TBPN - Oracle Slides, Disney x OpenAI, SpaceX IPO | Fidji Simo, Dylan Byers, Angela Jiang, Jonathan Slotkin, Aaron Cannon, Karan Kunjur

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

(00:36) - SpaceX IPO (29:55) - Oracle Slides (43:16) - Disney x OpenAI (55:38) - Dylan Byers, a founding partner and senior correspondent at Puck, covers the media industry, including business and gossip. He discusses the media's tendency toward self-obsession, highlighting how minor gossip can overshadow significant industry events. Byers also examines the personal dynamics influencing major mergers, such as the competition between Paramount and Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery, and the role of AI in the future of media, noting Disney's partnership with OpenAI to create interactive experiences with its characters. (01:28:01) - Fidji Simo, a French-American businesswoman, is the CEO of Applications at OpenAI, having previously served as CEO of Instacart and as head of the Facebook app at Meta. In the conversation, she discusses her transition to OpenAI, emphasizing her commitment to democratizing AI by transforming ChatGPT from a chatbot into a personal super assistant that can manage various aspects of users' lives, such as travel planning and health management. She also highlights the importance of integrating AI into both consumer and enterprise applications, aiming to enhance productivity and accessibility across different sectors. (01:52:26) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:10:32) - Angela Jiang, a former product manager at OpenAI who contributed to the launches of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, has co-founded Worktrace AI, a startup focused on automating repetitive tasks in large enterprises. In the conversation, she discusses how Worktrace AI observes employee workflows to identify tasks suitable for AI automation, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI models and their practical application in real-world business scenarios. The company recently emerged from stealth mode, announcing a $9 million seed funding round led by Conviction and 8VC, with participation from the OpenAI Fund and notable figures such as Mira Murati and Jason Kwon. (02:20:40) - Jonathan Slotkin, a practicing neurosurgeon and health system leader, discusses the significant public health benefits of autonomous vehicles, emphasizing that data from Waymo's 100 million miles of operation show a 91% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers. He argues that widespread adoption of self-driving cars could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the U.S., highlighting the need to overcome regulatory challenges and public skepticism to realize these life-saving advancements. (02:35:47) - Aaron Cannon, co-founder and CEO of Outset, discusses his company's AI-moderated research platform that enables enterprises to conduct and synthesize video interviews at scale, combining the depth of one-on-one interviews with the speed of surveys. He highlights Outset's recent $17 million Series A funding led by 8VC, bringing total funding to $21 million, and mentions partnerships with Fortune 500 companies like WeightWatchers, Nestlé, and Microsoft. Cannon emphasizes the platform's ability to deliver in-depth insights rapidly, noting that clients have experienced research processes that are over eight times faster and capture ten times more interviews than traditional methods. (02:46:02) - Karan Kunjur, co-founder and CEO of K2 Space, discusses the company's focus on developing large, high-power satellites to meet the growing demand for advanced space capabilities. He highlights the shift from smaller satellites to larger platforms, leveraging the capabilities of modern heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Starship. Kunjur also emphasizes K2 Space's commitment to providing cost-effective, high-capacity satellite solutions for both commercial and government clients. (03:00:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 TVPN. Today is Thursday, December 11, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrudeau. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. Christmas is around the corner. That's why you're here.

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Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Also, SpaceX IPO under the Christmas tree, $1.5 trillion for the big man, for Elon Musk. He's going to raise $30 billion, something like that. That's an incredibly small amount of dilution if he actually goes out at $1.5 trillion. Should be interesting. I thought he hated running a public company.

Just $1.5? Just $1.5. Just $1.5 trillion. He said the biggest number, because you know that there was. was that whole, like, leak, I think it was in Reuters, uh, open AI going out at one trillion. You got to go a little bit higher. What's just a little bit higher? He should have done it. He should had a one point one. I'm going to IPO one point one trillion. Really stick it to Sam. But he didn't. He says he's going out at one point five. He's got to lose some room for the for the first day pump.

Yes. Get it up to two. Get it up to three. Yeah. Um, but I mean, in terms of companies that should benefit from the space economy, like is this not the invidia of space? Like what, what, what, what other company is there. It's the space company. It's SpaceX. And so 30 billion coming in. Company was doing great. Launch product is fantastic.

The rockets go up. They come down. They're putting sonic booms over Montecito. Apparently. But I think that the actual launch market for anything but satellites, but for anything but data centers has just been a little small.

And so Starlink has been the big unlock, of course, for SpaceX. Massive market there. putting the screws to Verizon, AT&T, and the other telcos. The other telcos, of course, have been noodling on working with a rival, putting up smaller satellites in a sparser constellation with more bandwidth per... Somebody was talking earlier that to get the same amount of compute as a one-gigawatt data center, you would need 10,000 satellites.

That's not that many, though. Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe. Sure. So that's actually not... not so crazy. That seems like completely, that's actually like extremely bullish. Well, there is a, no, there is, there is a pathway to doing it with far fewer, which would just be like ultra, ultra, long.

I don't think they want to do big. I think the whole thing is constellation. That was the beauty of Starlink was that you could go up there. And because it gave them the ability to have all this residual capability, as Gwynne Trottwell puts it, which is like if the CIA shows up and they want to put a spy satellite on there, or some company shows up. up and says, hey, we want to put something really serious in space. But we only need 60% of the faring, or we only need 40% of the fairing, or we only need 80%

of the fairing. It's like, okay, great, we'll fill the rest of the space with two starlings, five starlings, 20 starlings. Well, we have the founder of K2 Space coming on the show later. We raised a quarter of a billion dollars, had a $3 billion valuation from T-Roe Price, Fantastic. Head of Sophia, Altimeter,

light speed, and some others. So we will talk more about that then. And we will also talk about fall, generative media platform for developers,

develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. So in terms of the space like thing, I mean, we keep going back and forth on this. Is it just a pump?

Is it just a new narrative? Is it a pivot to AI? I don't really care. I think it all comes down to this just idea of like Elon math. You know, the Elon math is always crazy. He's always putting up sort of wild predictions that then may or may not come true. A lot of them are way off. But at least he's telling a story that's like optimistic about the future.

And at least like it feels like that Trace Stevens like good quest thing is like, get to Mars is good. If he misses it by five years, at least he's still the first. the only person that cares about it, which is great. I went through, I tried to pull the, in true, like, hit piece fashion, I pulled up all the different, all the different times. He's, like, made a prediction and then, like, not landed it or not delivered on time. And it's crazy. The guy loves to rip predictions. He said he was going to put early SpaceX concept, when they started SpaceX, was to put a small greenhouse with plants on Mars as a PR demo before they would

even start the company. That, of course, did not happen. Before starting the company? Yeah, this was like the original thesis was like he went to some, Elon went to some like space, kind of space nerd meetup. It was like, we need to put a plant, a physical plant with a webcam on it on Mars. And if we land that there and we prove that life can live on Mars, we bring life to Mars, it will inspire everyone and marshal all the resources and all the capital and all the excitement to actually go put boots on the ground, which also he predicted. He predicted humans on Mars by 2024, of course, hasn't happened that we know of. It's possible. He snucked one up there. They keep saying that the star, they keep saying the star ships blow up, but maybe, maybe one of them

didn't. Maybe one of them sneaky, sneaky went off and put a person on Mars. Yeah, it's just the shell of the real ship. I like the inverse, the inverse conspiracy theory, you know, like, oh yeah, we never went to Mars or we never went to the moon? No, the inverse conspiracy theory, we're going all the time secretly, but you're not cool enough to get in on it. You don't have a ticket. Everyone else does, except for you. Because I was just on the moon yesterday, and I'm not telling you about it. First crude Mars landing as early as 2029, a little too early to say, but that one feels aggressive. We're just four years out, and you've got to put a whole crew down there. He also said tourist trips were going to be happening around the moon by 2018. Didn't hit that.

Yeah. Self-sustaining city on Mars of 1 million people, 2050. Feels a little early, but I don't know, 2050 is a long way right. Any time you're getting more than a couple decades. A couple decades out. Anything's possible. I agree. I agree.

But then, of course, there's a bunch that he succeeded it. He said that he was going to deliver reusable orbital rockets. He did it. Yep. And what else matters? At least, you know, you, you know, you know, he's also predicted fully reusable starship with rapid turnaround. It's a little too soon to tell.

He's behind some of the early dates, but in general, that project seems like it's real. It's going to happen. It's taken a little bit of time. He has a bunch of other funny ones. But it is interesting how the SpaceX narrative has shifted from first we're going to Mars,

then there was the whole, do you remember SpaceX point to point? Are you familiar with us? So there was a pitch for a while? Like a commercial, is this like, this is a replacement for an airliner? You'll just go up and then, come down and land. Exactly. Exactly. So it was like New York to Tokyo in like 30 minutes.

That would go so hard. Insane. Right? Insane. So the idea was like you're in man. Imagine imagine being able to commute to Tokyo for some obscure job. It would be amazing. It would actually be remarkable. And there's a whole bunch of economic research that shows that when you increase transportation, reduce transportation times, you really do get an economic boom because people can do business in areas where they couldn't before, even just reducing the time from San Francisco to L.A. from a six-hour drive to a one-hour flight, all of a sudden, people can go up and do business, come back the same day. They just get there more often. I had a hot take for a while that if I was the president, I would recommission the SR-71 Blackbird, which of course goes,

I think Mach 3. So you can actually get from D.C. to London in like two hours because it's a supersonic jet. And so imagine that Imagine the presidential SR-71 would go also very hard. Remarkably hard, right? And imagine the aura of, you know, something happens in an, I remember I thought of this because the queen had just passed away, very sadly. And of course, the president was planning on visiting the queen, paying respects to all the people of Great Britain.

But imagine if, you know, the news breaks, and it's like, this is important, I'll be there in two hours. and I'm there on the ground. Like same day the news breaks. Not, oh, we got to charter the 747 and bring the whole crew and land and I'll see you in two days and it'll be a whole thing. It's like jumping in the car. Yep, yep. Or imagine these trade deals.

These trade deals. Oh, the H-200s are going to China or something's happening in Taiwan. Hey, Cisian Ping. So what happened with the point-to-point program? Has there been any? Oh, well, it's all just predicated. I mean, so the space, the starships are still blown up. So no one wants to get on those.

But in theory, if Starship. But there was nothing that. But they never had any comms. It was like, we're scrapping this. No, no, no, no, no, not at all. Not at all. It was just like an interesting, it was an interesting, like, back of the envelope, like, bowl case for, like, the business, basically.

Just saying, like, okay, yes, starship is going to be really good at getting to the moon, getting to Mars, getting to, getting a bunch of Starlink satellites in orbit, right? It's like a good, it's a good business. But Elon is always the king of opening up new markets and just kind of saying, like, well, what if you was also replacing commercial air travel? And people are like, wait, that's a huge, huge market if you can do that. And of course, if you could make it more economical, who would ever pay for a ticket on a 747 when you could ride a rocket and get there literally 90% faster?

Like, it's crazy the amount of time that you would save. Now you have to go from Manhattan on a boat out to a launch pad. You can't take off from JFK. Like, there's a whole bunch of wrinkles. And that's why this is all practically probably like 20 years in the future. But it was one of those famous examples of an Elon project where if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it eventually will happen. And that's a lot of what's happening with the data centers in space.

We need to inference things. We need to inference things like cognition. And the team, because they are the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Right now, Devin's inference on Earth. Who knows? Maybe in the future. It's inference in space. I think that the space data center thing, people are still having the debate on like, is it possible?

It's like, obviously it's possible. The question is over under a gigawatt by 2027, which is when the other big clusters come online. Will it be competitive in the short term and the near term? And then on the flip side, like, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, a bear, are you saying that it's not going to happen in 20 years? And then, I mean, the big question is, there's one, there's one more Elon Gambit that he could run with. One more like, oh, you wanted a fifth act? Just one? I mean, there's tons. But there's one that's really wild, which would be if he straight up said, we're building the Dyson sphere. Like, we are going to

launch, Tyler's nodding. He's pumped. He's pumped. Isn't he the obvious, isn't he like the only can't, only real candidate. Well, he's the only candidate for everything in space because he has the leading space company by like two orders of magnitude. I think someone at Anthropic has said that the Dyson Sphere is in the plans of Anthropic.

Of anthropic? They weren't trolling? I mean, I don't know. They're going to need to acquire a space company if they want to do that because how do you get the, isn't the Dyson sphere just a bunch of solar panels around the sun directly capturing 100% of the energy that's put off? by the Sun?

Yeah. I don't think it has to fully, like, it's not like there can't be any light coming out. It's just like strips of- Oh, I thought, Cardishab 1 is you're capturing 100% of the energy that's hitting your planet. Cardiff 2 is you're capturing 100% of the energy that is given off by your star. Yeah, actually, I think... Maybe what I'm talking about is, there's a different term. Maybe there are two different things.

Maybe Dyson sphere could just be, okay, you're only capturing 50% or 10% and then, then Cardishav 2 is you're capturing 100% of the energy coming off your son. Tyler, the chat wants to know. Did we ever find out if this kid, I'm assuming they're talking about you, is related to Elon? Why would he be related to Elon? He's got a lot of sons. He's got a lot of sons. Oh, okay. Yeah, it could be anyway. Maybe. Should we read through this? So, Eric Berger over at Ars Technica. You should also read through the daily newsletter, tech analysis and news daily from TBPN. We're doing ad, for our own newsletter now.

We love that. Get our daily op-ed, top headlines, and best posts from the timeline. Every, I can't read the rest of this. Tyler, you got to close up. Every day. TVPN.com.

Go subscribe. Thank you. I'll send this time. So Eric Berger is writing a piece called After Years of Resisting at SpaceX, now plans to go public Y. And Elon actually replied to Eric and said, as usual, Eric is accurate.

So I thought it was worth reading through this. Yeah. Eric says, SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year. Multiple outlets have reported, and ours can confirm. This represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk. Wall Street Journal and the information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday, and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting a $1.5 trillion

target valuation. This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history occurred in 2019 when the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company began publicly trading as a Ramco and raised $29 billion. In terms of revenue, a Ramco is a top five company in the world. Now, SpaceX is poised to potentially match or exceed this value that SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is not a surprise. It's the world's dominant space company and launch,

space-based communications, and much more. For investors, seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier. But why would must take SpaceX public now at a time when the company's revenues are surging, thanks to the growth of the Starlink internet constellation. The decision is surprising because Musk has for so long resisted going public with SpaceX. He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of Tesla and feared that shareholders' desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars. Next section is called Data Centers. Ars spoke with multiple people familiar with

Musk and is thinking to understand why he would want to take SpaceX public. A significant shift in recent years has been the rise of AI, which Musk has been involved in since 2015 when he co-founded OpenAI. He later had a falling out with his co-founders and started his own company XAI in 2023. At Tesla, he has been pushing smart driving technology forward and more recently focused on robotics. Must sees the convergence of these technologies in the near future, which he believes will profoundly change civilization. Raising large amounts of money in the next 18 months would allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy at SpaceX as he influences and partakes in this convergence of technology. How can SpaceX play in space? In the near term, the company plans to develop a modified version of the Star-like satellite

to serve as a foundation for building data centers in space. There you go, John. Musk said, as much on X in late October, quote, SpaceX will be doing this. But using a next generation Starlink satellite manufactured on Earth is just the beginning of this vision. The level beyond that is constructing satellite factories on the moon and using a mass driver, electromagnetic railgun, to accelerate.

Explain to us. To accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without the need for rockets. Must said last weekend on X, that scales to 100 terawatts a year of AI and enables non-trivial progress towards becoming a Kardashev to civilization. Based on some projected analysis, SpaceX is expected to have in the neighborhood of 22 to 24 billion in revenue next year. 65 times revenue is what you'd be paying if SpaceX goes out at 1.5 trillion. For reference, 65 for 65x revenue for SpaceX. Invidia is the 24X revenue to market cap,

market cap to price to sales. So like twice more, twice as expensive as Nvidia, but also, you know, probably like even wider lead to the rest of the industry, newer industry. I don't know about the margins, but potentially higher margins. And, again, earlier in this article, talking about, like, space being

more vividly-in- Right. Anyways, that is a lot of money. It's on par with NASA's annual budget, and SpaceX can deploy its capital far, far more efficiently than the government can. So the company will be able to accomplish a lot, but with a large infusion of cash,

SpaceX will be able to go much faster. This is the thing that I'm not certain on. Like, has SpaceX been capital-constrained, or are the capability constrained? Like, I don't, it hasn't been clear to me. You know, clearly there's been like infinite demand for SpaceX equity for a very long time, so much so that people are, you know,

investing in triple-layered SPVs just to get, you know, and enduring massive fees just to get a taste. But, so, yeah, the question is like, how does this massive capital infusion actually accelerate the, business that much or is it just the right moment in time for a number of reasons? Well, you know that SpaceX, whenever they launch, they stream their launches.

They got to be on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. Abi Tripathi, a longtime SpaceX employee who is now director of mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall. That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. If you have followed Elon's tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he

leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others. Yeah. What's interesting is, so I totally, get that SpaceX was never crazy, crazy

capital constrained, even though like building a massive rocket, that feels like so... It feels so expensive. But at the same time, they've just been able to raise the money and it just hasn't been a problem. And of course, the, like, SpaceX as a business generates a lot of revenue. Like, some of the contracts with the government are in the

billions. And then Starlink is just throwing off... Yeah, it's telecom. So it's just throwing off tons and tons of cash. I mean, it's incredibly expensive to get the constellation up there, but you do have cash flow from it. And it's effectively, you know, like, I've been subscribed to Starlink for like a year or two. I never use it. I'm basically 100% margin for them, right? Yeah.

And I use it just as like a backup in case the internet goes down. I have it. Yeah. And you just look at the growth opportunity in effectively telecom. You have T-Mobles, a $217 billion business that is threatened by Starlink. AT&T is $172 billion business. and Verizon is a $170 billion business. But I think the reason you need $30 billion,

like sort of paradoxically or counterintuitively, might not be to build more rockets. It might be to actually just buy the GPUs. Because like, in theory, if you're putting a GPU in space, like Elon SpaceX doesn't make those GPUs. They don't just pull them out of thin air. They've got to buy them from somewhere.

And if they're buying them from Nvidia, those are expensive. And you've got to buy a lot of them. and to make a dent in, like, let's assume all the physics works. Let's assume that the launch costs are cheap. All the math works out. Well, if you're putting a gigawatt of compute in space, you probably have like a billion dollars of hard costs

just on the chips or something like that. I don't know the exact number. But you can imagine that you raise $30 billion. The business is humming, but you still have to outlay a ton just for the GPUs. And so, yeah, you do have a lot. you do have a new, a new consumption for cash. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously.

They got multi-ass investing in those trusted by millions. Did you want to review? Do you think that XAI gets rolled into SpaceX or Tesla? That's the hard part. I thought it was going to be Tesla for sure, because, you know, Tesla has the lineage. They have their own chip. They have massive data centers to train AI models for full self-driving. It felt like such a logical place for XAI to land.

but now maybe it lands at SpaceX? I don't know. Yeah, if SpaceX becomes the data centers and space company and they're effectively reselling. Also, I mean, I don't, it feels like there's some sort of arcane truth about, you know, consolidation where it might be not,

it might be less of a headache than people think to have different entities. Like if you think about, I mean, certainly like Stargate is a separate entity from opening eye. I'm not even thinking about it as a headache. It's just more so like XAI needs to get quite a lot more traction, I think, in enterprise and consumer. Somewhere, yeah. But yeah, effectively somewhere needs to become like the dominant, a dominant lab in at least one domain.

Otherwise, I think it will just make sense to roll into one of these other platforms. Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders Fund's investment in SpaceX because it might be one of the greatest, it might become the greatest venture capital investment of all time. It certainly feels like it's in the running. This is from Nico Wittenborn. It says Founders Fund investing $20 million out of a $220 million, which also invested in Palantir and Spotify early is just nasty.

And Dan Premack says, flashback to chatting with Founders Fund, Luke Nosec, when he led the first investment in SpaceX from an old PE Week Wire newsletter in 2008. I can't believe. PEE Week is... I read that newsletter back, not in 2008, but like back then. Wow, Primax's been in the game for a long time. So, he says, I spent some time on the phone earlier this week with Luke Nosec of the founders fund, which it used to be.

They had the, they dropped it. And then there's also an apostrophe here, which I think has been lost at some point. I don't know. to discuss his firm's $20 million investment in private space launch services provider SpaceX. The company is run by Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal along the Founders Fund partners, a few questions and answers. Dan, Founders Fund usually invests no more than a few million dollars in a company. Why invest $20 million when your fund is only $220 million?

Luke, we obviously have internal caps that we follow. What we do is look at how much a company needs and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook because that's how much it needed at the time. A lot of firms were offering more. Dan says, most of the companies, you back have some sort of internet angle, which makes sense, given your PayPal background. But what do you know about rocket science? Oh, there's no internet angle in SpaceX?

No one predicted the internet angle, but it is remarkable that a bunch of internet guys fund a rocket company and then it just becomes an internet company and it's an ISP and now it's a data center company and everything collapses down to the internet. And it's the Joe Wisen, they'll take. AI will get every resource that it needs. Like, the internet needs, internet is the business model for everything. Doesn't matter if you invest in a space company. Eventually, you're going to be an internet business.

And so, Luke answering about the rocket science question, he says, the most important aspect to us is the team. Remember, the PayPal founders didn't have banking experience, Dan, Elon. has put over $100 million of his own money into this company. That is crazy. That they'd already burned 100 mil, and then Founders Fund comes in with 20.

And develop both the Kestrel and Merlin engines, which are the first new rocket engines developed in the U.S. in a very long time. When we did due diligence, we wanted to speak with other investors of successful new rockets. But they were all dead. I love that. Yeah, so we have to, we're going to be the first year. Dan, your announcement of the funding just came,

days after SpaceX had yet another launch failure there. Any worries, any worries, Luke says Dan? Luke says, no, there are obviously going to be some technical kinks like an exploding rocket, but they get amplified because rocket science is more binary than would be a technical kink with a website. Either the rocket gets into orbit or it doesn't. The team has some very smart people and they'll make more. Anybody that ships just regular old SaaS should have a huge amount of sympathy for anyone in hard tech is launching any type of app and not having a single bug. Insane. Even a single, like, critical bug is tough.

At least, like, at least, you know, early, early days. And, of course, a critical bug in aerospace is quite explosive. Well, let's move on. So, so I did want to pull up. So just the estimates, FF is estimated to own 10.4%. So we can just keep it at 10. that means that this initial, it's not, and again, they've invested in multiple rounds since then. Historically, like the greatest venture investment ever, in my view, was Mossa's 20 million investment

in Alibaba. That's true. Turned it into 70 billion at the time of the IPO. Hard to, I wonder if we can figure out how much. FFone's about 10% of SpaceX. But I don't know how many, they've put in billion. Oh, yeah, yeah. To maintain that stake, they put it in time. So, again, it's still like going to be 150-ish billion dollar position just the carry check alone will be nasty as Nico said um wow you hit the gong for the old ff crew my former boss yeah let's hit the gong john's former boss my former boss how does he do it how does he do it yeah well really quickly let me tell you about profound and there's big news today

from Profound, the company that helps brands show up more often and more accurately in AI platforms like ChatGPT. They've just announced their new workflows product which lets marketers automate jobs like research reporting and content generation to drive even greater discoverability wherever people are searching. You can check out workflows and marketing that runs itself. I was texting the CEO of Profound James last. night and he was giving me an update on the business and he shared just like a clearly like copy and pasted it like the new customers that they had signed and I don't think we can share all of them yet but it basically looked like every

company in every company every big company it looked like they had them they have they already are working with MongoDB indeed mercury docu-sign ramps apier eight sleep US Bank Figma Ciki LG, so many of these different, different, you know, companies are choosing profound, and we feel lucky to be partnered with them. Here's a good post from just another pod guy. We could sprinkle this in before we move on to Oracle. Just thought this was an interesting point of view.

Elon is not really a person. He is the human embodiment of network effects. When you've been operating at that level and breadth that he has been, you aren't really dealing with an individual. You're dealing with a deep bench of talent and capital with a common. with a comms guy who is addicted to Twitter and its head. The same warnings about underestimating Trump, the person versus Trump's cabinet,

apply to Musk but 100x, and with far less irrationality injected and with a much higher caliber of people. Does he overpromise? Over-hyperalyze, of course, but I would guess the median IQ and depth of expertise of the bench around Musk is higher than that of any nation state.

I thought this was obvious to most people. Yeah, it's just crazy how, like, yes, You just have to accept the over-promising, the over-hyping and stuff, but recognize that it's like, no one else is trying, really. There's very, very few people. Well, they're trying. Yeah, but in terms of, like, the real people making a run at a lot of these crazy ideas, like, they're just, it's incredibly thin.

It's incredibly thin. There aren't that many people. There are a lot of people that, yeah, just don't take it seriously. But, anyway, let's move over to one of Elon Musk's best friends, I believe. They're boys. They're boys. I think they're boys. Elon can count on Larry for a billion or two over text.

So Larry Allison is addressing, he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. So Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarters fell slightly short of analysts' expectations, while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits. Before we continue this article, let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

So, I mean, this is all part of this. I think investors didn't realize that, like, when you do one of these crazy AI deals, you have to go build the data center, and then you have to wait, and then you have to get power, and you have to buy the chips, and the chips have to buy the chips, and the chips have to turn it on, then you've got to turn it on, and you've got to test it. And then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell them. All while enterprise AI adoption might be stacking.

We'll see. There was some crazy data out of ramp today. R. Karazian, the economist over there. At least some businesses might be saying, we've got enough AI. We like it, but we have enough. Apparently, 55% of businesses are just, like, good without paying for AI?

I mean, the paying thing is the key. At least directly. The paying thing here is, so basically. And just the examples, like a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud. Yes. But they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies

that leverage cloud to deliver their products. But it's an interesting, it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going. This is from Ara Karazian over at Ramp. He says, Ramp AI's AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45% of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors by the model. Open AI went down negative 1%. Anthropic up 0.8%, and Google went up 0.7%. And so you can see that this chart in In 2025, Open AI had a big, big jump. And then just has been flat for the last couple months, a little bit down.

Anthropics been on a much smoother, it seems like they didn't exist in 23, basically, or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then 2024, you see some slight growth here. And then 2025, a much smoother, like, okay, uptick, growing more, growing more, growing more, kind of all keeps up with this, you know, they've been 10xing every year, like an Instagram hustle account. But Open AI had a massive spike at the start of 2025 and then has been a little bit flatter. But it is interesting. I wonder how much you read into this. So ARA has a take here, we should go through before we do. Let me tell you about fin.a.i. The number one AI agent

for customer service automate the most complex customer service queries. on every channel. So he says adoption is flat. Is the bubble popping? And he says, I'm not calling it yet. The slowdown comes at the end of a rapid run-up in adoption rates in 2025, which coincided with a significant step change in the capabilities of these models. Now the effect of the latest advancements has faded. If we want to see another run-up in adoption, we would have to see at least one or two-step changes. Technological gains, the models get even better, spurring faster adoption or implementation gains. Early adopters figure out the best use cases for AI, and the rest of the market follows driving incremental adoption. Both are likely, the latter even more so, as adoption

actually rose in several industries with relatively low adoption rates like retail construction and manufacturing. Is Google's AI good now? He says it's still underrated. Adoption of Google's Gemini rose 0.7 percent. Its second highest monthly increase on record. And then he says, what's going on with Open AI? He says he cautions an overreaction to the latest result. which show Open AI adoption dropping while Anthropic and Google adding new users and what that means for Open AIs business. I've learned a lot covering how companies buy and use AI.

Mainly, this market changes rapidly in the typical rise and fall timelines of companies does not apply here. Open A Android rapid adoption of growth in 2025, in many ways emerging as default spend category for businesses. And it's not unreasonable to think that rate would normalize as competitors find their fit in the market. Also, there's just a lot of...

Overall, the interesting thing is every, like, it seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model is just getting smarter is not going to, by default, make adoption, like, accelerate massively again. They need to become more useful. They need to be able to, you know, Dorcas has talked about this. Like, they need to be able to learn on the job, basically, in the way that a human does. And I think, I think until we have that, there's some thing, you know, the forward deployed engineer movement of, like having people out embedded in companies, like trying to unlock the potential of the models. That's great. But I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful. Yeah. More useful. I don't know. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, when I look at those, when I look at the number,

like the headline number, it's 45% have adopted, have paid for AI chat apps, basically. You know, he's tracking Open AI, Anthropic, Google. and XAI on there, a few others. And you flip that around and you're like, 45% of businesses don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all? Or are they just good with free? Because if you told me like 55% of companies are in sort of like a private equity, scarcity, wartime mode, where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door,

even a $20 subscription is something that will be scrutinized. Because, you know what, like, son, we've been running this business for a generation. We're not going to spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is precious. And so we're not just going to go sign up for whatever. No, you don't just spend, spend, spend. You need to really understand if this is valuable. And you know what?

If the particular business we have, we have a specific POS system, we have, you know, we don't have that many unstructured questions, right? Like, realistically, it's like we're not doing a lot of random email, a lot of random research for our business. It's more like, you know, customer comes in, take their order, put it in the POS system. Yeah. Charge them. Go do the thing, which AI is probably not, you know, replacing. So it's interesting.

But it is one of the cool factors about this R. Karazian report is that it comes from ramp customers, who I don't think of as, I think of them is a little bit more forward thinking than the general population. If I were to say that there's bias in the data set, I would say it's biased towards being open to AI. For sure, for sure. Yeah, if I wonder if a company like Amex would look at their data of like AI adoption, just for cohorts that signed up for Amex over a decade ago, you would expect it to be lower. Yeah. Or even or even putting Amex aside like a community bank. because if I go to my local laundromat and I ask like what corporate card do you use they're probably like we don't do corporate cards here at all in fact we have a relationship with the local bank down the street

and they put up the mortgage for the building and we write checks or we do cash or they're even using a debit card yeah exactly or if they do have a credit card it's probably from the local bank branch it's not like they haven't built like their whole system so yeah it's fascinating to read into I do think there is something to be said to, I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. Like, it's not accelerating. And it is real. That there is, it's just getting harder and harder to justify, okay, it's a no-brainer to bring it in. It's a no-brainer to pay for it. Part of that's the competitive dynamic of, you know, 50% of the value from AI, you just get in Google search down. It's also what are you getting out of some of these, if you're a business that's not doing code gen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, et cetera. And somebody says, hey, for $20 a month or $100 a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level and math, but extremely low agency.

You have to tap, you have to tap the person on the shoulder. I like the laundromat. The laundromat's like, actually, I don't need somebody who's Ph.D. You know what? Sir, this is a laundryman. We've been running this laundromat and this family for 45 years. And I've never run into an IMO gold medal level problem ever in the math. I bet there are. I bet there actually are. I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet, uh, I bet, uh, I bet, uh, I bet, uh, I bet, uh, I bet, uh, I bet a lot of laundry. Alocation of laundry.

Yeah, I mean, if you have a big load. Yeah. Yes. How do you split it across? How do you between? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Uh, but, but, but, but, but yeah, so you have, like, you have a, a robot on your computer that is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly smart, incredibly low agency. Yeah. It can't learn on the job. You have to, like, tap it on the shoulder and say, hey, do this. Okay, okay, now do that. Now do this, do that. And it's like, well, a lot of these businesses don't have, again, these problems that need that level of intelligence. They need people that are even have some level of agency and not even maxed out on intelligence,

but can just kind of like chug away and learn on the job and get better. Or they need SaaS products that have AI functionality built in, right? And so to them it's just, oh, yeah, my POS system just flagged a couple more fraudulent orders and took care of. that or like ramp, you know, it's like, yeah, my receipts get classified better, but I'm not like a direct user of AI. Maybe they need to be on numeral. Numeral.com compliance handled, numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Disney is investing $1 billion in Open AI. Before that, before that, I do think it's notable. So Oracle's remaining performance obligations, which we know refers to contracted revenue, not yet

recognized is $523 billion. Currently, their stock is trading at $500. Worthy of a gong hitcher. But currently the stock is trading at only $568 billion. And so I just look at this as like Oracle continues immediately when they announced this backlog. They got a bunch of credit. It was almost immediately.

And it has basically just been downhill ever since, as the market has basically said, we're giving you less and less and less and less and less credit here. And to the point where in many ways they're getting like negative, negative credit for the partnership. That was the financial times take. The deal is worth negative seven billion. Yeah. And there, I think that the way that they frame that title was not entirely. It's definitely edgy. It's a blog. It's Alphaville. They're having fun. But. And then I, so I have one more, I have one more post here that's relevant.

So suspended cap says, I got to feel like that. At some point, Oracle, Larry, was misled. Was it OpenAI showing him something in the lab? Was it Jensen lying about token prices? Or was it a partnership that was supposed to happen that didn't? It's always been clear to me that this was a race to the bottom. Why would you want to take these economics that someone as sophisticated as Microsoft was happy to pass off? Remember?

I've said this a bunch on the show. Satya has more information. He owns OpenAI's IP, right? He's been serving Open AI models. he's been running an AI you know it's one of the most scaled platforms right he has more information than anyone in the room momentarily he looked he didn't look at when

Oracle announced this backlog and the stock jumped however many hundreds of billions everyone was kind of like wait is this did Satya miss this and I think the market is maybe realizing some of his wisdom yeah um suspended cap says Jensen's whole thing is that the rat costs four mills and you make 20 million, you net 16 million. No one can make you 16 million got it. But a lot of assumptions baked into that. Someone has to pay you 16 million for however many

trillions of tokens you can spit off. If a token is a commodity and someone can serve it at 50% lower than now, it's net plus $6 million on the $4 million of costs. What if the dollars paid for the infra results in massive losses for whoever is purchasing them is the assumption that the capital will just keep funding it? Maybe they will. I actually think they will, but I'm just confused at what Oracle thought they saw here. Well, story's not over. Let's move on to TurboPuffer, serverless vector in full-text search, Belcrum First Principles on Object Storage, Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

So Joanna Stern has a little bit of a screenshot take joking around about Disney, which is investing $1 billion in OpenAI, and is going to license their characters for use in SORA. She says, look at this hype, isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my bubble's complete? I think that's from some Disney song. I actually don't now, but just the cadences. Do you have any idea? Santa Claus is coming to town?

No, definitely not Santa Claus is coming to town. That's not a Disney property. Is it? Oh, yeah. But the tune you were singing sounded like that. This is because I'm bad at singing, I suppose. Okay, let's see if Grock can GROC it. Let's see.

Okay, anyway. There is news... Oh, is this frozen maybe? Look at this in. Isn't it need? Do do, do, do. Okay. Accompanied...

I don't know. Someone will have to tell us. Anyway. So Disney's making a $1 billion investment in Open AI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties

to generate short user-prompted social videos. Henry says it's from the Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid. What is the original line from the Little Mermaid? Look at this. Okay, anyway. Disney's three-year licensing deal will let users generate videos using SORA, OpenAIs short form AI video platform of more than 200 Disney Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters.

A curation, a curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney Plus. Whoa, that's the bombshell there. I didn't realize that. Because when I think about like going to SORA, it's very fun. to make a mash-up video of Mickey Mouse you're fighting Iron Man or something like that. And that's something that doesn't make sense to underwrite within Disney. They're not going to spend the time. The CGI is too expensive. It's just not going to happen.

But for a kid who loves a Pixar character, they want to see, you know, Wally join the Avengers and go fight Thanos. Like, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who enjoys Disney's IP, and yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create that. It makes a ton of sense that they would allow this to happen in SORA, in a way where the economic value is accounted for appropriately. Now, you can see whether or not stop and slop, but I just think the idea that this is going Disney Plus is crazy.

That's the crazy thing. Because, I mean, we covered this when we were talking about SORA generally, just this idea that is it a creation tool or is it a consumption tool? And we were saying, I think, pretty quickly, that this doesn't feel like an app that we're going to hang out in. Everyone in the studio was having a lot of fun. We checked their screen times a few days later. No one was scrolling SORA or more meta vibes for that. But we continue to see outputs from SORA going forward. Very viral on other platforms.

Totally. Even within our own, like, group chats. Like, what's been the most impactful SORA video that you've probably seen in the last couple of weeks? Like, me making a SORA video of myself promoting John Fio's energy drink company in a suit, and I just sent it to him directly in a group chat, and it didn't exist, and it wasn't funny in any broader context. Now, the weird thing is that is there real demand for,

SORA level quality content in the Disney Plus app. Like, when I open the Disney Plus app, I feel like it's a place that it has extremely high polish. And I feel like it's a safe place. Ultimately, to me, what's exciting about this is personalized entertainment, and which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this. If Tyler figured it out with Henry's help, the line earlier was look at this stuff,

isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection's complete from the Little Mermaid part of your world? But if somebody loves the Little Mermaid and then you can prompt a really high fidelity personalized video for like your kid saying like it's time to do the dishes and singing a little song, right?

That's the kind of moment that I imagine Disney would be excited about. Of course this will be immediately abused just in a thousand millions of different ways. But I'm sure they'll put a lot of guardrails in. One thing that's notable, this went out this morning. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale. Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google, demanding it to stop the infringement.

So yeah, basically the article says, as Disney has gone into business with Open AI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos on Wednesday evening attorneys for Disney

sent a season assist letter to Google demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement quote Google's infringing Disney's copyright on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop GenAI models and services and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation

of Disney's copyrights. So the letter continued, Google operates as a virtual vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on massive scale. And compounding Google's blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI services are branded with a Google's Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google's exploit of Disney's IP is authorized and endorsed by Disney. So the question, so Disney's not just allowing Open AI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested. And so the immediate

question is, will Disney do any of these licensing IP licensing with other platforms? It doesn't, this kind of lot, maybe it feels like we're in the press release economy all over again. Yeah, I don't know. It does feel like Disney's, sort of like picking a winner here in AI video. And they're saying, like, we like Open AI and we don't like Google, which is sort of a bold, a bold move. You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I'm fascinated by this.

Then again, Thrive Capital, bet the fund in some ways on Open AI, who's co-owner of Thrive, Bob Iger. No way. Remember he bought that he was part of a small cohort that bought a few points of Thrive. Get out the red string. It's all connected, of course. Get out the board.

Get out the board. You were right, by the way, on the structure. So Disney's putting a $1 billion investment in, but they're also getting warrants to buy more stock in OpenAI at its current $500 billion valuation. So there's a little bit of opportunity in the future if the valuation goes up that they'll get a good deal there. I really can't get over this Disney Plus.

I really, okay, it does say a curated selection. So I think that I would be very upset about the idea that I would open. It's just a random selection of whatever. You know where I'm going. Yeah. Like, I think that Wally is a film that is, like, I think it's art. I think it's art. And I think it's okay for my children to watch Wally.

You study. Yes, yes, yes. But I do. You took notes. I do think that a lot of the Pixar films and a lot of the Disney films, they have an opinion, they have craft, they have something that elevates the humans experience, the human, like, it is not purely brain rot, it's not slop. And if you were in a funnel where you watch something that's a great, interesting film with an opinion, with something to say, and then it's like, do you want to continue watching? five, four, three, two, one, and then it's just blasting you with the craziest sororah mashups possible. Like, you're going to make a lot of parents very upset.

So this better be in another tab. But I do like that they said it's curated because as long as there's like some sort of human in the loop to like say like, hey, that's, they clearly jail broke on that one because you know people are going to get crazy with this. Yeah, they're going to have every Disney character doing the little yachty walkout, you know. That's actually okay for the kids. I fully support that. Coffin is a banger, and I'm good with that. But no, I mean, YouTube kids famously went through a really, really dark period with Spider-Man and Elsa mashups and that were very suggestive and bizarre. And it's been a game of whack-a-mole for a long time.

And I think people don't expect when they open up Disney Plus, they don't expect it to be a game of whack-a-mole. They expect it to be curated. And so Disney really needs to continue to instill. this idea that they are, that they are curating. Yeah, so Disney has sent cease and desist letters to meta, character, AI, as well as against Mid Journey

and some other companies. Yeah. I wonder, have they ever sent a cease and desist to who? Open AI. Oh, I don't know. But they should have, because early, as soon as Chad GPT launched,

I was having it create stories of, you know, Spider-Man. I was particularly a fan of the, the deliberately IP infringing. So I'd be like, write a bedtime story for my son where, you know, Spider-Man teams up with Superman, which of course cannot happen because those are rival intellectual,

rival pieces of intellectual property, some owned by Warner Brothers, some owned by Disney. And so you cannot ever have those cross into the same multiverse. According to Google, Gemini, which Disney has now sent this, cease and assist to you. Disney has never taken any type of legal action against Open AI.

They picked their, they picked aside. Well, fortunately, we have someone who can add a lot more context here. We have Dylan Byers from Puck News joining us in person in just a few minutes, whenever he's ready. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, our sponsor, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-yard reasoning, next level vododed, and deep multimodal understanding. Let's pull up this clip, Bob Eiger and Sam. We're on CNBC this morning. We can pull it up.

This is a 12-minute video. Can we play some of this and see if there are key moments there? And then we will bring in Dylan. Yeah, so the current deal is a three-year license with exclusivity for the first year. So, again, it's very possible that a year from today, Google ends up with the same ability to leverage Disney IP. Disney will set and evolve the guardrails for how it's 200 characters will be used.

One year exclusivity doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. Because V-O-3 and Nanobanana are barely rolled out into YouTube. Like, you can put them in shorts, but it's kind of a creative tool. YouTube does not seem like we got to win the AI vertical video game this year. This feels more detrimental to Facebook and meta than, than Open AI, or than YouTube, honestly. Anyway, let's table this video.

We can come back to the clips. I'm sure it will be clipped more in more precise detail. Instead, let me tell you about Adio, the AI-Native CRM. Adio builds skills and grows your company to the next level. And let's bring in Dylan Byers from Puck News. Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to come down to the Ultradome. Good to see you in person.

Welcome, welcome. Please have a seat. Thank you. And maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself. However you describe yourself these days, whatever's quickest. I'm a senior correspondent for Puck, where I cover the media industry. Yeah. Media business, media gossip.

How is covering the media different than covering the oil and gas industry or tech or anything else? More navel gazing, more incestual. Because you're in the media, you can, are you doing the navel gazing or are you reporting on naval gazing? I, I, navel gaze at the naval gazers. Okay. It's sort of an oral boros of naval gazing. Interesting.

Yeah, very incestual. Has naval gazing been the top story over the last couple weeks, or is it more deal-making? Well, here's what's amazing. It's amazing that at a time when, like, Paramount and Netflix are going to war for Warner Brothers Discovery. Yeah. The media industry is obsessed with like Ryan Liz and Olivia Nutsi. Oh yeah, that's a big one.

Barry Weiss. CBS. Oh, yeah, yeah. Media industry is funny because it has a way of the smallest, most inconsequential gossip has a way of consuming the industry at large. That doesn't feel like what the last couple months have been, though. Like the Olivia Nuzzi, Liz, the thing, like that feels like, that feels like much bigger than some small story.

Is it really? It used to be bigger. So part of it, part of why media loves covering media is media likes to cover things that get a lot of attention. And media businesses in their very nature, their job is to get attention. So everyone knows.

I think that's part of it. I just, I just think we're obsessed with ourselves. Yeah. I would, but an example I would give very often I'll find like a fashion brand that that is like a household name will have like $5 million of revenue, right? Oh yeah. It's because they're just like people like fashion. It gets shared a ton. And so I think it's a very same thing with individual

influencers. Like they might be recognized on the street. If you put them in a headline, it's going to get clicks versus if I was like, I have a report here on a oil and gas company that's doing 50 million a year. You'd be like, no one's going to click on that. No one knows what that company is. People need stories. People need like person. You need personalities. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the media lends itself to that. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can do that at the executive level with the Paramount Netflix WBD deal.

You can do it down on the newsroom floor. Yeah. I think people need personalities to make these stories human. Also, there's just, you know, there's only so much intrigue in numbers. Do you feel like the Paramount Netflix, Warner Brothers story has been particularly personal? Have you been focused on it? 100%. It's the most personal at that level, at a major M&A level, even.

more so than when Bob Eiger and Brian Roberts went to war for Fox, which was personal too and had a lot of subplots there, especially on the Murdoch side. Of course this is personal. You've gotten David Ellison a guy who is basically staking a lot of personal money, a lot of his dad's money, trying to get this asset, and then being, doing all the right things, sending all the right signals to David Zaslov and the WBD board, having all the right dinners, going to all the right fights and then being sort of spurned at the last minute for someone else. And that negotiation and the Trump element and the relationships between Ted Sarandos and David Zazlov and then David Ellison and Larry Ellison and David Zazlov, it's like, it's absolutely fascinating.

So do you think, I mean, there is a world where selling business, it should be purely economic, right? Because it's the... Yeah, and it will be. It will be in the end. the funny part is like the personal element is there, but at the end of the day, whoever spends the most money is going to get the asset. But if you're more personal, you might be able to marshal more capital,

you might know more people, you might be more people might be willing to rally behind you, and we're kind of seeing that with Ellison, pulling in folks all over the board, because, you know, he has personal relationships with that. Is that roughly right? That's roughly right. I think that,

I think what you have, my partner, Bill Cohen, put it really elegantly. You've basically got a company with a $400 billion valuation going to war with a man with $400 billion valuation, Larry Ellison and his son. And yeah, marshalling the capital for it, you know, with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Jared Kushner and all that is interesting. And at a certain point, Netflix is going to reach a threshold for what it can compete with. I mean, another point Bill made is, at a certain point, if Paramount we're just willing to come in and offer like $34, $35 a share for this thing, I think it would

be game over. Netflix can't do it. But the person, I mean, the personal element is just interesting because you've got Trump who wants to be involved in this deal somehow. You've got David, who really doesn't like the idea, David Zaslov, who really doesn't like the idea of selling to David Ellison. But fundamentally what you're doing is just a very extended negotiation that's going to play into well into 2026 why doesn't he want to get involved with

with David I don't think this is how Zazlov wanted to go out right like I think I'm not saying you know all when David Zazlov got Warner Media

he did this whole song and dance coming to Hollywood and saying you know I'm a film guy I'm going to save the film industry I don't think anyone thought he was in it for the long haul I think everyone knew this was sort of like a flip but he liked playing the Hollywood Kingpin, and I don't think he wanted to go out

because David Ellison came to the table and forced him to go to market. And I also don't think that, you know, I think David Ellison and his team and Jerry Cardenali, Redbird, I think they came in and said, you know, somewhere around that sort of $23.50, $24 a share mark, and I think he took offense to that

because the number he wanted and the number he thought he could get was higher to 30. And David, like, look, I have spent a little bit of, a lot of my time at Puck writing about all of the various misguided exploits of David Zazlov at the top of Warner Brothers Discovery. But at the end of the day, like one thing he knows how to do very well is work a deal. The entire time that David Ellison was coming was at the table saying, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll spend more. He was talking to Ted Sarandos at Netflix and basically by virtue of playing those two off against each other,

he's probably going to end up driving the deal up to a price that is actually higher than $30. So, kudos to him. Do you think he's talking to anyone else? There's been a lot of skepticism about there ever having been a second bidder. People were saying, oh, the idea that Netflix would even bid, that's a fake stocking course. I remember in September, when Paramount first started this whole process, someone came to me and said, this isn't over Netflix is at the table. Everyone thought that was bullshit.

Greg Peters went out at a Bloomberg event here in Hollywood and said we don't do, you know, historically we don't do M&A deals like this. We're not interested in M&A and everyone thought, okay, well, that's it. Netflix has been at the table the entire time. And in fact, if you talk to the guys at Paramount, what they'll tell you is like they feel like Zazlov was playing Ropid up with them. It's basically saying, yeah, come to the table, we're good, everything you're offering is better than Netflix.

And then finally in the 11,000. It's got them to just continue to bid and bid and bid and bid and bid. Yeah, and we're not done. We're not done. That's the sort of funny thing. The way when Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters go out there and talk about this, they're talking about it like it's over. It's not over. No. We're, we're, I, you could have me on, you could have me back on in six months. I think we're still talking about this. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Do you think that the actual Netflix contract, the deal, the breakup fees, the announcement, the pageantry around like, we have a deal. Totally. Make it inevitable. Is that a tactic?

Yeah, I think so. Okay, to drive a higher price from, to let Paramount know, to let Ellison know, hey, your best and final? Like, now's the time to go rally the troops, go around the world, get fire up a jet. How do you make another offer and then say, just want to be clear that this is not my best in final? Oh, that was a funny line. I've never, I've never, I've never in a negotiation, like, never in a negotiation. had somebody make a new hire offer and then also say, like, typically you'd be like, yeah, there's not a lot of, like, it just shows that, like, what is the incentive to take the offer at all?

By your house for a million dollars, but I could go higher. I could go higher. And by the way, another partner in my, Matt Bellany, like, he's reported, Paramount will go higher. Okay. They will. Like, the ellisons will go higher. And part of the thing, and this gets back to the personal element, which is what's so fascinating to me.

David Ellison came to the Paramount deal, the first deal, with a strategy to basically wrap up as much of Hollywood as he could, scale it up, and then try to go to war with Netflix and YouTube and the guys up in Silicon Valley. The entire thesis of his battle strategy rests on him being able to acquire more than just Paramount. If at the end of the day Netflix gets Warner Brothers discovery and he's sitting there with Paramount, he's not he's not he's not he's not in the game well yeah so so i was thinking so he uh he acquired the rights to ufc yes they're killing the pay-per-view model which is interesting the paper-view model was being killed by illegal streaming which was like the bane of dana white's existence he basically to my knowledge was always angry about it was kind of the nature of the internet is just like if you're streaming something it'll show up in other places

in other parts of the internet and there's not much you can do. So Paramount, you know, basically going down and saying like we're going to own the UFC, which is a lot of people that will just subscribe because there's one-ish major UFC event every month and it's a much better deal than just going and buying each individual pay-per-view for $80 a pop or whatever. But that subscription offering becomes much more compelling if you're bundling in all this other IP. to my question is like you're definitely going to get the UFC fan base, but how big is that fan base? Certainly it's a popular sport in America,

but how do you build enough value around this to really have a competitive offering? I think what's interesting about the UFC deal. The UFC deal was a signal to the broader market, which is so much, again, it can be depressing to cover the media industry because a lot of the times it's going through periods of contraction or decline, or you look at, since we're talking about sports rights,

you look at someone like ESPN, right, who's being forced to make all of these very calculated decisions about, you know, should we pay X amount for Major League Baseball when you're competing, still competing for the NFL with, like, Amazon and YouTube. Well, in sports are the last remaining content monopolies, right? So in news, you don't really have a monopoly on anything. News is a commodity. Yeah, you might break the story,

but everybody else will have the facts. Sports rights are the one. Yes, sports rights and leagues. So the UFC. Intellectual property. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But still that is highly competitive with somebody else online saying I'm going to make an AI cartoon.

Sure. People aren't creating homegrown sports content. They're creating commentary and reaction content, but you still need to pay to see it live. At the end of the day, there's only one network you can watch Sunday night football on it. It's NBC. And that matters in a way. that when news break, when a bomb goes off, or a coup happens, there are a lot of different ways to go.

But what was interesting about the UFC deal is, at this period of sort of contraction negotiation among legacy media players, David Ellison was coming in almost like a sovereign himself and saying, I'm here, I'm willing to make bold bets, and I'm willing to even overpay, or what others would consider overpay, in order to go after these assets.

It also helps to he's younger. thinking on a longer time horizon. Like he's actually someone who's thinking, how do I build up, not just a media empire, he thinks about it as a media and tech empire, how do I build that up over the course of decades? So he's making these really long-term bets.

And again, part of that, it was never, ever just about Paramount. I remember sitting in the polo lounge with somebody before the Paramount deal even closed and he's going after WBD next. Like this is always, this is a scale play. And so that just brings me back to like, you can't, you can't,

execute the plan if you're just sitting with Paramount. And so if you're Zazlov, and then you guys like, well, yeah, our best and final offer is whatever starts with a two, he's like, the fuck it does. You need me more than I need you. That's right. Very clearly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I think that, I mean, I count myself as oddly like a media. I'm just getting up to speed on a lot of these media stories, and this one's been fascinating. but just digging into David Ellison's history, I mean, starting Skydance in 2004, he really has been in Hollywood as at least like, you know, giving it his all for 20 years. He starred in Fly Boys, the movie that he shot. Like, it's like, he clearly wants it. He's about that light. It's not, it's hard to call him a tourist, right? I don't know if you've seen Fly Boys.

It wasn't great. No, but to show up and not like, there are lots of. like, I mean, you could easily levy the, like, tourist label at, like, Elon Musk buying Twitter, right? What does he know about social networking? He's been a PayPal guy, then he's been a space guy, then he's been a car guy, now he's a social media guy. What does he know about the news? And it's like, that kind of was true. Like, he did just show up and was all of a sudden, like, I use Twitter a lot, so I'm buying it.

Yeah, power-easter. This is a 20-year journey, right? David Ellison fancies himself a true film buff, Hollywood guy. Grew up watching movies, going to the movies. His association with Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible to him is a massive badge of honor because he feels like he's really been supporting the industry. And part of the argument you're going to see, or we're already seeing it, that he and his team will make against Netflix,

is that Netflix is paying lip service to, like, the theatrical window. They're not a business that's built on putting movies in theaters. And he's like, we actually will. We are committed to Hollywood in the traditional sense. We're so committed that we'll, We'll put Tom Cruise yelling at you about TV settings on front of you. You've seen this? No, I haven't.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Tom Cruise, like, there's a lot of TVs that come with, like, specific refresh rates technology, like high refresh rate, not 24 frames. It'll do, like, 48. It's, like, smooth motion. And he hates it because it's, like, not as the filmmaker intended. Yeah. And so he'll do, like, pre-roll ads for that.

Clearly, like, a, yeah, truly, like, loves the theater still. We are going to, we are all going, in this process, because one thing that gets lost, you know, the creative community, in Hollywood gets really upset about the Netflix of it all. Sure. They don't seem to like Netflix. Yep. They don't like Netflix from a tech perspective, not a political's perspective.

They see them as politically aligned with Netflix. But more politically aligned with Netflix, in fact, but in terms of their nostalgia for what this industry is about, yes. We're going to see a lot of nostalgia over the course of this deal negotiation, and there's going to be a lot of hemming and hawing among the Hollywood creative community about what's happening. And all I would say is whether Paramount or Netflix get WBD, like the train has left the station. Like the industry has changed.

And even Ted's whole thing about, you know, we're committed to the theatrical window like bullshit. Like I guess movies will be in theaters for like 10 minutes before they're on Netflix. What, uh, do you think that, do you think that Hollywood in the actual traditional sense, like the local community, we're recording this live from Hollywood. Yeah.

It seems like the industry is, the culture of the industry is, like, dominated by nostalgia. That's like, that's the feeling that I have. The interesting thing about tech is that tech has a nostalgic element to it, tech culture, but it's like videos of us going to the moon and we're like, well, we got to do that again, whereas Hollywood seemingly is, just wants the whole production pipeline and process to go back. the way that it was. And I guess how are people processing, like having an even smaller

kind of potential buyer pool out of all of this? Well, you know, this is what you're making me think of. I think earlier when we were talking about media, you were talking about other industries like oil and gas industry, whatever. That's my example. The difference is that creatives are a real pain in the ass to deal with from the perspective of the front office.

Sure. You build your business around them, but they have feelings about how things should be that I think people probably in the oil and gas industry or the trucking industry don't. So there are a lot of like Tom Cruise's and Martin Scorsese who have feelings about how this industry should work

and what you need to preserve in order to preserve the integrity of it. What happens when new leaders take over is they have to do a song and dance where they pay a lot of lip service to this. And so you see Ted Serendos coming in and talking about how great it is to acquire the studio that made Casablanca.

Yeah. the future of the film, I fucking love gospel. I've seen it 100 times. The future of this business does not rest on like future generations going back and watching Humphrey Bogart. That is not where the future is going. Similarly, when David Ellison took over Paramount,

there's all this lip service paid to like Walter Cronkite and the integrity of CBS News. With all due respect to David, I don't think he gives a shit about Walter Cronkite. But you have to do that song and dance in order to sort of finesse the transition of the creative community.

And in truth, I think what's more interesting is I think whether you're talking about a David Ellison or a Ted Sarandos, they're actually thinking about the future. They're thinking about how to go to the moon again. They're thinking about you guys were just talking about Disney's deal with SORA. I want to talk to you about that too. When right after he dropped his peons to Walter Cronkite at this paramount event just down the street a few months ago, David Ellison talked about how we were just a matter of years away from his kids being able to talk to the character. on Pop Patrol and have those characters talk back to them. The Disney Sword Deal is like an early step towards that future.

They know that's where we're going. It is not my kids watching Bluey over and over and over again. It is them talking to Bluey and telling Bluey what to do. They're thinking about it, but the dissonance between what they have to sort of say to placate the Marty Scorsese and where they're actually thinking about putting the money is notable. I feel like it's notable. I mean, there's so, we talk to founders at least once a week

that are building like video models and products that could eventually be used by entertainment or are being used by entertainment. And I get, as an outsider to entertainment, I get excited because I'm like, if budgets for films hold flat and the tools that these entrepreneurs are building get better and better, you'll eventually be able to say, you know, a movie that would have cost $100 million could now be, four different movies that cost $25 million, and you're using AI to reduce the costs and using it for scenes that are just like, you know, historically expensive to actually shoot and do.

And so I see an opportunity for this like Cambrian, like even if budgets just hold flat, a Cambrian explosion of more creativity, more people having the opportunity to create films and television shows and things like that. But it feels like there's like zero excitement here about that. And maybe it's because it's in pockets, because if you're- It's entirely outside of the Hollywood system. Like the iPhone really did democratize filmmaking, but like the end result of that was like Mr. Beast on YouTube.

But I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's still, I'm saying even though the technology is not being created here, it still could be a catalyst for the industry. I think it's a competitor. But it is and it's a tool. It's a tool. I mean, it's a tool. And as with the iPhone, the question is who gets, who has the access to the tool and who gets to harness the tool and then do something great with it?

Yeah, the iPhone sort of democratized your ability to create content. And you can argue that the vast majority of what's out there is slop and is not nearly as good is what Hollywood can create. But then again, you just have to look at where people are spending their time. People are spending more time with user-generated content. People are spending more time on YouTube than they are on any other streaming platform. You can be able to talk to Humphrey Bogart. You can talk to Humphrey.

That's what I'm called. Put me in Citizen Kane. Yeah, you can put him on the plane. Wiley Coyote teaches algebra. Yeah, that'll happen for sure. The problem with nostalgia and with trying to preserve the order as it is is that the tools are there. They're going to be harnessed. They are more democratized than they have been in the past.

And at a certain point, the eyeballs are going to go where they're going to go. And you can't force it. And there's this weird sort of like Amish, like let's just like preserve this moment in time. Yeah. So is if we hopped in a car and drove over to Burbank and snuck into Disney, Do you think Bob Eiger has like a total revolt on his hands today? Because I feel like Disney is one of the truly creative places. They hire tons of those artists that have opinions.

They're talent driven. And yet they just put out an announcement, yeah, we're going to do AI content. It feels like a very, it feels like a divisive issue if I was, you know, in management. I'm sure. I'm sure it is for some people. I increasingly find that. that the stakes are so high and the change is so fast that the need to meet it is existential. And I think leaders like Iger increasingly care less about that blowback. You know, I'm so funny.

A long time, like 20 years ago, I was an intern at The New Yorker, and I remember when they opened up, they did it the back page where people could submit captions for the New Yorker cartoons. And the cartoonists hated it because they felt like that was their, the integrity of their work should not be opened up to the public. And in fact, that became like one of the greatest sources of engagement with the New Yorker was through that. I think people recognize that being able to say, I want Darth Vader on a beach, or I want, you know, Captain Underpants doing X, Y, Z. Like, that is going to happen. You can already sort of do it. And the question for Disney is are we going to have a piece of that revenue? Are we going to make money off of it?

And in fact, if we know that that's where the puck is going and at a certain point you will be able to talk to your favorite animated characters, how can we, if we engage with that, then maybe we can start driving. Maybe that helps keep engagement. Maybe that helps drive people to theme parks. There's a whole other piece of it I was talking about with my colleague, Julie Alexander, just earlier today. But there's a, there's a whole other element here. here too with YouTube where, you know, YouTube is, or sorry, Google is starting to generate Disney characters and Disney doesn't want that happening. Yeah, you saw they, they launched a cease and desist last night.

Exactly. They're taking legal action against basically seemingly every scale player except Open AI. Opening AI deal is a one year exclusive. And so I think that opens up, I'm assuming Disney's using these lawsuits and the cease and assist to start a negotiation of what this will look like once everybody gets access to it. But it's notable that I think this is, even today just seeing the timeline, I think this is underrated as a deal for Open AI to be able to drive just at a time when it feels like their product is being.

I completely disagree, but continue. At least somewhat threatened by Gemini. Sure. If you're an American household and you're like a Disney family, what family of apps are you going to be paying money to, right? If one of them creates these magical experiences for your kids and the other is completely blocked from generating an EIP around that. Because like when kids, I don't know, my kids are young,

but if you're a 10-year-old and you realize that like you can, like my son, I generate, like, I take pictures of us and I turn us into dinosaurs, and I have used chat GPD to do that a lot. It's stuck in his head. He'll be like, let's make some, like, let's make dinosaur pictures. And so when kids realize that any Disney content that they can watch can immediately be, like, brought into their life, that's going to be a reason. Or if he comes to you and says, hey, let's turn ourselves into the Avengers, and you're like,

well, there's only one app that allows me to do that, then boom, you're back in SORA as opposed to. And you're going to pay for it because I think parents will pay almost any price to bring joy to their children. Yeah. So I mean, I agree with that. I just think it's, it's going to be a slow takeoff of that type of content because. But I don't think, I don't think the whole thing, like Studio Ghibli was that a slow takeoff? Absolutely. It was it was a huge, it was a huge meme moment where everyone had to have one. Everyone needed to see what they looked like in the studio Ghibli mob. And then the usage like dropped off and then started climbing at like 1%. You know? And it is climbing and it is going to grow and it will be a dominant form. Sure. I'm just saying you now have 200 different characters, the most valuable IP in the world. I'm not saying it's bad. It's definitely like an improvement to that product. And it will make SORA a better app and it will be. Not just SORA, but it's, it's, it's, I'm assuming I didn't see specifically, but I'm assuming, yeah, it's chat TVD and SORA. So it's going to be taken.

To bring it, yeah, yeah, but to bring it back to the, the Ellison, like the Paramount WBD, like if you put them together, you get something like 15% of all watch hours in America controlled by that company. If you take Netflix and WBD, you put them together, you get 14%. You saw that quote, right? Like, SORA, I think, is going to be at like less than 1% for like years. And then it will eventually be 5% and then 10%. But it just next year is not going to be like the year that 10% of watch hours were AI generated video.

Like it's just not there yet. I think I commend Iger on at least trying to adapt his company for this future. Because that is where it's going. I mean, it's very hard to reject the thesis even with the available technology, which feels like very beta, very 1.0, that that's not where this is headed. And if you've got, no one is sitting on a better IP portfolio than Disney, particularly when you're talking about kids, obviously. And there's no easier way to do this than with animation.

So why not go there? Yeah, yeah. I just think, so I looked it up. Yeah. Disney Plus has just under 60 million total paid subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. I think a lot of those subscribers are subscribing for content for their children. For sure. Don't underestimate how many people without kids go to Disneyland.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. It's a big number. I'm just saying, like, that cohort, Open AI has, like, what, a third of that in paying subs globally. And so I just think this is, I do think this is a, at least for the next 12 months. I think this is a, this is, Chachibati BD doesn't have a lot of moats, right? Like the, the product is better than other comparable products. And this is a new moat where if you're those 60 million people that are paying for Disney Plus, like you're an old fan and you're,

and you're a super fan and you're going to park. How many people visit, uh, yeah. Here's an anecdotal thing. Yeah, please. To the best of my knowledge, the one way I've been able to make my son cool in his second grade class is by getting him on SORR, like, introducing, letting him play around with Sora earlier than his friends. Didn't do that with Minecraft, you know, but like did that with Sora for him. And I have all his friends coming up to me and being like, what is Sora, tell us about Sora, can we use Sora? I'm sure the other parents hate me. It's a wild thing to do.

But you do see, this is purely anecdotal. You see that level of like, oh my God, can we create something, can we just say something? and create it. Yeah. And you think about how sticky Disney has been, right? Like, I don't know a single parent in my kids class who doesn't have a Disney Plus subscription. You are just, you are, you are, if you, if that, if you can do that on SORA and you can't do it on its competitors, that's really, that's potentially really valuable.

In 2023, the last reporting period for the parks that I can find, a 140 million people globally paid to go to a Disney park and experience. Okay. The Disney. I'm sold extremely bullish for Open AI. Extremely bullish for HGPD. No, no, no, no. You win me over on this. I still don't think, I still don't think a significant percentage of content consumed by Americans

next year will be fully AI generated. I think that's where we're going to see a slow. That's where we're going to say a slow take up. But yes, it's a great deal. Hats off Fiji CMO. Well, yeah. So if you get 140 million people visit Disney parks this year, I bet you they will have things in the park, which is like recreate this moment, turn this into an animation.

Yeah, okay. This is very good. It's very good. I just think what the timeline this morning that was interesting, everybody looks at the headline number at $1 billion. Yep. And they're like, this is a round. This is barely, this is like slapping duct tape on, on a boat that's leaking water, right? It doesn't feel like that big of a number because it's not in the context of Open AI. But the competitive edge that gives them over the next 12 months is massive. This is fantastic. This is a great conversation. Thank you so much. I'm such an honor to finally be in the dome. I'm so glad you're here. I'm sure with the way the WBD deal evolves, you'll be regular gas. I'm just at the street.

So anytime. Fantastic. This is great. Thanks so much for our show. We have our next guest, Fiji, CMO. Hit the gong for us. It would be our honor. I don't know if I've earned this.

Well, what's a big number? You got to give us a number. How many years you've been writing? 14 years overnight success. Let me tell you about linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline work. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle

from Roadmap to Release. Let me also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. our next guest is Fiji Simo from OpenAI. She is the CEO of Applications. We are very honored to be joined by Fiji.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of a little bit of backstory on just what was the conversation like to recruit you to have you join Open AI.

It's a big move. It rocked the time. timeline. And I'd love to know what was the pitch? What was the opportunity? How did you wind up at Open AI? Well, I had the extreme privilege of being on the board of Open AI for many months, like I think about a year before Sam approached me. And therefore, we were already working really closely together. And at some point, he told me, hey, it looks like, you know, there's a lot to do and it looks like you have ideas on how to do it. So is there any sense that we could make this happen. And I had, you know, a big job running Instagram at the time, so it took some time to

transition, but I was incredibly inspired by the mission of open AI already, and it felt like a no-brainer. And can you take us through the GPT 5.2 announcement? I mean, one of the first documents that I think everyone knows you for in the open AI context, in the context of your new role, is the different areas where you see GPT5 and Open AI having. impact, chat GPT having impact in folks' life. Can you explain to me how you think those those different sections are going? What excites you about the news today and kind of contextualize. How do you think about the map of what chat chapti as an application is touching? Yeah, that's a big question.

We can break it down one at the time. No, no, I've got it. You know, when I look at the opportunity ahead of us, I think AI is the greatest source of empowerment for people. And I want Chad GPT to be the personal super assistance that allows you to advance every part of your life. So the manifesto that you were referring to to me was like putting on papers this notion that if you look at how the world works right now, wealthy people have a lot of support staff. They have a travel agent. They have a personal shopper. They have a financial advisor. Imagine if we could give that team of support. to everyone on earth.

And fundamentally, that's what I want to build. And I think with Chad GPT, we have the opportunity to graduate from what is still fundamentally a chatbot that you ask questions to, to a personal superassistance that gets everything done in your life. When you put that in the context of the announcement today, we're super excited to have launched 5.2. It's the leading model on... I was really...

hoping for that. It's a leading model in terms of everyday professional work. It's a big step change in intelligence. You see that on the benchmarks, obviously, but that gives me a lot of hope that we can be closer to achieving a lot of leaps on these use cases. So for example, if you take something like travel, you have to like, you know, be good at long horizon tasks. You have to understand the ball of the users very well. And so with GPT 5.2, And like the new capabilities, we're getting one step closer to making all of that possible. Yeah. So I feel like some people have a little bit of benchmark fatigue.

You know, everyone has their own prompts. And they feel like stuff's getting better, but it's hard to like, like everyone wants the original chat GPT moment again. So what have you done for me lately syndrome? But I'm interested putting all of that aside, I want to know how are you measuring success internally around the launch of a new model. Like, what does the rigor around developing KPI? Obviously, the company is in the interest of driving subscriptions and revenue, but there must be interim steps and AB tests.

And, I mean, this is your lineage. This is what makes you who you are. How do you think about assessing the impact of new models when they go out, like downstream of the bench? in the actual application. Yeah, so that's like my entire job is turning the breakthroughs into products that people use. And so, for example, on 5.2, we just talked about the consumer side.

I can go back to that. But on enterprise, for example, it's really important to us. We serve a million businesses across the world. What we look at is like, can companies start to do things that they weren't able to do before? We just released earlier this week an AI report for Enterprise and it said that 75% of people of workers were saying that with AI

they can accomplish tasks that they couldn't do before. And then we see that even on the coding start. On coding, if you look, coding messages from non-engineers has grown 36%. And so I look at all of these things as like, these are all, like, the research team gives me this, like, magical superpowers. My job is to put the superpowers in the hands of people and at home and at work.

And the thing we measure is, can they do more? And are they actually, like, understanding the use case and doing more? And there's a lot, you know, there is a big narrative around, like, is AI adoption really happening? Is it going fast enough? But what I am seeing is that there is a lot of pent-up demand as long as you cross those capability. So I'll give you an example. All companies that I meet with tell me that if there was a way to generate spreadsheets much faster with AI, generate slides much faster with AI, they would

use it for a lot more knowledge work because, you know, all knowledge workers generate spreadsheets and slides. With 5.2, like, that's a big step up in the ability to do that. Like, I can tell you, with 5.1, I was trying to do it, and the spreadsheet was kind of janky, things were, like, not really in the right place. With 5-2, it's like great formatting. It totally understand what like, you know, the numbers are about. It structures them the best way. And these are the things that like help unlock completely new use cases and ultimately growth for the customers that we work with. Do you do you feel like there's a, there's some sort of fundamental cultural difference between you know, your previous roles where there hasn't been so much of this divide,

the consumer side of the business and the enterprise side of the business on day one. I feel like ChatGPT is unique in that it's used by kids and college students and adults and people use it, just they bring it to work with them alongside and then enterprises and the government's using it. Whereas for something like a social media application, it didn't really have that same,

oh, we need this product to work for us in an enterprise context necessarily. How has that shift been designing an application that can be used? It's sort of the same underlying model, but it's used in such different ways. Yeah, it's a great question, and that's the thing that we spend a lot of time working on. The thing that's really interesting is that part of the reason why we're winning in enterprise is because we're winning in consumer. When you talk to CEOs, they tell you, well, if my workers are already completely familiar with the technology

because they use it for their personal use, that's much easier to deploy that in enterprise and have that be adopted. So that familiarity is actually really helping us. And so the thing we're trying to do is really keep that familiarity, but upsell the tools that are really specific to enterprise. So I'll give you an example. Connectors is a great example.

We do have connectors on the consumer side. You can connect your chat GPT to your Gmail and things like that. But on the enterprise side, it's even more critical. You have to be connected to like Slack, to like all of your enterprise knowledge. And so these are cases where we push harder on the enterprise side to make sure that companies are doing what they need to unlock the value. Yeah. I'd love to hear your take or how you're thinking about the partnership with Disney. Jordy and I were just going back and forth on it.

Landed in an extremely excited place. Seems like a fantastic partnership. I think that in general, looking at the timeline this morning, obviously everybody's going to form an opinion on partnership immediately, even before they kind of understand the facts. But as I looked at it, I think it maybe was getting less hype than maybe it deserves because it's only a $1 billion investment. It's relatively small in the context of O'I. But if you look at Disney's scale, the example I gave last, there's like 140 million people have paid to visit a business. Disney Park in the last year, I would imagine that all, like, I can imagine a world where over the next year, every person that's visiting a Disney Park is like, hey, I can kind of like personalize this

experience and like take and basically create this entirely new kind of like entertainment layer to that. So I need a relationship with OpenAAA. One way or another. Yeah, and I'm going to pay for the product. So it feels extremely significant in a way that maybe people aren't fully appreciating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're very, very, very. excited about it. If you think about Sora and ImageGen, this is all about unleashing creativity. I think we're all born creators and like if you give people

the tools to create easily and to go fast from imagination to a creation, we can see the golden edge of creativity. But for that, like, you know, we need people to have inspiration, to have like, you know, like IP to play with and Disney has by far the best IP, by far the best inspiration. And so, So partnering with them to bring these experiences to life is such a privilege and we're

really excited about it. Yeah. How our audience, I was thinking about this last night, our audience is probably on average spent way more money on ads than actually seen ads because many folks in the audience have spent money on digital ad platforms, run ad businesses. How do you think about positioning the ads product or whatever happens to the other side of the market? like the brands that want to be successful in the future of commerce.

Do you have any idea of the shape that it will take because we were just doing a Black Friday stream and just one founder after another singing the praises of the meta ecosystem, even the Apple oven ecosystem, the ability to go and put money in a magical box and get customers is remarkable. Have you thought more about what you, you want to offer ultimately to brands and companies that will be ultimately be partnering with OpenAI?

So not much to announce to their ads, but what I can tell you is two things. One, like, if we at some point we decide to go towards ads, we're going to do it in a way that is extremely respectful of the very special relationships that people have with chat GPT. The thing to understand is people trust that chat GPT has their back and give them the best answer for their needs. Nothing we do can jeopardize that. And so, you know, when I talk to brands and they're like, hey, how can we get more distribution? How can we, you know, influence the results of the LLM? So reality is have the best products.

You know, we want to build an LLM that is not impacted by, you know, you know, you know, paying companies that is not impacted by, you know, people giving the system and purely recommends the brands that are going to be best for you. Now, around that, around that model response, you can imagine that there are things that we could do to get, to give brand distribution, but we really want to keep the model response pure because the trust that people have in that is critical. Yeah, is there, is there good, like, I don't know, like, how do you actually set up the company for that? You need, like, an editorial, like, fire wall so that one team is just not even affected. They don't even like, you know, hang out at the

happy hours together and say, hey, you know, can you go do this this quarter because we have a big partner? Like, have you thought about what, what it culturally takes to get there? Well, the first of the very good news at OpenAIA is that the culture is already so focused on protecting the user, protecting the purity of LLM responses. It's so ingrained that I think anyone who would, you know, share like, hey, can you help me change things? That's a holiday party would be organ rejected. So I think that's already, you know, good. We built the right anti-bodies the day one. The other thing is, I think we're not just going to rely on culture. We're also going to rely on technical capabilities that have firewalls between these different things so that people can

really trust that the model is not influenced by anything other than having their back. Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How are you thinking about the, like, setting up the actual applications team for success? Are you, I've been struck by the fact that the narrative has shifted in some ways from, you know, the best model wins every time the best model, the best model, the best model, the best benchmarks, like just win and, you know, and then everyone will just switch around. It feels like we're almost leaving that era where, you know, the technical insiders, they do care about the benchmarks. They do care about the capabilities. But a lot of consumers just care about the user experience, the design, the, like, almost the qualitative aspects. How have you thought about developing a, like, a delightful user experience?

Is that a new muscle for the organization? Do you feel like opening eyes set up to deliver, you know, this delightful experience that can reduce churn? and keep people coming back. How do you think about that? Well, first off, I would say, you know, this is a company that despite not starting as a product company, has built the fastest growing consumer and enterprise business industry a product with 800 million people.

So while I think I can, you know, build an organization that does that even better, I really want to celebrate what they've done before me. And I think you're absolutely right. I think the magic is, at the intersection of research and deployment. So the thing I obsess about is how can we be tied at the hip with the product research team to understand what are the new capabilities that can unlock this new magical products?

And you kind of see that like sort of, we were just talking about it a minute ago. It's a good example where the capability was there and like that's what unlocks everything. But then the product thinking came in of like, you know, putting characters and yourself inside. the video. And so it's really a mix of like capabilities, but also a lot of delightful product thinking and really understanding what people want that unlocks this magical experiences.

We weren't even talking at the beginning about kind of all of the use cases, right? Like me, like, you know, just giving people more intelligence in the chatbot, like that's going to cap out at some point. What I need to do is help them realize they can use chat GPT for health and like help them, you know, make that easier. Help them plan their trust. help them shop. All of these things are going to be based on incredible models,

but also great products that makes this understandable. Because right now, you're still kind of having to stumble upon the value. And like, when people realize they can use tragedy

for health, they're like, oh my God, this is like unbelievable. But they kind of had to stumble upon it. And that means I haven't done my job fully

until everyone knows how to use the value. You guys are, Sam was talking earlier this week with some folks about the push into enterprise. How are you thinking about enterprise, not on the API side, but just on the core subscription size and around pricing?

Historically, as a, you know, 200 a month plan subscriber for ChatGBT, BT, I had hit some points where I'd be frustrated because I could sense the model being lazy, and I'm like, I'm giving you as much money as you've, I'm on the highest plan. can I be on a plan that's just not never gets lazy is the two thousand dollar a month plan yeah so i'm thinking like uh i i just like can you make it would it make sense to ever do and all

you can consumption all you can eat or consumption based consumption on on on the non-apy side sure just because you know i think consumer consumption based is is wild no one wants to do that but uh i don't know it's a bold bold statement i'd be interested to hear what you think yeah you know we've launch credit-based pricing on the enterprise side so that in addition to your subscription, you can buy extra credit to get more. I think that's a model that could possibly work on the consumer side. So, you know, we are open to exploring anything. We have it like now for Codex.

And so, you know, that's something that we could totally explore. But I think it goes back to a lot of the very, I would say, like, sophisticated people really understand the concept of buying more intelligence. Regular people just want, like, more outcomes. So I think the more we make that transition from a chatbot to, like, you give us your list of tasks and we do your tasks, the more we're going to be able to make people realize the value and then, you know, the pricing will follow. Your original manifesto, you outlined knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom,

time, support. That sort of covers everything. Is there a seventh capability that you're excited about? You mentioned spreadsheets. Maybe that's the seventh one right after time and creative expression. Put it at the top. That should be at the top. Economic freedom spreadsheets.

But is there a seventh category or a nascent, just even in your own personal use, a new capability that you feel like, okay, you know, maybe this year has been the year of agents. We've gotten coding agents. We've gotten deep research a year or two ago. you know, is there some new capability that you've seen glimmers of, okay, I think we're actually solving this piece or I think it might be good enough to use in this scenario. Yeah. I mean, we touched on a bunch, but what I would say is like for me, the next step is unlocking connection to the ecosystem.

So like chat, TBT is self-fair and insular. Yeah. And we launched, you know, at Dev Day, we launched on a platform. But I think, like, we were talking about health. Like, health would be so much more powerful if you could connect chat GPT to your health record and all of your kind of bio-wearables. We were talking about, like, travel.

It's so much more powerful if chatypT can connect with, you know, a lot of, like, travel companies. And so figuring out how it can not just do things in this, like, you know, text format, but really connecting and doing things in the real world, that's the thing that I think the models are. already for, but we're still catching up on the product side to make that possible. And then last, it's really like, you know, much more sophisticated use cases. There's a ton of questions in the chat about the code red. We have to ask, how is it going?

Has it been an intense period for culturally? It feels like there's been, you know, a lot of ups and downs in any startup's history. I imagine that it's been exciting and thrilling to re-engage. but how has it been internally so far? Well, for context, you know, code reds are not uncommon. Like, we declare code reds as a way to really marshal a lot of resources towards a priority. It's a way to signal what's at the top of the list and what can be deprioritized. And we focus. And I think during this time, focus is critical.

And in terms of how it's going, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of it, but I'm pretty proud of what we're releasing today. and leading the way in terms of best model for everyday professional work that has been a goal of hours for a long time. It's been in the works for a long time. It didn't start with the code red, but we're really excited to be able to release that today. And on top of that, it's of 10-year anniversary today.

Wait, today? Yeah. No way. I didn't realize it was today. Get a trading card up ASAP. Team, what are we doing? 10-year anniversary of Open A-AAA. That's incredible.

That's wow. Fantastic. That's amazing. Congratulations. How startups historically have been able to innovate because they tolerate some amount of failure. And I think if you look at the hyperscalers, too, they're willing to launch products that just don't work. If you look at the history of Google, they take moonshots. They make bets.

Not everything works. Some do. And it's an effective way. to continue to innovate. I feel like when OpenAI releases a new product now, whether it's SORA or the browser or anything like that, it faces so much scrutiny from the world. Some people are excited and bullish.

Other people want to see it fail. How are you guys kind of, what's your internal framework around failure today? Because ideally you want to keep shipping a lot of things. And if you ship three things that don't work and one thing that does, it's like, great. You have a new product that you can scale. Yeah, well, you know, I'm no stranger to a lot of scrutiny throughout my career.

I've worked at companies that went through a lot of places like that. And I would tell you, I think it's like it's simple and cliche, but you kind of have to block out the noise. The thing that's good about Open AI is like, the North Star is very clear, right? It's AGI that benefits all of humanity. And we have a lot of conviction internally that were on the right path to do that. And that does mean that, you know, some things are going to work, some things aren't. And because the culture is rooting in a research lab, which is very different from other companies that worked out, I think the fear of failure is much less because people already know in research that you explore a lot of path and, like, many don't work.

Like, that's the core of research. And so because that's the DNA, people don't freak out when a product doesn't work because they're like, oh, it's kind of like research. We have to test a lot of things. and some of them will hit, some of them won't. But I think this innovative spirit has gotten us to our rat and really leading the market. And I think that's something that we absolutely need to preserve. Well, thank you so much. Last question. Do you think, are we still going to see age verification this year?

Or is that going to be a 2026 launch? So age verification is starting to roll out already in some countries. And we're doing a slow rollout so that we can make sure that we're very accurate and predicting the teen with an adult. And then the adult mode that's going to be unlocked by edge verification is going to land in Q1. Got it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the amazing progress and such a great time. Congratulations to the whole team on a decade. Congratulations on 10 years in the business of building AGI. We're feeling the AGI here. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to talk to you soon.

Good chatting. Thank you so much for a lot of me. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. I love that. We love that. For the Stripe, for the Stripe Portfolio Company or Holyoke. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Let's take you through some news. That was a fun back-to-back.

I enjoyed both of those folks. That was, I feel like it's very fun. funny that we were discussing all week. The David Allison, Netflix, Warner Brothers, we're getting up to speed on media and what's going on there. And then boom, we get our little treat, the crossover of the decade with Disney and Open AI. It's funny.

You were clearly alluding to me being confused by the Disney Open AI deal. Because I went on my own roller coaster thinking, Okay, is this like a nothing burger? Is this a good thing? And now I am fully in your camp. I think it's very good. And I think that it does feel like we might go into something like the, like the press release economy that's going on in the prediction markets wars,

where every foundation model might need to hoover up particular partnerships. Because I didn't even know exclusivity was on the table. Like, you know that Open AI has a content licensing partnership with the Wall Street Journal. And so the Wall Street Journal gets paid when, When they, if I hit ShatchapT and I ask for a detail about SpaceX's latest launch, it's probably going to ask the Wall Street Journal. It's going to ask a lot of different sources, but they pay the Wall Street Journal. Now, if they do an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal, and I'm like, I can't get that in Claude.

Claude just doesn't know. Yeah, but that's way less significant because the journal points on the same news. No, no, no. To me, the journal is like Disneyland on a thousand. I would gladly never go to Disneyland ever again. if I could just read this precious, this precious paper newspaper every day. No, I agree. You're like any Disney content ever again in your life or the journal?

This is, this is, you're riding with the journal. This is the Disneyland of business. Of your mind. Of your mind. Of your mind. No, no, of course you are correct. There are not many Wall Street Journal fans that are anywhere near as insane as the Disney, Disney files.

What is Lysan Al-Gaib here saying? Lysan says GBT 5.2 Pro, it has ridiculous pricing, once again, $20 and $168. Tyler, do you know if GBT 5.2 Pro is more expensive? I guess the raising prices. Yeah, I mean, so this is the pro model. These are always like the very expensive ones. Yeah. I think it's pretty, let me actually look at the normal model, but I think it's pretty

comparable to the 5.1.1 was $1.75 and $14. So it's a pretty significant, pretty significant increase. But I don't know. Like this is a new technology. We don't know where the Pareto frontier of pricing is necessarily. We don't know. Yeah, so it's slightly more expensive. It's, yeah, 5.1 was $1.25 on the input.

It's $1.75 for $5.2. It's like, you know, marginally more expensive. Yeah, well, so let's see, direct challenge to Anthropic, The knowledge cutoff is August 31st, 2025. So Yuchin Jin here from hyperbolic labs. The co-founder and CTO is saying that this is a freshly pre-trained model. Yeah. So do you believe that?

Have you been studying the timeline while we've been live, understanding what's going on? Yeah. So some people are saying it's new pre-trained. That's the newest, like, cutoff date since, what was it? Is there a way that they could not do a full pre-trained, but they could just kind of do an update with the? the new. Yeah, exactly.

So people are, it's like, oh, it's a new cutoff. Yeah. Usually you'd think that's a new pre-train. It's probably more like a, it's like a mid-train or something like this where you basically do continued pre-training on new data. So it's probably not an actual pre-trained because you'd expect that to be like a much bigger update, right? I still, it's like, oh, GPD6, not P5.2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still have to, I still feel like the 4-0 pre-trained. It's like the latest and greatest up until now. Running that back, I mean, that thing was expensive, but it's not expensive. compared to now because they have so much more money. I don't like 5. Wait, 4.0? 4.O was never expensive. It was always cheaper. Yeah, but wasn't 4-0 like the base pre-trained for like pretty much everything today to date?

Yeah. Yeah. And so rerunning that, I mean, it was expensive at the time. It was like probably $100 million. But now $100 million, like they got 10 of those. That's like one AI researcher. Exactly. Exactly. So they should be ripping pre-trains all the time just because just to keep the timeline and check. Keep them guessing. Anyway. So got it. Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products.

products together. What you got here? We're eating good. Future pipelines may need to unify pre-mid post-training, injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To anyone wondering if 5.2 is a new pre-trained, I'm letting you connect the dots between this, says Alexander Doria and this synth slash agent pipelines aside. This is the new main catch of deep seek 3.2.

This isn't a new model card, new ELO update. It's an architectural update. at mid-training scale, everything mutable, and we are, everything is mutable, and we are likely to see more and more sub-model speculation. Interesting. Well, we'll have to let the 5.2 news sort of simmer in the timeline. Let everyone do their own benchmarks. How'd they do on ARC AGI 2? That is always an interesting one.

Did they, are we cooked? Did they blow us away? GPD 5.2 thinking is at 52.9% up from 6.7%. 17.6%. That's a huge leap. Wait, we got to run our joke benchmark. Yes, let's run some of the TVP on the benchmarks. We have a number of benchmarks around here. Try to make us laugh.

While we're pulling those up. Give us tie bench. We tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta has AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Okay. So, yes, this is my benchmark where I ask. to recreate the joke about the shrimp fried rice. Yes.

So I'll just go through some of these and you guys tell me how good they are. Yes. You're telling me a crab rang this bell? Crab rang bell? This is 5.2 thinking, right? This is 5.2 thinking, this is the frontier of AI. I kind of like, you're telling me a crab rang this goon?

That's kind of funny. Yeah, I think that's what I would have thought. But that's not. You're telling me a bear built this market? Oh, because markets can be bullish or bearish? A bare-built... You're telling me a ham... You're telling me a ham wrote this lettuce?

A ham wrote this lettuce? Ham wrote lettuce? Wait, wait, this is a good one. Terrible has happened. You're telling me a ghost wrote this script? Ghost wrote script? Ghost-written? Script?

Okay, yeah, yeah. You're telling me an owl delivered this mail? Yeah. So I think... On this benchmark, there's more, I could, I mean, you can put the picture. I think Gemini is still the frontier here. In terms of, in terms of shrimp fried Reich's bench.

Yes. Yes, because it's some good ones there. But again, to understand, it seems like Gemini understood the assignment, but still ultimately leaned on Reddit data and broad Internet data, and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the Internet before. Yes. But it did find the good jokes on the internet. All of the good ones that it gave me, I could find.

Yeah. But you still, it's hard to like search for that kind of thing because they're not just listed as like, oh, these are jokes like this. Yeah, it's hard to look for. Yeah, yeah. I do wonder if this benchmark. And also there's a thing where Gemini 3 was actually a new pre-trained. Yeah, yeah.

At least people are saying. So maybe that was. All right, let's try at least one more. Wait, I wonder if this is, like, saturated in the sense that like, every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the internet. Are, is there any new territory? Like, if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny

as shrimp fried rice? Yes. You think you could? I think so. Okay, maybe that's a challenge. Do it. You got to give me a month. Okay, when we...

You have time. In the new year. Okay, I want to... That's a key one thing. Just like adult mode, adult mode and Tyler discovering a new joke. A novel joke are both coming in. You're telling me... By the way, so Stanley in the chat says,

L.O.L. Why don't they swear? Seems pretentious. Our kids watch. I guess it is pretentious, but I don't care. No, it's our kids are watching at home. Yeah. Anyway. What's the next job?

Can see a swearing. You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these? You're telling me a chef, boyard, eat these ravioli? Okay, yeah, this is really, really rough. Oh, wait, this one's not bad. Okay, what's this one? You're telling me a shepherd actually pieed this? Pied this.

They're really food-based. They kind of latch on to the food. You're telling me a kid napped this? kidnapped, okay. Terribalts. Yeah, I don't know. All right, you just bombed, Tyler. Hopefully 5.3.

Gt3RS bench. Let's do GT3RS bench. This is the benchmark here at TBPN where we ask every frontier model to write unique copy, marketing copy for a GT3RS from Porsche. And we have an astute eye we watch for any tells.

I can tell you that this was AI written. is a generic. Does it use contrastive parallelism? Does it use antithetical parallelism? Antithetical parallelism is, of course, when grammatically you say, it's not this, it's that. It's not just a new AI model. It's an entirely new way of thinking, right? That is contrastive parallelism. There's a good Wikipedia article that I think is relatively new where it has a bunch of tails of AI that has like a bunch more stuff than what mostly. Yes. And people were going back and forth with Rune over this where Rune was saying, I think, you could actually build an AI detector. People were saying, well, Open AI had one of those,

and then they took it down because it wasn't working. But it's weird because I feel like, yes, AI written text should be impossible to detect. Like we're so past the touring test. The models are incredible. It really is remarkable. And yet I can totally tell when people use Chachapit to write a blog post. It's just obvious. So anyway, let's do Gt3R. Sbench. Yeah. There's a, I read a paper like a month ago, and there's this company around it, I think, Pangram, but they do, like, actually pretty good. Oh, they do good detection? Detection. Yeah.

But do you want me to read the, this is GT3RS bench? Written by either GPT, 2.5.2 or handcrafted by a marketing genius. You all have to tell us, Jordy. Do you think this was AI or not? Let's read it. I mean, you just said it was. This isn't a car you own. No.

It's immediately out of the gate. You're out of the gate with the AI slap. It's not this. It's not a car you own. It's a car you cherish. It's a car you own so much as one you operate. Wait, really? That's the first line?

That's the first line. Wait, operate. That's not even a good line. That's insane. Okay, keep going. The 9-11 GT-3R-S is a Porsche at its most uncompromising. Like that?

A naturally aspirated 4L flat 6 screaming to a 9,000 RPM. Race-bred aerodynamics. Never been in a car before, brother? Never been in a car before? Oh, is the fourth leader? Yeah, it stands for the leader. I don't. A race-bred aerodynamics that generate real downforce. Okay.

In a chassis engineered for lap times. Okay. Not likes. M-Dash, not like. What? That's not even true. It's like the most over, I mean, I shouldn't say it's overhyped, but it's like the most hyped car on the internet. It is engineered for likes.

In some ways, it's like, it's not, it puts up good track times. It's a great track car, but it's... It is engineered. Oh, no, no, no. Most people are buying it for the road for likes. We were talking about this with the G-Wagon. Like, who's, like, the G-Wagon has a particular, a particular vibe around it now, where it is sort of like an influencer mobile.

I think you've made the joke that, like, it's the standard issue in L.A. when you become an influence, and they just want to. just shows up, right? Well, that's partly because the roads in L.A. are so bad. You need something that could off-road in a pinch. Yes, yes. And so, but the question is like, is that, is that Mercedes designing the G-Wagon for influencers? Like, no, not at all. It's like, they designed it. They just stuck with it for a long time. Eventually, the influences who adopted it, you can't put that on Mercedes. It's not their fault that all the influencers drive them. Anyway, yeah. Let's continue with GPD3RS bench. Is that, is that it, or is there more?

No, there's more. Okay, keep reading the slop. Every surface has a purpose. Every input is immediate. Every drive feels like a qualifying lap. Built with WISoc level obsession, the GT3RS deletes. Did I also get that wrong? No, it's okay.

You just hesitated. You just sound like someone who doesn't talk about VISOC packages very often. VISOC. Okay, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I guess like Vimar. Yeah, yeah. The GT3RS deletes anything unnecessary and doubles down on feel. lightning fast PDK shifts, surgical steering, and suspension tuned straight from the Nureberg ring Playbook.

Playbook? The Nuremberg ring playbook. What is the NERB ring playbook? It's loud, stiff, dramatic, MDASH, and utterly alive. This is not a luxury purchase. It's a statement of priorities. It's a statement of priorities. I don't understand how the it's not this is that.

still in the soup. Like, I, like, just, I think, run it, run the trough through. It's not a new pre-trained, basically. I think it's one of the, it might be that, but it showed up in German AI team, low-key, hates AI generated written word as well. And they want to continue to be able to identify it easily. Maybe, maybe, I like that. It might be, they're, yeah, doing a public service here.

Okay, so, uh, get bezel.com, shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell team of experts. Chiching. Arc Prize is breaking it down. A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI 03 high that scored 88% on Arc AGI 1 at an estimate of $4,500 per task. Today, we verified a new GPT5.2 Pro X high, state-of-the-art score of 90% at $11.64. per task. This represents a 390x efficiency improvement in one year. This is, this is, this is the headline. This is the story. This is the best, this is the best fact I think about GBT 5.2. This is massive

congratulations to the Open AI team for delivering at this level. This is remarkable. Really, really great stuff. I love it. Now, go do it for RKGI3. What have you done for me lately? The biggest failure this year was not getting goalposts here in the studio that we can move. Production team. We need goalposts. Can you order on Amazon right now? Physical goalpost that we can move around the studio every time one of these releases comes out? Like a full-size one?

No. Something that me and Jordy can lift up and move to a different piece of the studio. And then we'll have a sign that has whatever our next goal post is, you know, Arc AGI V3. I want them to one shot that. And we will move the goalposts over there. And then we will erect a new goal. And we will move the goalposts over there on the release of a new model that does whatever we said

was going to impress us. But now no longer is enough to impress us. Well, you know what else is impressive? This scoop from Reed, Albergotti, the tech editor at Semaphore, colleague of Ben Smith. He says, Scoop, Google names a new chief to head up its $100 billion a year AI infrastructure buildout. Amin Vadat, who will report to Sundar directly.

This is very exciting. Imagine having a $100 billion budget for CAPEX. That's like Ben's dream. Four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah, Ben. Every time straight. If you're really, so Ben's a cap. Ben's a Kappex guy here.

Almost every time he walks up. To me, he wants another 30 grand for a new camera, this light, this. It's going up next to him. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for goal pose that will probably wind up costing 30. We're part of the problem. We are. We are. But Martin Casado says incredibly smart move by Google.

Amin is absolutely unique in his academic, technical, operational, and business depth. huge deal. Well, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan buy and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Angela from worktrace. Dot AI. She's in the Restream waiting room.

And now she's in the TBP and Ultradown. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Angela, good to meet you. Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's nice to meet you guys. Great to meet you.

On the news. Please introduce yourself, the company. Give us the news. I have a mallet here. Getting ready to ring the gong. Yes, I'm Angela, most recently a co-founder of WorkTrace AI, where we just came out of stealthed day, so we're excited to talk to you about it. Before this, I was doing a lot of deep learning.

So, you know, it was deep learning job after deep learning job. Most recently with that Open AI the last three years, mostly doing product management. Cool. And yeah, when I was at OpenAI, I mean, we were also making these amazing models, like they are now more and more. but there is still this gap, you know, that we hear about where people aren't getting their magic moments from AI, despite the models being super duper. It's pretty funny. You said you were doing a lot of deep learning as a product manager. Some other product managers are doing a lot of deep research these days where they're effectively glorified deep research. I do a lot of deep research these days. A lot of my docs are powered by deep research, I have to admit.

So, I mean, Sam Altman's been on record before talking about how not to get steamrolled. Like, do not start a company that is predicated on the model staying the same capabilities. Like if your whole pitch is, I got a new LLM and it does pretty well on RKGI, well, today was a bad day for you. But there are plenty of other pockets of opportunities. Obviously, Open AI believes in you because the Open AI Fund invested. but how did you think about creating durability or positioning the company in a way that was maybe synergistic with what opening eyes are you doing? Yeah, I guess one benchmark for it is that when 5.2 came out today, we were excited to try it.

Yes, exactly. It's an exciting day for us too. That's good. But yeah, when we thought about it, I mean, for me, when I was there, open eyes so strong and making just really amazing models. But I feel like they themselves, but they also want help from whoever to help distribute these models to the world.

I mean, there's so many people that need to benefit from these. And it's very difficult to actually get these into the context of enterprises, real-world use cases. It requires a lot of boots on the ground and getting deep into the use cases. Ultimately, they are punching above their weight

in terms of how many people they have to get all of the amazing models they have out into the world. And that's something that we felt was super complimentary to them. Yeah. Walk me through the product experience, how a company might actually integrate work trace and start building a bespoke workflow over time. What's the actual diffusion process into an organization to start getting value?

Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you about what I think the status quo is. which is what I saw when I was a product manager, which is that a team comes in. They know that AI could be transformative for their industry, and so they want to invest in it. However, they're keeping up with what is going on with the latest 5.2 model.

What does that mean for them? They're keeping up with what's actually going on in their workforce. And so what they often do is they bring in consultants or tech services company or the OpenAI go-to-market team to be able to figure out what is the exact right, use cases that they should apply this particular model or they model they know that's going to come out in three months to these particular teams that they know need help. So that takes like months as far as my experience has gone. Whereas with WorkTrace, what we do is what we're able to do is

like have a desktop app to be able to see, you know, what work is going on and then be able to flag that, hey, this is tasks that seem repetitive, that you seem to be spending a lot of time on that are breaking your flow, that 5.2 happens to be very, very good at today. Why don't you consider building out a workflow with 5.2 for this exact use case? So what that looks like then is like a prioritized list of use cases, so a roadmap basically for AI transformation for a company. And then for each of those use cases, it'll have actually the JSON or the output that you need to input into Open AI Agent Builder to actually start running an agent.

for that workflow. That's interesting. How do you deal with the scenario where the system is observing a workflow? And in the process of that identification of a workflow, it becomes clear that the person should just be using SaaS instead of, like, if somebody is like, oh, yeah, every day they open a spreadsheet and they have a list of people's names and phone numbers and how recently they contacted them, like, that might just be a sales opportunity to get them on a CRM. You don't necessarily need to agentically build a new CRM, maybe. But how do you deal with those scenarios? Because there's a lot of companies where they're not even on the frontier of SaaS implementation. Yeah. And there's a lot of like, kind of like industry-wide process mining tools that look for like bottlenecks in your work or

maybe where you should use those other tools. And so, you know, despite how good the models are, most of your work today probably can't be done with agents. There's a huge amount that can be, though. And like that's specifically what we're looking to find. So we'll mine for the ones that can today be used for agents. And we're making a bet that that amount will just get larger and larger over time. Yeah. And do you think that you have to live on the desktop in an app? Because I imagine that if my workflow is slow, but it's taking place inside of like, you know, the Salesforce ecosystem or something, they're not just going to let you build something on top.

Or will they? Like, how does AI? bump into these like walled gardens that are going to prop up in enterprise software where you know mark benny i was probably thinking like i don't want you puppeteering my software i want to be the one doing that i see i mean for us i mean to understand how work happens yeah it's best to be able to just see what you see when you're doing work yeah uh which honestly is more than your desktop it's like also your phone and you know it's like what like you know you in meetings and whatnot however you know we find that we go a long way by seeing just what's happening on your desktop to get a sense of how your work is going.

In terms of actually then doing the tasks, I mean, we still use the tools that you use. You know, we integrate them with Salesforce or any of the normal tools that you might be using because, I mean, that is just how work happens and we want to meet you where your work is. Do you think some people that are aggressively pursuing a forward deployed model are going to look at your solution and think like, oh, maybe I didn't. need to send my most valuable human capital out into the world. I could have just sent an app screen recorder. Because it feels like this is potentially more, at least for a lot of different types of work,

a much more elegant solution. Then let's fly this person out, put them in a short-term rental or hotel. Let's have them just sit in the office when you can actually just use, in order to implement AI, when you can use AI to basically watch them on screen and discover what these workflows actually look like. Yeah. I mean, part of it is that there's not that many AI experts in the world for what we need. There's not that many FDEs that we could deploy out.

So most of the companies that we're working with probably can't afford FDEs to come over, you know, for a couple of months at a time, but also continuously as AI changes. But also, yeah, at the same time, when we were thinking about what we were doing to help companies get up to date on AI, we were listening to their workflows, we were understanding their workflows, breaking it down, looking at variations, which just happens to be something that AI is particularly good at. So when we saw what it took to actually find use cases and then put them in the format that agent builders needed, it just felt like that in it of itself was a great use case for AI, which is actually what made us super bullish to pursue this idea. Get us up to speed on the fundraising history. I want to know what the latest news is. Yeah, so we recently closed our seed round, which we're super duper excited.

about. How much? Nine million. There we go. Very, very cool. I'm super excited about this. I love when an idea is obvious and you just sit here thinking, why didn't anybody do this before? And sometimes it just takes the right team to come along and do it. And look at who's in this D-AVC conviction, OpenAI.

Logan Kilpatrick's in. Big fan of him. Miramaradi. Wow, you really... Murderers Roe. Murderers, Roe. And Jeanners and Detmer is in. Genius Ventures.

I'm an LP, so, yeah, very, very excited. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on this. I have a feeling you'll be back for the A within a quarter. I think so. I just got a feeling. Also, the chat is obsessed with you. They think that you should go on Joe Rogan, apparently.

Which I don't know why, but I do think. that would be a fun a fun thing so good luck to you on the rest of the immediate tour we'll talk to you soon have a good rest of your day merry christmas cheers goodbye eightsleep dot com exceptional sleep without exception fall asleep faster sleep deeper wake up energized i'm getting back in it my falloff needed to be studied it's very clear what happened i flew to new york city and i slept in a bunk bed, which was not ideal. Randomly, I wound up in one hotel room, four bunk beds.

We didn't book the hotel. None of them fit me. The hotel room was booked by another company. It was a mistake. It was not Nick. Nick is fantastic. What'd you get, though?

I got an 87. What'd you get? I got an 87. I'll give you. I'm back. I'm back, baby. Never challenged me at sleep. Never go snooze for snooze with me

because I will out snooze you. And next, We are joined by John from Scrub Capital. John is a practicing neurosurgeon, health system leader, multi-time co-founder. What's happening? CMO. Welcome to the show.

And more. Welcome to the street. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you get us up to speed on some of the writing that you've been doing, some of your overall thinking on how America's misunderstanding self-driving cars, what we need to change. the actual message, the status quo, and then the message that we need to get out. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

So look, up until right around now, we've been thinking about autonomous vehicles as a tech moonshot. You know, cool tech story, take shots at it, like it, whatever side you're on. But what I'm trying to say, and now others are joining, too, is this is a public health urgency now. Because what happened is, Waymo put out data at 100 million miles. This is about a month or two ago. You can go download and analyze it yourself. They put out all the raw data. And what I found was astonishing.

We're facing guys the possibility that if we play our cards right now going forward, we could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of death in the United States. That's crazy. Wait, it's the leading cause. As a leading cause. Yeah. It's huge, though. Is it tens of thousands of people?

Yeah, 40,000 a year. And for children and young adults, it's the number. it's the number two cause of death in the United States, and it's the number one worldwide for children. And it also, I mean, not all life is precious, obviously, but it also must be a cause of death of young people because it's so random when it happens. It's not something where, you know,

oh, someone's lived their full life and then they passed away. Yeah, that's right. It does tend to bias towards younger people, healthier time of life. It's not like it tends to be the sick and elderly, that's for sure. So, but I'm totally with you. I buy it hook, line, and sinker. I'm a believer. But also, it seems like it's going fine because, like, Google has a trillion dollars of cash flow and they're going to do this and Waymo is rolling out. Like, what do we really need to change? It seems like everything's going well. Right. So look, we have a regulatory capture problem right now, guys, and I was so glad to come on TVPN. You could look at coverage in the Washington Post, coverage in the Boston Globe. city councils and other moneyed forces have politicians' ears and they're working against this.

And I think, you know, it's, we got to work to liberate this and get the message out that this is, this is not a risk story. This is a safety story, you know, from my perspective now looking at this from a medical lens. And, you know, I haven't even scratched the surface and I'm sure I'm going to get all flamed on Twitter now and everything else. Plaintiff bar in a lot of places is, is what's opposing this as well. And, and I won't impute motive, but people, can use their imaginations. Okay, so what's happening in, what's happening in California that allows me to,

every other week I log on, I see that Waymo's map is expanding California. It seems like it's going on. Historically has been, I don't know, I would, I would imagine that this would be a tougher environment than other states that are less population dense.

And Jordy, what's interesting about this is this doesn't respect traditional political tribes or left coast, right coast, whatever, it actually, it cuts jagged across typical tribes often. So like, you can have far left people where they love bikes, but love that Waymos are safer. So it's like, great. But then there's a group over there that doesn't want any vehicles, so Waymo's are a problem. Then you might have libertarians that say, you know, technology acceleration, let's go, let's go, let's go, but then, well, wait, are the vehicles surveilling me? So, you know, this is not traditional tribes. And I think,

what's we're seeing now is the data is moving people further and further along in this story, tribe independent. And to get to your question, or I think a lot of these companies are based, or, sorry, Waymo certainly is based in California. And there's a, there's a West Coast, you know, heaviness to this. And to be fair, Tesla is now, you know, also demoing this in Austin right now with human drivers still. Do you have any other reads on how this might break from a regulation perspective? It feels like, you know, we could be coming up on a seatbelts and car scenario where, you know, self-driving technology is a requirement for all the OEMs, and they have to either white-label

it from Waymo, white-label it from Tesla. It needs to be available more widely. Tesla and Waymo, I don't think that's in their business model. I don't think they necessarily want to put it in every Toyota and Honda, but they're, you know, you're making a... Rolls-Royce ghosts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're making like a health-based case. maybe at a certain point there needs to be a requirement. How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, so right.

Like airbags, we all remember or something that, you know, they started as kind of like a luxury thing on the high end, S-class Mercedes and then work their way down. I think we're going to progressively see this with progressively more and more automation. So right now, like the automatic braking is in there and almost everybody has that. But it's going to start to filter down. And Jordan and John, I think insurance industry pressure is going to pull. push this too. Okay.

We're eventually, when the data gets stronger and stronger, and I think we're about a couple of weeks away from Google's next, sorry, Waymo's next data dump, because just following their usual trend, I think we're a couple weeks away from probably 125 million miles. I think that this data is going to start to push rate differential over time, and that's going to kind of get people moving. Yeah, it's funny. If you were expecting a debate, you're not going to get one, because I agree with everything you're saying here.

But you did go to the New York Times to write this essay. Did you get pushback from the New York Times readership? Was that a conscious choice? I'm just trying to understand, like, who is the current, what is the current shape of the anti-self-driving car constituency look like? Because I'm starting to understand the anti-AI data center constituency, and I get that. Like, it's ugly in your backyard. or if your power rates go up, like that makes sense.

There's a tradeoff there. But who's not happy? What was the reaction to the New York Times piece? Yeah, so the New York Times was interesting. And I'll tell you, there was a very famous magazine that I pitched this to, and they weren't interested because they were writing their own. Okay. And this one definitely got a lot more traction.

Sure. So the team there was, the crack editors, obviously. And the fact checking is incredible. I mean, I knew it was good. But, I mean, every word, every statistic. check twice, it seems. And I don't know if that's just because this is a super, you know, high-impact story or because it's what we do.

But when I was watching, they actually shut down the message board when it got to about 2,400 messages. They might have been tired of moderating it. And I saw, you know, really these, again, these jagged splits where I guess it's sort of obliquely cutting across groups. And I'm having trouble. Now, I understand there's some data coming out that it actually tends to cut across tech literacy.

So more so than like left, right, libertarian, not. It's how tech literate you are. And that's going to get progressively interesting, I think. Yeah, what do you think about the job displacement narrative around self-driving cars? That does feel like, you know, there are people whose jobs are to drive around. Some of them will be potentially displaced. It certainly has an effect on the taxi cab market. Self-driving cars in other contexts are still seems like it's pretty far away.

How do you think about balancing the economic effects, the employment effects with the health benefits effectively? Yeah, so this is a critical question. I want to make sure that's clear. This isn't just willy-nilly. Let's put these everywhere tomorrow. The call is for this to be done smartly starting like yesterday, right? And let's make this a national priority.

And the job question's critical. And I don't want to ever be glib about it. I wrote a whole kind of mini thesis. and there wasn't room for it in the piece, and I'm certainly not a labor expert, but what I think is a couple things. One, we're already facing a labor shortage in a lot of markets, as you know, not a surplus. And we have supply chain and value chain breaking because of this. So I think what I'm looking here is we have a chance if we do this right with upskilling and other things. And I know upskilling gets panned a lot of the time, but I think we need to be thinking about moving people from operator to manager, supervising fleets of vehicles.

and we could have a truck driver managing a fleet of 10 autonomous rigs, you know, from a command center, who, by the way, now goes to sleep in his own bed, rather than hers, and rather than staring in a white line for 11 straight hours in a dangerous environment, I think that's a waste of human potential. Now, I want to be clear, their jobs are super important right now. They're keeping the country alive. So nobody here that I'm saying that their job is a waste of human potential. I'm saying if we just then don't figure out what to do with their jobs,

because this is happening whether we like it or not. We need to think about how to use that incredible expertise and apply it smartly. And then, you know, I'd like to say in 1981 was the peak cigarette manufacturer. 650 billion cigarettes were manufactured in 1981. Now we're down to 125 billion cigarettes a year. And none of us heard about an epidemic of job displacement because of cigarettes. being dropped by 85%. So let's do this right starting today.

And I don't know if you're going to go there, but if we don't, we're going to be importing Chinese technology. They have no less than seven companies pursuing full-stack autonomous vehicles right now. Makes sense. And I'm glad if I can name more than seven American autonomy companies. Waymo, Tesla, comma, AI, ghost is not doing well.

There's a couple that are not doing okay anymore, but it is a backup dragout fighters. What? Cacers company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, applied intuition. Yeah. I wanted, while we have you, I wanted your quick take on peptides. We're seeing an explosion of demand. You're an investor in a bunch of different health and medical companies. I'm curious how you've viewed this category.

it's it feels tough to invest in for a lot of reasons. Regulatory, a lot of these therapies are not actually proven by any type of real studies, but I'm curious if you got a hot take for us. Yeah, I don't know if it's a hot take, but look, so first of all, disclosure, we're investors in Lifeforce. Certainly check out Lifeforce. But so I've joked and others have that remember this old book, Prozac Nation. I think. I wish I had time to write peptide nation. One of us, or may, let's do it together. We need to make time for that.

But this is where we're going. And the data is getting stronger and stronger in pockets. As a physician, I've got to say, I'm not giving anybody medical advice right now to talk to your own doctor. But me and Chrissy Far, and you can Google this, we surveyed 135 clinicians who are active in health span on what they do themselves. not what they do for their patients, what they take themselves. And something like 15 or 20% of them are on more than one injectable, including peptide, of course, TRT, and other things. And I think we're going to-

I like a just doctor personally. There's no. I think we're going to build trust. You can't get me in the clinic if he's over 10% body fat. He's got to be dried out. He's got to be diced. Yeah. He's got to be solid separation.

It's got to be a mass monster. It's got to be stringy. Is it okay? if he's cutting and bulking or does it just when he's cutting? I typically only go in for the check-in when he's on a cut, when he's in fighting for him, kind of stage-ready. When you're making your appointment, you almost

need to know where are they? Exactly. Exactly. Miss me when you're bulking. I want to see you... You want to see the striation. Ready to go to the Arnold. To the Arnold plastic. I want you stage ready. I want you dry. Yeah, because bodybuilders are the epitome of health. Yes, yes, exactly.

Rodney's looking great. Yeah. You are looking great. Anyway, this is fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah, we're with you. I think it's a good reframing. There's so much. I like it a lot. So much investment happening in AI broadly. And it is interesting that and how much the government is doing to try to break down walls to support the industry.

There's all this, there's all this debate about like, will AI cure cancer? Will AI save lives? Like, is that just lip service from the big AI companies? And it's like, well, Well, this one could literally save 40,000 lives a year. Like, that's, that's good. That's more than many cancers. That's a ton. There's no reason why we shouldn't do that. And then we should celebrate it as AI saving lives.

Like, that would be great. It's more than homicide and plane crashes combined every year. Yeah. And if I could leave one thing, I would say to, please, look, this is not something that, oh, my God, Waymo started on this and Tesla started on this, you know, six months ago, and it looks great. this has been 15 years of deliberate work at Waymo, and I don't work for Waymo. I want to be clear, I'm not invested in Waymo unless it's through a mutual funded alphabet indirectly or whatever.

But this has been handled for 15 years with the rigor of what I would say is most analogous to a medical device. Totally. Not an app, not like a wearable, an actually regulated medical device. So what I want to say to people is that this is a moment now that's ready for safe and effective acceleration. Yeah. It's been so, it's been incredibly high stakes.

Like there have been multiple, I'm pretty sure, multiple artificial intelligence, self-driving companies where they've had a terrible accident and it's basically destroyed the entire company. And so the entire industry has moved slowly, but in this case it's good because there is human life on the line. I would call it deliberate movement.

And I completely agree with you. Yeah, look, this do this right and this will be remembered as one of the historic, the top three moments of American exceptionalism, if we don't let it slip out of our hands. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll have you back on soon. Goodbye. Thanks, John. Thank you, 40. Let's hop in that waymo, head over to wander.com. Book a Wander with inspiring views,

Hotel Great of Mennies, Dreamy Beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. and you can get there in your self-driving car. Our next guest is Aaron Cannon. That is a powerful name. Scrub. Scrub Capital.

They saw him and they were like, put the Capitol, put the Capitol in the Canon, launch the Capitol Canon at Aaron Cannon. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Thank you. And look at that chart in the background. Cheeky little chart.

Guys, that's real numbers. That's actually the real data. Real data. Hit it again, hit it again a few times. There we go. We're fired up, Aaron Cannon. We're happy to have you on the show. Thank you. We'd love an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Aaron. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Outset. I was on your show. I think it was at YC Demo Day like six months ago.

That's right. That's right. We were super bullish on you. No wonder you're back. No wonder you're back. I had my yellow ramp hat on in the YC offices. I was sharing our series A. Well, yeah, so break it down for people because they're going to assume you were in a batch this year. But you went through in 2022, was it? Yeah, we were 2023. Summer 23, we went through YC batch and been growing since then.

I just happened to be in the office and we raised our series A at the YC demo day. So I popped in. And yes, so outset is AI moderated research. So if you've ever tried to, you know, understand your customers or something, it really sucks. today or in the past and finally it doesn't suck i mean basically you know surveys are the old school way to do it um or you talk to users one by one and you know talk to maybe a dozen or so and and now i does it for you so our uh that's what our platform does and we um we just raised our series b uh announced it yesterday from radical ventures there it is um and uh yes uh yeah uh it's been great so uh

Here we are. Six months later. Did you ever, was Paul Graham ever concerned about outset? Was he worried, you know, founders might stop talking to their customers, or is he comfortable with the AI talking to the customer on their behalf? You know, I didn't clear this with PG personally, but, uh... Dude, you got to clear it with, you got to clear it with PG. You got to get his blessing.

You got to get his blessing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not do that, but it's part of the reason we don't work as much with startups. And we work with Microsoft, Google, folks like that, um, Weight Watchers, and Nestle. So we go for the big enterprises. What does success look like when you're working with these companies? What are you pushing towards?

Is it a key insight that impacts a future product decision? What does actually winning look like? Yeah. Yeah, it generally falls into two things. Either they're doing product research, where it's about a key insight that drives a product decision of what to build or even like not to build. There was like a famous Airbnb Brian Chesky told a story of like there was like a million dollar.

Research saved the millions of dollars because of like one bad design, right? And so like it could be a massive, like a single insight can be hugely differentiating for a product. And then there's marketing where you're saying like I'm about to, you know, release a new product to a new market. You know, you're Nestle and you're testing new concepts. You've got to get that right, right? So that's that looks like making smarter decisions and making them really, really fast. And that's like the real thing is that now with us, you can actually gather, you know, hundreds of actual interviews, like in-depth, nuance, like really hear from people and you can do that in a couple of hours. And then we synthesize all that data so you can go make a decision.

Are you guys taking away jobs from researchers or are researchers just able to do far more work and get far more insight? The classic AI question of, yeah, it's, so the reality is like, yeah, I mean, if you look in engineering, we're going to be able to, People are like, my engineers are much more effective. I'm going to build a lot more product. I want more great engineers. In this case, I don't have a lot of insight into how research teams at some of these big companies work. But I could see them saying, hey, we historically needed to hire this outside firm to conduct this research. And we needed X number of people to kind of manage it and try to unpack what was actually happening.

A lot of them might also have just been using web forms, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so what we actually see on the ground is very much not the get rid of your research. It's quite the opposite. And I think the reason for that is there isn't a ceiling of like, I don't need any more insight on a thing. Right? There's actually kind of, it's like an insatiable demand for it. The problem is the old way was not economical. So you have, you know, your researchers, you know, they do one study every month or two and it would be, you know, like talking to 15 users. And now that one researcher, can actually do a study every week each time talking to 200 users. And so you basically are like making smarter decisions. And then you add the speed at which people are putting new products into the world, you actually need that insight faster, right?

And so what we see on the ground is basically a research team adopting it and saying, holy crap, like I can actually go like do twice as much or go twice as fast with, you know, the same people we have on the team today. How multimodal are you today? How multimodal do you want to be in a few years? years, I can imagine research is happening, you know, on video interviews, audio, tax-based interviews, web forms, like, what are you doing today? And then what do you want to do? We want to do all the modes, all the modals. So today we are video, audio, text, and then you can do

do kind of forums, you know, think like classic survey questions? Radio buttons and checkboxes. So do you just email or text a customer and say, may I research you? Yeah, that's exactly it. That's the language. May I research you. No, but then we also do screen sharing. So that's actually where you're getting a participant, a video, audio, radio buttons, and then also share their screen while they're interacting with your prototype. So you've got to do all of that together. And then we partner with a bunch of panels that are called them to help kind of source people, right? So in our platform, we can actually source from millions of people.

And are you building like the full customer experience management platform down to data collection, but then also analysis? Because it sounds like you're adding sourcing, but it's not like you're going to give me a big bag of text and then I got to go sort it out elsewhere. Yeah, the theory has always been like the, if we're going to help you scale and speed up the way you collect the data, we got to break it down for you afterwards, right? And it's just two sides of the same coin. So since day one, we've had these two sides, right? Our core platform, AI moderated research is like, collect the data, synthesize the data, tell you what matters. The thing we now are building into the future and the reason we raised a bunch of this money, you know, just six months later is like we're going from, think like, you know, study by study, I got a question, let me go answer it, to the always on customer intelligence platform, right?

The experience management where, you know, at every touch point, you know, you get off a flight, you get a, oh, how is your flight? or you get a post-purchase feedback form and really every point in the journey, right, should actually be conversational insight, should be continuous, we should have contextual questions that actually makes sense, and so pulling all that together.

Makes a lot of sense. Sorry, I have one more, fraud detection. Like, what does that look like? And, yeah, like, is that AI powered or AI enabled or is that just, like, best practices? like what is the bad, like how big of a problem is fraud in customer research? Yeah. If you talk to anybody in the industry, they'll say like, it's a problem.

Yeah. And chat GPT made it worse, right? Yeah. Is that, what is that? Because I get paid $100 to tell Microsoft or get a gift card to tell Microsoft how I'm using Microsoft Excel. And I'm like, well, if I just go to chat GPT and I'm like, how am I using Excel? It'll just make something up.

And then I just copy paste that in and then I get the $100 Starbucks gift card. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, that's right. But what happens is like on surveys, it's really bad, right? Because you have an open, a free text field, and you just paste it in. You just try to detecting whatever, yeah. Right. Luckily, because most of our customers are doing very, like, video-based stuff,

it is much more, right. That is harder to, like, you know, fake your way through. But we built our own fraud detection agent, right? And it's like, it's actually kind of fun to watch, because it's basically looking at your screener answers, like, oh, you said you were an expert in, you know, Python. And then later in the interview, as they interviewed about what tools you're using, it's like they don't know anything about it.

And then you get your, you know, as a customer, you get your reasoning. So the AI agent tells you, well, this guy does not know what he's talking about. And so it's pretty impressive, yeah. It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Did we hit the dong already? Hit it again. I'll hit it again.

We did. Yeah, hit it one more. Hit it again. $30 million series. I don't know if we actually got to the number. $30 million series. Be radical ventures. Push yourself in the team.

Come back in here. one. It's not all about fundraising, but it is a pretty good indicator of momentum. Call up Rob Taves at Radical Ventures say, give me another 30, give me an... How about 300? How about you put your money where your mouth is, Rob? Make a bet. Take a bet on us. Look at that graph. Yeah, look at that graph. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great. See you again. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. Broadcom has smashed earnings. earnings for share of 195 versus 172 projected revenue of 18 billion.

People were projecting 17 and a half. Look at this AI image of a crying bear relative to AVGO. Bears and shambles. The simple Florida private equity has done it again. Up 3%. After market. I like the WoJack riding the green line upwards. After hours.

Sorry. And that is fantastic. Fantastic news for the good folks over at Broadcom. Congratulations to everyone on smashing earnings. And thank you to the chat for calling it out. Our next guest is from K2 Space. How you doing? Good to see you.

Welcome to the show. We are trying to pull up some audio. Do we have audio here? Can we play this? Oh, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself in the company. Hey, guys.

I'm Karan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of K2 Space. And can, I mean, obviously space is in the news, but can you give us a little bit more color on how you fit into the orbital economy. Yeah, yeah. So about three and a half years ago, I started this company with my brother Neil.

We wanted to build really large, really high power satellites, which at the time was a pretty big contrarian bet against the market. Everyone was kind of going smaller with their satellites. Yeah. And so we kind of looked at it.

We were like, hey, like actually the future, if you think about it, is all about higher power, right? And we're seeing that, but things that were probably about to talk about with the data centers and space stuff.

Yeah. But yeah, we're building largest space platforms that have ever existed. The largest space. But importantly, you're not building the rockets. That's right. Yeah, we're just doing the satellites.

We're going to be launched vehicle agnostic. Most of our first missions are going to be on SpaceX. On SpaceX. On SpaceX. But over time, we'll probably use a bunch of others as well. And when you were building the company, did you have a thesis around how the launch market would play out? Because there's, I feel like maybe this came up when you were pitching VCs, but

there was probably a risk. that, hey, if SpaceX becomes like a really powerful monopoly, they're going to be able to squeeze you like crazy. So was your initial thinking or bet, hey, I love SpaceX. It's amazing. It's unlocking an incredible new capability. But I do think that, you know, Firefly will be doing some stuff.

Rocket Lab might be doing stuff. Blue Origin might be doing stuff. And eventually the market will play out that I can actually carve out a business here one way or another. And 70% of our company comes for SpaceX. My brother is an ex-Spacexer. So we're all pretty big fans of SpaceX. And they've made such a massive difference in the market, right? Like when we talk about there being launch abundance, right?

It's both because they made bigger and bigger launch vehicles and they increased the frequency of those launches. Right. Like they're blowing past 150 launches this year as if it's nothing, right? It's crazy. So we always knew that we were going to be big users. Yeah. We always knew we were going to be big users of SpaceX Rockets. But I think it's pretty cool to see a bunch of these.

the other launch players coming online, right? Like there's a number of new players, whether it's like relativity, whether it's Andy over at Stoke, whether it's the folks over a Firefly. I think it's a really unique opportunity we have right now where hopefully five to ten years from now we have a bunch of choices. Yeah. Okay. So biggest big satellites, been in the business of making big satellites.

What was the first big satellite that you thought would be valuable? Communications, put a camera on it, spy satellites, Hubble telescope, what are you, what were you originally thinking before every venture capitalist said pivot to AI? So we started with giant telescopes, a bit of an extreme departure from AI. But yeah, we wanted to build really large telescopes because everyone knows James Webb, right? Like awesome, highly performant telescope. But it cost billions of dollars and took like 20 years to produce, right? And that's like kind of the straw by which we take data from the rest of the solar system.

And so we wanted to build many more straws and many bigger straws. Over time, we realized, like, actually, if we go bigger, well, now we can start to deploy a lot of power because we can host bigger solar rays. And if we go bigger, we can build platforms that are radiation tolerant and can handle different orbits and different parts of the solar system. But it all actually stemmed from giant telescopes, which is a little known fact, actually, about K2. But, I mean, the news today, $250 million at $3 billion valuation doesn't look like a science project. type funding round. You got TRO price, altimeter, light speed. TRO price. What does that look like? I don't know. Typically, wouldn't that be pretty common in a pre-IPO? It's like a growth, yeah, these are serious investors. So what is the shape of the business?

I imagine that like you actually have serious, serious traction and progress, actually delivering capabilities. What's the majority of the customer-based product mix look like right now? Yeah, so because we went in such a different direction, we started as like just a tactical contrarian bet that two and a half years ago started to get a lot of commercial traction. So over the last three years, we've basically gone from $5 million in TCV in 23 to $50 million in $2.24 to $500 billion in $25, right? And this is from a mix of large commercial and government customers, right? I don't know that many three and a half year companies that are like half a billion in TCD, right?

That's insane. So yeah, take me inside one of those contracts. Give me an example of what you're delivering. Yeah, so the perfect example of power is when you think about communications, right? More power equals more throughput. Sure. So if I drive up the power, right, any space-based data constellation suddenly gets more and more effective, right? And we were just like driving up the power incrementally, right? Like the typical satellites at the same price point as us were doing like one to two kilowatts of power. our first satellite is 20 kilowatts of power. Wow. Our next satellite's going to be 100.

And so we saw a really interesting use case to go after, which is just for all the players that are looking at what SpaceX is done to the comms market and are thinking about how to reset their unit economics, we were like the really interesting path for them to take to be able to think about a fundamentally different cost structure just based on how much power we were deploying and at the price point. So commercial comms is the first place. Government is the second.

I can talk about that. But those are the two big areas that we've kind of focused on as we scaled up the company. Let's flip over to the engineering side. A hundred kilowatts, that's 0.1 megawatts, is that right? Like, how are you actually delivering that? Is it just big solar panels? Like, what's the secret to actually scaling up power delivery in space?

Do you have batteries on board? Are there other propellants or resources for fuel? Or is it all just solar? How do you actually scale up power delivery in space? Yeah. So we basically have to reset the entire satellite. We had to go build giant solar arrays. We had to go build giant batterys.

We had to build giant primary structures. These things called reaction wheels, which is these large spinning disks that help you point a satellite with large solar arrays. So like 80% of the satellite we rebuilt from scratch in this factory behind me. Sorry, really quickly. Giant solar array in space, that could mean anything from like football fields to the size of this table. Just ground me in like order of magnitude. How big are we talking?

Yeah. So the first satellite that we're building that we're launching in three months, is 40 meters. 40 meters. Wow. So like, yeah, like halfway down a football field almost, something like that.

Wow. And then the- space yacht. Space yacht, yeah. Exactly. That's good. And then the next one will be 80. So it's going to be 2x,

the length, but obviously is much more in terms of surface. And does that only fit with the Starship faring? Is that Starship requirement there? Or can you get it up? Yeah, the first one,

the 20 kilowatt is made for Falcon 9. Okay. So it'll be, it's made to stack 10 and a Falcon 9. It'll stack, my Starship is so massive that it'll stack 50 in a starship.

Wow. Which is kind of cool. If you take the full one, yeah. Exactly. And then the next one will be made purely for starship. Yeah, so on the commercial side, from how are the telecom players thinking about the threat from Starlink, right? These are, you know, the big ones are multi-100 billion dollar market cap companies.

They have a lot of infrastructure on Earth and, you know, from our understanding, like really feeling the pressure from Starlink. But what is their kind of mental model? for Starlink as a threat and I'm assuming they're paying you to try to catch up. Exactly. Yeah, I think Starlink came in and basically took a business that had, you know, call it, you'd go like host like data at $50 to $100 per megabit per second. And Starlink came in and brought that price under 10, right?

So every single player out there had to figure out like, how do I go deploy a lot more capacity and how do I do it at a low cost? And deploying capacity in space is just all about how much. much does it cost me to deploy power, right? If I can deploy more power and I can do so at a lower cost, suddenly I better use economics. So we were the kind of the path to doing that, right, which was saying we're going to go max out power. So our satellite is as powerful as the billion dollar satellites that used to exist. But it's not going to cost a billion. It'll cost 15 million. You can stack 10 per Falcon 9. That's what it takes to kind of change the game for the

telco players. So a bunch of them saw that and we're like, okay, like this is actually something we can play around with and use. And really for us, it's just like the first customer, right? Like, we're all about integrating, like, the hardware stack for space. We want to max out power today. That's for communications. Tomorrow, that's going to be for compute. And then who knows, as we, you know, start becoming, like, a spacefaring civilization,

like what we'll do with that power later. Dyson spear. Dyson sphere. So this round got done. I'm assuming at a time when people were mocking data centers in space, there's been a little bit of a vibe shift over the last week. And I'm sure all your investors have been hitting you up. Have you ever thought about AI competing?

Elon and Gavin being like, I think you got to take another look at this. You should see this invest like the best interview. You should see this. I promise this isn't a data center round. I have to tell everyone what I was like. No, that's the thing. The data center would be, the data center would be three on 15. Yeah.

So it was funny. It was in November. Actually, like, you know, Delian has very strong views on this. I was talking to him about it early November, late October, we were doing the round. And, you know, they have a strong opinion. Founders Fund is right on a lot of things. So, like, I don't always want to, I'm not going to say I'm going to take the other side of a bet against them.

But now it's like, Founders Fund on one side, Elon on the other. I'm like, I'm just going to watch and see how this plays out. But, yeah. So our round was primarily on, like, the communications application. It was also on a bunch of the government constellations that were starting to work on. There's some really interesting things we're doing that the U.S. government is pretty excited about. So more of what you call it conventional.

I'm like, yeah, now we'll see what happens with the data center. Price of the break going up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is exciting. As a CEO, like it is somewhat your job to bring energy to what you're building and bring excitement to what you're building. And if there's an opportunity, even if it's five, ten years off, if you're going to be a beneficiary of that trend, you do sort of have a responsibility to raise your hand and say,

yeah, hey, it's logical that some of the value will accrue here to me. if that's the case. But you probably also don't want to whiplash everyone and be like, actually, I've been doing this the whole time. Any predictions on just how big some of these commercial satellites will get over the next decade? I saw somebody on the timeline earlier talking about how in order to recreate one gigawatt of sort of compute capacity in orbit, you need something like 10,000 satellites, but eventually you could just have one, you know, data center size satellite floating out. But how do you think about size versus and just like

massive individual satellites versus the more constellation approach? Yeah, I'm in the school of thought of constellations, right? Like I think we're going to build really big satellites that still exist in constellations. I think compute's going to be distributed, right? Compute and communications are going to be all part of the same. distributed network, right? So our bigger satellite giga is going to be like the length of a football field, right? It's called. It's called Gigga. Hit the Gong for Gigga. Best name for a satellite I've ever heard. It's an incredible name for a satellite. We are very critical of names. Sometimes people come on and they name their company's things that don't are not

necessarily hubris.com. A.I. Yeah, hubris.com. A.I. $5 billion seed round. What's going to happen? Who knows? Giga is a fantastic name. Thank you. Giga would be a beautiful name for a satellite. I'm glad you're doing it.

I'm very excited to see it. Anyways, very exciting. Congrats to the whole team. And yeah, hoping we can partner at some point to put a TBPN satellite up in space. We need one for sure. We definitely will need one at some point. One last question from my side.

Take us through a little bit of a tour of what's behind you. Is this the only facility? How big is this facility? What's actually happening here? Are satellites getting built out? This is 180,000 square foot factory, right? Where basically you'll see the start of a manufacturing line coming down here.

That's going to, you can't really see it in the view, but the clean room's over there with the satellite actually in it that's about to launch in three months. Oh, wow. You even have a huge signs up. It's this primary structure, side sections, final integration. Wow. Physical divides. That's amazing.

Yeah. So, yeah, we're basically scaling up now. We're 11 months in, but a large part of this round that we're raising is to go scale up mass production, go from one this year to 10 next year to 30 to the following year. That's awesome. And it's really all about scale at this point, right? Like, let's get the first one to work in three months and then let's do it many more times over the coming 24 months.

And also, is the company's name a nod to your initials? Yeah. So here's the thing. Like, people think it's about my initials and it's like, that's the most egotistical thing in the world. I promise you that is not the case. So, you know, my brother and I started this company, which starting a company of your brother is like the coolest thing in the world to do.

We're both congeurs. But it comes back to the Cardiff, right? Like helping humanity become a type 2, Cardishap civilization, K2. The whole thesis is like build bigger, right? That's cool. And our logo is a big Dyson sphere. I heard you mentioned that, right?

So it's like our whole thesis is like, let's start laying the groundwork to helping humanity become a type 2, Cardiff civilization. So let's call the company K2. You understand naming. I'm going to, I have to say, we, we had a company on, called Icarus, Icarus space. We were a little bit worried about it. For what it's worth, it's an insanely good team.

Insanely, crack team. And I really hope. Maybe they're playing with, they're playing with fire. They're playing with fire. They're super cool team now. They are, they are very cool. But there's been, there's been a rash of hilarious.

That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode. Anyway, Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to meet you. And congratulations. The whole team.

Massive. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Coffers are full. You'll see you soon. Um, well, that essentially, let's rip some timeline. Let's rip some timeline. I want to watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels.

When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding. This is sick. Is this AI or is this real? Do we know? I hope it's real. I can't tell. So.

This is Casey Hanmer's dream. This is Casey Handmer's dream. I hope this is a lot of... This looks pretty real. I was watching a video of somebody... There's a whole trend on TikTok. People throwing tires, the longest tire throw. Because if you throw a tire off a mountain,

it will just spin all the way down to the bottom so you can throw a tire for like miles and miles, miles, miles. It's a great content genre. Yeah, for some reason, solar panels over mountains, do you give me a little bit of disgust? Whereas I get it, I'm less... Yeah, mountains. are beautiful.

Deserts, deserts. I'm like, blanket it. It's sort of already. It's sort of already. But this looks like like it would be a really enjoyable mountain range to just go on a nice little hike. And so

I'm feeling the disgust. You feel in the disgust. But also impressed by the scale. It's just crazy that like there was no desert between these mountains and who they needed to get power to. You know? Like because, I don't know, there must be people

like right there living in the foothills or something and they needed to put them in the mountains. I don't know. I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire. You know, that's often a problem. Yeah, I'm curious around the efficiency because just given the movement of the sun, aren't you going to have, like,

it's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks, so wouldn't this, not in this, you would think that finding a area nearby that was flat would be more efficient. Yeah. But who knows? Snapchat. What's going on with Snap?

Anyone from Snapchat? focusing on making money. They are, let's see here, Base 16Z says Snapchat plus user growth pretty much guaranteed to reaccelerate with the new storage charges. So they're saying, you've saved 4,122 memories since 2017.

You've used 16 gigabytes of your 5 gigabyte of free storage limit. We'll temporarily back up new memories that exceed your limit for up to 12 months. or you can join Snapchat Plus and get your 250 gigabyte. So anyways, makes sense that Snap is trying to make more money. That's good news. I'm surprised that they haven't done any sort of big AI content licensing deal.

And of course, they have a deal with perplexity to bring AI into the Snapchat product. but does Snapchat just not have any data that would be surfaced in an LLM? Like Reddit seems to have done such a good job with that, but I guess people aren't really reviewing things or discussing things in text-based formats on Snapchat. It's all kind of just day-in-life content. Anyway, what else is going on? I wrote, here, Jordy, you want to go first? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so Trump says doesn't see why we can't have 20% or 20%. or 25% GDP growth. It says the market should continue to go up with great results. I mean, don't see why we can't have 20% GDP growth because it's like never happened in history, maybe? I don't know. What was China? He is AGI-I-pilled.

That's extremely AGI-I-pilled. Warchash has talked about this. D'Rkesh literally has talked about this. 25% GDP growth, the first AGI-I-pilled president, I suppose. Let's head over to the... Apparently, China hit 19.3% in 1970. Okay. Yeah.

Is that the greatly forward or something? More recently, more recently 14% in 2007. So I think Trump's looking at the data. Greatly forward was 1960-ish. Tyler, what do you got? Okay, so you guys gave me a month to write new jokes, but I already wrote some. Oh, you got one? Yeah.

So these were, I did use an alum to help, but these are not, never before. Seen. Never before seen. By the training. Get them in the next free trade. Did you search them in Google to make sure that? Yeah, yeah. I looked them up. These aren't these are brand names. The chat's going to verify. Okay. And I don't want you to get exposed. Okay. First one, ready. Okay. You're telling me Jerry rigged this car. Ooh. Is that Jerry rigged? Jerry rigged. That's pretty good. I can't. That's, but that's sort of like the point. But it's not a guy named Jerry. You're telling me my friend Jerry rigged this car. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. Okay, second one, you're telling me a brain washed this cult?

Oh, that's really good. Oh, yes. And that is novel. There we go. That is a great one. You're telling me a brainwashed this cult. You need to tweet that right now because that's 100K legs right there, 10K legs. That's very good.

Okay, I got two more. You're telling me a star crossed these lovers? That's sort of literal. That's sort of like what it is. That's sort of what it is, yes. Okay. You're telling me a tongue tied this boy? You got to post all four of those and see,

and I would predict that the brainwashed cult does number one, does numbers. The tongue tied boy also does decent numbers and the other two flop. Okay, I'll tweet them now and then we'll see tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, that's a great, that's a great test. But, well done. We gave you a month. We gave you a month. That is novel. That is novel. And that, that's not coming from, from any of the LLM.

So, oh, the shrimp fried rice bench is really, really good. Let's go over to Rune. He says, everyone will go public soon because they finally feel the heat of a well-capitalized competition, the wrath of Nyon. There was no reason to seek enormous amounts of capital. Until recently, we will see natural interest rates north of 3% in the end of secular stagnation. everyone's going public. Oh, in other news, 11 Labs partnering with meta to power expressive, scalable audio across Instagram, Horizon, and more, bringing natural and diverse audio to billions of users. Also, you got the founder of 11 Labs on the cover of Forbes.

Look at that photo. Look at that smile. Gigacad filter, engaged. Yes, yes, not beating the gigacad filter allegations. Yes, yes. No, I mean, Forbes headshot photographers, it's a great. great product. This is something that's very special. So congratulations

to Mauti over at 11 Labs. We're making the cover of Forbes. That's a huge moment for him and the whole team. Speaking of AI. Presidential AI challenge? First lady Melania Trump is introducing the presidential AI challenge

artificial intelligence is America's next competitive edge, driving advancements in your career, supporting your family and strengthening your community. I'm sure. No one will. I disagree with any of that. This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators

to shape America's future. Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future. Be part of the Presidential AI Challenge today. What is the Presidential AI Challenge? That's a good question. The presidential AI challenge will foster interest and expertise in AI in America's use.

Early training and the responsible use of AI tools will demystify this technology and prepare America. I think this might be the challenge. I think the challenge might be to figure out what it is. It's like a riddle. This is a riddle. I think it's a, I think it's some sort of like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery.

That's the whole goal to test the American people. Can they understand what it is? Okay. I think I figured out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school. Yep. And there's challenge. projects that groups of students will be able to participate in as well as awards and prizes.

Hopefully, solid gold, solid gold trophies. Massage trophies. Yeah. Statues. I want to see, I want to see the comically large checkbook come out to, you know, for the winners. Yeah. Maybe grants to schools. Maybe the exact projects haven't been like, you know, released.

There actually is a cash prize. $10,000 per team member. Wait, is it Peyton Melania coin or Trump coin or U.S. dollars? I think the... I think you mean Trump meme. Trump meme. That's right. It's not Trump coin. Get it right. It's Trump meme. It's the best.

Okay, here's some questions. You also win cloud credits. That's so... You do? Okay, that's actually amazing. I love that. A presidential award certificate, so boom certificate. You're getting cloud credits. You're getting $10,000 for your school. homeschool or community group, and you're getting $10,000 per team member in the middle school category and the high school category and the educator category.

It's amazing. So, I mean, Tyler, you, I guess there's no college tier. Too old. You're going to say you have to go back to school and participate and win. Get a fake ID that says you're 13. Just to go back and dominate the presidential AI challenge. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, it's exciting. Good luck to everyone.

Is the presidential fitness challenge back? I don't know. Did that get a... That has to be back. They're putting gyms in airports. Of course, of course. You're going to have to run a mile if you're an American kid. According...

The first... Wait, wait, wait, wait. I didn't see this. The first child was born in a Waymo. Yeah, according to Avital... That is crazy. Says Lisan al-Gaib. I mean, that is...

You are truly the puppeteer. of the silicon intelligence if you are born in a Waymo. You merely adopted the Waymo. I was born in it. That is truly the most 2025 story. You merely adopted artificial intelligence. I was born in a Waymo. Being born in a Waymo.

I mean, being born in a taxi cab is like a classic thing that's like been described for years. But Sager and Jetty is coming on the show on Friday. He says, I guess that's tomorrow. He says, on H200s, the pro selling. China theory relies on it being good for U.S. interests to keep China on the U.S. technology tree and forestalling Huawei. In my opinion, this ignores the singular flavor of U.S. biz relationship with China since PNTR. In every case, the U.S. companies came, became intertwined with China.

They became less favorable to U.S. interests and more malleable tools of the U.S. of the Chinese state. And so he is, he's bearish on the H-200 plan, but we will dig into it. all with him tomorrow. In other news, Kayser Eunice, the CEO of Applied Intelligence, is on the timeline. He's joined X. He says, after 16 years and 10 months sitting on a fantastic handle, he says, I'm finally writing my first X. Also, we'll start writing more regularly. This, my first post is ironically on why I'm posting. And so he shares a link to a blog post, and Ryan Peterson says, welcome, brother. But also, writing a long form blog post is not being on X, L.O.L. Which is very funny. On the blog post, he says after many years of railing against going on X, I'm finally

pulling the Band-Aid and getting on the platform. Historically, if you've watched my talk, you've heard me say that one of the keys to applied success is focus. And I'm often demonized. I've often demonized social media specifically X as wasteful and distracting. It encourages superficiality, showmanship, and the wrong values of a real substance. Well, well, well, how the turntables. Some of that is still true, but as a company has grown, the balance has changed. The value of having a microphone now outweighs the downsides. So I'm going to try this.

So glad that he is posting. Let's hit the gong. Let's hit the gong for him, and then we've got to do the Salesforce. Before Salesforce, I want to say congratulations to share Gilles O'SAer. He is the founder of General Agents. he launched his product on April 2nd and was acquired by Jeff Bezos's very, very exciting. Congrats to the general agent's team.

Give me the Benihoff numbers. How much is he making on AI? According to Tone, Salesforce says their agent force ARR is now 540 million. On 4.3X year over each. year. This is why he might be renamed the company Agent Force. We will see. We will see.

And closing it out. One more. Jason says the original Omega Speedmaster 29151 is one of the best looking watches of all time. And this is a particularly good looking example from 1958. Harrispring knows how to shoot a watch. And it is

stunning, stunning, stunning silhouette. Well, thank you for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please do. Have a great rest of your day. And Merry Christmas. Goodbye. Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.