you. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Snapchat's one of the largest message, maybe after I messaged, probably the largest messenger, certainly bigger than WhatsApp, for example, in the United States.

So I think, you know, in terms of people who are familiar with, you know, our messaging interface, that's where they go to have their conversations, being able to have those conversations. being able to have those conversations, not just with your best friend, but also with, you know, agents like Sparky. I think is an interesting opportunity. That's very cool. There's a whole bunch of news. Open AI today shortened their vesting period. How do you think about aligning talent, aligning incentives for talent? You've, you know, this transition now, your public company, how do you think about whether or not a vesting cliff makes sense?

We were going back and forth on it. I was saying that I'm so used to a one-year cliff growing up. Coming from the private market. private markets. At the same time, there's a lot of people that show up, and on day one, they're creating a lot of value. So how have you thought about incentivizing employees with stock? Our perspective on this has really evolved over the years, and we learned a ton. Actually, in the early days, we did something really different. We had a 10, 20, 30, 40, 40, so you would only vest 10% of your grant the first year, 20%, the second, 30%, 40%. And the idea, and we were in

LA at the time, the idea was to really make sure if you were joining SNAP, that you were joining it because you loved it, you wanted to be there for the long term. It was very popular at the time. I think it's still very popular in the valley to kind of hop, you know, spend one year at a company. Yeah, why do four years when you can build a basket of... Exactly, yeah. And I think, you know, I think that can be really,

that can put a lot of pressure on the culture, especially in a startup, where you really, you know, I think it's so important that the team is all in on what you're building. But, you know, I think over the time, our view has just been, like, to take as much friction out of the compensation conversation, you know, as possible. I think, like, a lot of this stuff is really, frankly, like, irrelevant, right? Like, what really matters, obviously, if you look at retention and building a team, it's your

leader, right? The people that you're working with, obviously what you're working on, the culture, you know, and that long-term orientation. So I think a lot of this compensation stuff is sort of like details and the less complicated it is and the less time you spend talking about or thinking about it, the better. Yeah, what about other just lessons from becoming a public company? we like to joke with Eric Glyman at Ramp one of our buddies that he's maybe about to go out.

What is he preparing to do? What are your recommendations for CEOs that you counsel about the process and the transition that the company goes through in the IPO process, just culturally? I mean, the most substantive change is that people's compensation changes on like a minute-by-minute basis.

Right? And that can be very distracting for people, especially in the early days. And when companies are newly public, tends to be a lot of volatility, right? And so I think it's just really important, again, to create a company culture that's not focused on that. Yeah.

Especially if you want to build something meaningful over the long term. I remember hearing a story about Enron putting the stock price in the elevator. So like the exact opposite of what you said. Like literally orient the entire company culture around the stock price. So you come in, stock prices up, everyone's having a good day. Stock price is down. How did that work out for that? I don't think it worked out well.

I don't think what about setting, what about setting, you seem like, you know, through this conversation, you seem like very clear on your values, willing to say like, yeah, we don't want to do VR specifically. There might be money to be made there, but we wouldn't even do it on a principles basis. How do you think about kind of setting vision internally with the team and externally with shareholders? There's been so many companies this year that specifically in AI that kind of like to talk about a vision around, let's say, like, curing cancer. then you look at what they're actually doing in practice, and there's not always incredible,

there can be like kind of a disconnect between those two things. And I feel like that, that, you know, it's confusing for people that are just users, spectators, shareholders, and then team as well. So how do you find that kind of alignment in vision? What a great question. So I think for us, like one of the things we always remind our team is that as we look at leadership at SNAP,

you know, a lot of people, think about leadership in this traditional hierarchy, where you have leaders and then the team. We have at SNAP inverted that, right? So if you're a leader at SNAP, you're at the bottom of the pyramid and an upside down pyramid, right? And then you have the team that you're responsible for. And then you have our community more broadly, right? And that includes our partners. And so that's also how we think a lot about communication. So when we're communicating to the world, when we're communicating to investors, we always try to remind our team that like our investors are a subset of our community. Right. And so it's really, really important that we're we're

we speak in language that people actually understand, right? Instead of talking about, you know, we can talk all day in fancy AI terms, right? But that doesn't really matter when it comes to communicating to your customer and the customer experience that they're having. And in fact, sometimes it can be more confusing. So I think as long as we put everything through that lens of putting our community first and foremost, and then communicating, you know, making sure that we're always talking to our community first, even if it's some investor update or, you know, something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Do you have any book recommendations? Did you read any good books this year? Oh, my gosh. What's... Christmas gifts for people.

What's there... I know it's a really wild question to just throw out at you. What's highly relevant, I think, for this form, there's a great book that I read on... I'll have to find the name for you. But it's something about like, you know, it's very academic,

but it's sort of like the economic impacts of technological disruption. Sure. And it really... Maybe Carlo de Perez, maybe. Yeah, like textbook style. Okay. But what's great is that it just shows, like, you know, from the railroads to semiconductors,

et cetera, like the patterns that emerge through these sorts of large technological changes. And I think it's so important because I think we just need to be reminding folks that, like, these sorts of changes have happened before. There's actually quite a consistent rhyme and reason to what happens. And that means that all of us should be able to kind of think ahead and manage ahead, you know, through some of the consequences of, I think, what's going to happen through, you know, what will be quite a disruptive period of time. Do you think it's underrated that AI can potentially really help with moderation on big platforms,

like scale platforms where for the first time you might be able to effectively, like, review every message that's going everywhere? Or is that a negative thing? Is that a positive thing? We were just talking to Dave Bazuki at Roblox, and obviously the potential of like screening every message seems like a really great opportunity for him? And I'm just wondering if, like, there's so many, like, opportunities, but also, like, risks with this stuff. Like, how have you processed this idea of, like, AI as a moderation tool,

sort of under the hood? So, so first of all, I do think AI moderation is already, like, very widespread. Sure. Like, I think that's already best practice. I think virtually everyone's already doing that. Yeah. At least, obviously, we've embraced that at SNAP. I think it's very important. And I also think it's a really powerful tool, again, for customers, if they want to fact-check something, even that their friend told them, right? The ability to fact-check using AI today is pretty compelling compared to what it was in the past. So when people are talking about concerns about misinformation and this sort of thing, I think AI is a pretty powerful, like, counterbalance to that. What I'm more interested in, though, is the use of sequence models to find bad actors and to stop them before something bad happens. So that, to me, is what I think the frontier of, like, Internet safety is, you know,

currently, it's certainly an area of research for us and something that we're really excited about because we have a lot of information about what bad actors try to do on our platform. We catch a lot of them, right? But with almost a billion people, it's hard to catch all of them, but we're trying. But what's really interesting is, you know, we can train sequence models based on those patterns. What sequence of events are bad actors engaging in? How are they using the platform so that we can predict, you know, when someone is about to do something that is against our terms? And so to me, I think that's a lot of like the paradigm that we're going to see in internet safety

over the next couple years. I think right now there's a big focus on features and trying to tease apart what sort of different features, different platforms have. I think there's just going to be a massive shift to being able to identify bad actors, even before bad things happen using tools like sequence models. Yeah, yeah. Are you seeing

like the level of like bot activity or at least people trying stuff increasing? We've been talking to a lot of like cybersecurity folks and it feels like all the bad guys on the internet, all the black hat hackers have more tools, but then also the white hat hackers have more tools. And so it's sort of like a cold war. But I'm wondering if like do you feel like you're spending more time for just just more headaches focused on,

you know, defending against like endless bot armies? Or has that just been like a drone throughout the entire process or the entire career? I think for us like if you look at cybersecurity, right, Some of the, like, most significant threats are actually, you know, are human vulnerabilities. Sure. And I think that's where AI actually is almost the most dangerous. Because today, right, our team members can get phone calls from Evan. Yep. Hey, I really need your help.

I got to investigate this thing. Hey, I need $200. Wire me $200. Or buy some gift cards really quickly for this creator event we're doing, right? Like, that's, like, and I think, like, the ability for bad actors to use AI to exploit our human vulnerability is something that we really worry about and think a lot. Yeah, I mean, there were so many times when, like, the phishing email was clockable just by bad grammar or, you know, spelling mistakes. And it was like, that was enough of a tell. And, like, one pass through any LLM and you get rid of all of those.

I think another thing that's going to become increasingly important, you know, as we look at cybersecurity, is the, interconnectedness of all these services, right? Like a lot of companies today, especially young companies who aren't investing a ton in cybersecurity, are using a huge number of vendors. And what's really interesting is, you know, today, compromising a vendor and then using that vendor to compromise the, you know, core business. That's the sort of stuff that's really concerning, especially with fishing, right? So we saw an interesting one recently where one of our vendors was compromised. I received an email that looked like it was from the vendor, right? but it was actually a fishing email.

And it's, again, very hard to tease apart. So I think the interconnectedness in terms of cybersecurity is something that folks just don't talk about as much as maybe we need to. We joked about some news organization acquiring paperless posts and then just understanding where all the different people going to the fence.

I do have one kind of more broad question, and then I know you got a jump, but Snapchat I think of as like country scale or it's the size of a nation state. You're basically the governor of a, basically the governor of a state or a country. And California specifically has gone through a really wild year. You grew up in the, in the palisades. I'm wondering if you were, like, what would you do? Like, how do you kind of, like, how do you feel California is today as a state,

even Southern California more specifically. I think, you know, we, I live in Malibu, and John lives in Pasadena. We weren't affected by the fires, but there was this, like, extreme frustration during that moment because it felt like in many ways the government had kind of failed the citizens. I'm curious if there's anything that, like how you're thinking about the future of the state and how we can make positive change. Well, we could spend another hour on this. So I love California so much.

obviously I was born and raised here. I think it's an incredible state, and it's so important to the future of U.S. competitiveness, right? So I think people talk a lot about the competition between U.S. and China. I don't think people talk enough about the competition between China and California, right? Which is a really, really interesting relationship because both China and California are deeply interconnected at the same time that we're competing a ton. So I think California is just unbelievably important to the future trajectory of the United States. I think if you look at California today, I mean, you know, you obviously know all the stats, but like highest unemployment rate,

highest poverty rate, most homelessness. Housing crisis. Massive housing crisis. The people moving saying, I'm moving to Austin for quality of life. I love Texas. Texas is amazing. But it can be like, well, it can be like, I mean, it's very cold in the winter. It's very hot in the summer. If you're moving somewhere like that for quality of life, it just means that housing is,

I mean, housing affordability is like top of mind for a huge percentage of people. And of course here that's, you know, most, elevated. Yeah, I think the affordability crisis here is incredibly concerning. I think one of the things, if we look historically at, you know, the way that our government has operated, we kind of, we tend to fall in this pattern. It seems like, of, you know, very heavily regulating our industries, which, you know, by the way, to some degree is important. One of the reasons why we love California, it's beautiful, right? It's clean, all these sorts of things we really love about California. but at the same time we also then layer a ton of subsidy on top of that.

So you dramatically restrict supply with very, very heavy regulation. And then, you know, we've got a very large economy. We've got one of the highest tax rates here in California. We put a ton of subsidy into that economy after dramatically restricting supply. And as a result, in all these areas, you know, especially things like housing, I think you have massive increases in pricing. And I am optimistic in the sense that I think the legislature this year is really starting to pay attention to it, right? There's some progress on SQL Forum, for example,

there's more attention being paid to, you know, how expensive it is to building affordable housing. When the government pays for affordable housing, it's about 30 or 40 percent more expensive than just market rate affordable housing. And so I think, you know, people are starting to pay attention to it. But another thing that's fascinating is I'm just not sure Californians are aware of how problematic things are right now, especially because our politics are so partisan. that I think if you look at the California voter base, they're saying, oh, well, at least it doesn't look like the federal government, so we're doing better here than they're doing in D.C., so I'm okay with that.

So I think to me part of the journey over the next couple years is Californians really waking up to the fact that we can do a lot better here in our state, and in fact we've got to do a lot better if the U.S. wants to continue to compete. Yeah, and I went growing up in the Bay Area and living in Southern California, in my adult life, I went through a brief moment during 2020 where I started looking on Zillow outside of the state because it was like they shut down the beach. I was like, I'm living like half a mile from the beach and I can't go there. And I made that very specific decision. I was like, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to leave this. This place is too beautiful. I've had family roots here

going back to the early 1900s. We need to stay and people need to focus on making it better. It's the greatest place on earth that I've been to. And it's worth, it's worth continuing to invest in and steward. And I felt like the fires were so symbolic too with the palisades of like, you know, everything burning to the ground except Rick Caruso, the guy we couldn't elect as mayor, uh, even though I believe, you know, again, I believe he genuinely loves the city and wants to see it shine. So anyways, we'll have you. We should. Because we could talk about politics for the rest of the show. What is in here?

We don't talk about, we don't talk about, oh, is this an ornament for the tree? No way. This is incredible. Ooh, I think this is going to be a new, new tradition. I like this. Yeah, we, we, oh, this is amazing.

There we go. Wow, perfect. Thank you. This is remarkable. Great 225 edition. Would you mind signing this? Oh, wow. We love collecting autographs.

We love, we're building a a museum of business. And then I think you got a chance to hang out in the front. We've got to put that up at the very top. For sure. For sure. Thank you so much. Fantastic.

We'll let that drive. That looks fantastic. Yeah. Congratulations. Thanks so much for having it. One, almost one billion global Snapchaters. Can we have you hit the gong to sell?

You got to hit the gong. If you come to the, if you come to the Ultradome, please pick up this mallet here. Hit it as hard as you want. As long as you want. I love to have you labeled it too. That's interesting.

That's our interview. Fantastic. Thanks for having. I love to have you back on. I really love you back on. I really love the ornaments. I didn't even realize that that would be something that could happen given that we have a tree.

Like this is going to be a thing now. We're going to grow an ornament collection. As merch. It's amazing. Incredible. I love it. Well, that was a fantastic thing. conversation. Thank you for everyone for listening. And let me tell you about Vanta,

automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There is some Oracle news. What else is going on? I've just pulled up this hilarious video of Oracle pivoting to AI. I don't know if we should flip back to this. We have RJ from Rivian coming on just a bit. Play this video. while we wait for RJ to join. This is perfectly on brand for us. I put this in there for you, John. So the news here is that Oracle bondholders now sit on 9% of unrealized losses on 18 billion of debt issue.

Don't focus on that, John. Focus on this video. Matt Turk says Oracle after pivoted after pivoting to AI. 80 years young. This guy looks great. This makes me want to own the stock. This really does feel like this really does feel like the current state of Oracle. I mean, Larry Ellison looks fantastic.

He's been on a tear. And, you know, like... This is, this is your future, John. After we're going to, we'll probably retire somewhere around 70. So we got a good run ahead of us still. But then you're going to go and go back and hire an elite team and really make a run at the Arnold Classic in the vintage division. Yeah. Well, let's head over to Keller Clifton.

Andrew Cote. Keller says next gen infra. And the drone tower is really remarkable. Like, what is that? Four, eight, 12 drones in one tower, all charging. These are, of course, the zipline drones that deliver everything from Chipotle burritos to,

I think blood transfusions and all sorts of stuff, saving lives. And Andrew Cote says, we are not mentally prepared for just how cheap everything is about to become as robotics of all kinds explode into the market. And Elon chimed in. He says, harnessing even a millionth of the Sun's energy would make every human a billionaire in purchasing power.

Wow. I'm not sure Dead Mouse concerts are going to get any cheaper, given that some of these robotics companies are hiring in order for their holiday. But Keller is locked in. Keller is locked in. He's not hiring Dead Mouse. Yeah, maybe we should see. I mean, we don't know that he didn't. It's possible he didn't. It's possible. I mean, I don't feel anything possible. Anyway, fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries for every channel.

Joe Longsale. Older friend I admire. I'm having a real, I'm having real liquidity trouble. Me. You own over 45 million of shares in a private company. X. I started you back to us early. 10 million off? Not sure. I don't like to sell stuff. Me. Okay, FYI, it's QSBS. I'll think about it. Yeah. In the chat, Ryan asks, are we going to cover Roomba? I'm, uh, do you, somewhere in the stack? Did you hear the news about Roomba? Finally, filed for bankruptcy. Very upsetting because of course they were going to sell to Amazon. Are Chinese companies are buying up the assets at auction? I'm sure. It does seem like they, they are, I don't know, is GoPro in the same, in the same bucket? I don't know, how is GoPro doing these days?

But yeah, Rumba, so GoPro is down to 150 million market cap. Up, of course, it was in the billions at one point. And Rumba, you know, you just get really heavy competition from international players. It compounds and compounds and eventually. There's nothing to do. But ideally, hang out with the good folks over at Amazon. But that was, of course, blocked. And so they had to go their own way. And their own way led to Doom, unfortunately. But fortunately, we have an American company that's bringing it back.

This is not an intro to our way. This is introdomatic, the Rumba competitor or a new company that came on the show. And you have one at home. You have the phoenix rising from the ashes. Okay, you know, you want to know why. You have the reincarnation of the room. You want to know why I believe Maddoch is really going to go all the way. Why?

Is because my children, specifically my one-year-old, is constantly messing with it, and it still works. Really? That's impressive. My one-year-old is just constantly sitting on it, moving it, moving it, taking it apart, sure, putting it back together, and not in a, not, in a very, any type of more specific way, she's just kind of messing with it.

And it still works, it still runs every day. I don't, you know, some of these things, device like that you, you, the concern is always, okay, it works, but do I have to spend a bunch of time thinking about it and kind of like managing this new robot? Yep. And is it, and then at that point, should I just have a vacuum and just use that? Yep. This thing has just been running,

perpetually on a schedule reliably. I've had it running for at least six months now, and it's really fantastic. I have an idea. Okay, so you turn your kids loose on Julius. dat.ai. We see if that still works once your kids have gone crazy all over the AI data analyst that works for you.

Join millions who use Julius to connect their data ask questions and insight in seconds. If it holds up, you know, I think it's a good sign. I think it's built for... Gold Rock says I won Radio Shacks Innovation of the Month in like 2009 for making an Arduino Roomba. That is cool. Early.

Speaking of kids. I was hanging out with some mutual friends of my kids last night, some parents. And you know what they had in the driveway? Did you just call the parents of your kids mutual friends? Sorry. So my son's friends parents. What do you say? Play date.

I went on a play date. Okay? Shoot me. I went out at PlayDate and the parents of my kids, friends, yeah, the parents of my kids' friends, they had a Rivian R1S in the driveway. And they're very happy with it. And I'm very happy that we get to talk to RJ from Rivian here in the studio. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us today. It's great to have you. Yeah, nice to be on. Yeah. love to, I mean, first set the table on, you know, like how the year went, where the business is, and then, of course, I want to go into the new chip and just self-driving broadly.

But how are you describing the scale of Rivian at this point in time? Well, I mean, we've launched, as you just referenced, we launched a set of flagship products. We have an R1A, which is the best-selling premium SUV in the U.S. and then electric industry in the U.S. And then we have a truck, R1T, and then we make commercial vehicles. But we haven't launched our mass market product yet, which is coming in the form of what we call R2. R2. And so that will dramatically expand the scale of the business.

And I think a lot of the, in some ways, challenge we've had is we're investing to be a very large business. So we're investing in vertically integrated technology to enable us to be a multi-million vehicle of your business. And the technology investment has to happen before the products come. And so we have huge fixed costs to develop all this tech, whether it's, you referenced it already, whether it's in-house silicon or all of our compute platforms, our operating system, you know, of course, all the high voltage work. But that all comes together really nicely with the launch of R2, which is what really gives us this scale to support all this R&D. Let's start with R1T. Electric truck felt very contrary, and it feels still a little contrarian.

Truck buyers, you know, not to generalize, but it's a very much like, I like my truck, reliable with gas. I don't like this new thing. Did it seem like a risk to you at the time when you put, when you said, okay, we're going to do the truck first. We're going to do that so early. Yeah. Like, what gave you confidence that it would deliver and you could actually win that market

over? you mean the truck the truck market specifically is such a it's such a large market and it's and i think we often think of it as like one singular type of buyer which is like the person who's loading up about you know two thousand pounds of concrete in the back yep vast majority of trucks used in the united states are actually used more like cars so they're you know they're used as a daily driver. The bed is used more for lifestyle activities. So you put a dirt bike in the back or, you know, kids, toys in the back, that kind of thing. And so we said we're not as a company trying to address the contractor use case. So if you're, if you want to load concrete and some

blocks in the back of the truck, this is probably not the vehicle you want to do it. And it could do that. It's capable of it. But that's not the brand aspiration. And it was one of the reasons we also made it really clear that we had both the truck. And then this. sibling vehicle, the SUV, and there's so much shared content between the two. But the other thing we wanted to do is just to eliminate any questions of whether or not it was capable. You know, you'll laugh, but in 20, I guess 2019, I would get questions like, well, what if it gets wet? Can it drive through deep puddles? And like, so there's just like a very very low level of understanding, I'd say, generally around electric electrification, what that can do

in terms of off-road and capabilities. And so with R1, we made it really. capable. So it's, you know, it can go extreme rock crawling. You can go drive through three feet of water. It can, you know, it can accelerate faster than, you know, most hypercars. So our current quad does zero to 60 in like a half seconds. It's sort of. It's unnecessarily silly in terms of its capabilities. But it's a, it's a flagship product. So it's there to make a statement. It's there for for building the brand. Yeah. On on the SUV side, have you been surprised by how much runway you've had in that market for full-size SUVs? Because it feels like a lot of people went after trucks very quickly,

but the fast followers haven't really come after the R1S. And I mean, I grew up in a family with a Ford Explorer. And I've always been full-size SUV-Di-I. One of those things that in 20 years, people will look back at this window of time that Rivian had to just dominate that full-size SUV category and feel like this was the biggest possible blessing that you guys couldn't necessarily plan for, but it kind of worked out nicely. Yeah. I mean, to your point, I mean, in the space of electric vehicles priced over $70,000, these are all depending on how you draw the boundary. The way we look at it, we have about 35% market. share. And so it's the best-selling electric premium SUV in the United States by a significant

degree, you know, significantly outselling something like a Model X, which is also in that same category. But it, but interestingly, in the state of California, it's the best-selling premium SUV electric or non-electric. Oh, really? You know, if you, for those that are spending time in California, if you're driving around the Bay Area, you're driving around. So, yeah, they're just everywhere. So, you know, our hope is that with R2, it's a price point that starts at 45. it captures a lot of the magic and the essence that's in R1, but in a much lower price point. So if we can have even a fraction of the market share that we have with R1,

with R2, we'll be very, very, very happy. Where did the headlight design come from? When I first saw it, I was like, it looks like cartoon eyes. It was not for me. And now it's completely grown on me.

And it's just completely been like, oh, that's just like, it's become not only like I think of it as cool. I don't think of it as like cartoonier, childish, but also it's simultaneously become iconic because I see it from a mile away and I'm like, oh, that Rivian. And I feel like that's exactly how you wanted it to play out. But what was the thinking with that? Because it does feel bold and different. Yeah, definitely.

And, you know, getting to something that starts to feel iconic, it's always hard because you can't design something and it immediately becomes iconic. So I think it has to start with a really strong point of view and a strong conviction. around a certain direction. So in the case of the front end, I mean, no, in 2018, no one knew what a Rivian looked like. We didn't know what a Rivian looked like. So we were figuring out. So there's lots of different faces of the vehicle.

And one of the things we arrived at was the realization we wanted it to look technically capable, but also friendly. And so often if you go friendly, it starts to look like nice but not tough. And so we wanted like nice but still tough. So it was a really hard balance. The original Waymo's from Google were like a little bit too nice. And they're like these goofy things and then they finally, yeah. But yeah, continue.

So it was like, it was a lot of iteration. And one of the, I grew up a car enthusiast. And so I've always been drawn to cars that now we would consider be iconic. But if you look at the history of those cars, often in the beginning, they're made fun of. And so, you know, if you look at the Volkswagen Beetle as an example, that was thought of as heck, even Volkswagen called it ugly. They leaned into it. Well, even on the other end of the spectrum,

the F40 was controversial. Yeah. And now it's obviously, you know, a car that a lot of cars want to have. Yeah, I mean, a lot of supercar start out, like kind of mocked and then we're not being daring enough or something. Yeah. Yeah, so we wanted to push the boundaries,

but we also wanted it to use really clean forms. And the benefit of a clean form, like, you know, like primitive shapes. Yeah. And this is like half circles with, you know, it's like a, like a stadium. It doesn't age. It doesn't, you know, it's a form that has been around for ages. And so it feels very timeless.

And the way we integrated it very seamlessly, the hope was is that it would become something that's very recognizable. You see that on the road, you say that's a rivian and then that it could scale to different sized vehicles, different vehicles, different vehicles segments. So, yeah, there's still people that don't love it. But I'd say the vast majority of people who have been around it start, have. You've liked it from the beginning or as you just described, I've grown to really like it. I want to talk about R2, but first, I want to ask you about R0. Are we going bigger? I mean, when the numbers go up, the vehicles get smaller.

What do I have to do to get something that competes with like a Cadillac escalade ESV out of you? Because I have a big family. I have two huge dogs and I want the absolute monster land yacht. And I'm just, my serious question is like, is there something about the physical of electric vehicles where it gets harder to make something that's really, really long or huge or big? Or is it more just like that's more of a niche thing and maybe you'll get to it or the market will get to it eventually? But it's not the highest priority right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love this question because we have, we as a company have so many different ideas. And so you can imagine

there's like 50 different concepts or ideas we might have for a vehicle. We have to pick a few things to do. And so when you then look at the electrified space and you say, what's, what's going to sell at volume? For a flagship product, we started with something that was larger. But as we move into mass market, the size of the market that exists for these very, very large vehicles, things that are bigger than R1 is very, very small. So there's not a lot of customers, you know, it's like maybe 10,000 units a year. Okay. And then you look at just the the biggest segment by far is a two row five passenger SUV. And I'd say there's probably like one highly compelling choice today under $50,000 since the Tesla model Y. And so it's like wildly

underserved. You imagine there's 300 different choices in the in the combustion world and you've got like maybe one. There's many choices, but there's one that's highly compelling, which how molded, like how how people wake up every day and they, they tell them, they're buying the car that that they want but in reality there's like a regulatory environment that that forces manufacturers to make certain decisions and trade-offs and push different vehicles with the new with don't want seatbelts in your car right now inside joke the but but with the new with a cafe regulations going away people are talking about America being flooded

with these mini trucks I'm not gonna I'm not convinced that there's actually that many buyers of those vehicles in the U.S. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But how much do you feel like the popularity of different vehicles is really just downstream of choices that manufacturers have had to make because of, for various regulatory reasons? Boy, we have this discussion all time. I mean, the causality of demand is interesting because you don't have an infinite set of choices, So the board demand starts to look like what supply it looks like.

And we see this. We believe this is going to happen with R2, where there's very few choices in, I'll take, let's talk about it in detail. So Tesla launch model Y, very, very successful. It's a non-traditional form factor in terms of a mid-sized SUV. It's more, it's very car like. Yeah. That has its advantages. But you've found a lot of people that are coming out of more traditional SUV form.

form factors into that, but they don't have another choice. And so what we saw happen is a bunch of other manufacturers create their own version of a Tesla Model Y. So the form factor is very similar to a Model Y. You know, if you look at the side view of it and draw a line over the profile of it, it looks, you know, it's a model Y. It's like different OEMs versions of that, which was actually the wrong conclusion to draw because you didn't provide customers with better diversity of choice, but rather you gave

them a less good version of a Tesla Model Y. If you want a Model Y, buy the Model Y, not some other company's version of it. And so we were very clear on the need to have a very different point of view and not fall into that trap of thinking everyone is going to want that exact vehicle form factor and profile package. And so I think that happens all the time in automotive. And it's sort of shocking. But if you were to think about take like the sedan space, you have the BMW 3 series, the Mercedes C class, the Audi A4, they're all like dimensionally very, very similar. And then you have, you know, the BMW 5 series and the Mercedes E class and the Audi A6.

And so you have like these interesting segments that are like very much, because of this like hard to trace causality, you just have a lot of people building very similar things with different fronts, different rears, maybe slightly different surfacing. But the specs of the vehicle are highly aligned. And so I think there is an opportunity with electrification to reset some of those expectations and to reset segments, sizes, performance characteristics, some of the attributes. One of the things we worked on really hard in R2 was the rear seat, like, comfort or space is completely unlike anything else in a segment, so it's a lot of space.

And then you look at all the cars in space and they're all like within 15 to 25 millimeters of each other for rear seat leg room. and you're like, why is, why are there 30 cars that have almost identical rear seat configurations? Well, yeah, when the team sees something like that, or are they like, are we missing some sort of like regulation that, like, requires? Like, you ever, and then, and then you kind of try to figure out, wait, do we actually have flexibility, you know, I always, you end up wondering, like, are we missing something? And then you realize. Well, the mechanical nature of cars means that everybody can buy everybody's products. So every company, like Rivians are owned by every car company and they take them apart and they own all the other, you know, all the other things they're competing against.

And so as a result, a lot of like the mechanical innovations, let's say welding techniques or casting techniques, they sort of very quickly become state of the art. But the downside of that ability to buy each other's products and so easily observe them is you do have this funneling towards like consensus around different segments. and so we sort of lose some of the uniqueness between the different vehicles. And see, like for car integers, you find a lot of times car enthusiasts will say, cars say they all look the same, they all feel the same. And so we try hard to change that, but there are certain expectations. I'll give you a really good example on our R1T. We did a ton of research and we looked at what people put into the bed of the vehicle.

and if you're using it for lifestyle, you want to be able to fit it in your garage. And if you're putting anything other than a motorcycle, in which case you'd, or dirt bike, we'd have the tailgate down, the bed length doesn't need to be longer

than four and a half feet. It just doesn't. There's nothing that goes in that requires, unless you're doing like construction and you need to put something. And so we made the bed shorter with this articulating tailgate that goose necks out.

So it gives you, it's actually longer with the tailgate down so it fits a really long motorcycle. But when it's up, it everything fits in the, you know, it fits in the garage more easily. And so we, we look at most, if you drive through a neighborhood, you know how you know who has a truck and your hood is because it's parked in the driveway. Most trucks don't in the garage. Yep. And so we wanted to fit in 95% of the garage in the United States. So we went through all this thought process. We built it. And the standard size is five foot. And the amount of times have been asked, why don't you make the bed five feet long? I said,

well, of course we could have. It was just a decision. We made the decision. We made the decision. they wanted the truck to more easily fit in a garage. So those are like you sort of sometimes if you break the mold of like what's expected for dimensions because customers, media, car journalists are so trained on a certain size. Sure. The battle may not be worth it. Yeah. And also there's like there's the decision to purchase a car and you might just be looking at specs and you're like five is better than four and a half. But then you live you live with the car for four years and you're like, oh, well, this is actually way better. I never needed that extra half foot. Yeah. Yeah. What a, uh, Where do you think Chinese EVs are overhyped or underhyped?

No, give us a white pill. Well, yeah, so recently there's been a lot of excitement around them, and fortunately we're not letting them flood our country with them. But we had a guest on the show recently that had said he was in China a few weeks ago, and there was one of the, I forget which manufacturer, but one of them were just like caught, like side of the road burning on fire. he felt like they were potentially overhyped because they do have some features that are kind of scroll stopping. I'm thinking of the one that can jump.

The Yang Wang U-9. Yeah, but given that every manufacturer is free to assemble, I mean, disassemble any other vehicle and learn from it, what do you think American manufacturers can learn from what they're doing? Yeah, I do think it's important to sort of pull the curtain back on what sometimes I think gets presented as if it's magic, particularly on cost. So I think there's two things to take away from the Chinese electric vehicle space. First, there's over a hundred different brands and manufacturers in China. And there's only a small fraction of those that I would consider to be in the category of what I'm going to talk about, leading in technology and having really

robust architectures. But the two things with that said, so if you say there's more than five less than 10 manufacturers that fall into the categories I'm about to describe. You have an interesting phenomena where a lot of these newer companies in China, for the same reasons that Rivian or Tesla have very different software architectures, electronics architectures, and incumbent OEMs, is they started with a clean sheet. And when you start with a clean sheet, you would very quickly arrive at a completely different technology topology than what evolved into cars over the last 50 or 60 years. And what I mean by That is prior to like 19, early 1960s, cars were 100% analog. So there are no computers in a car.

And the first computer to make its way into a car was, ironically, it was for the fuel injection system. And so for any of the car enthusiasts out there, this is like those original like Bosch, KTronic fuel injection systems that we started to see emerge in 1960s and early 70s. And car companies at the time said, boy, we build engines. We designed vehicle bodies. we assemble the cars. We don't need to make these little electronic modules. And so they pushed that work to suppliers. Companies like Bosch or Continental would make these little computers

that run the fuel injection system. Then subsequent to that over the currents of the last 50 years, a bunch of other things started to have a need for computers. And your seat suddenly became smart. And there was a computer that went with the seat. Your air conditioning became intelligent. a computer that went that, your sunroof had a computer. Before you knew it, the vehicle architecture was this proliferation of, you know, in some cars,

100 to 150 little mini, what we call electronic control units or computers that run these specific domains, like the domain of an engine or the domain of a door or the domain of a C. And it's precisely the opposite of what you'd architect, if you were thinking about it as a clean sheet. You would never say, I'm going to build a network architecture and software platform that is 150, different software code bases running 150 different little mini computers, which communicate through this sort of klutzy can architecture. That might all need to be independently updated at various points in the car's life cycle. It's just like it's a total disaster.

So what you'd say is I'd have as few computers as possible doing as much as they can. And so, you know, the fancy way we describe that now is it hits a zonal architecture. It's a computer that controls a whole zone. And so tests, of course, developed their architecture like that. We, of course, developed our architecture like that. And a couple of the Chinese did as well. And the real benefit of this, besides just taking a lot of cost and complexity out, is that you can make updates really easily.

And so if I want to change, let's say, the sequence events that occur when you unlock the car, I don't have to coordinate amongst 15 different suppliers, the supplier for the Horn ECU, the supplier for the DoorLock EC, the supplier for the interior lighting issue, I can do all of that in like a matter of minutes internally because it's running on our own software platform and it's all of our own code. And so just the emergence of regular updates,

improved features, features that respond to dynamic customer needs, I think is a really big shift. And in the West, there's two companies that have that, Rivian and Tesla. And then in China, there's, as I said, more than five less than 10 companies that have that. And if you don't,

do a software defined architecture well, the ability to do like AI integrated into the vehicle or an AI defined vehicle is enormously hard. So you have to have all these ingredients to be able to do like the broader architecture well. Anyway, so that's one big difference. And that actually underpins. We did a $5.8 billion software licensing deal with Volkswagen. That technology I just described for network architecture, software OS, is what we license

as part of a big partnership with Volkswagen Group. But the other is that the Chinese companies have just fundamentally lower cost structure. They have much lower labor costs. Their cost of capitals often free or more than free, meaning they get paid to build a plant or they get enormous government subsidies. And so you can just build a spreadsheet to look at this. It's not magic. They're building the cars.

They're not using some new type of material from outer space. It's using very consistent materials for what we use in the United States. you insist in joining and forming techniques and putting the cars together very similar. They just have labor costs and capital costs are much, much lower than the United States. If you had to pick a gimmick that you do like, what's your favorite gimmick?

Because the jumping car is a pretty good one. I showed that to my four-year-old, and he was like, I need that car. I don't think it's good unless they're jumping a human. Oh, they got to jump a human. Otherwise, it's just a cheap trick. I don't need to jump. I don't need to jump a paper clip.

Okay. Or a pothole. Hey, you do need to jump a pothole. You got a flat tire. I did blow out of tire. You blew out of tire this weekend. Anyway, favorite gimmick, if you had to pick one, what do you like? You know, there's a tank turn.

There's, you know, a whole bunch of these different gimmicks. Are there any gimmicks that you think are fun? Or maybe retro gimmick. Yeah, I don't know. You know, just fun to watch. I don't know if I, we haven't, again, We haven't decided to put any of them in there. But we do have something called kicksteer in our vehicles,

which when you're operating, because of the quad motor, you can turn the vehicle on its axis. That's good. And there's a sort of cool, but. Yeah. I mean, even the gear tunnel to some degree, like, stood out. It was, like, the gear tunnel, when that launched, that was definitely like a, oh, like, this is different than normal.

This is not something I see. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like there's a balance. Like, you don't want to be all, all gimmick all the time, but you need a little bit of style and a little. little bit of substance. You need some... We got to talk about... Please.

We clearly needed an hour or 90 minutes. I know. I don't know if you have a hard stuff. We got to talk about some of your guys' new releases, the chip, and some of the new technical decisions that you guys are making around self-driving. Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so last week, we actually finally announced it. Amazingly, it didn't leak. We've been working on this since 2020, early 2020. But we've re-architectedgeded our whole self-driving platform around...

we call an end-to-end train model. So the model is using the millions and millions of miles are being accumulated through our deployed fleet of our Gen 2 vehicles, which launched a little more than a year ago, to build effectively a neural net or a foundation model for how to drive. And on our Gen 2 hardware stack,

it's using an Nvidia platform. It's got around 200 tops of compute. We've got 55 megapixels of cameras, a nice array of radars, but it's a great platform for building a data flywheel and for delivering ultimately this will be able to deliver point-to-point autonomy so you can put the address into vehicle drive there but to get to higher levels of autonomy we've developed an in-house processor well look at the timing you guys did that perfectly

but the in-house processor is a it's a significant step up so it's a 800 tops it's got 35 billion transistors on the silicon the neural nets capable process sync 5 billion pixels per second. So this is like an incredibly powerful platform. And we brought it in-house just to, given the importance of vision, this is a vision-based robot, the vehicle, but we have other things we're doing in the vision-based robotic space as well. And so we came to the view that having our own inference was going to be really viable.

Yeah. But it took, it took, you know, the better part of almost four years to build the team, develop it. You know, these are things that take a tremendous amount of capital. We're working with TSM on making it. But, yes, we're excited about that. And then we also include upgraded cameras, and we have a new LIDAR, which is another sensing modality that sits at the top of the windshield, which will help us raise the capability of the vehicle ultimately to what we call level four, which is think of it as the vehicle can

operate empty or without anybody in the driver's seat. So it could pick your kids up from school or drop you at the airport, these kinds of things. Is LIDAR dangerous? I was telling Jordy that there was a LIDAR system that if you pointed your phone at it, it would damage the phone. And of course, you know, he said, well, if it's damaging the phone, can't be good for your eyes. How do you tell customers that, okay, our LIDAR is safe? Like what are the parameters to optimize around?

Yeah, I mean, that was just, that was a poorly designed LIDAR system that was doing that is our LIDAR. They don't burn out your phone. and certainly know for not your eyes. Yeah, okay. Boy, this is great, you're showing the image here. So, I mean, the beauty of something, a lot of the LiDAR is you can use the LiDAR and the radar array

to help train our cameras. Because again, and this is a, think of this as we're building a brain. We're building a neural net on driving the vehicle. And it has the ability to see very, very far distance is much further than the human eye or a camera could see, but also see in perfectly dark conditions or perfectly bright conditions.

And imagine it helps with weather, like extreme weather as well. Yeah, well, the radar does particularly well where you have like optical inclusion. Yeah, like heavy fog or heavy rain or snow. Sure. And then the LiDard does need a lot of sight because it is a laser. So the LiDAR is very helpful for training the cameras and training the radar system. Yeah.

But it's also very helpful for a long range. Is, so, I mean, it seems like you've solved the inference problem. Like, the vehicle is ready to rock. Are you worried about, or is it a challenge to, like, accumulate enough data? Are you getting enough data off the current fleet that you feel like you're competitive there? Are you GPU rich or GPU poor in the training phase? Are there, is it about the algorithms? like, do you need more AI researchers?

Like, what is the most, what is the rate limiting factor to actually delivering, like, something really top-notch? Yeah, so, so, I mean, the first is building this, when we say data flywheel, yeah. Every vehicle that we, every Gen 2, so we launched in end of 2021, and that was what we called a Gen 1 vehicle. Yeah. In the summer of 2024, we updated it with a complete new set of hardware under the skin, but

really most importantly changed the self-driving platform. And that's the beginning of this data accumulation platform. And what this is being used for is there's a whole host of trigger events that we identify interesting or important information from the vehicles that driving. That gets back up through the cloud and then we process them, as you said, on a large, you know, a large pool of GPUs. And, yeah, this is, you know, we're talking like many thousands of GPUs. enormous amount of investment in GPU spend here. But ultimately, that's being used to train the model. And certainly create this very large model that runs offline.

And then we distill it into something that's a little bit tighter and smaller that runs real-time in the vehicle on inference. And the beauty of expanding the inference capability with our Gen 3 platform is it allows us to run bigger models. And so as the model becomes larger and larger to understand all the nuances and sort of intricacies of driving, the need to compress that to run real-time. I should say the ceiling of what it can run,

and therefore the need to compress it is reduced. We don't have to compress it as much. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. But this is by far biggest investment category. It's been interesting because when we first launched, a lot of the investment was going into the fundamentals of the business of ECUs, base software, high voltage architectures, things like DC, DC converter,

all this stuff to make the car real. Now those platforms are pretty stable, and we're now shifting. A lot of those R&D dollars are going really almost entirely towards AI and our self-driving platform. You saw Luminar went bankrupt today. What do you think happens with that asset, with their technology from here?

Do you think there's, I imagine, there's a number, I can imagine a number of different types of businesses that would be interested in the technology and what they've built. But what's, what's your read? Yeah, it's hard for me to comment. It's not something we're looking at, but, you know, I can't, I can't comment on others. There may be folks out there looking to buy it out of bankruptcy. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. Convertibles.

Are we, you're selling my dad. My dad really wants a convertible. Are we doing it? No, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. The number one best selling convertible in the United States, Jeep Wrangler. Yeah, Jeep Rangler is very popular. Is it possible? So why don't we do it?

Why don't you do it? So it's so funny you ask this because we, I don't think I've ever said this before, why not say it here? We, on R1, we had a version. of the roof that was removable early on. And we actually tooled it, and we decided not to launch it because it was just a lot of complexity.

But in the fullness of time, at some point in Ravian's life, I'd love to have a version that has a top come off, if nothing else, just so that my dad will be satisfied. Amazing. I'll buy one, too. I'll buy one too. Confirmed.

Within the long arc of history, we are launching a convertible. No, thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to see, like, how you guys would approach the removable top. I think it would be very interesting. I don't like a lot of convertible design specifically, but if you guys were thinking about it and saying, like, well, what's the actual technology we have today? What's the best way to make it? So anyways, this was a super fun conversation.

And please come on again soon. We'll definitely reach out and have your team reach out as well, if whenever you have news. Yeah, thanks so much for wrapping on. This is a lot of fun. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, RJ. Go bye. Let me tell you about profound.

Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Let me also tell you about this post from Nialism Disrespecter. So is the U.S. economic plan really just build the machine god? Tyler, what do you think? Is the U.S.'s current economic plan really just build the machine? machine got. Yes. I would agree. I think it is. I think that that is basically the plan. We need to nationalize the labs. Nationalized the labs? Why are we nationalized in the labs?

That's the only way we can marshal the capital. Soon enough, it seems easy right now. It's like, oh, it's so, you know, you can raise so easily. Give me, you know, three years. You need 10 trillion. Or even, what is it? The $10 trillion dollar training run is going to require. There's only a couple ways you can get that. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's a way that the government can can foot the bill, well, not fully nationalizing, right? There's got to be a way. Yeah, but I mean, certainly, you know, maybe not nationalized, but there's a lot of ways where it's like, it probably does make sense in some sense to, to subsidize intel, stuff like that. Well, react to this, the fact that Sergei Karayev, Karayev says it's the annual reminder,

the years left to escape the permanent underclass. It was infinity in 2020. It was infinity years to escape the permanent underclass in 2021. And for, the last four years, it's been exactly two years to escape the permanent underclass. Feels like, to say, I think, isn't actually creating a permanent underclass like it was supposed to. Just two more years, bro. Then just two more years. Just two more years. Anyway, let me tell you about turbo puffer, serverless vector in full text, search built from first principles, on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Okay, so John, actually, I had a question.

Please. So I'm always curious, like, it seems like in self-driving, there's like Tesla and then there's comma. Yeah. And I think of those as kind of the leaders, right? Yes. But, you know, comma, there's like the open source. There's open pilot.

Yes. So why, it seems like there just aren't that many manufacturers that are using open pilot? Is there like a reason? Are they, is it like George Hott? He just like hates big manufacturers and he wants to keep it? Well, so, so, I mean, I'm not exactly sure the open source license. I imagine that the open source license says you can't research. sell this. Now, the question is, if you bake it into a car, I would imagine most, most companies,

like Tesla sells self-driving as an upsell. So you buy a Tesla, it doesn't just give you the Tesla's full self-driving system for free. You have to pay an upgrade. I would imagine that Rivian matches that pricing model eventually. And so if you build on open source software that says you can reuse it, you can use this open-sode software, but you cannot sell it. I believe that, isn't that the Apache license. There's a few different licenses. There's MIT. I think MIT license you can do whatever you want with.

But there's one license that says you can use it but you can't resell it. Not for a commercial use. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like the license transfers down the chain. And so if you're giving it away, you have to give it to you, you have to give it to your customer. So you can't monetize that way.

So there's that. There's also the possibility, again, this is just off the top of my head. But I would imagine that the, is it the NHTSA, National Highway Transport Authority? I believe that if it's coming from an OEM, from a vehicle manufacturer, and it's making claims about this is a level two system, the level three system, you can take your eyes off the road, you can take your hands off the wheel, that probably has to go through a certification that comma doesn't necessarily have to go through a certification for. or so you're in this scenario where if you're effectively white labeling in comma, maybe you don't, like,

you would be subject to a higher level of regulation because you're not a third party product. So I would imagine that you still like take a peek at the open, at the open pilot repo and see how they're doing it. But then ultimately you go and build your own sort of proprietary stack. Yeah. I guess also for, I mean, Rivian, they're using LiDAR, so it's like just not compatible. Yeah, yeah, LiDAR also just like way more cameras too. Like the open pilot system is built on two cameras on the front of the device and then one on the back that looks at the driver's face.

And so you have a you have a wide angle and then sort of a telephoto that will show you the road far away and then the full surroundings. But most cars, Tesla, I'm sure the Rivian will typically have cameras on both. both side mirrors. They'll also have cameras on the back. Cameras, you know, they'll multiple on the front. So you just get way more data. And that's why I think he was pushing this concept of like, like the autonomy compute module 3, ACM3,

is capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. It's like, why do you need so many pixels? Because you have multiple cameras that are feeding you 30 frames a second, 60 frames a second. And so you need to be processing all of that. Whereas open pilots not to zes. designed for a camera that's mounted on the bumper because it doesn't have a wire that goes to the bumper. It's just a phone that's stuck to the windshield effectively.

One more note. I believe Rivian uses Luminar as a supplier. Oh, interesting. And so hence why he couldn't comment, but he said he wasn't looking at buying. Yeah, which is, but I mean, they supply it for Volvo. They might be using a different one. Govold going forward. Who knows?

But they just made that announcement, so essentially. but I'm sure they have a variety of vendors that they're speaking with. Interesting. Oh, well. Well, let me tell you about graphite. com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software.

Faster. How did you sleep last night? Are you back in the game fully? Holiday seasons upon us. I slept. Holiday parties are here. Brutal night's sleep. I got a 93, though.

Saturday was rough. The holiday party came through. I made it out with a 69. Not good. avoid them. Avoid the VC holiday party entirely. If you care about your sleep, go to aidesleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. I got a 54. 54 on the night of the BC holiday party. Rough. Absolutely brutal. Fall asleep, faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized at AIDSleep.com. Well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, Scott Kapoor.

Ho, ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Scott. How are you doing? Great to see you again. Thanks so much for hopping back on the show. I did not wear my elf outfit for today, but, uh, no, uh, we, we were, we were this, just to do a little inside baseball, we were this close to putting on full Santa suits. And then the team said, you know, we're, we're talking to a, you know, U.S. government official, you guys, you guys. I was going to say, I thought, I was being aggressive. I went Sands jacket today. I'm like, I took my very, very casual, very casual, but you're a serious guy. You're a serious guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're bridging the gap. But anyway, give us an update on what's new in Europe.

Yeah. So we just announced a really excited new program today that I'd love to tell you and your listeners about. Of course. It's called US Tech Force. Yes. So this is, ooh, all right. This is a two-year program where we are recruiting a thousand engineers, product

managers, data scientists, AI specialists, into government. You'll work in government for two years. Literally every agency in the government, basically, is participating in this. So if you want to work at Department of War or Health and Human Services or State Department or IRS, whatever you want to do, like we've got opportunities. And the whole idea is how do we modernize the entire federal government infrastructure? So we've got a real challenge in government. Number one is just, obviously, we need more smart people who've got like modern software development, modern AI expertise. And then we're also really have not done a good job of recruiting

early career. So if you look at kind of people earlier in their career, only about 7% of the federal workforce is early career. And at all the companies, all the companies that you guys, you know, talk to on a daily basis, I bet you that number is like 25 or 30 percent. So we are by at least a factor of three to one in a real world of hurt in terms of being able to recruit and retain early career people. So this is a two-year program. We're doing this in partnership with about 25 of the tech companies that you all know and love. So, you know, Coinbase Robin Hood, data bricks, snowflake, uh, invidia, XAI, OpenAI. And what those companies are doing, is they're going to help us kind of create a program around this. So in addition to working

in your day job in government, we will have a speaker series with, you know, we'll get Sam Altman to come, you know, talk to you and tell you about what it's like to work at OpenAI. We're going to do career development. And then at the end of the two years, these private companies have all agreed to participate in a job fair where we're going to showcase all the work that these guys are done. And you know what? If you want to go in the private sector, God bless you, go do that. If you want to stay in government, we'll find a job for you. But we're not asking you to make a 40-year commitment. we're asking people to do, you know, do good for their country for two years, solve some of the world's biggest and toughest problems. And then we will gladly help you in terms of your private sector career opportunities.

A thousand people, how, assuming this goes well, it feels, you know, extremely critical in this moment. Is this something you want to like 10x, you know, for the next two-year period? Where does this go? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So I think there's two big opportunities here. one is just look, there's way more demand than for 1,000 engineers in government. So yes, if this is 5,000, 10,000, I think we'll still be barely scratching the surface of what the needs are. And then more importantly, what we're trying to do is we're trying to do a more efficient way of hiring by centralizing a lot of the hiring. So at my department OPM, we're going to do all the outbound recruitment. We're going to do all the initial screening. We're going to do all the initial assessments for people. And then we're going to hand the agencies a list of, you know, here's a thousand people who have passed like the technical qualifications you told us we're necessary for the. job. Now, you all, quite frankly, compete against one another and convince these people why they should work at HHS versus Department of War or others. And if this works, I think this is going to be a

model for how we do kind of centralized hiring going forward in the government. So we hire a ton of program managers, HR people, financial analysts. Like, there's no reason why an applicant should have to know that 40 different agencies are hiring for a program manager. All that person should need to know is, like, my skills are in demand by the U.S. government. I'm going to centrally apply to OPM. my resume is going to basically get circulated to all the interested agencies. And then, you know, I basically kind of have my pick of the litter of figuring out which one is best aligned with my career objectives. Okay. Walk me through how, how someone in one of these roles in part of the tech force could actually have an impact. I worked at the Census Bureau maybe 15 years ago.

Yeah. And I would have been like a tech force person. Like I came in and they gave me a, like, a stack of papers and a pencil. And they were like, we do stuff on pen and paper here. And I was like... Let's be clear, John worked his way to managing a team of like 100 people very quickly as a college student. It was a very funny story. He made the most of it.

But our job was to go around on a map and interview people in different houses. I was like, we should use Google Maps. Google. Just put all of the addresses that you need to go to into Google Maps. And then you know exactly where you need to go that day. And of course, they were like, no, no, no, we don't have a deal, right? My child. Exactly.

Exactly. So, like, I didn't necessarily have the authority to just tell the entire, you know, organization as A, we're using Google now. Also, there's probably some sort of privacy thing. There's a whole bunch of reasons why, you know, you can't just fire it up. But how do you empower, like, the Tech Force folks to actually have, like, a positive impact that, like, reverberates throughout the organization? Yeah.

So you are 100% right. And this is why a lot of these programs traditionally have not accomplished what we'd hope that accomplished because what happened is, Someone like you, a smart guy, let's assume that for a second, right? A smart guy gets dropped into the blob that is the U.S. government, basically, right? So you're right. Like, you will just, you basically have no authority. You have no ability to get things done. So what we're doing here is there's two critical differences we're doing here. Number one is, if you are one of these thousand folks, you are going to go over as a team to an agency. So I can just, I'll give me an example. You know, for example, at IRS, you know, they probably could hire several hundred of these people. I don't know. So there are going to be several hundred people who will be part of this. team. So number one, you're going to be part of that group. Number two, as I mentioned, we're going to create a programmatic piece around this. So your buddies who are at HHS or your buddies who are at State Department, you're going to see them, you know, once a month, twice a month, at a speaker series, at dinners and stuff like that. So you're going to get real good networking

across pollinization. And then thirdly, to avoid the problem you're talking about is we're not going to drop you into the blob. We're basically going to have you as a full unit basically reporting into kind of, you know, senior political leadership in those organizations, and they're going to decide what you do. So you're not going to come in here and, like, manage a contractor, which is unfortunately, you know, a lot of what does happen inside these organizations. But we're going to create basically a separate team that can do a lot of the bespoke development that has cover from the most senior political people in the organization. So you're totally right. And your experience is not unusual, by the way. That's a lot of what

I've heard from people as we try to figure out what to do. And so our hope is that by combination of those things, we can avoid that problem. Because look, for this to work, like, what I'm trying to test is two things. One is, like, you know, can we actually solve the modernization problem in government, which I'm quite convinced with smart people we can? And then two is we demonstrate that the work you do here is valuable, not just to the government, but valuable to the private sector, such that if you want to go get a private sector job, the private sector looks at what you did and says, wow, like those skills are generalizable to whatever, Google, Facebook, you know, Coinbase, you name your favorite company.

And so we've got to make sure that the people here are successful. What do you think are the most overlooked agencies, interesting kind of corners of the government that are going to be hiring through tech force? I think the guy from Gumroad, I saw him, is at the IRS. We've seen Doge people over at the Treasury. But what are some kind of overlooked opportunities? Yeah, so there's real, I mean, so like there are really good people, quite frankly, across the board. But yes, look, the obvious ones, of course, are Department of War. You know, it's really cool to do drone stuff, and that's awesome.

And some people want to do that. But, you know, like interior is doing a bunch of actually very cool stuff. Energy. So if you're interested in energy, you know, they're doing a bunch of like supercomputer-like stuff to basically, you know, make sure that they can have, you know, like quantum computing work and stuff like that. They've got to solve, like, the broad energy good problems. That's pretty cool. You know, CMS, so Dr. Oz over at CMS is trying to redesign kind of how consumers interact with CMS. So, you know, something like, for example, an integrated position directory, which I know sounds like very commonplace these days, but like that doesn't exist.

So there's kind of a combination of what I would call like back-in infrastructure stuff. And then the other part of this that's going to be really cool is, you know, my friend and yours, I think you guys know, Joe Jebbya, who's one of the co-founder of Airbnb, who's been sitting literally just behind me in the office here at OPM, helping us redesign our retirement. services application. He's now starting this whole thing called Design for America, right, which is basically this very broad, like, you know, design-oriented, re-look at all the applications that are customer-facing in government. So you can think of this also as an opportunity to take the work he's doing on the front end coupled with a lot of the modernization stuff that has to happen on the back end. And, you know, collectively, I think we can really transform kind of the way government services are delivered and, you know, quite frankly, provide a much better service to the American

people. Fantastic. Very, very cool. Where can people go to get started? Is there just a web form to apply? Yes, there is. Yes, it turns out we have a web form. There we go. You can go. Joe Gabia designed by Joe himself.

By Gabia? Exactly. Let's go. That's exactly. There we go. By the way, it's, I just learned it's Jebia not Gebia. Unless he's pulling a fast one on me. Can you imagine?

We also correct our pronunciation. Joe Jebia. Where are we go? So you go to. Tech Force, you can go to either at US Tech Force, which is our X handle, or you can go to Techforce.gov, or you can go to my Twitter at SKU-P-O-R. All those places will point you to the right one. Apply. Tell your friends, tell your family. This will be a great, like, dinner conversation over the Christmas table to say that, you know, you're now coming out of the closet in terms

of working in the basement, and you're ready to kind of get a real job. I love it. I'm very, I'm very excited about this. I mean, I can see, I'm excited. for people like all over the career kind of spectrum people that have done 20 years in industry and see an opportunity to come back and serve the country in this way and in the future young people coming out of college that are highly motivated have a skill set and and can apply it and you know across all these different touch points so very exciting well thank you so much thank you guys much yeah great to get the update cheers we'll talk you soon Goodbye.

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or at least a credit for a billboard. Yes, absolutely. Well, we have our next guests, Colin and Samir from, of course, the Colin and Samir show. Welcome to the show. They're going to come and sit down here. Good to see you guys. Welcome, welcome.

How are you? Good to see you in the Ultradome. Good to see you. How are you doing? Great to have you guys in person. Yeah, man. Finally. Can I raise this?

Because everyone just became very aware of my height when you shook my hand. No, that's, how do I do this? John's a tallest person here. I look like I'm under the desk right now. How do I raise? Guys, do you lean back? Stay off the wide. Stay on the tight, guys.

Stay on the tight. You read my rider. Yeah, God. I know, I know. For a while, that wide was a 15 millimeter or something. And it looked insane. I looked way bigger than the guest. Now it's like evening out.

What an incredible holiday vibe here. Yeah. Yeah. Look at this signed. We got a signed holiday. Wow. That's going straight to the top. We're excited for the top.

We were very, very close to being in full Santa suits. I had it out. It was Christmas week. He fell from here, of course. He's in it. He's at. Yeah. With the bells.

I think we will be. With the bells on the shoe. I do think we will be doing the Santa outfits. Yeah. This is maybe the last time we wore suits this year. Maybe, maybe. Anyway, it's been a wild year for us. It's been a wild year for you.

What have been the standout moments for you this year as you look back on it as two creators? I actually think we're in a standout moment right now in everything that's happening with Netflix and Warner. And like the conversation around that, I actually think has a lot to do with YouTube creators and what has happened with YouTube. And I think between that and then what we,

just saw with Disney and SORA. I think these are two topics that it's worth getting into and giving our perspective as creators of what's happened. I feel like the notable thing is in all the antitrust debate and conversation. Everyone's like, look, look at YouTube. Look at all that watch time.

Look at all that watch time. Do you buy that? Do you buy the YouTube? Like, because there is a narrative in Hollywood that Warner Brothers and Netflix are too powerful together. It's too crazy. And then a lot of people are saying, hey, YouTube's like running away with the whole game this is a side show, where do you stand on it?

I mean, look, Greg Peter said that as a quote, right? That like, even if you put these two together, it's still smaller than YouTube. Which is such an interesting justification of why the deal should go through. But I think the reality is, like, Neil Mohan was just named Time CEO of the year. And I think his positioning and what YouTube has done really well, two guys who have been on the platform for 15 years, his positioning is they build the best stage. essentially evaluate it like an open mic night for the internet. It's just anyone can go on there and see.

You literally don't know. We don't know if like the greatest piece of content could be uploaded today. YouTube has no idea. And I don't think you can compete with that. The fact that they don't pay for content. Yeah. The fact that people will upload with the chance of getting distribution and not even looking for the economics. The economics are there.

Like if you can create content, obviously, gets millions of views. Like, there are many ways to monetize, but that's pretty dangerous in a good way for YouTube to sit in that place where, like, someone can just, there's a guy who spent two years making a documentary about bird watching. And was like, I'll just put it on YouTube for free. And it's incredible.

Wait, who's this? His name's Owen Riser. It's an amazing documentary. It's called Listers. It has like almost three million views now. And he didn't know how he wanted to monetize it. He had offers from streamers, but just didn't want to do it. Put it on YouTube and put his Venmo.

link in the description. No way. And he, in the time we talked to him, which was like two, three weeks after we put out the doc, he had been Venmoed $75,000. Wow. That's amazing. Which is unbelievable. But like that, that, this model of just kind of like, I don't think we talk enough

about the fact that you can just upload a video or what we're doing right now is just being, it's just live. Right? And like to do that 20 years ago was impossible. Yeah. And so I think it's going to be really challenging when you're Netflix and you're, spending money on something like stranger things. And like you're placing a bet,

you're placing a bet that you think the audience will like it based on historical data or based on packaging actors and like old school Hollywood technique. Whereas YouTube's like, yeah, like I think you'll like this. And if you don't, I'll just get data to figure out what you'll like next. Well, and I think that's why Netflix and Paramount value this IP to such an extreme degree.

Of course. that's the one thing I feel like YouTube hasn't done, is like creating really valuable IP, I think, takes decades. Like you have to fill it up. It seems like no amount of money can just create a new Superman or a new Spider-Man. And it feels like we would have gotten that out of YouTube, just the broad economic forces, or we certainly would have got it out of Netflix.

And we have it a little bit with Squid Game and certain things to your point. But it just, with all the tech money, all the money, there's so much of incentive, but there's just no shortcut for, okay, this has been my dad watched this. And I watched it with my dad. Sure. And then I watched it with my kids. And like, I'm going on Generation 3 of Star Wars right now.

When I think about YouTube IP, I think of like Miss Rachel, which is like, I think at some point she could trade herself out and have an actor, like an act. I think about dude perfect and good mythical morning. Yeah. So Rhett and Link with Good Mythical Morning. They're on 3,000 episodes right now of a morning show that people have grown up on. it's been around for near two decades now. Like, it's daily.

I think there's, there's a lot of value to what they've built. They've built like a big company with writers. And like, they could either someone else could take over that show or they can sell this catalog of relatively evergreen content. Dude Perfect is expanding right now.

They've been around also for almost two decades. They just launched Dude Perfect outdoors. They launched a new podcast. Like, they can expand that universe pretty well. So I do think like really good IP is building on YouTube. it's all going to take time. But again, the amazing thing about the platform that is YouTube is that, you know. I guess the question is like, like you pointed this out to me.

The first time you were on the show was that there are, I forget exactly the stat, but it was something like there's a ton of young kids where their favorite person is someone no one else knows. And it's sort of a referendum on like the NIMSEL phenomenon, that you can be niche, huge in that niche. Like you are getting stopped for a. signature by that fan or never heard of them like like you know just a bunch of people that are like never heard of us could walk down the street here exactly and there could be people who were like holy

shit it's john and jordan and then have to explain who everything about what you do yes to the next person the opposite can't whereas that's not true for spider man that's not true for star wars there's certain things that have broken through to its it's household name level and i think mr beast has done that yeah for sure um dude perfect yes to some degree but it just feels like it's it's a function, it's not saying that it can't happen. It's just a function of time more than money or anything else. And I think if dude perfect 20 years, super impressive, incredible. But it takes 50 to be a 50 year old property. Like there's just no, we had the acquired guys in the show and we were talking about like, why should we ring the gong for you? What is it? And the metric that I was

the most like envious of was they've been doing it for 10 years. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, yeah, I wonder if it's actually a function of you need like three generations to grow. up on the content in order for it to be durable IP. That is true. We're just getting to the point where there are creators like Rentlinck or Dude Perfect that are going towards 20 years. Yeah. So we're seeing these creators do this for the first time.

Totally. Well, I think on this, like on the point of Netflix, YouTube Warner, like, we'll see what happens. But I do think it's interesting that Netflix, in order to compete, it needs to acquire a bigger catalog. And maybe, maybe, maybe with what they're doing and they're starting to also offer deals to podcasters. Yeah.

At what point do they just open up the platform and say, here's an upload. So I think 2026. Really? Yeah. Whoa. I think there's going to be a creator program of some sort. Because even if you can do that's more curated, but.

I've heard you can do that on Amazon Prime. I'm pretty sure if you have a document or you can just upload and say, I'm going to charge 20 bucks. Yes. Cool. You can do that. I think if you look what Netflix did with Mark Rover, massive YouTube creator, they took his top 10, basically greatest hits from YouTube, repackaged them. They're on.

Netflix right now, and it was a top 10 show on Netflix number one kids show. Wow. They also signed a deal with him to make a new series, a reality show. He also did a Christmas special with Elmo, directed by another creator, Daniel Thrasher. So very cool. But that shows me that they have an openness to content that I don't think they would have been open to a couple of years ago, that maybe they wouldn't have deemed premium enough. Sure, sure, sure.

But I mean, at a certain point, like, just, even just the AdSense is, if you just took the ad sense from a Mr. Beast video, like that's enough to go, to Hollywood. That is the budget of a Hollywood 20-minute production. Here's the other... Maybe, but that's... Yeah, maybe. I think Jimmy's ad sense is very different than other people's assets. Sure. I think what you guys have probably experienced is sponsorship dollars are... Yes, yes, yes.

...are going to drive, you know, the majority of production budgets. But my concern with the Netflix and as they move into podcasting is like their appetite for niche communities because they tried this with fitness at one point. They did a partnership with Nike where they were trying to compete essentially with Peloton.

They're like, maybe people come here to work out. The audience was too small. And they don't do well with niche. And our world, like we just talked about, is like, it's choose your own adventure from a media perspective. And YouTube is great at that. Well, here's what, here's what, like taking Cape Op Demanders and making it a national conversation, making Squid Game a national conversation.

I mean, the big thing that, uh, the Netflix is missing and maybe their opportunity to grow watch time is there's nothing real time on Netflix at all. much of the time that I want to watch content, it's like I'll watch some geopolitical, like, creator on YouTube or I'll watch like what happened, F1 commentary, reaction, right? Netflix does has nothing for me if I want to kind of understand what happened in the last 24 or 48 hours, right? And I just feel like a lot of watch time on the internet is that kind of more real time. There's like evergreen entertainment content that Netflix is dominant and and YouTube, but YouTube has both. And so I think that can explain some of the differential. I think this actually,

it, it, it, it, the conversation moves nicely into the Disney Sora thing. And, and largely because some, what was your immediate reaction to the news? To Disney Sora? Yeah. It's like, it was going to happen. I'm surprised they're the ones who did it. But I think what Colin and I have been kicking around is like the video gamification of everything where even if you look at prediction markets, right? So like you guys obviously have a partnership with Polymarket. And you look at Cal She, Polymarket, like everything is a video game, right? And if we look at the early origins of YouTube,

it was video games. So look at the early origins of Twitch, it was video games. And I think our expectation as audience members is that all of our media is interactive. We can play with it. We can touch and feel it. And it's only getting increasingly more interactive. So the Disney Sora conversation,

especially like as generative AI has come into the picture, it's like generative AI itself is entertainment. So me generating images and videos is, time I'm spending, entertaining myself. Right? It's not just utility. It's entertainment. Yeah. And I think, obviously, if you have this IP, you guys just talked about, it takes 50 years to build IP. You look at Disney's IP. It's hundreds of years. You have this IP. How do you monetize it? Well, what's really interesting,

my assumption, I haven't read into this if this is what's happening, but with SORA is that if you use one of the 200 characters that's licensed to SORA over the next three years, there's likely some fraction, you know, micropayment going back to Disney. And if it's not, I think that will be the model. Where essentially, yeah, I'll give you Mickey Mouse. Just give me a fraction of a penny every time someone uses Mickey Mouse. Now, like, from an audience perspective, it's interactive media. It's more fun for me to prompt and generate Mickey Mouse in the context that I want him.

And then for Disney, like, they have this IP that can be generating like very small amounts of money, but you'd scale that out to like 30 million people using it or 20 million people using it. It's like that gets pretty significant. It's kind of their move towards UGC in the same way that Netflix needs to open up a creator model. Let's open up our IP for a lot of creators. And like they said, some of it's going to come to Disney Plus. I just, I think it's, I thought I was smart for a lot of reasons. I think Open AI specifically needed some competitive edge around.

I think people were, Nana Banana has like really broken through. I have two account, I have an account that I just have free models for the different labs. So I did the same prompt yesterday with Gemini and Chatchibati for an image generation. And Gemini was like 10 seconds. Chatubuette on the free plan. It takes like, I didn't even come back. I didn't actually go back and see it, but it took like multiple minutes. And so having something that gives them a reason to drive a bunch of new paid subscriptions, I think.

And like specifically get the next generation. Disney products are like a drug for children. They're addicted, right? and I think it's like adding a personalization layer that didn't really exist for Disney. Like you go to the parks and you could like do as have a meal with a character or whatever and that was personalized or take a picture or something like that. But I think if you're Disney and you're trying to drive more signups to Disney Plus, more retention, more park visits, I think it's actually smart because if you put the only thing

my three-year-old knows about AI and he doesn't even call us. AI, but he's like, make a dino picture. He just, that's like stuck in his head, because it's such a fun experience of like, we take a picture, we take a selfie, and then we just make it make us look like dinosaurs or whatever. He loves it, right? So Disney doing that and getting, you know,

I'm sure a lot of people will say this is like terrible and shouldn't happen, but getting a bunch of young people to have that experience of like making a Disney part of their like everyday experience in life, I think is going to be, have like powerful downstream effects. I feel like Sorow was a bit of a, Napster moment for visuals. Like Sora came out and sort of broke the mold of what we would expect. And a lot of people started using the IP anyway and we were like, wait, you're supposed to pay for

this stuff. Yeah. Right. And then like a new model of streaming has emerged and I don't think artists are particularly super excited about that model, but they've adjusted. Right. And I think this is another moment where it's like, oh, okay, the way that we monetize this art has shifted because of technology. And it has just happened. And Disney in a way is now, I think, just coming over me like, this is already happening. People are already using our IP in ways we didn't want them to on SORA. So let's just get involved and create the new model. Let's come up with the new model for how we monetize this. I actually think even if you look at what you guys are doing with this show, like I always think about a live show like yours as like your open source, you're giving open source material to the

internet in a way, right? People can clip this and play with it and interact with it and talk about it and retweet it. And it's like it's a playable medium. And I would assume that, there's some clips of this show that have extremely high viewership that no one in this building made. For sure. For sure. Right? And so that- Some of the clips with, yeah.

The best performance. If you probably took, like, individual assets that got the most views, probably at least five out of the top ten were posted by other people that were just driving. The most viewed clips of the Colin and Samir show are not made by our team. Wow. For sure. If you go on TikTok, search Colin and Samir show, you search some interviews. Like, they are all clipped by other people. that we wouldn't have clipped them. Or it's even reframed. Yeah, it's reframed and it's no longer

reframed around your show. It's reframed around the time. We can't even compete with our own clips. Yeah. You know, we tried doing like, oh man, that person already put it out. Yeah. Yes. We tried to compete with the internet for our own clips of our own show and we couldn't compete. And that's where I think the perspective of like Disney and Sora is like, yeah, just like here's material to play. Do you think a content ID type system will come for clips and from AI? I think, I think it has to. I mean, I think I think YouTube has press with content ID. I think,

I think, well, all as creators live in the world where we're like, yeah, you can use my, the same way that Sora

kind of showed it. It's like, yeah, you can use my face. But I think there will be, there will have to be a revenue share model. Like,

I think for this to work properly, and maybe nobody cares about this. Well, it's not just a revenue, so it's like multi-share because it can't just be what it is, I don't know exactly if it is this way currently,

but there's the thing about, like, I could be using some clips from your show and clips from this show and this. But as soon as I put Mariah Carey's like, you know, Christmas song in there, like she's getting 100% of the revenue. Right.

Owns it, right? And there's like only one claimant right now. But they'll need to be like slices where it's like, okay, your face was on screen for this. I don't want to say it, but I'll say it. It feels like Web 3 was starting to get onto this with fractional ownership. That's interesting.

Where you can tokenize yourself in a way of like, yeah, if this token is used, I receive X percent. You may or may not actually need the blockchain underlying. Sure. There's this idea of fractualization makes a ton of sense. There was an idea of that where Grimes gave her voice out, right? And it was like a 50-50 rev sheriff used her voice. And like I think that maybe will happen.

But I also think just the internet and like YouTube specifically I think will look pretty different in that. Not only will we say you can use my IP in my face, but I think you'll take like the full length episode of your guy's show or let's say our show. And I think you'll just type in, you know, I got seven minutes. Can you just give this to me in seven minutes? It's like you can use their voice and like their style of animation, but just like give me the seven minute version of this. Yeah. I think if you've ever played with notebook LM,

you start to see like how like manufacturing your own entertainment where I could go give me TBBN, give me Colin and Samir and give me acquired last episode, but like summarize it all for my 21 minute drive. Yeah. Connected to Google Maps. It's like, yeah, I'm always, I'm always interested in where that lives. Like does that live in the consumer side? on the platform side or on the creator side.

Because like we literally do that. We have a 20, 20 to 30 minute cut down of the three hour show. Right. That we cut down, we edit. Diet TBP. Diet TV. Very familiar. It's very, yeah.

It's been really good. It's so funny because I've seen other people create, yeah. Seeing other people create like diet versions of their show now. And when when we were first like conceptualizing the show based on people's feedback of like, I want the show in 20, 30 minutes. I was like, oh, we'll just call it Diet TVPN. It's like all of the flavor, like, way, you know, way less calories. And John was like, diet, like, does that make, does that make any sense?

But it is a good. It's like not an industry term. It's not an industry term. No, but it makes more universal sense. But anyway, I think you'll be able to make your own version of diet. Yes, yes, right? And like, but you'll have to say yes to that. And again, there will have to be some new way of like, yes, so long as I'm compensated

when that happens. but if it is us, you know, Ben and David and you guys in one episode, like, also the question is who's weighted heavier? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Is it acquired? I don't know. They're like the luxury brand of,

they're the Rolex of the space. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, that's funny. You may not even have to ask the platform to do it from an audience perspective. You think the platform just does it? I think at some point, yeah, they're like, we know better than you based off of what you've already told us in your behavior.

Tensually. What's odd is that the AI models, they're really good at a lot of things, but they have not yet been good at clipping. Like, you don't want to go up against the internet, but I would say, you know, if there's five mega viral Colin Samir clips that you guys didn't clip,

those are clip by humans, though. Those were not an AI. Because as soon as someone could do it, they would definitely run, oh yeah, run the prompt over all their content. Let me put it out, I'll try and monetize it. There's decent platforms that can get you like 65% of the way there.

But yeah, you're right. The framing clip. They're good as tools. They're good as things. tools alongside the human, but the editorial, it's an editorial question. There could be this show generated by AI, right? Like, I'm just saying, if you just look at the technology, like, we could ingest news and figure out how to give it in like an audio. Yeah, form contextualize it. Yeah, it's not as fun. It's like that has no, I'm not. It's also nowhere near as special.

Like, there is something very special about what happens here day to day. Yeah, it's hard to set changing and, like, feeling like you're here in the moment. Totally. Yeah, I think to clarify, like, if anyone's listening to this being like, oh, my God, they're like, this is the dystopian world of content. Like, there is no world where I see, like, your guys show as an example is like, there is more room for interesting creative now than ever. If you are thinking about what is, this is maybe a bizarre way to put it, but what is like a uniquely human format.

Yeah. It's why we've invested more in live events. Like, we did our first big live event in New York in September. And, um, that was with Google, right? They were a sponsor, yeah, and it was super fun. And it was great, and there's 500 people in a room. And I think you feel like that there's going to be a rise in live events. For sure, obviously, I imagine you guys are going to do some version.

We haven't cracked it, but you'll do something where people can show up and people will die to show up to it. Yeah, acquired, obviously. It had 6,000 people in the Chase Center. Like, I think good creative will always win, but I do think back to the Netflix conversation, the question is like, who is the arbiter of taste in all of this? And I think the old Hollywood world is like Hollywood is the arbiter of taste. We're going to show you what good is. And Netflix is that, right?

They're going to curate stuff editorially. I think that still matters. I don't want to suggest it doesn't matter. I enjoy that. The other side is that the audience is the arbiter of taste and the curators of what's good. And that's the creator. I would, as a Netflix subscriber, I would be excited for them to have a corner of Netflix that's just history content from independent creators.

just like effectively like providing like Johnny Harris. Yeah, stuff like that because I've been on YouTube to fall asleep at night I can't watch anything tech or business related because it just kind of like prompts a bunch of ideas.

So I have to just like it's got to be like 30 years old. Like it's got to be like history. And something I've noticed recently is like there's a bunch of channels getting a lot of views that are getting served in the algorithm that are clear and I only clock that it's AI because they'll use images and then they'll be like a talk track.

and there's a bunch of creators that have just nailed this format over the years but I'm starting to hear like this battle wasn't just a fight it was a turning point in history and very like clockable as AI and so now like in the same way on Amazon as a consumer you're like

I just want to buy stuff on Amazon that's from brands that are over 50 years old because then I know that it's not like somebody just you know that's how I feel about TikTok shop I'm, I sometimes will get caught with a product that I'm like, hmm, maybe I want that. But if it's on TikTok shop, I'm like, I don't. Rough.

Yeah. Blanket disendorsement. Wait, is that not, but like, do you guys not? I've no, we don't have a TikTok on this or something? No, no, no. No, no. I don't even have TikTok in stock. These guys are in deep negotiation with TikTok.

No, no. I've never been met with silence for that. It's the opposite. I actually said, we're like the hardest digs this year. No, we're crazy. Creators. We don't have TikTok on our phones. We have one friend that sends us TikTok links,

and I've never watched any of them. Not a single one. It's rough. When Larry comes out and says, like, I fully control TikTok now, it's mine. I've got it here on my phone. I trust it. You can trust it. Then I'll give it a spence.

You know what it is? You guys don't have TikTok, so we'll tell you about this. There is, like, AI creators now. And that is very bizarre and dystopian to me because they, even me and maybe I'm getting to that age where I'm part of the cohort that can't tell, but I can't tell. Oh, so you're not talking about like,

there is a creator that creates various animals being pulled over at DUI checkpoints. Like, that's their stick. I'm talking about like an AI-generated human creator who looks human. Okay. There's this. There are people in on the joke or no?

It's just the pace. They're not. They're not in on the joke. And the tools really have opened up a world where it is easy to create. I mean, I've seen these and I've been like, Can we pull up one? Is that sort of the biggest trend of 25, you think?

I'm super interested in a more tactical level what's changing on YouTube. Because obviously we've been through like eight-minute shift and the 20-minute shift and then clickbait to like the counter switching to ABD and all these different little moments have happened. Like were there any, is it fair to say that AI is like the biggest change in 25? or was there another kind of meta shift that you sort of noticed? It's the one that we talk a lot about is the shift from, you know, podcasts being the meta when you think about the last presidential election. Okay, yeah.

Podcasts left. You know, obviously like podcasts played a major part. If you look at the amount of podcast appearances and viewership that Trump got for Donald Harris, like it's just the graph is unbelievable. Yeah. And I had this whole take during the election that it was about watch time too. Because the crazy thing is that she not only would she would common go on like a smaller show with a smaller audience, but she would only do a 45-minute hit, and Trump would be there for

three hours. And I'm like, we know AVD. Like, watch time is important. We actually clocked and we wrote down how much time. And I think for Trump, it was like 16 hours available. Or maybe more. And for Kamala, it was like under two. And it's just like as a voter, if you want to just sit and be like, I want five hours of content from this person to make my decision. I'm going to listen to five hours of both. And there's not five hours of one. That's a tough sell. And he's a, and he's a, Anyway, that looks extremely real. I would never guess. I don't know if I can show a camera.

I don't even know what camera is looking at me right now. Oh, there you go. There you go. I don't know if you can tell. But like the- So here's the thing that's going to happen is people are going to start to realize if this person didn't post at all before 2025, they're not real. Because I feel like this year, the models got good enough.

Where were you in 2019? Check the early Instagram. My understanding of how things have changed on YouTube is that if I was to zoom back to when I first got on the internet I think the amazing thing was like it was all information we could access information in a crazy way like at least when I was a kid we would go to like the library and go to the library and try and find like a book about something

and that changed when we could search Ask Jeeves or Google or AOL or Yahoo And like, we could just find out things. And that was crazy. And I think the information era was capped with the rise of social media and, like, Facebook specifically. When Facebook came about, it wasn't just information about the world or fun facts. It was information about people. And information about people was, like, really interesting and had gossip connected to it and had,

like, voyeurism connected to it. And it was just like this fascinating world that mirrored celebrity culture. And that then ushered in the next era, which was the attention era. And the attention era was kind of brought all the way forward by, you know, someone like Mr. Beast, Jimmy, who was like, here's human psychology and here's how these algorithms, what they favor, what are the incentives of the internet? And let's push that forward. And that's like we got to that point with the meta of YouTube being all about information and attention. And I think this next era that we're in, and the biggest shift that's happened in YouTube over the past year has been a shift towards perspective. Information and attention void of perspective is just completely uninterested. And I think that actually wasn't the case. If you're talking about history YouTubers, we were talking to this car creator, James Pumphrey used to work at Donut Media.

And he was telling us, like, at Donut, they could get a million views of like the entire history of Volkswagen. But that, he can't do that anymore. He has to add perspective to it. The title has to be like, why or how Volkswagen... Why Volkswagen is cooked. Yeah, or how Volkswagen turned their back on us, right?

And that has perspective suggested. And I think we can access information now very easily through LLMs, through search, through anything, we can actually also access, like, attention driving things, meaning, like, scrolling TikTok captures my attention. I don't think I'll, like, remember any of it, or it just won't matter, but it can fill my need for something to capture my attention.

But perspective, I think, is the thing that makes it stick in your brain of, like, I'm coming to these guys to Jordy and John for their perspective. I can get this information at other places. Totally, totally. And so I think we actually saw that quite a bit on YouTube where the Mr. Beastification, the kind of like big idea that drives a ton of attention is like still kind of interesting, but it's not as interesting as it used to be.

And someone like Marquez Brownlee who does the smartphone awards, you're like dying for his perspective on what was the best phone of the year. And I think he has a lot of longevity because his content is rooted in perspective. Emily Sundberg's another great example. That's perspective. And so I think perspective has always mattered, but it feels like that era has really been pushed. Using Marquez as an example, do you think that which offers more perspective or like waveform podcast, his podcast where he can kind of riff, it's unscripted, versus a review where he has the requirements

to tell you the price, the value, the specs, does he have more, a longer leash to give more perspective in the unscripted format? Or is there an equal amount of perspective because he is who he is and he brings his perspective everywhere? I think Marquez in the face to camera is the best perspective to Marquez. And people had problems with that like last year with Humane. Oh, yeah. People felt like his perspective carried so much weight that it could.

Bankrupt a company. Yeah. Same with Fisker. Yeah. The car. And so. But I think that also goes to show like, how much his perspective matters

and how much someone like that's... I remember he said, he said a bad, he told us, a bad review doesn't tank a company, a bad product tanks a company. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, all that to say again, like, I think if you're... I would be wearing a humane pin.

If we're not for the review. I mean, it can't accelerate a demise, though. Even if you look at like Ryan Trahan and, like, his videos, they lead with, like, something, like a really fun idea of, like, I stayed in one-star hotels or something. But then his pursuant, perspective gets layered within 30 seconds on top where he's like his his job is to leave a five-star review at this one-star place because like he wants to find the good in the world.

And even that is like perspective. Yeah, totally. And so I think I think POV is like that's the era we're in on the internet. Like if you're just delivering me information. And POV can be style. It can be tone. Like I think you guys are a great example. There are a lot of people talking about what you're talking about.

They're not talking about it in the style that you're talking about it with the same tone. Yeah. When I think about the Mr. Beast copycats, I think, like, there's distinctly a lack of perspective and a lack of view. It is just like, okay, yes, like, if Mr. Beast does this and you clone it and rotate that piece, like, you have a slight iteration that's enough to get the views. But it wasn't actually something that was, like, inspired or trying to push the envelope. I think you can navigate how to get views right now. Like, you can navigate how to get attention on the internet. If you study it, if you study it enough, you know, you can navigate it. But it doesn't mean people will remember you.

What's the state of the thumbnail industry, the thumbnail sub-industry? Well, on that note, I feel like there's this emergence of the creator with short-form video being so powerful for discovery. There's an emergence of a content creator that might have 200,000 followers and no viable business or even path to a viable business because they have a bit that they run that's really funny. And so they can get attention in a certain audience, but then like the pathway to monetizing it. you see this with like certain kind of accounts on Instagram where it's like your pathway to monetizing is like online casino advertise exactly and so that's kind of like that's kind of like UBI for people that are funny online it's just like you can that is a hilarious that's unbelievable and I totally agree with you but that that I actually

somewhat appreciate it because there's this guy that's a guy who actually is sponsored by steak and he's hilarious there's a guy who it's so funny I just want him to uh It's like agent, agent something. Well, I don't care what sponsor he has, really. I'm not, I don't buy products based on like some guy that I see for 10 seconds. But I do, yeah, this like sort of UBI for people that are funny online right now is like gambling. And it's dark, but at the same time, there's a dark side to it, but it is. What's the light side to it, just that people are making money?

Well, the light side is that on a personal level, get enjoyment out of it. And I'm like, he's providing it. It's effectively a free product. I mean, the same thing happened with sports, sports podcasting. There's like a massive bubble in sports casting. The white pill is that like there's a lot of people that have jobs.

Important. Podcasting. And that's a pretty fun job. The Chinese micro dramas, right? Like Chinese microdramas like real short. Actually on the drive over here, saw ads for real short. Like big billboards for real short. If you're unfamiliar, it's like, it's, if soap operas were on TikTok, you know, to swipeable

feed. Well, yeah. The crazy thing is that those have been so. successful, and it's, to me, very much the same idea as Katzenberg's, like, short, short form play. No, it's not the same idea. Dude, that was, when we went into, I'll never forget walking into the Quibi pitch meeting, where they invited a bunch of creators to come pitch shows. When we walked into their office, like, the play there was, like, spend a ton of money

on content. Like, they were like, we have a Spielberg movie and an Aaron Sorkin movie. It's like $100,000 a minute for some shows. Yeah, but they were like, wouldn't. What is it on real short? It's higher than TikTok, right? I don't want to totally discount what you said. You're right, Jordy.

That, like, what they said in the meeting, I remember, I'll never forget it. They were like, I was like, when does someone watch this? And they said, when someone is waiting for the bathroom, like in line for the bathroom, they'll flip it on and watch like a seven-minute increment of a show. And I remember being like, but people watch, people look at Instagram during that time. Like, how are you going to pull me into the condominium? I guess, I guess it's hyper, it's hyper competitive. for that time, but I think there's something to be said for

slow content that's made in a slow format, which is like with production. I've been thinking about like fast and slow content. We make fast content. From a production standpoint. From a production standpoint. Like there's people that make content. John's content on tech historically was slow content. It would spend two, three weeks making a video.

You'd put it out, you'd get a bunch of views. We're the opposite, very fast. We're making three hours of content a day with like three hours of prep a day. And I think like taking a form factor like short form video and then putting a different type of content through it, which is this more cinematic, highly produced content, it works in the form of like real short. Yeah, but they're spending fundamentally. They're spending a lot less. They're spending way less.

But also they're formulating it a way where they're earning your attention every 60 to 90 seconds. a hook every 60 to 90 seconds to get you to keep watching. You guys know how the economics works? No. Okay, so how it works is like if you download real short or drama box, basically they're spending like typically $200,000 for a 90-minute show, right? And that's cut into like a hundred slices. And what's happening is when you download real short, you're getting like tokens.

So it's kind of like Roblox money, like Roblox, right? So you're getting these tokens and you have to buy more. And the first 11 swipes are free. You go past the 11th, you got to make a payment. You got to spend tokens to keep watching. Every swipe, you're spending tokens. Interesting. And, you know, we interviewed a director on our show who's directed 20 of these,

and he is acutely aware of the fact that, like, some of his content has been viewed by 30 million people. And when you're making micro payments, again, at that scale. Making $30 to 40 bucks if someone finishes your movie. And it can be upwards of $30 to $40 if someone finishes the movie. Huge. So these, and the max budget is $200,000 to make. these. Now, the content itself is like, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's

all speaks to like the most aggressive, you know, just versions of what people want on the internet. But, um, the silver lining, the reason I brought this up, the silver lining is that people in Hollywood are working. People who were directors, writers, cinematographers, this is where they're working. So, I mean, it's by no means a perfect model in terms of like compensating actors and people working, are working. Yeah. There are opportunities. So I can unlock coins right now in real short.

If you want to read some of the titles on real short. I'll read a bunch. American sniper, the last round. Okay, I was actually going to ask like, you know, is it all romantic or romance? I think it's mostly romance. American sniper, the last round, that does seem like something I would watch. Okay. I'm down for that.

Step aside, I'm the king of capital. That also seems directly targeted. John gets one shot. Did you prepress for me? It might have a geotag on it. It seems like it does. Maybe John, you get into acting in these. Yeah, some of these are a little scantily clad into,

maybe this Christmas, the billionaire married a homeless girl? That's kind of interesting. Didn't China just ban that? They just banned that. They did? That's right. China banned. There was a ton of, I mean, there's a very popular type, like, format for a show.

Basically the Hallmark movie. Yeah, like very successful guy marries or falls in love with. with a very normal, a normal woman. And apparently China has a top-down mandate to not do this kind of content because it's creating unrealistic expectations. Oh, I'll be, I will definitely just be randomly plucked from obscurity by a billionaire.

And it's like, well, statistically that's not going to happen. So maybe like marry your high school crush and have kids and build a family. instead of just waiting around for a billionaire to come pluck you out of obscurity because you've seen so many of those stories, which is like a fascinating problem to have. Yeah, amazing stories are that popular

that it's gotten to that place. Oh, totally, totally. Yeah, I do wonder, like, I mean, we've had so many discussions about the downstream effects of TikTokification or YouTube affiliation or whatever, Mr. Beastification. I wonder if we're going to be having that discussion in a year or two

because it feels like people are just learning what real short even is. Yeah, for sure. It's early. It's early stage. Obviously, the business is working. now. What happens to a generation raised on it is good, is it bad?

I don't know. The last thing I'll say, just to close the loop on what I think big metas that have changed on YouTube, another one is length of content and serialization, meaning like creators are approaching YouTube as if they're making a show, like a series, that you can binge. Cleo Abrams is a great example. Like, Huge If True is a show. It has a format to it. It has an intro card.

That could, similar to Mark Grover, be pulled onto Netflix. That was an explainer show that explains cool science formats. And from the era even when I was watching you as a YouTuber, like we all weren't looking, we knew we were making content that fit a format that was, you know, should have been repeatable if we were at our best. We weren't making a show. No.

And now people are making a show. Yeah. And a YouTube channel is a TV show. Largely because it's watched on connected TVs, right? Even our show, over 50% of our watch time comes from a connected TV. And our average V iteration is 48 minutes. on TVs. But you look at like Mark Robert.

Thank you guys. Hit the gong. Hit the gong for that. For the obscure YouTube metric that only the real ones recognize. Hit the gong. Whoa. See, that's how you hit the gong.

That's a great. That was the hit of the day. Hit of the day. Yeah, but like Michelle Carrey challenge accepted. If you guys are unfamiliar with that, it's a show about taking on big challenges. She hung out outside of a military airplane.

It recreated Tom Cruise's stunt. But that's one of many episodes that fall in the same format that are 30 plus minutes in length. So help me square that with what I regard as YouTube's sort of organ rejection to overly serialized content. I'll give you an example. Johnny Harris, you're all fans here. It is a show. There's a bunch of great content. But then when he goes and does, you know, I'm doing a three-part series, it seems like YouTube's like, we don't want your three-part series.

We don't want your four-part series, and it feels like part two is the death-nell of a YouTube title. And you should never put part three, part four. And they say, hey, we have playlist for you. I don't believe it. My suggestion is not doing, you know, part one, part two, part three. Although a creator named Preston Goz did an amazing series about building a mini-truck for abandoned railroad. That's three parts, and it worked. Okay.

But you agree with me that it does feel like it's counter. It speaks to a packaging problem. Yeah. Yeah. On Netflix, the show has title art. Yes. Right? And that's what gets me into it.

That's where I get the recommendation from. And then once you get in, I don't really care what the artwork is for every individual episode. It's like it would almost be better if you're doing like a four-part series, four-40-minute episodes or something. Just drop a four-hour YouTube video.

I saw somebody watch a 10-hour video just on Star Wars episode one. You see that one, right? I think you'll see the UI changes come to YouTube. So it'll leave UI thing, eventually. I think it all start to feel. Like super chapters almost.

Exactly. But it needs to live in one place because it feels like just if the algorithm even has a bad day and it serves you part three before it serves you part two and you're on you're on part two, you're going to be like, what am I doing? I'm not clicking. I know this can seem minor, but they're either testing it or it's rolled out where you can now upload 4K thumbnails to YouTube. And I think just higher resolution thumbnails. I think a lot of that is because now people are sitting and they're watching on their TVs and like, If it looks like crap, when you click on it. They are ushering this move across the platform

for people to be ready for consumers to be sitting on their sofas and choose to watch. I'd imagine someone listening would be like, but didn't you just say that anyone could upload to YouTube and anything could happen? This feels like a high lift to make like a show. Sure. And it is.

But these creators have all been on the platform for a decade. So the suggestion for me is that like this is happening. If you watch like Hot Ones is a TV show, right? So I think you've seen it. It's happened over a, decade, but it is like if you are exploring what is the now of YouTube, that is the now. Like it is, people are making premium shows that are watched on TV. And then the question is, does Netflix come in and repackage and license those episodes?

Yeah, or open the doors to a creator program, which I do think is a very, very realistic path. It's not going to be anyone can upload, but it's probably going to happen. So what's the state of the thumbnail artist today? Is it all AI? Are there people that have graduated from YouTube thumbnail artists and now they're doing Netflix thumbnails? Because I imagine thumbnails are important on Netflix too, right? Oh, they're insanely important. I mean, every time you log, if all of us logged into Netflix right now, we might have different versions of the same thumbnail. No, I mean, I said it last time I was a show. It's like they're the gatekeepers to viewership. But I think

thumbnail artists are more like strategists now than pure like designers, right? Because it's more of thinking through the strategy of what will peak someone's curiosity enough to click. I don't think we need to be like hyper, hyper designed all the time, but there's some really great artists out there. When I think about this, there's a thumbnail that comes to mind, which is stuck in your brain. Yeah, it's stuck in my brain. It's a really good thumbnail from a basketball YouTuber named Jesser.

Oh, I know Jesser. And he went to go tour the new LeBron Nike facility. And it's like kind of a similar thumbnail to Mr. Beast where he's like hanging out of a helicopter and you can see this like gold LeBron statue. Yeah, that's iconic. Yeah, it's like a classic. Even at two pixels. And it has 6.3 million views. But I mean, I don't, I watch some of Jester's videos.

I like his like guest, the NBA player videos. Those are awesome. But I looked at that and caught my eye and I clicked it. But what was amazing is that it pays off in the first second. You watch it and you're like, oh yeah, there's a gold LeBron statue. And this is a brand new Nike facility. I'm in. And so AI could.

create that thumbnail for someone else, but unless you actually did it, you gotta do this. But unless you're jessor and you pay it off upon hover, because it's also like things auto play on YouTube, it's not. The hover is a very big deal. It's underrated. It's why that now you can't clickbait someone because

a thumbnail is proven over a hover before you even click. It's like, did this really happen? What does the video look like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the fact that he's standing there, that's a strategic move of being like, if I'm going to make this thumbnail and design it, like this, it can't be so hyperbolic. It has to be pretty real.

You've got to set the expectation with the thumbnail and then match it. The bird watching doc, listers, the thumbnail looks like a movie. It's like very low phi, but there's text on it that reads very much like a movie that was shown at Sundance or something. And then you click on it and you're like, I had no idea this is going to be so incredible. There's a very distinct smell in here. It's not a bad smell. It's a good smell, but it's a very distinct smell. People say that it smells like rubber. Rubber. I would say if anybody in this room has ever been to India,

it smells like India. Like when you get off the plane at India, this is kind of what it smells like. Oh, let's go. You know, there's someone in the technology world that just got fired for saying that exact thing. No, really?

This is the whole drama. Who? Very recent. Yeah, the CTO of Klein was talking about a hackathon, and it was a lot of men in the room, and it went all back and forth, and it turned into dust up on both sides. I'm talking about like a childhood

nostalgia for me of landing. Yeah, that should I... Well, guys, so... Go ahead, George. As much as I would love to continue this conversation, the good news is we are. Yes, we are. It's true.

I'm not sure when it's going to release, but we should wrap up. Slow content. Slow content. Slow content. Slow content. And slow. But thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having to close it out. I love the show. And we'll be back tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you for tuning

in today. We'll be in properly dressed for the season. We will. we will finally finally so thank you for tuning in with us today goodbye we love you see tomorrow good bye you guys cheers yeah